So I woke up this morning, made coffee, opened Twitter like an idiot before I'd even sat down, and the first thing in my feed was Stan Lee's name trending. You know before you even click it's bad news. He died today at UCLA Medical Center. He was 95, which, okay, is a genuinely long life and not some tragedy-cut-short story, but it still landed weird in my chest for a second.
I want to be careful here because I know half the internet is about to do the exact same "here's my personal Marvel journey" post and I don't love adding to the pile. But this blog has been running since November 2011, which means basically this entire site's existence overlaps with the MCU turning into the cultural monster it is now. Iron Man came out in 2008, sure, but 2011 through now is when it went from "fun superhero movies" to the thing that ate all of pop culture. I've written about Marvel trailers on here more times than I probably should admit. So it feels dumb to pretend this isn't relevant to a tech-and-internet-adjacent blog, because so much of how I even experienced Stan Lee was through the internet. The cameo-spotting threads. The GIFs of him in the security guard uniform in Ant-Man. The running joke that he might secretly be immortal, which obviously reads different tonight.
I'm not going to pretend the guy was a saint, either. There was that whole ugly situation earlier this year with people around him getting accused of financially exploiting him, restraining orders, the elder abuse allegations against a former manager, which was in the news back in April and it was genuinely uncomfortable to read about. An old man getting isolated and squeezed for money by people who were supposed to be looking out for him. That stuff doesn't cancel out, and it shouldn't get scrubbed out of the story just because he died. It just sits there alongside everything else, unresolved, which is how most real things actually are.
Anyway. Small tangent, but this was also the same week Apple finally, finally updated the MacBook Air after leaving it to rot for basically four years. New one dropped last Wednesday, the 7th. Retina screen, Touch ID, starts at $1,199 which is a genuinely rude price increase from the old $999 base, and of course it's USB-C only now, so hope you like buying dongles. I've been eyeing one anyway because my 2014 Air's battery is basically a decorative object at this point, but that price jump stings. Apple's whole thing lately is "we removed the ports you use and added the ones you don't have cables for yet, that'll be $200 more, thanks."
And I'll just note in passing, because I don't think I need to write a whole separate post rehashing it when every tech outlet already did — the Google walkout from earlier this month, the one where something like 20,000 employees across offices from Tokyo to Dublin to Mountain View walked out over how the company handled sexual harassment claims, including that $90 million exit package for Andy Rubin. I don't have some brilliant new take on it. I just think it's worth saying that a walkout that size, across that many countries, coordinated mostly through internal docs and Twitter, is the kind of thing that would've been logistically impossible ten years ago. Whatever else the internet has broken, it's also just really good at letting a lot of people find out they're angry about the same thing on the same day.
Between that and Stan Lee dying today, it's been a weirdly heavy stretch for a random Monday in November. Not in a doom-and-gloom way, just — a lot happening at once, some of it sad, some of it just annoying-Apple-pricing sad, which is a much smaller category of sad and I know that.
I think tonight I'm just going to rewatch the first Iron Man. Not the good sequels, not Winter Soldier, which is the one I'd actually call the best of the bunch. Just the original, dumb, kind of low-budget-looking 2008 one where Tony Stark builds the suit in a cave with a box of scraps. Feels like the right one for tonight.