Rachel and I hadn't seen each other since 2017 - an almost unforgivable sin - so we decided that the best way to ask forgiveness was for Jon to take a trip to St. Paul, Minnesota
...Author: Jonathan
Twenty Twenty Vision
A recent message titled Start 2023 on the Right Foot on a pub run mailing list that I'm subscribed to started out with the following observation:
I feel like this year should be a bit more normal, if only because it's the first time the year isn't a play off of 2020 repeating itself. There was 2021: "twenty twenty won" and 2022: "twenty twenty too". Three years in and I think we've achieved a new normal,
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...Something’s Fishy
Google Translate is amazing. You can write fairly natural English and it'll produce a reasonably acceptable German equivalent most of the time. Results may vary if you start to use wildly creative colloquialisms or misspell words. Now, if you speak German reasonably well, then as you can see, even fairly well-written English sounds a little off in the translation once you write longer, more complicated sentences. These errors magnify when you start to use complex or metaphorical expressions,
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...We Don’t Talk about Burnout: How Superheroes Deal with Workplace Stress and Trauma
“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions. Your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administering stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
When you last heard from us over a year ago, we were writing with a spirit of optimism as we seemed to be emerging from a pandemic that had stolen a year of our lives.
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...The Stupidhero Landing
The Superhero Landing - sometimes referred to as a "three-point landing" - involves heroes touching down after flying or jumping from a great height by catching themselves on two feet and one hand, typically crouching into the kneeling position at the end, if not flat out landing on their one hand, one knee, and the opposite foot in a bend-leg crouch. Here to demonstrate it is Tony Stark - aka Iron Man - at his very own Stark Expo in Iron Man 2:
The landing is certainly impressive,
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...R, Matey!
R is a really interesting sound. Or rather, it's a letter that has an interesting range of possible pronunciations. It can be rolled or glided in the back of the throat like in some dialects of German, trilled in the front like in various Spanish dialects, or pronounced as a fairly tight, fluid liquid up against either the palate or alveolar ridge, like in English. In some Asian languages, R and L aren't well defined,
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...Destiny Manifests
We see fate unfold in complex and interesting ways in all kinds of stories. Whether showing us how a complex series of events can lead to one crucial moment, persuading us that our actions - no matter how small - have true meaning, or just entertaining us with the fantastic hypotheticals of time travel and the web of consequences that it might weave, Destiny clearly plays an important role in the stories we tell.
...Identity Crises
We are what we do. The world, be it our closest friends and families or the general public, will remember us for the impact that we have on it. When people meet and ask each other "what do you do?", we tend to answer with our career, not a description of our hobbies and personal activities. But what if you're all meeting in the context of a new job, or a new academic program? For example, when I started working at UNC Chapel Hill in 2011, my new coworkers didn't ask me "what do you do". They asked...
...Intros
Superman and God is the brainchild of Rachel Bachmann and Jonathan Tweedy. Beginning as an arbitrary book title suggestion in the Fall of 2001, it gained traction in our minds over the years, simmered on the back burner through the ups and downs and twists and turns of our lives and our friendship, and then started to boil over when we reconnected several years ago. Initially intended to be a collection of essays, it evolved from a book idea into a blog idea because of the immense diversity of the discussions that we find ourselves wrapped up in whenever we talk.
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