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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 2, 2023 16:17:58 GMT -5
Jeddak, your post reminded me that occasionally I'd ask my high school students which one super-power they'd like to have. The answers were inevitably overwhelming. The girls wanted to fly. The boys wanted invisibility. (In second place? X-Ray vision.) You do the math.
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Post by zaku on Dec 2, 2023 16:27:26 GMT -5
It's all make believe. Just read them and have a fun time. The creators did not intend for readers to just accept characters, powers and gadgets as one would Felix the Cat's Magic Bag. In the 40s, the Batman titles not only published diagrams of the Dynamic Duo's Batcave, but tried to plausibly explain how certain gadgets worked. In the 60s, Spider-Man's web-shooters / fluid were given a couple of pages of pseudo-engineering in an attempt to make the device seem real.
Then, there was 1960s Iron Man stories, which were never shy about creating endless explanations of how his armor and weapons worked. The "make it appear real"movement reached a fever pitch in the 80s with DC's Who's Who The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe and Marvel's Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, which took deep dives into how powers, weapons and other devices would believably work. The readers ate that up, because they were looking for the fiction to be explained in a way that blurred the lines between comic book and how they understood things to work in reality...and it was fun.
The best explanation is that in superhero universes the third law of thermodynamics is just an opinion 😅
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Post by codystarbuck on Dec 2, 2023 19:40:40 GMT -5
The creators did not intend for readers to just accept characters, powers and gadgets as one would Felix the Cat's Magic Bag. In the 40s, the Batman titles not only published diagrams of the Dynamic Duo's Batcave, but tried to plausibly explain how certain gadgets worked. In the 60s, Spider-Man's web-shooters / fluid were given a couple of pages of pseudo-engineering in an attempt to make the device seem real.
Then, there was 1960s Iron Man stories, which were never shy about creating endless explanations of how his armor and weapons worked. The "make it appear real"movement reached a fever pitch in the 80s with DC's Who's Who The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe and Marvel's Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, which took deep dives into how powers, weapons and other devices would believably work. The readers ate that up, because they were looking for the fiction to be explained in a way that blurred the lines between comic book and how they understood things to work in reality...and it was fun.
The best explanation is that in superhero universes the third law of thermodynamics is just an opinion 😅 Haven't you heard? All science is just opinion.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 2, 2023 19:48:46 GMT -5
The best explanation is that in superhero universes the third law of thermodynamics is just an opinion 😅 Haven't you heard? All science is just opinion. I'm sure somewhere on Youtube there's a video saying what I want to hear, made by someone who almost passed 8th grade science. I'm "doing my own research."
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 2, 2023 19:58:06 GMT -5
Haven't you heard? All science is just opinion. I'm sure somewhere on Youtube there's a video saying what I want to hear, made by someone who almost passed 8th grade science. I'm "doing my own research." Somewhere? Try everywhere. The stupid is strong in this country.
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Post by Icctrombone on Dec 2, 2023 20:02:33 GMT -5
Teleportation, definitely. Or the ability to stop time for the rest of the world while I could move freely. Not sure I'd be a superhero with that power, though. The temptations. . . You mean super speed ?
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 2, 2023 21:04:52 GMT -5
I can't count the number of times I've seen the phrase "the golden age of everything is 12." Thousands I'm sure. Certainly several hundred just on this site.
Now maybe I'm the anomaly, but that is not the case for me. I'd buy that the golden age of nostalgia might be 12. But I honestly find most of the stuff I liked at 12 to be pretty terrible now. Comics, books, TV (I really don't know what music I was listening to at 12, but 90% of the music I listened to from 15-25 is absolute crap).
Nostalgia is a trap. Fight the trap.
There. I said it.
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Post by Icctrombone on Dec 2, 2023 21:13:32 GMT -5
I can't count the number of times I've seen the phrase "the golden age of everything is 12." Thousands I'm sure. Certainly several hundred just on this site. Now maybe I'm the anomaly, but that is not the case for me. I'd buy that the golden age of nostalgia might be 12. But I honestly find most of the stuff I liked at 12 to be pretty terrible now. Comics, books, TV (I really don't know what music I was listening to at 12, but 90% of the music I listened to from 15-25 is absolute crap). Nostalgia is a trap. Fight the trap. There. I said it. Saying it was the golden age doesn't mean it was great. Nostalgia is key.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 2, 2023 21:31:29 GMT -5
I can't count the number of times I've seen the phrase "the golden age of everything is 12." Thousands I'm sure. Certainly several hundred just on this site. Now maybe I'm the anomaly, but that is not the case for me. I'd buy that the golden age of nostalgia might be 12. But I honestly find most of the stuff I liked at 12 to be pretty terrible now. Comics, books, TV (I really don't know what music I was listening to at 12, but 90% of the music I listened to from 15-25 is absolute crap). Nostalgia is a trap. Fight the trap. There. I said it. Saying it was the golden age doesn't mean it was great. Nostalgia is key. It is, but I very seldom see that amount of introspection. Generally what I see is basically "everything was better then and everything since has sucked, especially now." Leaving aside politics (because that way inevitably lead to Slam getting banned again), no, everything wasn't better then. You were 12, for Hell's sake. You were not a discerning consumer. It's possible that what you liked then is still good. It's probably more likely it was garbage...because you were 12 and 12 year olds like a lot of stupid stuff. It's even okay to still like it. Just have the self-awareness to recognize that some of the things we like are junk. I mean, I like a lot of really crappy stuff. But I recognize that it's garbage.
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Post by impulse on Dec 2, 2023 22:06:24 GMT -5
I don't even have grand ideas about it, good or evil. I am just thinking about not having to sit in rush hour traffic or buying plane tickets to go somewhere. Lunch in Paris? Sure, why not!
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,084
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Post by Confessor on Dec 3, 2023 5:21:48 GMT -5
The stupid is strong in this country. America does not have a monopoly on stupid.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Dec 3, 2023 5:27:50 GMT -5
The stupid is strong in this country. America does not have a monopoly on stupid. Ain't that the truth...
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Post by tarkintino on Dec 3, 2023 6:14:57 GMT -5
Haven't you heard? All science is just opinion. I'm sure somewhere on Youtube there's a video saying what I want to hear, made by someone who almost passed 8th grade science. I'm "doing my own research." Sheesh! In the YouTube space, you can replace science with "history", "politics", "toys", "movies" and just about any other subject and find most of the "experts" are on that 8th grade level. Hell, 8th grade is four grades too high, considering what passes for knowledge on many a YouTube channel.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2023 8:09:20 GMT -5
I'm sure somewhere on Youtube there's a video saying what I want to hear, made by someone who almost passed 8th grade science. I'm "doing my own research." Somewhere? Try everywhere. The stupid is strong in this country. It's why my wife and I decided to homeschool our kids. We were probably well-positioned to do it, we both had strong educations ourselves plus complementary areas of specialization as I was a math major with a strong science background and she was an English major. We had also both taught as adjunct college instructors so at least some familiarity with being educators. But while I'm not saying homeschooling is the right option for everyone, I believe many people could do it regardless of their preparedness if they were focused and leveraged the many supporting resources out there. Academically both our kids have not only thrived overall, but it has given us the flexibility to adopt different educational strategies and resources as made sense to us. The foundation is more classical based, but we've been able to sort of mix and match applied learning tools using say Singapore math for a period of time but then making a judgement call to switch to something else later. Coming back to YouTube, we leverage some content there when we preview it and find it beneficial. One of my favorite stories is some years back my kids really got fascinated by huge numbers in math, and we found a great video from a British professor contemplating a "Googolplex meters sized universe". The size is so mind-boggling on paper, the video does a tremendous job explaining the implications, and it then provoked a question from my kids that I didn't know the answer to. Well, I looked up the professor's contact info and sent him the question, also explaining to him I was a homeschool teacher, and he quickly responded and gave a great and helpful response. He then asked me about homeschooling because he was considering it for his kids! My long-winded point being, yes, it's true there's a lot of disappointing content out there and a lot to feel pessimistic about education in general. But while it means working perhaps harder in some ways than before to overcome that, some of the "better" uses of stuff like YouTube like I just described in my example are resources I never had growing up, so I find some optimism amidst the backdrop of broader educational woes we face.
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Post by Icctrombone on Dec 3, 2023 8:34:48 GMT -5
Saying it was the golden age doesn't mean it was great. Nostalgia is key. It's probably more likely it was garbage...because you were 12 and 12 year olds like a lot of stupid stuff. It's even okay to still like it. Just have the self-awareness to recognize that some of the things we like are junk. I mean, I like a lot of really crappy stuff. But I recognize that it's garbage. I'm a believer in the slamanian doctrine of romanticizing of the material we've read as youngsters. Case in point, I LOVE the Kree /Skrull war. In the proceeding years I've come to see it as a good tale with many diversions and Roy Thomas packed too many plots into the story. It was weird that he included the Inhumans when he didn't need to. But I still love it.
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