the Kat lives

Sweltering. Boiling. Fry-your-eggs-on-the-hood-of-the-car kind of day. The sun was a yellow haze and hung fat and heavy right above the highway. The heat is a physical, damning weight with the gross, icky, no-good humidity. A visual weight - a fuzz, a blur like a TV white-static buzz that obscured the asphalt concrete. His mouth was dry, his hair was sticking to his forehead, and - here’s the kicker - the car’s A/C was broken.

An A/C would’ve made being stuck on the highway at least bearable. But instead, Danny’s left with having to keep all the windows open. Making the whole car smell like gas and burnt rubber. 

Several cars honk, and Danny bangs his head on the edge of his steering wheel.

“We should’ve went of exist 32.” The man in the review mirror, Mr. Moore, in the back seat says as he fiddled with his watch before once more loosening his tie.

Danny mentality counts to five before he speaks as courteous and politely as possible. “I thought you said It would’ve taken us on the opposite direction to your office?”

“At this point,” Mr. Moore says, his voice feeling as washed out and drained as Danny felt. “The long route would’ve been faster.”

Danny couldn’t argue with that.

“Young man,” Because of course Mr. Moore was the kind of awkward middle-age man to unironically address him ‘young man’. “How long have you been in this Uber business?”

“Not long,” Danny says. “How about you and your office job? A paper factory, was it? How long have you been working there?”

“This was my first day,” Mr. Moore says. In the review mirror, Danny can see his shoulders deflate. “I was planning to arrive early to make a good first impression, but I would consider myself lucky at this rate to arrive on time.”

“Hmm. That’s unfortunate.”

If Danny was by him self, he’s just fly or phase through with the car. Invisible, and intangible means no risks, no witnesses. Boom. Problem solved.

But Danny had Mr. Moore in the back of the car. And he was smack-dab in the middle of the highway. Surrounded by cars. Filled with people who had things like phones and nothing to occupy them except road rage.

But who would believe them?

Sure, people could record it. But between all the social media filters, photoshop, and glitching phones, who, who important, that is, would really believe it?

Danny sits up, turns around, and looks at Mr. Moore. An unassuming, grey, boring, sweaty man who worked at a paper factory. 

Who the hell would believe Mr. Moore? Never mind belief, even, what would Mr. Moore do about it? They’re a long ways from Amity and no one outside of that town knew about real ghost hunters or a government branch like the GIW. Mr. Moore was just a guy who worked in a paper factory, who probably never had anything extraordinary happen in his life ever.

Danny would be doing this man a favor, honestly.

Mr. Moore gave Danny an odd look as Danny stared at him unblinkingly. “Um… young man?”

“Put your seatbelt on.”

“… Ok?”

Danny whips his head forward with a borderline maniacal grin.

“God, fuck this,” Danny cursed. He pressed his foot on the gas petal as he turned the car intangible and simply drove through all the traffic, much to the screaming horror of Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore’s screams echo all the louder as Danny pressed even harder on the gas and everything flashed past like Willy Wonka’s Horror tunnel. He shouldn’t of crackled and laugh like how he was now, but he did.

In almost a blink of an eye, they reached the drop-off point.

“Alright Mr. Moore.” Danny eased on the brakes. and slowly costed to the spot. The car, the hunk of garbage, creaks as it comes to a complete stop.  “Here’s your stop.”

Nothing.

“Mr. Moore?”

Still nothing.

Danny cautiously turns around and see’s Mr. Moore rigid and slacked-jawed from where he sat.

“Oh god.” Danny says. “I broke the man.”

The first sign of movement Mr. Moore makes is looking at his watch with glazed eyes. “… I’m six minutes early.” He slowly turns to Danny. “I’m early.”

“You won’t be if you stay in my car.”

Mr. Moore still doesn’t seem to be in any particular rush as he stared dead (ha) ahead.

“You went through cars.”

“Yes,” Danny tells him slowly. “I did.”

“… Ok.”

“Ok?”

Mr. Moore nods. “Ok.” He looks at Danny with an odd and unnerving calmness that certainly wasn’t there prior. “Can I call you again for a ride?”

“Uh… sure?”

The man once more nods and, finally, opens the door and swings out. Even if his legs wobbled as he walked. The man reached for his pocket, and pulls out his phone.

Danny hears a ding, looks at his phone, and sees five stars.

They’d treat the current Lost Boys incredibly differently! You could do a cool AU about that, but it is not canon.

Hook being one as shown here would be rad (this is rad) but is also pretty definitely not canon either. His whole shtick is about treating the backstory of having been an upstanding Eton boy from a prominent English family who ‘went bad’ and turned to piracy as some grandiose tragedy despite the fourteen different levels on which it’s ludicrous and thus very funny to an adult audience, and to a lesser extent a child audience in its original era.

Whether the pirates are in fact actual humans with actual human origins, or just fantasy-manifestations of Neverland like say the mermaids, is the ambiguous point. Their entire identities are comprised of child-friendly pirate cliches.

(Murder is here treated as child-friendly lol.)

Peter forgets them after he kills them; there are always more.

Lost Boys are reportedly sourced from babies and toddlers who fall out of their strollers ‘while the nurse is looking the other way’ and get sent (maybe by the fairies Peter used to live with in London but also this is satirical so it’s not gonna make sense) to Neverland if they’re not claimed in seven days, like lost luggage.

This is incompatible with Hook, which is fine for transformative purposes but, again, not canon. (Peter’s own may-or-may-not-be-true stated backstory is he found his way home after getting Lost and his mother had replaced him with a new child, a betrayal he has never gotten over.)

Now, increasingly infamous fact, Peter did ‘weed [the boys] out’ if they seemed to be growing too much, though whether they actually had control over this via mindset or he only thought they should because he did is never clarified. It would make a lot of sense either way with the stated cosmology.

Peter Pan is very spooky and amoral on purpose but I get really fed up with the tendency to oversimplify that into 'he’s the bad guy.’

That’s missing the entire point! He’s not the bad guy! He’s a danger, but in a morally neutral sense. He’s the hero and the monster and that is the whole-ass point.

He’s the product of an inability to develop advanced moral sensibilities due to supernaturally arrested development, and possibly being dead.

(Also a lot of what’s wrong with him isn’t even the spooky fairy business but the effects of what 'being a boy’ meant in James Barry’s imperial cultural framework, that encouraged intense fantasy violence way more uncritically and with less nuance than we tend to a hundred years later.)

Innocent and heartless is an oversimplification of what children are like, of course, but you still have to keep both parts! Peter is both. His empathy very much exists, is furiously powerful in odd moments, but it’s crippled and limited by his inability to grow as a person, to learn and make connections, because those are among the roads to growing up, and he will not consent to that.

Real compassion requires an understanding of suffering that costs a portion of your innocence. Peter can’t have that. Not that, or any of its comforts, because he will not bear the cost.

He chooses, over and over again, to remain what he is, and the novel Barry wrote around his original stage script has intense horror vibes but only in that he explicitly depicts growing up as a catastrophic loss of self, but clearly shows that the alternative of stasis as depicted in Peter is terrible in its own way.

(The Hook movie is actually the adaptation that’s most faithful to the original themes, which always annoyed me as a kid because they never adequately accounted for what motivated Peter to alter that ancient conviction so the core character arc of the whole film lacked foundation. Like?? You want to just imply this feral being fell in love with a very special girl who we learn nothing about, and altered his entire nature for her???? I’m supposed to believe that with no support whatsoever? Blah.)

Women (and many men) fought for decades with hospitals to even have men allowed in the delivery room during the early stages of labor, which can last for several hours, and hospitals only began to give in to their requests in the 1960s but even then they would be kicked out of the room by hospital staff before the actual birth took place. So many of the couples watching the show would have had to go through labor without having/being allowed to support their spouse regardless of their wishes. Having the child’s father present for the birth only began to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Which means most people watching this show either went through birth without the support of their spouse, were not allowed to support their spouse during the birth of their child, or their own mother’s went through that during their birth.

Moreover, a lot of kids watched this show. MLK himself contacted Nichelle Nichols and asked her to stay on the show when she was considering leaving, because “you don’t have a Black role, you have an equal role,” and there wasnt many Black role models on tv. I can only imagine how Black kids, Asian kids, and mixed race or mixed culture kids felt seeing people like them on tv. Hell, seeing Uhura on screen is what inspired Whoopi Goldberg as a little girl.

Like, all the years of anti-Chinese racism in the US? Sulu. Anti-Japanese sentiments left over after WW2? Sulu. Korean War in 1950-52? Sulu. The Vietnam War, with Johnson in 1965 (a year before TOS started airing) choosing to start sending American troops into the conflict? Sulu.

Sulu was Roddenberry’s desperate attempt to show all Asian people as inherently worthy, inherently human, and yeah, he probably put kind of too much on Sulu’s shoulders, but it was the 1960s and Roddenberry fucking cared about representation, so he did what he could.

Scotty was third in line for the captain’s chair. The only non-Kirk who had the con more then him was Spock.

He was smart, he was a *ranked* crewmen, he was a gentleman, he wasn’t a skirt chaser, and he was capitol L loyal. The only time he got into a fight was when someone both went after his Captain, AND his Ship.

And he was Scottish. 

Also, it’s very worth noting that the “token minority character” label doesn’t apply in any way to these characters.

At the end of the elves life he was gathering water from a river and found the wedding ring my character was wearing when he jumped into the world soul. That night my character came and took him to the next life.

But! I like that many of you have correctly noted that both sets of armor are perfectly serviceable AND have historical context. Geralt's leather armor isn't going to hurt him a bit, and the exaggerated muscle sculpturing IS 100% a hilarious design choice, but it's also one ancient cultures employed all the time. (Romans in particular loved this shit)

The problem with feminized tiddy armor that hugs each breast isn't that it's sexualized, but that it will kill you. Armor cupping each boob and having an indention in the middle of your chest means that any blow to the torso drives the mid-tit indention RIGHT INTO YOUR STERNUM. It's not decorative, it's arguably more dangerous than no armor at all. Meanwhile I'm looking at Geralt, and his flexible leather armor has minor intentions and is probably over a base plate, Roman style. He's not in danger he just wants to be cute.

Oh, yes.

A few years ago I went to pick up a woman I met on OKCupid for a date, and a friend of hers was there. They kind of over-explained “Oh, she just showed up to say hi” and there was a vague nervousness in the air that even my autistic ass was picking up on. Her friend was playing conspicuously with her phone. I went “Ah, the safety. Need to get a picture?”

Dead silence for about a second and a half, then the friend took a picture, looked at my date, and said “Have fun” and walked out the door.

(I would ordinarily have been clueless, but I’d just been asked to be the safety the previous night.)

My advice to male-presenting folks: recognize that this not your problem. By which I mean, this sort of security check isn’t a problem for you. It doesn’t hurt you. You aren’t being insulted or disrespected. And if you treat it like what it is– a reasonable adaptation to an unreasonable situation– and just roll with it, your dates will be more comfortable, and you will have a better time as a result.

The same applies to phone calls mid-date. Let them answer the damn phone without drama.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits...but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Satoko to Nada