Status Updates From Third Class Superhero: Hear...

"Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction" captures brilliantly the anguish of a writer who wants to write the story of his mother's life before she dies, but suffers writer's block. A coda of sorts to "Reality" and it affected me profoundly.

"32.05864991%": a brilliant treatment of the word "maybe", that Schroedinger's cat of matchmaking, carrying multiple probabilities and meanings, which we anticipate with dread or hope, but always collapses to a single state in every alternate universe, except perhaps this one. Wow.

"Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation": in which the titular man, 46, realizes his lack of agency and can't stop running between "middles". Like the previous story, very meta and full of profundity.

"Florence": a tale about cosmic distances and time, about the senescence of humanity, and regret, and loneliness. Oof.

"Realism": I fell asleep several times. Then woke again, back where I started. This is a story. This is not a story. No, it's a story about a story. Nay, it's a story that never ends, or never begins. What I'm trying to say is, it's hard to grok. Until the last line.

"Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation" is an odd beast: a list of statements describing a (frustratingly) vaguely imagined multiplayer game and its high scorer's strategy. It ends up in that liminal Yu-space often inhabited by his middling protags who traverse a banal existence one degree of separation from a better life.

"My Last Days as Me": Brilliant tale of a sitcom actor Tinged with Melancholy. Wow.

"Problems for Self-Study" hits some of the same high notes with its struggling physics doctoral student on the spectrum as David W. Goldman's "Axiom of Choice" does with its lovestruck math ABD. I feel so seen. But ugh, the equations didn't survive the OCR intact...

"The Man Who Became Himself" radiates _Being John Malkovitch_ vibes, sans voyeurism, but with John inhabiting himself. Yeah, this one's wild and yet poignant. Brilliant.

"401(k)" is a cute indictment of bland corporate culture, jobs that suck the life out of you, Capitalized Thoughts, and oversaturated consumerism. It's hell, really.

Title story is a bright entry in the crowded "supers" subgenre, and could have been the tale of a joker in the Wild Cards universe. I quite like the ending.