The Strondovarian word for death is Mev. As you would expect from any intelligent beings, the idea of death holds significant place in Strondo culture, but not in the exact way it does for humanity.

Strondos don’t look forward to their own death by any means. And they absolutely consider the deaths of their loved ones with sadness. But the tragedy they see in death is less tinged by a fear of the unknown, and more seen as an unfortunate end to ongoing work. Certainly, if they find themselves in a situation where imminent demise is threatened, they will fight against it, but unless they are noticeably near death they don’t spend time worrying about it the way many humans do.

It’s may be hard to translate in human terms, but they genuinely see the effects that a person has on the world around them as a part of that person themselves. If people are still talking about a deceased person, they still live on in a way. If the Knowledge Bank has information about the deceased, they are not forgotten. The changes that person made while alive represent proof that they existed. The tragedy is that they are no longer around to make changes.

That’s not to say that belief in the afterlife doesn’t exist on Gurx, but over the thousands of years that the Knowledge Bank has been a fixture there, it has essentially become the dominant religion. Many Strondos posit than in the distant future, after the New Gurx project is finished, perhaps, Strondos may be able to use the information in the Knowledge Bank to recreate individuals and place their minds in new, undying bodies.

Pictured to the side here is an Eoumbao, a kind of carved stone which could be likened to a tombstone on Earth, but it isn’t really that. It doesn’t mark the location of a corpse, it just serves to remind anyone who notices it that a certain Strondovarian used to exist. The standard Eoumbao depicts the deceased’s face, but the important thing is the Phrob (let’s translate that as “info-icon”), which is the colourful bit embedded into stone. When scanned by a device connected to the Knowledge Bank, it will bring up all the information it can about the person to whom the monument is dedicated. It’s standard practice for the Eoumbao to depict the honouree’s limbs extending off the stone, to represent their continuing ability to effect the world.

All of this, of course, is of no help to the poor underclass on Gurx who get no notability in society, essentially being barred from the afterlife due to a lack of notability. But even they seek to live on in the memories of their families and loved ones.

This isn’t going to be a particularly deep one, but I just want to say I think that the Superman villain called the Annihilator and Annihilator Junior should come back.

In one multi-part story in the Silver Age comics, the Annihilator was Karl Keller, a Nobel prize winning chemist who used Kryptonian chemicals to fill his body with explosive energy that made him powerful enough to defeat even Superman (because, as I’ve said, people who think Superman is too powerful are too lazy to remember you can just make powerful foes). Annihilator used his powers for a successful supervillain career and, on a whim, adopted a teenage criminal named Pete as his son. They did crime together, even managing to conquer America. It couldn’t last of course, and Annihilator soon realized that the biochemical process that empowered them was bad for their health. He tried to warn Junior, who assumed the old man was turning on him. In the end, somehow Junior was de-aged to a toddler and Annihilator, now reformed, got a chance to raise him right this time. It’s as dumb as the comics of that era always are, but it doesn’t mean there’s not potential for real stories there.

As far as I’m aware the characters have only appeared since in a Jimmy Olsen book that was going for comedy and treated them as jokes. That’s fine, that book was fine, it’s fine. But these characters don’t need to be jokes.

All it would take is for a story that treats the characters more seriously than a Silver Age Superman comic. That’s not difficult. We can keep the idea that Karl is a brilliant scientist who dislikes Superman (a bit overused, but it’s fine), but we need to establish that he’s been raising Pete for more than a week. If he’s a single father trying to raise an adopted son who has been getting into trouble, you wind up with a villain who can go up against the Man of Steel but who has more complicated motives. Does Karl want to keep Pete out of the life of supervillainy? Maybe that could work. Or we could position Karl as an opposite of Pa Kent, actively teaching his son to abuse his power. I’d probably go with that latter take, because it was the fact that Clark is also an adopted child that made me think it’d be good to have the Annihilator(s) around for stories about adoption and family.

Of course, we also need to give them a Super-Pet. Some sort of Annihilator Ferret or something? Look, we can take the stories seriously and still have goofy fun, okay?

Well, this site is meant to be a monument to my life or whatever, so I really ought to mention that I got robbed at gunpoint for the first time yesterday.

I was, as usual, working my restaurant job and it went like this: Someone orders two large pizzas and a two-litre of pop for delivery, so I drive to the location. Pretty normal so far. There were no lights on in the place, so I call the number I’d been given and, after a few failed attempts, get through to the guy. He says something like “Oh, it’s actually 61-B, around back” so I go around back and there are still no lights on. But there are woods behind the place, and a man steps out of them. I’ve seen weirder on the job, so I just assume maybe he’d been over there smoking or something. He approaches and asked if I have change for a hundred dollar bill. I have a little bag with the money I use as a float, but I had taken in no cash that night, so all I had in there was what I bring at the start of the shift, which would have been just enough to give him his change if I used a bunch of coin. I ask him if he minds getting the coin, he says he did not, so I put the food and drink down on a patio chair in that back yard and I start counting coins to make the change.

As I’m trying to count the cash in the dark, he says “Hey” and I look up and he’s got a gun pointed in my face. I’m obviously flustered, so he I give him the money and leave the food (the pizzas still in the warmer bag I brought them in), and he starts yelling at me “Now get away from my house!” so I start leaving, but he notices I have a phone in my hand, and he makes me give him that as well. I remember giving an exasperated sigh when he asked for the phone. In fact, I don’t think I was at any point as scared as he hoped. Taking the phone, he again starts saying “Get away from my house!” and maybe “You have two seconds!” or something to that effect and there was something in his voice that made me assume he was trying to frighten me. I figure a man in that situation is probably himself scared, so I feel like he was maybe trying to get me more visibly scared as a power trip.

In any case, there’s no way that was actually that guy’s house. If it wasn’t just some sort of weird rambling, I feel like his repeated insistence that it was may have been some sort of “criminal mastermind” plan to make me assume he actually lived there to, I guess, throw us off the scent or something? In any case, this guy was an idiot and bad at robbing me. He got about forty or fifty dollars (largely in coin), sure. And I’m assuming he took the food, even if I didn’t see him do it. And, of course, my phone. But you know what he didn’t get? My effing wallet, which had at least twice that amount of money in it plus credit cards and whatnot, was in my pocket untouched. I don’t know what his transportation situation looked like, but if he’d taken both my phone and my car, he’d have left me stranded on that street and would have had a lot more of a lead for a getaway (not that he’d know I’d refuse to awaken the occupants of the home and would instead have walked to a gas station or whatever to get help). What I’m saying is he’s bad at his job.

I’ve got to say, I’m also kind of annoyed because I aim to live my life as a very boring person, and being able to honestly say “I’ve looked down the barrel of a gun being aimed at me with ill intent” is not as boring as I’d like. It’s probably more common in this world than I’d prefer, but it’s not boring.

But you know what I can say now that I actually have looked down that barrel and thought I might die in a moment and not even have time to mentally register that it happened? I can say this: I miss my phone! I have not gone five waking minutes since this happened without reaching for my phone. I am addicted to my phone and I don’t regret it. But what’s worse is the loss of photos and notes and text messages that were on there. I’ve been stubborn for too long about figuring out how “cloud storage” or whatever it is works. I’ll definitely bother to figure it out on the next phone, because the amount of stuff I’ve lost hurts.

For posterity, I did have that Google “Find My Device” thing on that phone, but I got my laptop even before I gave my statement to the police, so within a half hour of the robbery, and it could not detect the phone. I can only assume he destroyed the phone or something. I miss it so much.