Normal is Boring

Even as a worm, Wes is still the only one to see that Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom are one.

P1, P3

Masterpost

Danny Phantom: no.

JL: what? Why?

Danny: I have yet to receive confirmation from the gods that this action will—*glowing green brick falls on his face, a small sticky note falling off*

JL:

Danny:

JL:

His parents passed away two years ago due to a lab accident of their own making.

No Nasty Burger explosion or incident of cheating, just time flowing and mistakes being made.

Clockwork would not let Danny go back in time to fix it, insisting it was unfortunate, but would not be the incident to turn him to Dan.

Jazz got custody of him and they both moved to Gotham, where Danny went from being a hero to just a medium, communing with the dead as a part time job to help pay bills while his sister worked as a TA and full time student at GCU’s psychology program.

Jazz was still around, his friends were still around, and Clockwork was watching him closely, often giving him random sticky notes to ensure him he was going in the right or wrong direction.

At 18, he got noticed by the JLD—something about his death aura being so immensely powerful.

Eventually, they made the connection between Danny Phantom and Danny Fenton, as well as the connection between Phantom and the Ghost King.

They wanted him to work with them, be a hero again.

Having just gotten accepted into GCU’s astrophysics program, he declined.

And then a Real Threat came.

Darkseid. A new god with power like earth has never seen.

He wanted to subjugate them all. He thought he could find the anti-life equation’s secrets on earth.

After all, Pariah pulled an entire city into a death realm. Surely there is something to learn from that.

This time, when Batman showed up at his door, he had Superman, Wonder Woman, and Constantine with him. Both the JL and JLD asking for his help with a threat they could not defeat alone.

“No.”

It was a Monday night. Danny had homework. Whatever the hell they all wanted, he was not interested.

The door was almost closed again when the Bat stuck his foot in the crack.

“Hear us out,” Superman pleaded.

Pleaded. With an eighteen year old college student.

“No. I told you before, my hero days are over. You need someone to contact a ghost, fine, I’m your guy, but I’m not putting on the suit I died in just because you know my address,” Danny retorted, already frustrated.

“We can’t defeat this threat without you. Darkseid is coming, and with him he brings an entire army of—“

“Yeah, yeah I’ve heard it before. New threat, unimaginable powers, untold horrors to be brought down on earth. But every time I’ve said no, you handled it just fine without me.”

“This is different. The gods—“ Wonder Woman started.

“If the gods wanted me involved, they’d tell me themselves. Trust me, I’m doing you a fav—“ A glowing green brick interrupted Danny, narrowly missing his head as it fell from seemingly nowhere and landed on the floor next to him.

The Justice League said nothing as Danny leaned over to pick it up.

An equally glowing green sticky note was stuck to the brick, in Clockwork’s unmistakable swirly handwriting.

It is time to involve yourself in the realm of heroes once more.

Well, shit.

Danny sighed, setting the brick down and running his hand down his face.

Maybe if he was lucky, his professors would accept the excuse of “Batman wouldn’t let me do my homework.”

He opened the door wider, letting the heroes (and the ghostly tax evader) into his shoddy apartment he shared with Jazz.

Superman: "what do you need?"

Danny: "you" *points at Batman* "I need you to go to all my professors and explain to them that I won't be in class this week, and I'll need an extension on my homework"

Batman: "This will take you a week?" *BatDad senses tingling, sounds like something his kids would do to get out of school*

She literally went “debate me! Debate me!” Over and over like the grifter she is and when she couldn’t get what she wanted and when “no” wasn’t enough she resorted to retaliatory sex-pestery, posting an image of somebody’s body with intention to shame and embarrass and spawn more waspish tittering from her internet followers.

Mira and Zoey, post reveal: "Ah, all these weird traits make sense now. It's because she's half demon."

Celine, who spent most of her free time researching demons to better understand Rumi: "No, she's just like that."

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.