For some reason, one of my earliest experiences in reading superhero comics was the Official Marvel Index to the Fantastic Four, which was actually not comics, it was prose summaries of the Fantastic Four’s comics. I remember many nights laying in bed reading dry descriptions of these high concept character driven adventures. Maybe it wasn’t the ideal way to experience them, but it was how I did, so I cherished it.

Life went on and I grew up, but one thing I remembered was that there was an image in one of those Index issues of Ben Grimm, the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing, relaxing on a beach and his erect penis was visible, but because of his craggy, rocky skin, it was hidden. Eventually I didn’t own those Indexes anymore, so I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure I had seen it.

Much later in my adult life (April 2021, according to when I posted about it on Twitter), I found the answer to my childhood memory:

It was his foot. He was indeed relaxing on a beach, but he had one leg crossed over the other and his toes were positioned such that a child could see them as being a dong. I don’t know what I expected, but I was sure that if an artist (I had actually assumed it might have been done by the inker as a form of rebellion) had snuck Ben’s boner into a comic it would have been noticed long ago and it would be known to the Internet. So why wasn’t it? Maybe I imagined it, or misread some coincidental pattern on his skin? But the memory had been so certain. Anyway, I never entertained the idea that it was just his foot.

Anyway, since that time I’ve definitely read at least one Fantastic Four comic that calls into question whether Ben even has genitalia post-transformation. At least I’m pretty sure I have. I guess I can’t really trust my memory about these things.

Wasuperman

(Originally posted to Twitter Oct 11, 2020)

I was reluctant to join Twitter when it was new. Eventually I did, though. And I got to like it.

Some people bemoan how “people are always looking at their phones” these days, but I can only speak for myself about how having the Internet readily at hand has made me happier. Back before I had a “smartphone” when I was caught out in the world, I didn’t look around with greater appreciation or some other idyllic feeling. My mind was just as chaotic then as it was after I got the phone, I just had to deal with it in different ways. I remember sitting in waiting rooms and just arranging everything on the tables so that they were at right angles to one another. I often used to just throw coins around randomly, like just hucking pennies into the street and such. I did minor graffiti on many occasions. All this was stuff I did just because I didn’t have something better to focus on.

Twitter was never the most important use for my newfangled high-tech phones, but it was high on the list. It would allow me, at any time, to check and see if any of the people I cared to hear about had said anything I might like to read. It was a source of entertainment I could pull out of my pocket when I needed it, and also it kept me feeling like I was connected to society around me. And sometimes I made dumb jokes on there*. And, perhaps most importantly, Twitter confirmed that I am the Pope now:

But it is now past time to leave that particular social media site. For what it’s worth, I have joined Bluesky, an up and coming rival for Twitter’s userbase. It is currently invitation-only but it has enough people on there that I can usually find something entertaining when I crave it (Which is good because Canada doesn’t have pennies anymore). But I will miss what Twitter was when I enjoyed it.

*Making dumb jokes on Twitter was never my favourite usage for it. I know the common belief is that we need to be careful what we say on the Internet because it sticks around forever, but a lot of the time that just ain’t true. I crave permanence and the Internet is an ephemeral place. If I had my way, everything I ever posted on Contains2 (or its Geocities predecessor the Adam West Batcave) would all be accessible on this website, but they just aren’t. This is why I got Marq to make a thing for me so that the things I posted on Twitter would show up on this site too (they also helped keep things visually more appealing here for a couple years), but that program eventually stopped working. Before I fully leave Twitter I am going to go through and find any jokes worth repeating here or turning into Phone Guys strips or whatever. But no matter how much I salvage, I’ll be losing something. That’s the Internet for ya.

For a long time I’ve had a vague memory of a movie or episode of some anthology television show in which a woman was cursed so that any time she said “I love you” to someone, they would turn into a doll. The way I remembered it was that, at the end of the story she was fixed and realized that she could say it finally so she jubilantly shouted “I love New York” or “I love this town” which I thought at the time was reckless. But anyway, I had this memory, but never thought much about it.

On a whim I tried to search Google for it tonight. I got nothing. I could only find episodes about evil dolls and the like. I was flummoxed. I was sure I’d seen this thing. I assumed it was some episode of Outer Limits or Amazing Stories or something, niche sure, but mainstream enough that it’d be talked about online.

I reached out to other people I know to see if they remembered it and with their help I eventually seem to have found it. Really Weird Tales seems to be the answer. The thing is, the woman in Really Weird Tales (played by Catherine O’Hara no less!) does NOT turn people into dolls by saying “I love you” to them. What she does is if she loves someone (whether she says it or not) they explode. That’s in the same ballpark, but it’s a different game. But I kept watching and at one point she feels affection for a doll and it explodes. So is that it? My childhood mind conflated that with turning people into dolls? NO! There’s more. In an attempt to cure herself she has to go on a date with someone she finds repugnant, so she does that, but it goes poorly. That said, we do get the “I love New York” scene that was so embedded in my memory. AND THEN it turns out that the repugnant guy has a thing where if he hates someone, they turn into a doll! So the movie has the love thing and the doll thing, they’re just in different people than I remember. Clearly this is the movie I saw as a kid, my memory just got some things twisted.

But it gets weirder, because during my search I was led to a Reddit post by someone else trying to find the movie and that searcher ALSO remembered it as her turning people into dolls. Memory is weird.