Been meaning to update this for a while, so here goes:

After that, I relied very heavily for a while on the valved Aura (3M 9211+), it was how I got through summer 2024 since the non-valve Aura was just so hot. It was not the most comfortable, but between the Aura and the valved Aura, the valved Aura had advantages (both left marks on my face after wearing).

Then there was a combination of factors, including suddenly the valved Aura being out of stock where I was buying it and me stopping the habit of looking for them (if you want them, they're currently in stock in Uline, I assume also other places), because I'd switched entirely to the BNX F95 in both white and black, which are very light and breathable, which really outweighs the downsides (not many, but it feels like I do need to adjust it more than the regular Aura).

I've also dabbled with the BNX H95B, which has a different shape from the F95. It doesn't fit as well but it's also very light. It's basically a nice light mask for when I don't need to wear a mask for too long or talk or whatever.

But if I'm, for a wild example, waiting in a hospital waiting room for hours and hours, very nearly the only one masking, then the BNX F95 is absolutely the mask for that.

At this point, the Auras just live in coat pockets and backpacks as "oops, forgot to grab a BNX mask" backups. Because the Auras are great masks but they are much hotter and much tighter than the BNX ones.

As superhero movies go, this is a very good superhero movie. As regular movies go, I kept being annoyed about the seriously compressed timeline and some really basic suspension of disbelief, like "is anyone going to say Lex Luthor is lying about translation" because, uh. Also, how does anyone know Kryptonian? So many little things just drove me up the wall.

However! It was a good movie, and the Clark/Lois stuff was very well done, I actually really loved their interview/fight because it worked so well in with characterization, it didn't strike my "I cannot, I cannot, I cannot" that I tend to have about couples arguing.

The main effect of the movie was, after it was revealed that Lex had people going over every inch of every Superman fight so he could get a single strand of Superman's hair so he could clone him -- I went and reread some old favorite Smallville fics. Good times.

The movie also did something I noticed with the Knives Out 2: Glass Onion film, where it made the Cool Evil Rich Villain... not come off very compelling on the slash goggles. I did not walk out of this movie shipping Clark/Lex, even though I ship Clark/Lex. Lex Luthor, played by Why Do I Recognize Him Oh That's The Boy From About A Boy, is very well done and very well performed and is not a magnificent bastard and he has zero chemistry with Clark, but not in a way that detracts from the film. This is not a film where Clark and Lex have ever been on good terms; this is not a film where they even ever knew each other. There was nothing about the movie that was in the same flavor or theme as Smallville, but hey, always fun to go reread some stuff.

But for a movie that did Lois so well, did we have to have Eve The Awful Clingy Obsessive Wannabe Girlfriend with Jimmy who did not want to date her, just wanted info from her? That was so hard to endure. I think worse of the movie for making that decision, it casts a long tail on the movie even a week after I finished it, like "oh yeah so that was a movie that made me go reread some old fics from 20 years ago, and also had this unnecessarily misogynistic sideplotline played for laughs (?)".

Nathan Fillion also appeared to be treating this film as "I will do bad acting on purpose to show that my character is a buffoon" but mostly it just came off annoying.

I also have a nit to pick with this movie that is solely from watching it with the DVD closed captions, which kept noting when the main Superman theme was playing, which is: the soundtrack to this movie is ... well, it's got some perfectly acceptable pop songs peppered in. But the rest of it is just so bland.

But this movie is better than every MCU movie I've seen, with the exception of Captain America 2: A Good Spy Movie With I Guess Absolutely Zero Repercussions For The Worldbuilding Oh Well.