So, for whatever reason, the Justice League are fighting Phantom, thinking he's evil or suspicious and trying to bring him to the watchtower or whatever, but of course Phantom isn't cooperating, either not trusting the JL/being bitter they didnt show up to help Amity Park/whatever
UNTIL... One of Clockworks' notes show up, and Phantom pauses to read it, before surrendering to the JL, saying he'll follow them.
Now obviously, the JL are confused and suspicious, but eventually come to the (wrong) conclusion that Phantom is just a lackey or something, and that the person who wrote the note is the real mastermind manipulating this poor innocent super-powered teenager.
Danny finds this all either hilarious, or stupid. Probably both.
one cool thing about having an autistic dad whose special interest is underwater spearfishing is that when he catches fish he'll just call up a nearby chinese restaurant like "hi. i caught a fish. can you cook it and i'll bring my family by?" and they're like "yeah sure come on over white boy" and the fish is delicious.
it's worth adding that my mom is chinese and she always gets embarrassed by this. like she doesn't want to come to the restaurant with us. she doesn't want to be seen with the white man she caught plus the fish that her white man caught. everyone who works at the restaurant thinks my dad is awesome and compliments him + her for choosing him and we all find this very fun except for her.
The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.
You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”
I mean this with my full chest (And this was suggested for my TikToker) find out what's companies depend on the forests You're going to be talking camping and other outdoor companies
Call them contact them and get them to lobby to stop this because it frankly calling our representatives hasn't been working Not that you should stop Do that as well
But if we can't beat these lobbyists we have to join and use them for our side
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
Chuck Jones is the best counterexample to “the curtains are just blue” because you would not believe the amount of thought and art theory he put into his silly little cartoons
I need to dig out my Chuck Jones books but one time he was talking about the Wile E Coyote gag where he runs off a cliff and continues running for a little bit before noticing there’s no ground underneath him and then turns to the camera and holds up a sign saying “Help!” before plummeting and Jones said the reason Coyote does that instead of immediately trying to get back to the cliff edge is bc Coyote embodies anxiety and in that particular moment represents the fear and worry about the judgement of others over and above the desire for self-preservation.
Like, if someone was told that interpretation without knowing any better they’d think it came from some pretentious academic or whatever but nope! It’s literally the creator like those are the thoughts he had in his head when he was creating the cartoons
AU where the war ends for (reasons), Fire Lord Azulon is still on the throne, and the Southern Water Tribe and the Fire Nation are struggling to broker a truce. So the Fire Nation decides that the best way to foster peace is with an arranged marriage.
Hakoda would never force any of his people to go through with this, so as the chief, he steps up and agrees to marry, no matter how much his heart still aches for Kya. Katara and Sokka are furious on their dad’s behalf, and agree to make things difficult for their future “”””step-parent”””
But Fire Lord Azulon has Ozai whispering in his ear, so the person he sends to the Southern Water Tribe is 16yo Prince Zuko. The least useful royal.
The Fire Nation ship arrives. No one had high hopes for this political marriage, but everyone is horrified when a terrified teenager steps onto the ice and introduces himself as Hakoda’s future spouse.
Zuko is quietly freaking out, but trying to hide it. Azula and other people at the palace have been whispering about how dangerous and violent and savage the Water Tribe Chief is. Hakoda seems polite, but he’s so much bigger than Zuko and the same age as his father, and Zuko has no choice but to marry him for the sake of his nation.
Except Hakoda isn’t having any of that. There’s no way he’s marrying a scared kid the same age as his son. The deal is off. How can he keep negotiating with the Fire Lord, who sent his terrified grandson to the other side of the world to marry a man twice his age?? No fucking way.
Cue Zuko being adopted into the Water Tribe family. And who knows, maybe Katara and Sokka will take Zuko out in a canoe to work off some steam, and they’ll accidentally discover a certain frozen monk that helps them bring about real peace.
[id: graffiti on the base of a concrete overpass where previous grafiti has been covered over with gray paint multiple times. In black all-caps handwriting, it reads: "What kind of paint are you using to paint over this? Because if it is latex, its probably way too cold for it, you want good adhesion, you need like at least 40°-45°. Maybe wait till it warms up a little, I mean what's the big rush? Like, I'm in a rush now but our situations are different" /end id]
Making a puff sleeve is not so difficult as it may seem. There are different ways how you can make it but this is how I usually do it. You can use this technic on both short and long sleeves.
Start of with a normal pattern of a normal sleeve in your measurements and draw a cross across the pattern.
Cut among the lines and separate the four pieces so you get space between them.
With this pieces you can make different kinds of patterns depending what kind of puff sleeves you are going to make.
A) By separate the four pieces like this you will get a pattern of the classic puff sleeves.
B) By connecting the upper tips of the pattern pieces you will get a sleeve that is only puffed on the lower part and normal (un-puffed) on the upper.
C) By connecting the middle tips of the two lower pattern parts you will get a pattern that is puffed on your shoulder and normal (un-puffed) on the lower part of the sleeve.
Place your pieces on your fabric like you want them, draw it out and cut your sleeve out.
Zigzag around the edges and then sew the sides of the sleeve together.
To make the puff effect on the upper part of your sleeve take needle and thread and start to sew two set of lines among the markings with big stitches.
Pull the ends of the threads on both sides to get the sleeve wrinkled.
To make the lower part of the sleeve puffed I usually use elastic band.
The elastic band will make it easier to take the sleeve on and off.
Measure your arm and make a ring out of the elastic band. Needle it to the lower part of the sleeve and sew it on. Remember to pull the elastic band as you sew.
Sew the sleeve on to your blouse and you are done!
So, as it’s roughly explained, the state alchemist program is a kind of “recruit potential human sacrifices” mechanism, with a side-order of “brute strength for the army”. But basically, the state alchemist title is mostly about being a researcher–given people like Shou Tucker exist, and given that the only requirement to stay a state alchemist is to submit a yearly report of your research that says “look I’m still being a useful scientist”.
So far, so far this is sensible, yeah? Father and the delightful children from down the lane are running a recruitment program for potential human sacrifices. So sure–butter them up! Give them lots of money, get them buddy-buddy with the government, and give them endless resources for research. It’s be pretty easy to trick a state alchemist in that position to open the portal if Sugar DaddyBradley is nudging them to do it.
And I’m still willing to go with this logic for the whole “draft the state alchemists into war” move. They make it pretty clear that was something of a last-ditch effort. And the blood transmutation circle around Amestris was an absolute necessity for Father’s plan. So the risk of a few state alchemists dying or resigning from your Potential Sacrifice Pool is worth it for the completion of the circle.
Now. To get to my fucking thought.
Edward fucking Elric. This fucking fight-me 12 year old troglodyte shows up to the exam and performs circle-less transmutation in front of mother fucking Bradley, demonstrating to one of the seven Actual Fucking Homunculi that he’d already opened the portal. Ed was literally prepped as a human sacrifice before he showed up to Central. A fully set human sacrifice showed up at the homunculi’s door, said “hey look what I can do!”, proved he’d opened the mother fucking portal already, and said “hey yeah hire me”. Human sacrifice, free shipping, no assembly required, handcuffs not included!
They could have just tossed Ed into a shoebox and kept him there until the Promised Day. They wouldn’t even need to make up an excuse he attacked the f u c k i n g president. That’s fucking treason babey. He’s 12, he’s an orphan, he’s from a rural town in buttfuck nowhere, he’s literally the easiest person alive to disappear. They could have arrested him for assassination crimes, kept him in gay baby jail, and just popped him out for the Promised Day
What do they do instead?! “Oh lmao this kid’s great. Let’s give him infinite money, no supervision, no governmental responsibilities, access to all our secret resources, and toss him on a train to who-the-fuck-knows-where-land”
They fucking did that
And like? They then had the audacity to be concerned when Edward “Fight Me” Elric almost got himself killed about 293 times. Just an endless game of “I thought u were watching him” from one homunculus to another when Ed fucking absconds half-way across the globe to go entice some other hostile entity into murdering him to death. That’s the whole series. Every arc is Ed baiting death while the homunculi are in the background like “:/ wish he wouldn’t do that”
This only gets worse when you consider they later learned Al opened the portal too because really?? These two stab-happy globe-trotting public menaces are 40% of your final evil plan for godhood. 40%. Almost half. You couldn’t fucking set aside a cardboard box to keep these idiots in?
We all knew Father was terrible at planning when we learned his thousands-of-years-in-the-making-plan involved him procrastinating until the last five minutes to get his last sacrifice, while he was?? playing chess in his fucking basement, I guess. But it’s like every time I think about it like really think about it I find 7 more reasons Father was a fucking shit idiot moron, king of the stupid fucking idiot club, flesh and blood founder of seven other established dumbasses, all living in their idiot hovel under central, just giving random dumbass 12 year olds infinite money, j u s t b e c a u s e.
People in the replies trying to explain Father’s actions fall into one of three categories
Father didn’t baby-gate Ed because humans are like ants to him and he had no concept of how thoroughly Ed and co. could fuck his shit up
Father and the Hot Topic Brigade didn’t lock Ed up because they recognized the unbridled chaotic 12-year-old energy compressed into such a small vessel and they understood no jail cell on earth would reliably hold this thing
Father and his sin-sonas didn’t put Ed in a box because locking Ed away in their lair would mean dealing with Edward Elric day-in and day-out in their own home for the next four years and frankly even godhood isn’t worth certain flavors of hell.
Fuhrer Eye Patch saw Edward “Catch these Hands” Elric and thought oh. He’s gonna cause problems.
But. You can’t look me in the eyes and tell me that Brad the Pissed Off didn’t also anticipate Roy “Don’t Mind Me Just a Manwhore Passing Through” Mustang causing problems at some point.
The solution? Give Elric to Mustang. The Human Blowtorch is going to spend so much time chasing and corraling the 6th grader who can turn his arm into a sword at will that it will be impossible for him to cause problems for CopyofHohenheim.exe.
What King Grumpy Pants didn’t anticipate was the two youngest state alchemists in history going hey, we cause a lot of problems separately, but imagine the chaos we could wreak if we joined forces!
You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit
Completely unrelated, but current students of OU are transferring out and alumni are wanting refunds for their tuition, since OU has made it abundantly clear that their degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
If you call the university's main number and express polite confusion over the situation, they will transfer you to someone to talk to about it. So if you feel like playing Concerned Parent: 1-405-325-0311
Danny who thinks the bats know and are just really good at the whole secret idenities thing.
Batman who has no idea becausd they all think danny is undead like redhood is undead, like everyone whos died and came back undead: we think it would be good if you were there when we meet the high king of the infinite realms
Danny who can duplicate himself: ...okay?
Batman introducing the king to the members of the leauge and politicians and also we hope you dont mind danny is here as a consultant
Danny who has to shake his own hand:... how could I possibly mind? (they think hes offended because hes bad at lying)
Danny who makes death jokes at himself and the leauge are so worried hes offended the king but then the king joins in
Danny knew batman was a planner, he'd seen the shark repelent spray in the helicopter that has definitely been used. He's seen the thousands of terabytes the main computer uses to store every possible contingency plan. He'd read the planners the man sends out for harder missions to make sure everyone is on the same page, literally.
So when Batman asks Danny, during an expanded league meeting, to introduce them to the ruler of his realm, he's not surprised when no one bats an eye at King Phantom and Phantom sharing a name. For all they know, it could be a common name, like Daniel or Maria.
Phantom readily agrees to call for him. Batman, the planning genius, even asks him if he needs some time with the King before the summoning. Giving Danny the perfect excuse to avoid a summoning.
He was proud to say he could hold a duplication through the realms after practicing for months, showing off infront of the Batclan was definitely something hed be trying.
"Hey, man." Constantine stared at him straight on like he was crazy. "You can come through now."
Three days later Phantom presented the league with an alternative, he'd just call the King using the flip phone Tucker had fiddled with.
It took him 5 minutes to open a portal, hed never thought about how the ring made it so much easier.
Once finally finished he pulled out the phone and hit the 5 for speed dial.
Having a duplicate in another realm was different than a usual duplicate, he couldn't see through the eyes, or control it persay. It was just as much Danny as he was, but a simple change in perspective and treatment could change his response. In this case the lack of sincronicity would actually be helpful.
It also meant "his King" was honestly shocked when Phantom blurted out: "Nice outfit, d'you get the cape from party city?"
He didnt exactly want ti call himself regal looking, but the whole get up and his existence as the balance inbetween shone through a lot more with the crown and ring than his ice core normally did. "Hello, Phantom. An introduction, of any kind, would be helpful."
"Right yeah, the guy who looks like he just materialized from a ren faire is King Phantom, Bringer of Balance, the Chosen One, yadda yadda."
King Phantom's eye twitched, right on cue Batman interjected.
"I am Batman, Lady Gotham's Knight. It's a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness." Danny had told Batman to say that!
"Ah, you are Lady Gotham's. I should have known, your birds are all she talks about these days."
Batman looked over to Wonder Woman. "I am Diana, of Themyscira."
The King procured a tiny vase with a bow keeping the lid in place, "Pandora sends her wishes."
As they went through introductions painfully slowly Danny stopped paying attention.
By the time they got to actual negotiations Danny had been staring out into literal space for so long he wasn't sure what they were even talking about.
Which obviously meant that's when he'd be called for.
"BECAUSE YOU-" The King took a deep breath in and looked at Danny with dead eyes. "I know for a fact you love the ren faire, as does your beautiful girlfriend, Samantha."
"Phantom, I am painfully aware you dislike politics, but you are currently acting as an embassador for your realm." Danny stood tall as he watched his kingly self copy a pose Lancer had done done so many times while tired of Danny's shit.
"You could have gotten someone else."
He could feel Constantine step closer to him.
"Okay well,, hey."
Before Danny could insult himself back the magician told him to shut it.
"Hell blazer." He said it not like a question, more like a king calling for attention. "I appreciate the nagging, however i am fully aware of what Phantom is capable of. He is the second strongest in the realms, after all."
He's not totally sure the league knew that, but they did now. The whole 'existing as balance itself' meant he ended up with every power available to a realm's being... even if it could permanently damage his core. A thing he found out only after trying to use an electric blast that made him throw up.
"We're tied for first and you know it!" Constantine stared at him like he wanted to exorcize Phantom, since Danny wasn't sure if he could he added, "Your Majesty."
"Oh," it was weird seeing his face twist into that creepy, too wide grin, Sam thought it was wicked at least, "you're scared of someone here."
He heard someone behind him humm questioningly.
Danny muttered to himself some nonsense words with ghost speech thrown in, his duplicate took it and ran.
"Phantom." Oooo he sounded angry. "You cannot leave when YOU started this. I will finish negotiations, and then I am taking you back with me." His physical form shifted ever so slightly and the crowns spikes grew taller, casting dark shadows as it grew brighter.
The room dropped 20 degrees as Danny fought back. "That's not fair!"
Before things could get more heated, or well colder, Constantine cut off their line of sight to eachother, Batman pulled Danny to the back of the room and simply sat with him.
They waited THREE HOURS before everything was over.
True to his word, the King beckoned Phantom over and opened a portal without any movement betraying how he did it.
He shoved Danny through and followed after letting it close slowly to hear some ghost speak leak through.
Saying he was going to keep him in his keep for five years, just in case Dead Man could hear.
Once closed he laughed and pulled himself back together.
all the “peer pressure is bad” education we give kids is practically useless because all it cares about is telling them that Drugs Are Evil rather than the much more useful lesson of ‘the person who responds to you saying you don’t drink by telling you they’ll find a way to get you to is also going to be shitty about all your other boundaries’.
