"Rocky is a grown ass engineer and a 400 pound rock spider from space."
Yes, I hear you but I think Grace should be able to carry around his emotional support Eridian like a foul mouthed chihuahua in a sweater. I think they'd both enjoy this.
Adrian can carry them both around in an Erid IKEA tote later.
rocky and adrian built grace a home ….they created a foggy beach and tried SO hard to get the water temperature and the texture of the sand right. they found a way to feed him. they gave him a classroom so he can do what feeds his soul more than anything else. they literally love him to the point of invention and they didn’t even have to do any of it because they’re all he needs…..
Grockadrian but its rocky feeling something so familiar with Grace but being scared to do anything about it because they dont want to cheat on their partner, so "Friend Grace" becomes prominent as they try to seperate themselves from their feelings for Grace.
Until they land on Erid and Adrian sees Rocky for the first time in over 50 years and can see that Rocky's love for Grace isnt as platonic as Rocky would like to believe it is, and Adrian has to soothe Rocky's insecurities, promising that they arent a bad person for falling in love again, its okay, you didnt cheat.
Now Rocky feels like they have to choose between their mate that they thought they would never see again, and their codependent leaky human, except wait, why is Adrian purring when they look at Grace? Why is Adrian nudging me forward? Why is Adrian so determined to make this biodome not only habitable but comfortable? Why do they keep coming with me everyday to visit Grace? Why are they insisting we move our nest next to the biodo-
Some background: my family (immediate and extended) are big wine people. The kind that circle the wine around in their glass and then smell it to interpret the bouquet. Collectively they have memberships at over 20 wineries. They know wine.
I also, through growing up in this environment, know wine. As I've outlined before, my relationship with alcohol has been rocky and marked with periods of excessive drinking, but I am in a very good place now with that at least and wanted to know what I'd ordered.
The verdict: overall approval from all 6 people who tried it (including me). The flavor was dry and not nearly as sharp as other cabs I've had, but also full of flavor. It was an approachable wine, especially for its varietal, which I found to be impressive. Multiple people asked if I could get more, which unfortunately cannot come to pass. (Sell more wine John!) While my family and I feel Maison No. 9 is still the best celebrity wine on the market by a long shot, this is a comfortable #2.
having anti punitive justice morals sucks because you want to say "man that guy sucks he should get hit with hammers until he dies" but you also want to make it clear you don't think anyone should be put in charge of the 'hit people with hammers until they die" machine.
Bruce: I think I'm ready to start dating again.
Alfred: I have been preparing for this day. Here is a list of all available bachelors and bachelorettes in your social class. Well-mannered, well-connected, and perfectly trained to run an estate with you.
Bruce: I want the man who trained pigeons to salsa dance.
Alfred: Of course you do.
Bruce: His name is Danny. I'm pretty sure he lives under Brown Bridge.
Alfred: Of course he does.
Bruce blushing: He beat Batman in a fist fight last night and threw me in a dumpster afterwards. It was glorious.
Alfred pouring himself a drink: Of course it was.
Bruce: What do you want from me!? Are you here to make me suffer more? To show me the weakness of my humanity? Are you the physical proof of my failures to deny sin?!
Danny: I'm literally just standing here, man. I haven't done anything.
Bruce: Then stop wearing my butler's face!
Danny: Look, dude, I don't care what mental breakdown you're going through. Schedule it for three a.m., like the rest of us. I'm just looking for Alfred Pennyworth. According to my adoptive parents, he is my biological father, and he might have an answer to a medical problem I'm going through.
Bruce: No! Alfred can't be your dad!
Danny: Why not?
Bruce: He just can't!
Alfred: Master Bruce, you are sixteen. You're old enough not to be threatened by another child being mine. Cease this jealousy at once.
Bruce in French: It's not jealousy. It's puberty.
Alfred also in French: I beg your pardon?
Bruce crying French: He's so hot Alfred and I didn't know he looks exactly like you at that age. I basically dreamed of kissing you in the moonlight.
Danny in french: Again. Mental breakdown needs to be rescheduled. So you're my father. I thought you would be taller.
Well, okay, he's a fortune teller. But he's a very good one. So good, in fact, he was able to leave small town Amity Park, find his way to the big city of Gotham, and open a highly successful fortune telling business.
In a place like Gotham, where people dress up in costumes to create or fight crime every other Tuesday, his craft is often....dismissed. No one with so-called Future Sight made it often in this city.
But Danny did. And that's because he is a scammer.
See every single one of his clients that comes into his readings leaves with a message that is not as cryptic as other fortune tellers. Not as randomly said to try and fish for information to build upon.
In fact, Danny is able to name little details about people's lives that even the most hesitant to believe in his abilities are left convinced he could actually peek into the future.
Danny is so sure he can convince anyone that he even offers people to take their money back if their reading ever sounds off. It's a good hook to have new clients come in, often looking for a bit of fun or as a joke and leave convinced to come back.
Danny offers a variety of tools to tell fortunes: runes, tarot cards, palm readings, tea leaf reading, crystal ball observing, and even interpretation of dreams. Because of this, he can blend each service into more appointments, and more people keep coming back and back again.
The truth of the matter is that Danny's secret of success is his ability to speak to the dead. He means this in the literal sense.
Every since Danny's accident, he had assumed everyone could see ghosts, but Amity Park had been known as the most haunted place in America and it took months for the first ghost sighting to happened back in his freshmen year after he became Phantom.
Before then, the only ones who believe in the paranormal were Mr. And Mrs. Fenton. This unfortunately meant they were discarded as crazy. As the town's freaks.
He will admit that up until he was fourteen, Danny was embarrassed by his parents' work. He also didn't believe in ghosts and couldn't understand why they did so intensely.
Then he became a Halfa, and he never doubted them again.
It took him fighting in the streets as Phantom against other ghosts for the rest of Amity Park to stop calling his parents crazy.
The Fenton Ghost Portal drenched Amity's already abnormally high ectoplasm levels to the amount that ghosts were not only visible. They were also able to touch things physically.
This all ended in Danny's junior year, when his parents finally decommissioned the portal. They still thought it didn't work and the electricity bill to keep the thing running was too high after three years.
They needed to cut some costs in order to help Jazz in college.
Once the overflow of ectoplasm was gone, Danny found that ghosts could not long cause trouble. They could not longer even be seen by normal people. The three years of ghost terrorizing the town became a faint memory.
Unless, of course, you were a halfa who could still see ghosts as regularly as before. Now Danny was the only one facing this problem, for even Sam and Tucker could no longer detect Skulker, or Ember, or even a blob Ghost.
The ghosts themselves all willingly returned to the Zone after they realized they were helpless in the mortal plane. Except for the ghosts who were created and lived in the mortal world. These were the ghosts like the Dairy King, who mainly wanted to be left alone.
Danny would chat with a few every once in a while and found that the ghosts were actually gaint gossips. They were dead with nothing to do but witnessed people's daily lives and judging them for it. He soon learned every dirty secret about everyone who was anyone in Amity Park.
It was during Danny's senior year that he put used to those secerts. Dash Baxer had thrown a wild party to celebrate their last first-week-of-high-school, and the Trio had crashed it once word got out. Dash's parents would be out of town, so alcohol would be present.
While Tucker was kissing some girl in the bathroom, and Sam was busy out drinking everyone under the table, Danny had found a set of tarot cards left out by Dash's mother. He only picked it up and shuffled to have something to do with his hands since Danny didn't drink- Phantom's healing factor wouldn't let him get drunk- and he felt awkward without his friends.
A very intoxicated Star spotted him from across the room shuffling the cards and stumbled over, demanding he read her fortune. He voiced had carried, grabbing the attention of the rest of the A-listers who also crowded around.
A few of the football players jeered they would hurt Danny if he gave Star a bad telling, and in an effort to avoid that, Danny had called upon one of the secrets the ghosts had shared about Star.
He told the blond girl he saw her publishing a book. She scoft, claiming everyone knew she liked to write until Danny pulled another card and told her which local publishing company had approved her manuscript.
He then described the jorunal she wrote her plot in - a blood book with a starfish in the top right corner - telling her the cards showed him the image of the third page. That satisfied the girl, who was a little put off he was able to guess her journal, and the football players backed off.
The party resumed with Dash taking back his mom's cards.
An hour later, Star came back running towards him, waving her phone. She had received a email, from the same company he had named and her book based off that same plot was going to be published.
The ghost who told him about that had been inside the room when the editor had approved the story.
The rest of the party memebers all scrambled for their own reading with an excited Dash being the first. Danny spent the entire night reading out fake fortunes using his dead knowledge and the rest as they say was history.
By the time Danny moved, he had half of Amity Park scrambling to book him for a reading, and Danny found himself expanding his horizons by trying out new methods. His parents didn't really support Danny's career path, as they wanted him to go to college like his sister or focus on the family business.
Especially his mother who didn't find any logic in Danny's "gift". Much like her arguments about Santa Claus, she and Danny wind up in a lot of screaming matches over the subject.
Technically she was right, since he wasn't reading the future, he was merely using ghost gossip to accurately make assumptions of the future but it still hurt. He choose to move away to get away from it all.
In Gotham, Danny quickly established a new ring of gossip ghost informants and opened for business with the same tactics.
So yes, he was a scammer, but he was never wrong.
He even got Bruce Wayne to admit that he was correct after coming in for a reading using leaves. Danny didn't have to do any leg work for the billionaire, he just asked the man's parents that were following him around.
He doesn't really know why Thomas was giggling so much when he told him to tell Bruce, "I see a bat near the rim - you will be experiencing danger very soon. Oddly enough, I also see a black cat , which means a false female friend and a heart- meaning passion. These are scattered predictions. Let me consult my crystal ball for clarification. Hmm. I see a woman with tan skin, green eyes, black hair, and an oddly cat shape necklace. She is kissing you, but she is also reaching for a cat statue made of jade."
Mr. Wayne had turned deathly pale while Martha Wayne shook her head and muttered about her son's taste. Thomas Wayne only cackled.
Thankfully, Bruce Wayne had left after handing Danny a whole whooping two thousand dollars - the reading was only one hundred!-and he been so happy he closed the shop early, gone out to a nice dinner for one, and got home to relax in his tub.
Danny was just not expecting Batman to show up to his apartment while he was busy ready trashy gay novels while he soaked. The scream that was ripped out of his mouth made his Phantom side shrivel up in shame.
Thankfully, it was what convinced Batman that he was not trained in any way to think he was stealing or breaking laws for his readings.
It just made the hero lean into his face and menacingly ask "Do you have magic?"
Now the GIW was greatly defunded over the years, but that didn't mean they didn't still pose a threat to a Halfa like Danny. The last thing he wanted was for people to know he could speak and see ghosts. Who knew what it would take for them to make the correct jump from being able to communicate with the dead to being part of the dead.
But what could he tell Batma to have him look the other way? He scrambled for a idea while he sat there bare naked in his tub, surrounded by red candles and a book about a man trying to seduce a vampire on his floor.
Nothing really screamed magic in his opinion.
Neither Thomas nor Martha were with Bruce - they were likly haunting their grand baby Martha loved watching over Richard- to ask the dead couple for an idea or listen to them shout out advice, so all Danny thought to do was say:
"Yes, sir. I'm a wizard"
Batman leaned back narrowing his eyes "What kind of wizard?"
What kind? There were categories!?
"Im not that powerful, so I can't cast spells, but I can use my magic to draw out auras and read them." He ventures after a moment sinking into his water. He is grateful he threw in a galaxy bathbom so the black shimmer hides his important bits from view.
"Auras" Batman repeats slowly.
"Yes. I'm an aura wizard. Trust me."
There was a pause, and then with one swift nod, Batman disappeared into the shadows of his bedroom.
Danny waits a few minutes before he finds the courage to leave his bath and check his apartment. The hero is gone. He believes Danny's explanation.
TIL Researchers historically have avoided using female animals in medical studies specifically so they don’t have to account for influences from hormonal cycles. This may explain why women often don’t respond to available medications or treatments in the same way as men do
This isn’t just some point of interest. This is a major gap in medical research that is probably killing women (and trans men, and ovary-having NB people). Its only relatively recently that doctors are even being taught that heart attacks present in a wildly different manner in people with ovaries than they do in people with testes. Women who go to the ER with a heart attack are still often turned away because their clinical signs and symptoms are not the same as those in men.
The hormonal cycle of the reproductive system is huge part of how our bodies work and it has been completely overlooked because it made research more complicated.
I was recently at a talk about this and one of the examples she gave about how dangerous this can be is that after ambien was initially released they had a rash of women who were taking their prescribed dosages and having insane side effects, like taking a pill and going to bed then waking up the next day in prison after they were arrested for sleep driving. The stories were chilling and ambien did some follow up studies, this time including women and then issued an advisory to all women to reduce their prescription by half. This wasn’t a minor difference in how it was processed by the female body, and is something that should definitely have been noted in trials, except that women had intentionally been left out of them.
Recommended reading: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. One of the chapters is on exactly this kind of thing. The other chapters explore the many, many, many other places that research isn’t done on women, or isn’t put to use even when it is. It’s good, well-sourced (there are literally 70 pages of end notes that are solely source citations), and infuriating.
Sex Matters by Dr Alison MacGregor is all about the ways in which medicine and medical research ignores women and our biology - and how that means we’re at higher risk of medication induced long QT death, dosages can be all wrong, medication that may have been helpful only to women was never trialed on female cells, let alone in female control groups.
This is one of the proofs of systemic misogyny. Because anyone with the slightest attempt to think immediately notices “hormones make the research numbers more complicated” means “hormone differences are likely hugely important for safety reasons”.
But it was accepted fact long enough that it’s industry standard. And now it’s hard to change.
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
stormborns
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