this is an infected blog! DNI!

be a lurker. just read things and think about them without feeling the need to weigh in or call out or disseminate everything you encounter. it's so nice and so freeing and it's a good way to learn things.

Verbally

Say ew or something if you really have to react.

Don't put them at the top of the feed by interacting.

I really liked @whitehairglowinggreeneyedcrush 's tags on this post and felt compelled to draw the trio watching a movie together cuz of it <3

Comic idea from my dream: every morning you give your pet People Juice and send em to school. They gotta learn calculus and read Hemingway just like people do

However, Phantom also is not known outside of Amity. He only ever helps if Amity is in danger in some way, and doesn't go to other cities or assist other heroes.

(It's because Danny never wanted to be a hero in the first place and he doesn't want the headache that comes with something like the larger hero community being able to call on him. They have things handled anyways, so fuck it.)

As such, Phantom merch is only sold in Amity. Tiny dolls and hoodies with his logo and lunchboxes sold on Etsy and Facebook Marketplace, and no sales outside of the city.

Phantom, as a hero, is kept a secret from the Justice League and the Justice League Dark, entirely by circumstance. Just the way he likes it.

Then Dash Baxter, self-proclaimed #2 Phantom Phan (Paulina beat him in hand to hand combat and won the title of #1), went to Gotham University and became the roommate of one Damian Wayne.

Dash, who Does Not Stop wearing his Phandom merch.

Damian was told to at least try the typical college experience, to do dorm living for a semester to see if that could kickstart him gaining friends in college, only to find a freak of a roommate who wears merch for a hero he's never heard of.

Would this end up as a "And they were roommates" kind of situation?

As in they either do end up together. Or it's just that how liminals tend to socialize means that the Bat's and Damian's other non-Amity friends, all assume they're dating.

Love the idea that due to liminals being more passionate (at the very least, but sometimes outright obsessive) and possessive in general than the typical person, means that even just totally platonic friendships between two liminals can end up looking like a romantic relationship from an unaware outsider pov.

Like with liminals you've got one of three things when it comes to non-romantic relationship, you're enemies, you're irrelevent, or you're ride or die besties.

There is no being just casual friends with a liminal, you're either best buds or you're a random stranger they've been forced to share proximity with. Which means more often than not you end up as enemies.

Anyways, adore the idea of Damian just going full liminal cat-like behavior and constantly sprawling all over Dash, or even just demanding Dash carry him around once they get comfortable around each other.

Like don't get me wrong, lovelovelove damian&dash, no matter what happens i want them to be such besties.

but like. he goes to amity, and then what.

"my people.." softly? or "what the fuck" swears for the first time?

what does this mean for phantom. what does this mean for the a-listers. what does this mean for the phantom gang!!!!

A-lister centric AU maybe?? accidental "ive been inundated into some sort of cult, father, but it is harmless and i can handle myself." phanclub member Damian???????? does he wear the merch??? what if he accidentally love squares it with danny/phantom, and what does that mean for his best friendship with Dash?? does dash wingman for him??? for who??? fenton??? phantom??? why does it feel like losing no matter which side he supports for his new bestie???

inquiring minds want to know!!!!

“Damian, what are you drinking?”

Damian holds a glowing green cup. “A smoothie.” He takes a long, slow sip.

“Damian.”

Damian continues to drink, making constant eye contact with his father.

Bruce’s eye twitches. He makes a move to slap the toxic beverage out of his son’s hand.

Damian hisses, and climbs up Dash’s tall frame like a feral cat. “If Dash can have ecto-smoothies, so can I,” Damian shouts. He punctuates this by slurping his smoothie loudly.

Bruce tries to grab Damian. His son evades him, switching to Dash’s other shoulder. Damian continues drinking, using his free hand to flip off his father.

Dash gives a good natured smile. “If your dad is hungry-“

Damian scoffs. “It’ll probably kill him. We grew up in separate households.” Dash nods in understanding.

Bruce does not nod in understanding. He does not understand. He is very confused, actually.

“Cool to meet you Mr.Wayne. I’ll bring Damian back in a few hours. We’re going to meet up with Jon at the arcade.” Dash confidently walks away. Damian is still perched on Dash’s shoulder, smirking spitefully at his father. He attempts to slurp from his smoothie cup, but it’s empty.

//-\\-//-\\

Damian and Dash move in perfect sync, connecting against eachother in a non-brand-specific-dance-based-rhythm-game (or NBSDBRG for short)

Jon looks on in awe. Damian always made fun of his lack of skill at NBSDBRGs. To be fair, Jon is distracted by the cool lights and sounds. This time, watching the two dance is absolutely mesmerizing. Damian and Dash have laser focus on the game.

Jon pulls an eraser out of his pocket and flings it at Damian. Damian dodges without looking away from the screen.

Jon plans for how he can best prank Damian without ensuring the wrath of his best friend. He sneaks behind Damian, and blows just a bit of his freeze breath down his friends neck.

Damian jumps, ruining his streak. “Jon! You sabatoeur, how dare you.” Jon cackles. Dash hoots in victory.

“I would have won had Jon not intervened.”

“Sneak attacks happen all the time. Not my fault you’re not prepared.” Dash argues, grabbing the pool of tickets pouring out the NBSDBRG.

Damian scoffs. “The whole point of a sneak attack is to catch people unprepared.”

“I’m always prepared. I’m prepared in my sleep.” Dash playfully shoves Damian away from his pool of tickets.

“How is that even possible?” Jon asks.

“Bear traps. Not just good for bears, you know.” Damian nods sagely at Dash’s wisdom. Jon just blinks in response.

“Still, your performance would have been far worse if you were fighting off a combatant while playing.” Damian points out.

“Yeah right. I’m great at multitasking” Dash says.

“Wanna bet?” Damian asks with a dangerous gleam in his eyes. “You against Jon, while I attack you with this.” Damian brandishes a marker. “Three strikes from me, and I win. I have until the end of the match to defeat you. Meanwhile, you have to beat Jon. You win if you evade me during the match and beat Jon’s abysmal score. Winner gets all of today’s tickets.”

“Oh it’s on.” Dash cracks his knuckles unnecessarily.

\\-//-\\-//

Dash pours the last bucket of tickets into the collector. A combination of Damian’s spending money, Jon’s enthusiam, and Dash’s mad gamer skills led to a very large winning haul.

Damian had overestimated Jon’s competence at the dancing game. Dash examined the prize counter.

He laid eyes on the vigilante merch. It wasn’t great: the Robin plushies had brown hair for some reason, and the Batman’s ears were longer than his entire torso. There were some plush versions of different heroes: Wonder Woman, Flash, Superman, Hawkman.

But there wasn’t any Phantom merch.

“They’re missing the best hero.” Dash complained.

“Which one? Superboy?” Jon asked.

“Phantom! Danny Phantom, the ghost hero. He’s way better than all these underpants wearing clowns.”

“I’ve never heard of Phantom.” Jon said.

“He’s the local hero to Amity Park, where Dash grew up.” Damian explained.

“Hometown loyalty, I get it.” Jon nodded. He’d be loyal to Kansas heroes, if there were any.

“It’s more than that.” Dash argued. “Phantom is like, the strongest hero ever. He could beat any of these Justice League guys, no contest. He could probably take them all out at once, if he really wanted to.”

“No way.” Jon argued. “Superman has so many different powers. Some small town hero I’ve never even heard of could never defeat Superman.”

“You’re crazy.” Dash said, selecting a Batman plushie that had nipples for no discernible reason. He chose that one, along with a very large dog plushie, and a chew toy for dogs, and paid with their haul of tickets. The dog was nearly the size of Damian. Dash carried it with expertise.

“No way. Phantom probably couldn’t even beat Superboy. I would know about any heroes that powerful.”

“I would agree with Jon.” Damian said. “Superman is a lot more powerful in person. Your hometown bias is likely swaying your viewpoint.”

“Bet. You get Superboy down here, I’ll get phantom, the two fight. Whoever wins gets nipples Batman.”

Monoma is lowkey intimidated by his classmate's parents. once, Awase's mom came to visit the dorms, and Monoma acted so aggressively normal that it actually freaked the rest of his class out.

this is kind of evident due to his Everything, but Monoma is the ultimate ride or die. he is absolutely down for some hijinks and/or tomfoolery at any given moment, provided it's one of his classmates asking him to partake. (he is incredibly intelligent, and he uses 100% of this intelligence to get up to some shenanigans)

Monoma can be kind, but he is also brutally honest. do NOT ask his opinion about something unless you are open to being read to filth.

Monoma takes pride in having a clean living space that smells nice at all times. he has scented candles. seasonal hand soap. all of the works.

we only ever see him being a pain in the ass, but i imagine that Monoma is actually pretty popular with the general public because he knows how to be well-spoken and well-behaved when it suits him. like he will be soft and gentle with the old man that was almost mugged and then come straight back to UA to call bakugo a bitch directly to his face. that kind of deal.

Monoma is, in general, a polite boy, but i like to imagine that he's known Kendo for so long that any sense of propriety has simply flown out the window

You’re crying.

And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.

And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.

And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?

Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

I know it's a metaphor. But sometimes it isn't

One of the things that eugenicists believe is that it is bad for society when the “wrong people” breed.

The entire premise of the movie is that “stupid people” kept having kids while “smart people” didn’t have kids, and it ruined society because stupid genes propagated while smart genes died out. This is eugenics propaganda.

I know people will read this and their response will be “actually it’s satire” but the movie isn’t satirizing eugenics. It’s satirizing anti-intellectualism, and consumerism, and it proposes eugenics as a solution.

When eugenics was first conceived, it was used as a way to justify inequality. The idea was that people who held privilege were able to do so because they were smarter and genetically superior to lazy and stupid people who don’t have privilege. Obviously this is bad and wrong, but it is also the core lesson of Idiocracy.

The movie literally ends with the main character becoming president and having “the smartest children in the world.” Because he and his wife have smarter genes than everyone else. The proposed solution for the things that Idiocracy is satirizing is for the smart people to have children that can be in charge of the world.

In Cars 2 the plot revolves around a new alternative to fossil fuel called Allinol. It’s a great super fuel, but it has one major problem.

When cars using Allinol get hit by an emp, they fucking explode and die.

This isn’t actually a flaw with allinol, it’s a feature. Allinol is being made by a group of defective cars called Lemons, and marketed to other cars as a way to even the playing field.

Lemons, in the cars universe, is a term for cars that have manufacturing defects (the movie hints that the term lemon might actually be an in universe ableist slur, but it’s the only term we are given to refer to these cars with)

This plot is pretty fucked up when you remember that the cars in the these movies are a stand in for people. Lemons are the disabled people of the Cars universe, and the plot is that evil disabled people are killing able bodied people because they feel disenfranchised.

Own its own, having the existence of lemons is fine. It is okay to acknowledge that people are born with different levels of physical ability. The problem is that the movie posits that the lemons are inherently worth less to society than other cars, and that they need to accept their place.

There is no attempt to make life better for the lemons in this movie. They stop the evil lemons from killing cars with Allinol, but they don’t do anything to aid the lemons who were not part of this evil scheme.

Cars 2 says that society values some lives more than others, and that’s the way that it ought to be. This movie says that inequality is just the way of the world, and that instead of helping people with less privilege, you should profit off of them so you can squeeze a little value out of them.

Lemons can’t get anywhere on their own? Charge them to tow them places and provide no alternative. (Mater brags about this a few times in the movie)

Lemons need frequent replacement parts? Stop making those parts when it’s no longer profitable to do so

A lemon tries to buy an unavailable part in the black market? Arrest them.

A lemon tries to change the system? Ridicule them.

Red dragons swallow their prey whole and use the undigestible remains as fuel for their fire breath, which is lit by creating a spark with their tongue. Living armors are colonies of mollusks who expand and contract to mimic muscle movement. Actually "man-eating" plants is a misnomer, they catch small animals with a filament that retracts when touched and they use their decomposing prey as compost.