“He has to fund the Justice League. They often have a space program.”
“But couldn’t he do more good if he just invested-”
“The Earth is routinely invaded by aliens, gods, and the forces of an extraterrestrial god of tyranny.”
He has, like, three charitable organizations he funds, named after his father, his mother, and Alfred.
Between both Bruce and Batman’s contributions, Gotham should be a better city than it is, and the only reason it isn’t is DC Editorial Mandate that basically says Gotham has to get worse and worse and worse or there’s no Batman stories they can tell (and, obviously, they have no other characters besides Batman).
There’s a reason Batman thinks the city is literally cursed.
I want to see Bruce Wayne go off
“Oh, oh, just charity my way out of dealing with the Penguin, a living, breathing 19th century Marxist’s cartoon of the bourgeoisie? Just fund anti-Clayface measures? Crack down on corporations who put out shapeshifting cosmetics? What socio-economic pressures turn botonists into actual fucking dryads?! What inspires anti-animal terrorism? THAT’S NOT EVEN A REAL KIND OF ECO-FASCISM!”
For the record, Gotham is canonically curse, because it sits on some sort of evil swamp. I think.
There are like, half a dozen curses. The Lazarus Pits are leaching into the water, Slaughter Swamp is an unconnected body of water a few miles outside of the city that also ressurects people (see Solomon Grundy), the Bat-demon Barbatos and his followers (the Court of Owls) have been fucking up the city psychically and financially, the malevolent influence of the warlock Doctor Gotham’s tomb in the center of the city, the madness hypersigil of Amadeus Arkham (in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), there were several outposts of subterraneans and aliens beneath the city during the Silver Age, constant chemical warfare that makes it the equivalent of a WWI trench managed by MK-ULTRA, it’s in New Jersey, and I think God just hates it
tired: Batman could do more good by running charities than by fighting criminals
wired: Batman could save literally every other city on the planet simultaneously with the amount of effort and resources he’s pumped into Gotham, which is a lost cause, but this is his city damnit.
Inspired: Batman’s diligence is containing the menace that is Gotham’s madness from escaping too far from city limits.
For all his billions, for all his activity, for all his efforts, Gotham is a bonfire fed by the madness of mortal people, cultivated by dark powers and just existing there makes living souls like kindling for it. And left to its own devices,it’d become a breeding ground for supernatural unrest that no mere social service system or social awareness of activist campaign, no government program, no actions of a singular vigilante, could ever hope to undo.
Batman is single handedly if need be but fortunately not alone so often, holding back the noxious psychic influences of warp and wyrd entities and what they do to the very environment and landscape through the power of sheer, unbridled humanity.
Ascended: Gotham is containing Batman, because the forces of evil, consciously or not, have figured out that if let loose, this motherfucker and his sprawling adoptive family would’ve solved every crime in the world ever, so they throw literally everything they have at his home town in hopes that he stays there.
Because they were foolish and let Alan Scott escape. They aren’t making that mistake again.
What if Gotham is the pump?
Like. What if, because Gotham is such a shitshow, anyone looking to improve their lives has their eye on being able to move out of Gotham, so whenever Bruce Wayne’s charitable endeavors come somebody’s way, they take it, pack their bags, and move the fuck away, and take that money with them.
Meanwhile there’s an ongoing influx of people to Gotham primarily because they’re flat broke and real estate in Gotham is dirt fucking cheap because it’s a shitshow, and there’s always places hiring because 1) they’ve got Bruce Wayne money to try to make a difference, 2) there’s no shortage of places that need to be fixed up a little, and 3) villains are always in the market for new henchpeople.
So you’re a broke millennial from any other town in the country, and you have student loans, a job that hasn’t kept up with inflation, and your landlord has raised the rent three times this year so far and it’s eating up two-thirds of your paycheck. You look for housing on the internet and discover that one-third of your paycheck will get you the mortgage for an actual house in Gotham, a house you own and will never have to deal with your scummy rentjacking landlord again. And Wayne Industries is hiring, and so are sixteen different disaster remediation places, and six staffing services with a sort of weird vibe to them but they offer benefits, since when do temp agencies do benefits, and sure the crime rate is high but the rest of the world’s heading in that direction anyway, especially if you’re homeless, which you’re gonna be in like four months if that jackass your landlord raises the rent one more time, so get in losers, we’re going to Gotham!
And you settle into your bigger-than-expected apartment and get a job that brings you a comfortable paycheck and you learn to live with the terrorist attacks and the explosions and the gunfire and the neighbors and the drunken billionaire swimming in the restaurant fountain, and you pay off your student loans, buy a car, suffer a few months’ unemployment when your boss goes to jail for trying to assassinate the mayor and then your partner loses their job for a few months when the office gets smothered in a jungle’s worth of climbing plants and you develop hospital bills when you both get caught in a hallucinogenic terror gas eruption at the mall, but hey, you’d be homeless by now in any other city, so you live with it.
And then it’s a few years later and you’re wanting to start a family, but the neighbor three doors down owns pet hyenas and the park was firebombed last week and someone froze all the water pipes and you crashed your car into one of the impromptu ice sculptures and you’d really like your kids to grow up in a normal city where they don’t have to receive advice like “don’t talk to strange plants.”
So you visit one of the social work offices and get yourself a bit of assistance, save up your money, sell your house for the price of a down payment to the sort of incoming fool you were six years ago, and use your polished resume to get yourself a job someplace that doesn’t have What To Do If Clown Attack on their safety training syllabus.
You came, you left, and Gotham remains. A shithole.
This is a really well thought out way in what keeps Gotham moving. Sure there’s the people that have been there they’re whole lives, families that go back generations, but these are reasons people move in. The kind of people that want out. And maybe are desperate enough to take that Job hunching.
It’s also weird to see my pithy response circle around over 20 times and end up back on my dash…
When the glimmering hope continues against the tide of the hopeless.
When the glimmering
hope continues against the
tide of the hopeless.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading: #it’s true and extremely funny #imagine you’re an actual billionaire and you’re doing everything that in every other city would’ve already minimised the crime rate #and none of it works #comedy if I’ve seen any /End ID]
The little RB statistics chart is so pleasant and stimmy to look at and I want to see what it looks like when it gets really REALLY huge because it makes me think of some deep sea lifeform
here lemme help
*ahem*
reblog this post to kiss the person you reblogged it from
hope that works :)
THANK YOU THIS IS MAKING MY BRAIN SO HAPPY AAAAAAAAA
THIS IS SO SATISFYING ITS LIKE A GROUP OF PLANKTON OR A RAILWAY CHART…
I don’t usually suspect Jonathan Harker’s employer, Peter Hawkins, of deliberately sending the kid to Transylvania to die for a client, but something about the correspondence between him and Dracula read as creepy to me this time. I am sending you a young man full of energy…
Because I love pain, I have a lot of feelings about an AU where Mr. Hawkins intentionally serves Jonathan up to Dracula, like Herr Knock in Nosferatu. He doesn’t know that Dracula is a vampire, but he knows that he has terrible things planned, and Jonathan isn’t coming back from the trip to Transylvania. He’s in some kind of dire financial straits, and sacrificing Jonathan is the only way that the Count will agree to deal with him. When Jonathan shows back up again, Mr. Hawkins leaves him all of the proceeds of the deal out of guilt.
For maximum deep hurting, after everything is said and done Jonathan goes through Mr. Hawkins’ personal papers and learns that the man he thought of as a father left him to be murdered for money.
Okay okay hear me out.
Jonathan doesn’t go through all the papers. Jonathan is overwhelmed and overworked and still not sleeping and is desperately trying to re-find the groove of his life. Jonathan does not have time nor energy to go through all the papers.
But. When they move in, Mina, who always intended to “help him in his career” and understands all the legal jargon and has an organizational mind and whose own work is now bolstered by the addition of Mary the Maid - Mina goes through all the papers in an effort to help get the firm 19th century up to date with a vengeance, and she finds both the guilt will and the pre-transylvania documents spelling it all out. And she looks over at her extremely fragile husband who probably can’t take another shock (such as learning that the man he thought of as a father left him to be murdered for money) -
Van Helsing: About one thing I am curious. In September when I visit, Mr Jonathan turn over to me so many correspondence between Mr Peter Hawkins and this Dracula whom now they hunt. But these correspondence appear nowhere in your so excellent document for all our use
Mina: the Count must have burned them as well
Van Helsing: But for what reason you have not type them with the rest?
Mina: …well they didn’t seem terribly relevant. And… my poor darling has been through so much. He doesn’t need to read about the man he considered a second father selling him to a monster on top of everything else
Van Helsing: So Mr Jonathan, he have not seen these documents?
Mina: no.
Van Helsing: …but you have read them all
Mina: yes.
Van Helsing: ……..
Van Helsing: before or after he die?
Mina:
Mina: is there something you’d like to ask me, Professor?
Van Helsing: it may be we ride to both of us death. In this desert place, you may use me as confessor, and none shall ever know
Mina: Oh I am damned already, but my conscience is clear. Shall a man not kill on behalf of his beloved, as my Jonathan rides to do even now?
Van Helsing: ….
Mina: And have you not said I have a man’s brain and a woman’s heart?
Van Helsing: ………👀
Mina: So you surely can understand, Professor. For his sake, I do dare much.
I honestly believe the whole “adults require less sleep” thing is honest to god probably a myth created by capitalism
It is.
i honestly believe that sleep deprivation is the biggest ignored/neglected root cause of health dangers that prematurely kill adults
ask me sometime about the role of sleep in the leptin ghrelin cycle and how its interruption destabilizes weight homeostasis
or about the new research showing that heart disease is not caused by fat, like we thought for years, but by inflammation in the circulatory system whose root cause is unknown but one of the prime suspects is, you guessed it, sleep deprivation
but nobody wants to hear that lack of sleep is killing people. employers don’t want to hear it. and god knows that having sold their waking hours to capitalism to survive workers don’t want to lose the only time they have left to them to live their lives, mostly stolen from sleep
i mean even i don’t want to do anything about it and i love sleep, i just love overwatch more
this this this this this
our society places almost zero value on sleep
on enough sleep
on uninterrupted sleep
on regular, predictable, cycling sleep
all the evidence we have suggests sleep is really, really, really important to the processes of the human body, including both mental and physical health, and yet when was the last time you heard somebody suggest that people had a *right* to sufficient, regular sleep?
Reminder that
- Humans are not meant to sleep for extended periods of uninterrupted sleep.
By this I don’t mean “humans shouldn’t have 8+ hours of sleep a night”; I mean that we are supposed to sleep for four to five hours (ish), then get up and do something relaxing like reading for a half hour to an hour, then get another bout of four to five hours. This is what our bodies were designed for.
Sleeping the whole night through was a fad started with the advent of the lightbulb. Sleeping the whole night through is so recent (and artificial) that First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels.
- Lack of sleep for even a single night severely compromises your immune system.
If you’re planning on getting little sleep or pulling an all-nighter, make sure to eat lots of fruit and veggies/take vitamins that day. Or even better, get yourself some bee propolis. It’s a natural remedy used for thousands of years in Latin America and is insanely good for boosting up compromised immune systems (if you get the drop kind, put 3 to 4 drops in a spoonful of honey and mix well with a 2nd spoon to mask the strong taste). It has no side effects and is all but impossible to overdose on.
- According to several government bodies around the world, chronic lack of sleep is literally tied for 1st place as the worst kind of torture (the other is solitary isolation)
- Expecting a teen to get up for 8:30 classes is the equivalent of expecting an adult to be at work at 4 am.
After babies, teens are the age group that needs the most amount of sleep. Puberty is exhausting, and the body needs time to recharge. Ideally, a teen should be getting between 10 to 12 hours of sleep at the bare minimum. Most teens are lucky if they manage to get 8. And that’s a gigantic problem; not only does lack of sleep affect mood (which is extra significant when your hormones are already riding a rollercoaster to begin with), but also has massive effects on growth, which is kinda what the whole puberty thing is supposed to be about.
- Humans were not designed to have the same sleep cycle across the species. Much the opposite in fact.
Night owls and morning people are an actual thing. Because we’re pack creatures, Nature came up with a clever way for our ancestors to always have someone on the lookout for predators and threats: make people naturally alert at varying times so that there’s always someone alert to keep watch.
Forcing night owls to follow morning people’s sleep cycle means night owls live with what researchers have referred to as “permanent jetlag”.
“
First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels”
I vividly remember attending a training session with a scan from an 1880-something newspaper that said “unions used to be something we needed, but we’re past that now.” The corporate propaganda hasn’t changed in 130+ years.
“ A familiar stranger is an individual who is recognized by another from regularly sharing a common physical space such as a street or bus stop, but with whom one does not interact. First identified by Stanley Milgram in the 1972 paper The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity ”
