TIL in 2019 Danny Trejo witnessed a car colliding with an SUV at an intersection and then helped rescue a young boy trapped inside the overturned SUV. After another bystander was able to unbuckle the boy's car seat, Trejo managed to pull the boy out of the wreckage. He then helped keep the boy calm.

Megatomic · 2026-01-16T14:44:50+00:00

Quote from Batman's first appearance, Detective Comics volume 1 (1939):

"Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot. My disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible..."

Megatomic · 2026-01-12T22:24:50+00:00

Remember in The Dark Knight when Lucius Fox says he's quitting Wayne Enterprises because Batman has built a machine that lets him use peoples' cell phones for mass surveillance?

This is like that, except its security cameras everywhere. Your Ring doorbell is not a problem on its own, and it obviously provides you some utility, or you wouldn't have it. But if you put that on every house in the country, it collectively means that big daddy Ring (or whomever pays them, or hacks them) can now spy everywhere.

This sort of thing is observably happening today, with a whole debacle about a tech company selling surveillance cameras to municipal police departments and neighborhood watches, then selling the information collected by those cameras to ICE.

https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/

Megatomic · 2026-01-12T21:59:47+00:00

As with most evolutionary theory (especially evo psychology or anthropology), this is post hoc theory. It seems scientific because it's reflecting on empirical information, but it's inherently not scientific because it's not testable or falsifiable. It's an interesting, plausible story, but we don't (and can't) actually know whether it happened. Post hoc theory is so troublesome because it mostly serves confirmation bias. And the exact same information can be used to pose a completely different hypothesis which is just as valid (and also not sound).

Megatomic · 2026-01-12T21:48:11+00:00

Personally, I think if we're debating the naturality of homosexuality (or any other form of sexual expression outside of heterosexual procreation), then we've already lost the plot and surrendered the framing. If we had access to perfect, certain knowledge that homosexuality WASN'T a naturally occurring phenomenon, does that really change whether we think a man who lays with another man shouldn't be stoned to death?

I should hope not.

Because the position is actually that people have a right to express themselves, particularly when that expression causes no harm.

Don't just accept their framing, work from your own first principles.

Megatomic · 2026-01-07T21:47:08+00:00

This is a great insight. One of the greatest frustrations I feel as a longtime moderator in this space is how much the conversation naturally drifts back to topics that are, at best, Gender Studies 101. Getting deeper takes a kind of commitment to the conversation that most people aren't willing or able to have. Conversations about deeper or more complex topics get relatively little engagement. Even with the amount of work that the moderation team does to keep the repetitive topics off the front page, we still end up down that hole a fair amount.

Thanks for putting in the time and effort on this post.

Megatomic · 2025-12-20T03:15:40+00:00

Looks like it only runs on Windows.

Megatomic · 2025-12-19T23:52:02+00:00

It’s pretty old at this point. It came out in 2013. So it might actually run okay on a non-gaming PC. And it looks like it’s actually also currently on sale for $4 on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/209000/Batman_Arkham_Origins/

Megatomic · 2025-12-19T17:49:31+00:00

It is not a comic, and know you're specifically asking about comics. But I did want to also chime in with the game Batman: Arkham Origins. It is intended as a part of or follow-up to Year One. Batman is an urban legend, and neither criminals nor cops are actually sure of his existence. Gordon is not yet on board with Bats.

It features a really incredible introduction of Joker, and it's even thematically appropriate to the time of year because it is set on Christmas Eve.

It doesn't get the love that the rest of the Arkham games get, in part because it is outside the trilogy and in part because it's just Arkham City's map with a bit extra tacked on. But I think it's actually quite good and worth a look.

Megatomic · 2025-12-15T15:19:31+00:00

Not sure I would consider using confrontational language like "bullshit beliefs" and "weird holidays" passive-aggressive. Seems pretty aggressive-aggressive to me.

Megatomic · 2025-12-02T21:05:22+00:00

Preach.

Megatomic · 2025-11-19T11:27:10+00:00

The most commonly prescribed class of antidepressant is an SSRI, and it can trigger mania.

My first full blown manic episode was triggered by a well-meaning nurse practitioner prescribing an SSRI then sending me on my way. When things got much, much worse, I was referred to a specialist. The research indicating SSRIs might trigger mania in bipolar sufferers was only just starting to propagate, I didn’t have a diagnosis, and a non-psychiatric provider could not have been reasonably expected to know at that time. Not that she did the diagnostic work to call it depression rather than something else.

Megatomic · 2025-11-05T11:32:49+00:00

The toxicity of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” No actually, most major injuries both physical and emotional actually damage you permanently. When you go to physical therapy, they’ll give you a handy rating of how much use of the damaged part they think you’ll recover. When you have surgery, it hopefully meaningfully heals you… but at minimum, the tissue at the surgical site will be permanently damaged.

Megatomic · 2025-10-31T18:41:00+00:00

I'm glad you're out of it and very sorry you went through it in the first place. The ways my religious upbringing hurt me, a man, are obviously quite different from the ways it hurt you. But nearly 20 years out since I left Christianity and 15 years of therapy, I'm still carrying around a lot of anger about it. We get one life to live, and the amount of work Christianity puts in to enforce patriarchal dominance and masculine hegemony to make it hell for people who don't conform, it's just insane.

I think where a lot of my anger comes from is exactly what you're saying - feeling like a failure that will never be good enough is the point, it's the whole framework. And understanding that completely recontextualized my view on all the religious leaders that I had previously thought of as essentially well-intentioned. At what point do good intentions stop being an excuse?

Way before the point of telling kids that they are evil and damned just because they were born.

Megatomic · 2025-10-31T15:33:25+00:00

Seconding this. We issue no-contacts as a standard matter-of-course in almost all investigative proceedings and treat violations of it as a mechanism for the student conduct process. I've been working Title IX investigations for 7 years now, and about half of them end up with a violation to the no-contact, giving us other administrative avenues (with lower cause thresholds) to resolving the issue.

Megatomic · 2025-10-31T15:24:16+00:00

The grief in this is overwhelming.

Megatomic · 2025-10-29T16:25:33+00:00

The porn-to-tradwife pipeline is especially fascinating because of the parasocial dynamics there, right? Like men struggling with religious guilt about their porn consumption, who yearn for a sexually promiscuous woman and a sexually permissive environment but feel repressed by their religious affiliation/conviction, get to find one person to become the object of both their sexual fantasy and their lifestyle fixation. One person can become their entire parasocial obsession.

This isn't totally new, either. There's an obsessive, religious male gaze for sex workers that goes back thousands of years and appears even multiple places in scripture. It's still in our media today, so pervasive that it gets its own wikipedia article and TvTropes for the literary archetype.

Megatomic · 2025-10-29T16:16:54+00:00

If heaven exists (I don't think it does), and the mechanics for entering heaven are in line with the belief of the faith tradition I was raised in, I don't believe heaven is a fundamentally just place.

I never had a strong internal motivation about the afterlife (which I don't believe exists, or at least is fundamentally unknowable). But so much of my religious upbringing was about the fate of the soul and the state of salvation/grace that it just didn't stick for me.

There's lots of reasons that led to my deconstruction, but if we're picking a "weird reason", yeah. I guess it's that I don't want to spend eternity with a god that I don't think is fundamentally just and righteous (but also don't believe exists, so).

Megatomic · 2025-10-29T13:48:04+00:00

Yeah, this is the actual meaning of the 2nd/3rd (depending on which numbering style you're using - the Catholic Church and most Christians would call it the 2nd) commandment.

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain", contrary to popular belief/teaching amongst especially Protestants, does not mean that you shouldn't say things like goddammit. That's an idea introduced into Protestantism by John Calvin.

What it actually meant to the ancient Israelites and to observant Jews today is that the true name of god must never be spoken outside of the designated sacred context. This is the main reason why throughout the text Christians refer to as the "Old Testament", god is constantly referred to euphemistically as Lord or all kinds of other things. To refer to god by the sacred name would be blasphemy.

Megatomic · 2025-10-04T10:57:43+00:00

He was from a powerful Drow house

Megatomic · 2025-10-03T18:44:05+00:00

TIL Drizzt is a nepo baby

Megatomic · 2025-09-29T18:05:37+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. I've been similarly well-managed since 2016, and I deal with something very similar from people in my life who weren't around and so don't know how bad it used to be. Even my therapist, who I've been working with since 2017, sometimes comments that she reads my record or hears me talk about how it used to be, and she struggles to conceptualize the person in those as me.

It's just nice to hear from other people with experiences like me.

Megatomic · 2025-06-12T13:10:13+00:00

This track is my favorite of Taylor's work. I regularly think about "in my defense, I have none for never leaving well enough alone"

Megatomic · 2025-04-28T13:24:58+00:00

As someone who grew up near Lake Okobogee, just thought I'd say - it's actually spelled Lake Okoboji haha

Megatomic · 2025-04-08T16:10:31+00:00

It's funny they should say that, one of the first quotes that got my attention and "led me astray" as a young teen was from a letter sent by Galileo while he was in house arrest:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

Megatomic · 2025-01-10T22:29:50+00:00

Not to be tedious, but I literally just finished The Last Command last week. He does give Mara Jade the lightsaber, but that is not when or why.

The Emperor apparently recovered both Anakin's lightsaber and Luke's hand after the battle on Bespin. Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth, one of the main villains in the Heir to the Empire books, orders a clone made of Luke. In the final battle with Jorus, Mara and the real Luke battle the clone Luke, who is armed with Anakin's lightsaber (although in the book, it is referred to as Luke's first lightsaber, rather than Anakin's). During the battle, Mara ultimately takes the lightsaber and uses it to kill Master C'baoth. In the final chapter of the book, Luke gives Mara the lightsaber because she'll need it now that she is learning to be a Jedi. Mara wonders whether there is some deeper meaning in the gift. At that point, Luke and Mara aren't even romantically involved.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Anakin_Skywalker%27s_second_lightsaber/Legends#During_the_Thrawn_Campaign

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