under construction

HIV/AIDS

Type 1 diabetes

Gestational diabetes

Hearing loss

Inborn errors of metabolism

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

shawn gains the ability to actually see ghosts after a really bad motorcycle accident nearly kills him. he still predominantly uses his eidetic memory/keen senses to solve crimes (even if a ghost tells him the culprit, he has to prove it. mostly.), but sometimes his head-start on lassie is genuinely supernatural.

gus, upon seeing his best friend ostensibly talking to himself in the middle of his father’s old kitchen, initially thinks shawn has just lost his mind with grief and the lack of closure with his dad. shawn and henry try to combat this by relaying info to gus that only henry and gus should know—shawn is very devastated to learn what actually happened to his sixth grade hamster—but gus still doesn’t really believe him. frustrated, henry knocks a glass off the coffee table like a cat, and gus screams like a little girl and finally believes shawn. mostly.

this becomes a recurring bit throughout the show where whenever gus becomes too doubtful, shawn makes a ghost knock something over—usually henry, but sometimes the victim of the week—and gus freaks out. lassie thinks the whole ritual is just a part of their elaborate ruse to undermine him.

and the not so silly:

henry realizes around maybe s3/s4, when yang kicks into gear and shawn takes a shot in the dark (harhar), that the reason he can’t move on is he feels extremely guilty for leaving shawn alone. especially without ever really telling him the mushy stuff. ie, I love you son, I’m proud of you, etc.

s8 finale is henry finally accepting that he can’t always be there for shawn—it’s literally impossible, dead or alive—and he just has to trust that shawn knows what he’s doing, and realizing that letting shawn go is part of being a father watching your kid grow up.

ghost physics! the (written) horror lover in me wants them to look like they did when they died (ie, wounds and all), but that’s probably too grotesque for the original tone of the show LOL. so, they probably just look normal, albeit confused. whatever clothes they died in are their ghost clothes. (yes, this implies an obligatory naked ghost episode.)

additionally, I think what keeps someone on earth as a ghost is sort of variable; like definitionally, it’s “unfinished business,” but what counts as unfinished business depends on the ghost. often, it’s a traumatic death and the ramifications of it, but not everyone who has one stays as a ghost and vice versa. ex, in my original vision for this au, henry’s death is painfully boring but he hangs around because of his guilt regarding shawn.

I feel like it’s also important to note that these ghosts are still people. they can be catty, jealous, forgetful, good-spirited (haha, spirit), mean-spirited, the whole gambit. very rarely does shawn get a ghost that can succinctly say “I was murdered by colonel mustard in the library with the candlestick”—they’re often as unreliable as narrators as shawn is.

OK OK back to funny stuff. henry has no idea shawn can see ghosts. shawn does not expect his dad to be a ghost. their first meeting post-henry-mortem scares the shit out of everyone.

shawn, completely unaware his dad’s ghost is standing behind him: “cmon, dad, what am I supposed to do with a freezer full of fish?” henry, completely unaware shawn is going to hear him: “well MAYBE if you’d paid ATTENTION when I showed you how to—” shawn screams. henry screams. shawn is immediately pissed that his free house comes with the worst occupant of all time (but, secretly, relieved).

if we’re talking about this from the show perspective, that scene would be shown later—probably when shawn is recounting all of this to gus, which is when I imagine the audience finds out henry is actually dead. until that point, we do get little hints: henry never speaks to anyone but shawn, gus avoids bringing henry up (which is initially played as being mindful of shawn’s strained relationship with him) but the couple of times he does he talks in the past tense, little comments from the chief or lassiter about how henry would be so [insert emotion] about shawn.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

me: hi there, you’ve got TST-

him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*

me: hey, is everything o-

him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!

Dooku:…what are you doing

Obi-Wan, panicking slightly: I’m a double agent. Passing them bad intel.

Dooku: I didn’t ask you to do that

Obi-Wan: …i’m taking initiative????

Dooku:

Dooku: My boy would never do such a thing

So we also have an unhinged (but in the OTHER direction) Anakin chasing Obi-Wan across the galaxy going: 'Come back to the light side, Master, you're my brother!'

I LIVE for this 70s/80s au of the twins, I feel the world needs more of them 🗣️