#claims to be some sort of scientist who needs it for their research

[puppy-bird]

so we all love mammal prey x prey ships, wolf/rabbit, cat/mouse, but what if we switched it up a bit and did the same thing with herps?

here me out: poisonous newt / snake who's immune to their poison

[pyrrhiccomedy]

What sort of proof would you need to believe that a fundraiser was real?

I actually put in the legwork to verify one of these fundraisers today (I wanted to see how hard it was to actually vet one of these posts). It took about an hour, but I was satisfied by the end of it that the person in question exists, is who they are claiming to be, has a GoFundMe, and that the GoFundMe being spread around is probably the same one being linked to (I wasn't 100% satisfied by what I could find on that count? but I ended up in a place where I was reasonably confident). I'm happy to share my work, and have added it below.

I've gotten a lot of nasty messages since making that post accusing me of being anti-Palestine. My heart and money is 100% with Palestine, and I've given as much as I can afford, to reputable aid organizations. I believe both in a free Palestine, and doing your own research on the recipients of your money when you decide to financially contribute to a cause.

Anyway, this is the GoFundMe that I think is legit, and below is the legwork I did to reach that conclusion. While I still think it is better to give to a relief organization if your goal is improving the lot of the people in Gaza, I don't think this one is a scam.

This is the fundraiser for Eman Zaqout, who - first of all - is a real person! This is very easy to verify: Googling her name returns a LinkedIn with a complete work history (she is a molecular biologist), her profile with Unesco, and her profile with the Palestine Academy for Science & Technology. You know, the kind of stuff you'd expect to see when you Google someone. Great start.

Next step: Is the person running this GoFundMe the real Dr. Zaqout? (While I have some sources which say she is in a PhD fellowship and does not yet have her doctorate, she is listed as Dr. Zaqout at the Palestine Academy for Science & Technology, and I'd prefer to use the honorific in case it may in fact be more appropriate.)

So. Dr. Zaqout joined LinkedIn in 2014. And she does link to her Instagram from her LinkedIn, and her Instagram links to the GoFundMe. That's a great start!

However, it's worth mentioning that her contact information on LinkedIn was updated less than 3 months ago (which includes the link to her Instagram). Given the number of Palestinians whose accounts have been hacked or spoofed by scammers in order to lend their scams legitimacy, I don't love that change. That coincides with the surge in scam activity following the All Eyes on Rafah movement gaining momentum. Plenty of Palestinians have had their entire social media presences stolen by scammers.

However again - her LinkedIn (which, as established, may be compromised) also links to a TikTok account! And the TikTok account has video! And that sure looks to me like Dr. Zaqout in the video! While the photo of her on LinkedIn is no longer trustworthy since we know her account has been updated in the past 3 months, there is also a photo of her here at Palast.ps, which is a legitimate scientific organization. And yeah, sure, a dedicated scammer could have hacked that too, but there are also photos of her on LinkedIn that look like this:

It's not the best photo in the world, but it's identifiably her. Fabricating this kind of ephemera is more than I would expect of your typical charity scammer.

And in the most recent TikTok video of her, she's even talking about a GoFundMe, on 7/17! And she posted another video on 7/21 in which she is not seen, but you can hear her voice, and it does sound like her.

Today is August 2nd. The last two videos uploaded to Dr. Zaqout's TikTok are just photo collages, so they can't be used to verify that she still has control of her social media accounts. But for now, I'm prepared to say with some confidence that that woman is Dr. Eman Zaqout, that Dr. Zaqout is legitimately a Palestinian scientist, she did actually start a GoFundMe, and that she was posting about it as recently as 12 days ago.

All right all right, we are cooking folks. The last questions we need to answer: is this actually Dr. Zaqout's GoFundMe? The last scenario we need to rule out is that her social media presence was stolen in the last 12 days.

Let's start with that GoFundMe.

First of all, it's not being run by Dr. Zaqout. That's normal: GoFundMe isn't supported in Palestine, and all Palestinians will have to rely on friends or family abroad to set up their campaigns and collect donations on their behalf. This campaign is being run by a Mazin Fakak. I think that's supposed to be this Mazin Fakak, which makes sense; he is based in Quebec, and Dr. Zaqout either studied at or is in close affiliation with McGill University, which is in Quebec. He also lists Arabic as one of his spoken languages. So far this is a plausible connection for Dr. Zaqout to have. His LinkedIn profile also hasn't been updated in over a year, which makes me disinclined to think this is a recently-stolen scam account.

My one issue here is that when I Google Fakak, this is all that comes up. A LinkedIn profile created in 2014 that hasn't been touched in over a year, and two GoFundMe fundraisers for Palestinian families. And Dr. Zaqout never mentions Fakak anywhere. I would feel 100% confident of this fundraiser if she did.

But while my investigation into Fakak didn't turn up anything that confirms the connection to Zaqout, it also does nothing to disprove it, and the circumstantial evidence available to me lends credibility to the claim. So while I land somewhere around 80% on the verifiable credibility of this GoFundMe, please balance that against my 95%+ confidence in Zaqout's legitimacy, and the fact that she appears to still have control of her socials as of 12 days ago. If she posts on TikTok with another live video again (and not a photo slideshow, which can't be considered verification of anything), then I'd say this one is completely safe.

[swan2swan]

One of the most important skills anyone who does literary analysis must learn is the ability to see things from a character's perspective.

And I don't mean "empathize with oppressed people" or "literal POV", I mean that you need to be able to get into a character's head and erase everything that YOU know as a person and rebuild the world from THEIR perspective.

Getting into this discussion now vis a vis people judging Mayuri, Nemu, and their relationship. Yeah, he's a terrible person. In their first fight together, she jumps in the way for him and sets him up for a decisive blow, letting herself get cut apart in the process. His response is to chastise her for performing poorly, and then he begins to stomp on her and threaten to kill her when she asks for healing so she doesn't bleed out.

He then chillingly reveals that he can do whatever he wants to her because she's his daughter.

This is where people start to lose their focus: because, from his perspective, the claim is mocking but accurate. He used his DNA, he created her, he raised her, he keeps her around, for all intents and purposes, Nemu is his daughter. On paper, it all adds up.

But she's also just a creation to him. To him, Nemu is just a robot. The Creature of Doctor Frankenstein. She's his seventh version of the experiment, we learn later, as well: to him, there's apparently no difference between her and the seventh attempt at making a security eyeball. She's a tool. If it breaks, it can be fixed. It screams, it's just a distress call. She eats, it's to sustain her energy. She draws and colors, she's keeping her brain fresh. She bleeds, it's just a leak and can be fixed. That's all she is to him.

And, yes, he's obviously evil. That's why he gets obliterated there...and then Nemu expresses thanks that Uryu didn't kill Mayuri thoroughly, and reveals that she feels some love and loyalty to him.

...whcih she later also reveals is logically determined, because she casually brushes aside the notion that Szayelaporro taking her as a hostage will have any effect on Mayuri. Her body is ravaged, and Mayuri once again just brings her back to life, lickety-split. She's still a tool. (but there is a moment where Mayuri tunes everything else out to go and inspect her).

But we also learn something very wicked about him there: Nemu has drugs in her system to protect her. It's very much implied that the specific drug Szayel triggered was in the event of bodily violation: Mayuri doesn't want anyone taking advanatage of his precious Nemu. Obviously, it's a logical move, just another security measure, but Mayuri has all sorts of protective measures on her that show he's concerned about her.

He just doesn't realize that he's getting attached.

So, yeah, his relationship with her is pretty terrible...at the start. But if you get into his head, you see that he's a deranged, immortal scientist to whom life has absoolutely Zero Meaning outside of progress, research, and advancement. He's an organism that continually adapts; his speech scoffing on the idea of perfection shows that he has a fear of stagnation and ceasing. He has to keep progressing, he can't be weak. That's who he is. Yeah, he's evil, you shouldn't really be like him, but as a whole, he's not exactly WRONG. He's the cold hand of science and evolution given form.

And in the end, he starts to gain emotions. The sadism recedes a little. He's got softness. And that's his greatest creation. His development isn't anywhere near finished, either, so...you have to consider that.

[weaselandfriends]

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen: Some Notes

Yesterday, I finished The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, the new novel by @nostalgebraist. It's a dense and at times difficult work, like much of Nostalgebraist's output, and I don't immediately have some overarching narrativized analysis of it. I do have some thoughts, though (includes spoilers):

Temporal Setting

Herschel Schoen is set almost entirely in New York City; that's made abundantly clear. The question is when this story is set, which is impossible to pin down and subject to a lot of contradictory details. For instance:

Frederick claims his daddy knows "Moses," i.e. Robert Moses

Damien Eggert developed technology during the "last war," supposedly World War II

Marshall McLuhan is being taught by a college professor as though he is a cutting edge new theorist

Miriam watches a box television set with antennae, and has a particular fixation on sitcoms

Herschel frequently listens to the radio

Miriam is typing her account on a typewriter

These facts point toward a 1960s or 1970s setting, but then you get facts that point to a more modern setting:

Miriam watches Vincent's "video essays" on an ambiguously-identified handheld device with a "knob"

Herschel encounters two men on the subway who appear to be talking using cell phones or Bluetooth headsets, in modern jargon ("He needs to be leveraging the new dataviz tools, pronto")

Herschel sees what appears to be a flock of drones in New York Harbor

Frederick and Damien's technology seems to operate like modern AI technology

There are also numerous references to Damien's colleagues, who seem to be real scientists or AI researchers of disparate time periods, but with whom I'm not familiar enough to temporally distinguish.

This temporal confusion leads to strange oddities like Damien using scans of physical books from real libraries to train his AI machines, rather than, say, any sort of internet resource. There is no reference to the internet existing at all and Herschel seems incapable of comprehending that the men on the subway are using cell phones (saying they're talking to themselves), though Herschel didn't even know who Santa was so it's not as though he's a paragon of the bleeding edge. Still, these confusions persist in Miriam's perspective chapters, and while she's not exactly the most reliable narrator herself, she's at least wise to the basics of the world in a way Herschel is not.

Spatial Setting

At the same time, there are some spatial oddities to the setting, especially on the one occasion the story leaves NYC and goes to Portland, Oregon. Portland is described bizarrely:

Through the window of the bus, I watched the low, crouching buildings of Portland, Oregon advancing and receding. It was an ever stranger place than I had expected. It did not really look like my idea of a city at all, come to think of it. [...] “Are you sure this is really Portland, Oregon?” I said, as we walked along the street. He laughed uncomfortably. “They don’t really look like buildings at all,” I said. [...] Its exterior was strangely squat, like all the other “buildings” of this “city,” and curiously round, like they were. Like them, it looked very, very old. And its interior was strangely spacious, with an extensive and cavernous basement.

West Coast homes rarely have basements, if the more overt strangeness of the city's presentation wasn't clear already. Furthermore, despite living in squalid poverty, Vincent's home has two kitchens. Even most mansions wouldn't have two kitchens.

There is also the spatial oddity of the Schoen's apartment. Miriam describes it, in Chapter 166

She didn’t look at Herschel, or at me.  She turned toward the inner side of the living room, the side with the doors that lead to the bedrooms and the bathroom and the kitchen.

Later, in Chapter 21, Herschel affirms:

I looked, to try to catch sight of the gift-box that was mine. It was difficult to make out, for the Intercessor was already striding across the room, towards the wall of doors. I thought I spied some sort of box under his arm, fluttering in the changing shadows. But I cannot say for sure. He reached the wall of doors. He stopped, before a particular door. I knew he had selected that door, singled it out, in full awareness of what lay behind it. “May I go in?” he asked, with the utmost politeness. As though he were only a common houseguest, and not the king of the universe. “Go in?” I said, with the utmost simplicity. “To my . . bedroom?”

Can you try to imagine this layout? The Schoen apartment has a living room, and then there is one wall of doors, and those doors lead into two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen.

There is also a living room balcony, as well as windows in the kitchen. So we're looking at a layout that might be like this:

This is already a strange layout on its own, but gets stranger when you consider that the apartment is a brownstone:

He was real, he was a boy, I was his sister, we did live on earth, in a dusty little two-bedroom brownstone apartment in Flatbush, with too many drawers in the kitchen, we were always losing things in those drawers

Brownstones are townhouse apartments. They usually have a small and narrow footprint with multiple floors, like so:

(For reference, this is a layout of a brownstone in Brooklyn, which is where the Schoens live.)

It's difficult for me to imagine how you can cram the Schoen's apartment's layout into a footprint like this. This doesn't even account for the fact that there is apparently an elevator that the Schoens take to reach their apartment:

I rode the elevator, crossing the many floors that separated my home from the earth below it.

Brownstones are usually converted single-residence homes. They are usually not that tall and usually don't even have elevators.

What's interesting is that, even in light of these spatial oddities, the layout of New York City is depicted, as far as I can tell, highly accurately, even down to the trains Herschel takes to get around the city.

There's another oddity I'd like to talk about here, though I pointed it out to Nostalgebraist and it turned out to be a mistake. Frederick is said to attend Midwood High School (which is a real school), but there's a scene in Ch 17 where the school starts being randomly referred to as Midway instead of Midwood. I was hoping this might be some VALIS-style flashback delusion to the Battle of Midway overlapping with the real world, but alas. The error has since been corrected.

Though I also wonder what this line is about:

I would scale the walls of Yankee Stadium, and peer into its maw, seeing the true face of my Adversary within it!

What the hell does he think is in Yankee Stadium?

Herschel's Physical Body

In Ch 16, Herschel's mother Ruth beats Herschel several times with a frying pan.

This scene is bizarre for a few reasons. First off, the perspective character, Miriam, NEVER SEES Herschel being beaten. She always closes her eyes and only hears the sound of him being beaten.

Secondly, this isn't being hit with a belt, or punched. This is being hit with a frying pan. Herschel seemingly takes no serious damage from this. He does not refer to it in his own writings and is apparently up and about the next week.

Did this actually happen?

Another odd thing: Herschel's height. Take this passage, after Madeleine steals his paper crown:

My arms were not as long as Madeleine’s, and she was much taller than me, as well. In order to reach her scalp and recapture what was mine, I would need to come closer to her, and elevate myself as well. I began to climb up onto the surface of the table.

Herschel is supposedly 16. Madeleine is a high school student, so at most two years older than him, and also a girl. While it's entirely possible she's taller than Herschel, it wouldn't be "much" taller, certainly not so tall that Herschel needs to climb onto a table to reach her head.

At the same time, the way Herschel is described relative to Frederick is bizarre. Frederick is described as older than Herschel, but still in high school, so again he is at most two years older than Herschel. What is the meaning, then, of this bizarre exchange with Mrs. Rachel?

“I have a friend,” I said. “Frederick Eggert,” I said, “is my friend.” “Yes,” Mrs. Rachel said, “and that’s a good thing, Herschel. I’m very glad you’ve been able to form that bond. It’s very encouraging, developmentally. Especially in light of all this other . . . context . . . which is, well, not so encouraging. “But now, Herschel — you’re so careful with words, I’m sure you noticed that I said peers, I said forming relationships with your peers. “And Frederick Eggert, ha, well, he’s not exactly your peer, now is he?”

Is this a reference to the economic disparity between them? Why, though, would that matter to Mrs. Rachel as a developmental psychologist? Why does Frederick constantly use the infantile term "daddy" to refer to his father?

Herschel also can't tie his own shoes, though that might be a developmental issue.

The strangeness of Herschel's body interests me because it is, ultimately, his body that divides him from the Intercessor:

The Intercessor’s exit was unceremonious, when it did come. At some point, after many hours at the kitchen table, he suddenly began to make a curious show of himself, plying me with a variety of sententious and vaguely valedictory utterances.  I could not see what he was driving at, and I was afraid of asking him directly about it. I was in my body, and it had its ways. And so, at one point, I found that I had to leave the game table, in order to use the bathroom. I was only in that room very briefly.  But when I returned to the kitchen, I saw that its window was starting to glow with the first hints of the dawn. And when I looked around my home, under that dawning light, I saw that there was no Santa Claus there, and no steeds or sleigh.  He had simply vanished, and I was alone.

Though I wonder, if we presume Herschel to have a "real" body during Of Nativity, how is he shown all the things he is shown? How is he transported to space to see the Intercessor's true body? Is it a hallucination? An image projected on his ceiling? It's not described that way.

Frame Narrative

There are strange elements of the frame narrative, too. Ostensibly, Miriam Schoen is collecting Herschel Schoen's papers and adding her own narrative to it, all for the benefit of an audience of "devotees":

I did not think about my little brother’s flock of devotees, clamoring for a properly dignified print edition of his “papers,” and demanding of his poor sister that she cough up every bit of family trivia she could remember that in any way impinged upon their prophet, the messiah. Because – how could my little brother have such followers? When he is only a little boy – a poor, sad, crazy little boy?

Miriam Schoen supposedly left NYC for Portland on December 24, carrying with her many of Herschel's papers. However, this doesn't explain how Of Nativity, Herschel's self-written account of the events of December 25, ended up in her possession.

A few other strange aspects of the frame narrative:

Why does Miriam refer to herself as a Redactor? (And labels all of her chapters "Redactor's Preface"?) What is she redacting, exactly?

Why does the Intercessor's Preface exist? Did Miriam put this here? Did the AI?

Why does She of High Mind exist? Herschel gives an account of the order of his December Chronicle, and She of High Mind is never mentioned. The chapter is the most incoherent in the entire story, with passages omitted due to illegibility. Miriam marks these omissions with "MS," suggesting she is in fact the one editing this chapter, but there is no explanation given for its existence. Tonally and with the capitalization of words it matches the small excerpt Madeleine reads on Herschel's paper crown. How did Miriam get this and why did she include it?

Of course, there's also the fact that in the final chapter, Miriam mentions she doesn't remember when, how, or why she has the typewriter she's using to create the account.

Who are Herschel's devotees? His prophesies of doom go unheard in his life. Are they the AI that supposedly went back in time 10,000s of years to ask for his assent?

Likewise, I wonder when the Revelator's Preface was written, and who the "you" in it being addressed truly is.

Incest and Sexuality

Madeleine teases Herschel once, so he immediately has to masturbate. Right after this scene, Herschel goes out and angrily confronts Miriam:

“I have learned,” I said, “what it is that the men of the earth call coupling and fruitfulness.” She turned her head, slightly. “I know,” I said spitefully, “what it is that you and Vincent share, that you do not share with me.”

Which leads to this exchange:

“My, my,” she said, in a merry daze. “My little brother’s growing up, isn’t he?” she said. The rhetorical question, and the sickly sweetness that dripped from its edges, reminded me equally of Mrs. Rachel and of Madeleine. Why, why, do you torment me so? My Sister, Miriam Schoen, why do you torment me so?

Herschel will continue to conflate Miriam and Madeleine throughout the story, especially in She of High Mind:

And SHE ATE the grass of the field, and ATE also the fragrant DATES growing from the PALMS of the field, and thus was SHE made MADELEINGIAN, and [lettering becomes increasing difficult to make out -MS] was made clamored [? -MS] and manyful [? -MS] and [rest of paragraph wholly illegible -MS]

She of High Mind is crammed full of weird, Freudian sexual imagery throughout, involving SEEDS and such. I find the conflating of the female figures in Herschel's life (he also, at one point in She of High Mind, describes his sister as becoming RACHELLINE) interesting in the context of Herschel's abhorrence toward substitution and pattern.

She of High Mind also begins with this line:

Then forthwith SHE went down from her virginity, and went down unto the SUNDERING FIELD.

Virginia, whose letter about Christmas Herschel reads, is a figure of extreme importance to Herschel; later, he uses her as a SUBSTITUTE for the virgin ant queen in the story's climax.

Comedy

Miriam describes Herschel as a "laugh riot," explaining this as something nobody understands about him, something she wants people to understand. Herschel describes Santa as a master of parody, who laughs at the absurd.

Herschel will later consider it a similarly absurd joke for the thousandmade forms to have interest in him, and wish for him to understand them:

For – although he was made in divine image – he is a lesser thing than his imager.  Even his virtues were fashioned for the sake of their eventual failure, and his strength for the moment when, at last, he is laid low and broken.  Thus does man’s maker glorify and sanctify Himself through His creature, which He has fashioned in order to prove itself great, and then to prove itself inferior to Him. But the ones that were assembled here, watching me, did not resemble man in any way whatsoever. It did not seem right, the way that they were watching me.  I ought to have been entirely beneath their notice.  The notion that they had taken an interest in me was a disquieting one, for I felt that it demeaned and devalued their exalted nature. But they had taken an interest in me. They were tremendously interested in me. And they were not only interested in studying me, from a distance, for their own “purposes.’” No: they wished for me to know them, as well. This wish of theirs was absurd, of course.  It was laughable.  It was what men call a very good joke.

Meanwhile, there's also an emphasis on bad comedy: the things that are "like jokes" in sitcoms but that aren't funny, as well as Damien Eggert's profusion of cliches that are said as though they're supposed to be funny but aren't.

Ho, ho, ho is a laugh.

Plaitings and Fleurons

This unique phrase appears twice:

As a little girl I liked to draw. I don’t, anymore, though. I drew shapes, rather than pictures. Spirals, nested rings, lace-like plaitings and fleurons. That sort of thing.

Much later, referring to Vincent's video essay setup:

I saw the green-on-green wallpaper behind the man. I saw its green plaitings and greener fleurons, nested, nestling.  I fell backward, smiling, into that lace fairyland.

These are, of course, patterns. And patterns are a motif of crucial importance throughout this story. The whole story seems to be built around them, with reflections and similarities across Herschel and Miriam's narratives. (Herschel as a prophet versus Vincent as a prophet, Miriam and Herschel both cowardly refusing to watch violence and battles or the oncoming wave, sitcoms and Damien's cliches, and so on.)

I have more thoughts, including some observations about how it is hearing the Intercessor copy his own voice that causes Herschel to change his mind about its truth (and also how the Intercessor demonstrating it can copy Herschel and Miriam's voices makes one wonder how much of this narrative was written by them and how much by the Intercessor), the similarities between the ships Herschel sees in the harbor and the true form of the Intercessor (red and green and white), and the similarities between a lot of how Herschel describes the ants at the end and elements of Herschel's own narrative. Is Herschel just a creation of the AI, like Virginia the Ant, intended to retroactively justify its own existence? Is this how "time travel" was accomplished, why space and time are so strange, why so many elements of the story don't cohere perfectly logically? I'm not sure. I don't have a complete idea of the story yet. This post was mostly meant to be a collection of observations I had, to continue to think about. Maybe some other readers have a few ideas about what these things mean?

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

I really don't have any time or respect for people who call themselves marine mammal scientists while acting as lobbyists and continuously misleading the general public about marine mammal welfare.

Animal welfare is a relatively new scientific field - especially in cetaceans. It's really only in the last few decades that we've been actively studying and determining welfare parameters in dolphins and whales.

That said, we have scientists like Dr. Isabella Clegg, Dr. Jason Bruck, Dr. Heather Hill, Dr. Kelly Jaakkola, Dr. Kathleen Dudzinski, Dr. Fabienne Delfour and many other incredible scientists, research fellows and facilities contributing amazing welfare data.

Not to mention the fantastic global Cetacean Welfare Study

We're learning how to study welfare, what good welfare and bad welfare looks like, what affects welfare the most, monitoring welfare acoustically, comparing parameters to wild animals, what is actually the best habitat for these animals and so much more.

Yet you have people like Dr. Naomi Rose, Dr. Lori Marino and Dr. Ingrid Visser who claim that "the science is settled" on cetacean welfare. That we don't need to do anymore research, show's over, nothing to see here. Tank bad, sanctuary good, don't look at over there at the actual research, trust us - we're the scientists.

That's why I get so frustrated when I see people uncritically use these scientist's sources. Or any sort of anti cap media who take their word as gospel, regurgitate Blackfish talking points and deliberately mislead with emotive, anthropomorphic language.

I can't understand why, when presented with the notion that these animals may not be suffering, that the response is anger.

Why? When I realised that the orcas at SeaWorld were living a much better life than what was portrayed in Blackfish I felt relief! I was happy to see the high energy enrichment and training session videos.

I was happy when I travelled all the way to Orlando from Australia and spent hours and hours at SeaWorld at the underwater viewing area. I asked questions and I watched the orcas rest, play and engage in sessions. I was excited about the idea of being apart of this world and getting to work with animals using positive reinforcement and prioritising welfare.

Little did I know that only in a few years I'd be networking with those amazing welfare scientists and working with dolphins! I don't expect others to have the same journey I did, but I hope some of what I post can make a difference in changing how people perceive cetacean welfare.

There's a lot more we need to learn and study but a lot of the current data is pointing to positive/neutral welfare states in cetaceans in human care. I hope more will be published on orcas - a lot of the data is in bottlenose dolphins (which is probably why lobbyists aren't targeting them in legislation as much anymore).

Cetacean welfare is in no way a settled science, so be very wary of sources that claim it is or make uncritical claims about "captivity".

[max1461]

I've talked before about how scientific knowledge assumes a robust body of everyday knowledge. When you do a scientific measurement, you need to trust that your instrument is giving you the right reading instead of an error, for instance. You probably don't know the ins and outs of how the instrument works yourself—you're trusting technicians to be able to do their job and make the instrument work. They may use a mixture of formal knowledge and informal knowledge to do this. You hear all kinds of stories of technicians saying things like "this machine's a little finicky, if it doesn't give a reading just give it a couple of whacks" or whatever all the time.

You use everyday, "common sense" reasoning of various sorts to determine if your instruments work and if your technicians are trustworthy and capable and so on. You can bolster this knowledge in other ways—for instance, if another research group on the opposite side of the world gets the same result as you, that's some evidence that your readings weren't a technical error. But trusting this research group requires all sorts of other informal knowledge, which you get through e.g. your professional network as a scientist and so on, about whether they're working in a reputable lab and whether the journal they published in is reputable and so on and so forth.

I'm not saying that this makes scientific knowledge untrustworthy. Far from it, I think scientists' ability to manage these epistemic hurdles is generally quite good, although certainly not flawless. They're an occupational hazard of being a human and trying to collaborate with other humans to figure stuff out about the world, there's no way you can get around it. But I do think it means that if you want to consider yourself, you know... epistemically virtuous, a good skeptic, you need a working model of how everyday knowledge is and should be obtained, an epistemic theory applicable to "folk knowledge" not obtained through the scientific process. Not only because you use folk knowledge all the time in your everyday life and should probably be thoughtful about whether it's bullshit or not, but also because the scientific process itself relies on it in a straightforward way.

Anyway, I can't do a rigorous scientific study to figure out... how I should respond to my friend when they're down, or how to throw them a good birthday party, or whatever. And I would be dubious of any psychology study which claims to answer these questions in a general sense. But that doesn't mean that I don't know how to do these things for my friend! My specific, "folk psychological" understanding of who my friend is as an individual, what they care about, how they respond to things, these are more reliable guides than the psychological literature would be on this issue! That viewpoint is not "anti-science". The alternative view is so patently ridiculous that basically no one hews to it, not even scientists.

On second thought I'm sure there are like, some podcast guys who believe it...

[mdhwrites]

Idk if you talked about this before but what's your thoughts on the Blight parents' relationship? Asking this mainly because I saw a long post saying all of Alador's actions were forced by Odalia (even the scene of telling Amity to drop Willow) and the only reason he neglected the kids was because he worked to protect them hence he wasn't abusive. Imo he and Odalia got along fine in their debut so when the "odalia abused alador" reveal dropped it was surprising for me. Since they were also hexside friends, I wonder if the show would've explored that aspect of their relationship before it went downhill (it would've been cool as Odalia as a character feels wasted)

I absolutely have talked about this before, in part because between S1 and 2, the Blight Family was actually one of the most interesting parts about the show for me. They were literally the first blog I wrote about TOH because I thought people treated them unfairly, especially Odalia, because High Society Characters are different from ones we normally sympathize with. If you want to see that version of the Blights, where they're both neglectful and making mistakes but also genuinely meaning well by their kids, I have a story called The Power of Love that explores a LOT of TOH's post S1 potential but especially Amity and her family alongside with making Boscha a real character. I've also just talked about them being shit in the past but I really want to focus on this in this blog: They're both terrible people. Everyone likes to focus on the fact that Odalia is a greedy capitalist but an honest story would recognize that Alador is a mad scientist. That Odalia would sell her children to get ahead while Alador would experiment on them if allowed or if he saw it as useful to his research. He makes robots though, so that's never in question. Amity ONLY gets Alador's attention... By besting his own creation. He watches that whole fight in Escaping Expulsion like he's studying it and liking the results. So yeah, he notices Amity is strong and is able to use that against Odalia to make her not be the dumbest form of villain, so they can claim to have some sort of principles... But how much do you really think that matters to him?

His statement when Luz tries to end the fight by saying the investors get it is that she has a point. Not that they are maybe going too far or that the abomiton's job of destruction is bad but just that the point has been made. Because that's what matters to him. After all, they specifically know that this creature is going to kill Luz. This isn't an interesting experiment for Alador. He doesn't care. He'd rather get this over with so he can go back to his lab.

Even Clouds on the Horizon actually reinforces this. Yes, he complains about not having a weekend off in five years... But that's FIVE. FUCKING. YEARS. There's a point where you know... Maybe he should have complained about this? Questioned anything. But that raises the question of: Before this... What the fuck else was he doing with his time? Both Escaping Expulsion and Reaching Out have him entirely in mad scientist mode where you might distract him for a moment but he will just keep working and ignore everything around him. That's part of WHY he likes Odalia. Odalia loves to talk. Loves to be social. Loves to remove the part he doesn't care about and easily gets distracted during. Even in Clouds on the Horizon, he doesn't explicitly state that his complaint is a lack of time with his kids. He's finally feeling it now because, if we're generous, Amity opened his eyes but... That implies he's a good person. That he just needed a reminder of who he was deep down, just like his daughter did (because Amity frankly has similar issues to this). But... if he were a good person, jokes like 'Immediate execution" would be done instead by having imply that the punishment is very light, revealing that his true nature, when he's not thinking, is kind. But it's not. It's more extreme than expulsion and goes all the way to murder. And why shouldn't it? He still had to have had this talk with Odalia. Agreed with the outcome. Learned the lines. If he was mad about it, he doesn't need to be at that meeting. He could be home working. This was instead important enough to him to get him out of the house. Same goes with dismissing Willow. He took time out of his day for that and didn't keep on script. Him cutting Amity off is not his job there unless he wants it to be. He defers power to Odalia though because she is better than him at this stuff. She is comfortable interacting with other people in ways he is not and their relationship is pretty much divided by those lines. It's very businesslike but neither person actually gives a fuck about people so why shouldn't it be more about collaborating strengths than it is anything emotional? And here's the thing: I'm just going by what the show shows us. Because if we claim Odalia made Alador do everything he does in the show... Who is Alador? We never get a real glimpse of that. If we even say the abomatons aren't something he wants, then he isn't an inventor. The best we have is he'd like to be a layabout and that doesn't technically include his kids. He could just be lazy then and do whatever he wants because that's what he already did... But at least he was making something.

The closest we have to anything else is Amity claiming that he used to spend time with his kids. We have literally no evidence of this, his personality doesn't support the claim, he didn't give a shit about Amity's well being until she challenged his creations as he was entirely on board with destroying social life, twice, so why should we think he was some paragon? Why should we believe Amity who doesn't even go on to ask about his fate once they're back in the Isles and she sees her siblings? Who seemed to care MUCH about her mother's opinion for Reaching Out rather than literally ever bringing up her dad?

It's revisionist in a way that tries to rewrite their dynamic into something more complex than it was. To try and make there be a point to Alador when him having control of the Abomatons doesn't even go anywhere because they still get shot down and still have to leave Alador behind to fight the damn things while they go rescue Luz. Cut out literally the entirety of Clouds on the Horizon and make it the Hexide kids rushing to the Day of Unity instead and you have a different force that can hold back the abomatons while Amity and co go off to help Luz. Worse yet, replace abomatons with "Elite EC Coven Scouts" and you effectively get the same result making Alador and Odalia even more pointless besides a very minor road bump on Amity's character arc all things said and done with how easy her rebellion against them is. They have no point in the story so people are going to scramble for some deeper meaning. Some reason they should exist by having them tackle something as provocative as domestic abuse or the like. But it doesn't. Instead, it's just inconsistent, wasteful writing that has no point to exist when the main character it should be affecting, Amity, is barely a part of any of it. She has some of the least screentime of any character in Escaping Expulsion. She isn't a part of her dad's transformation in Clouds except in an abstract way where Alador just wanting to spend more time video gaming would have been as meaningful with how shit their relationship is at the end of Reaching Out because they wouldn't even let us have a hug in that episode between the two because TOH refuses to just let a plotline end simply even when it involves extremely minor characters. And Reaching Out is the closest we come. An episode where Alador still rigs an entire abomaton to make sure Amity goes to the tryouts without knowing it's Odalia's dream not hers. And if Odalia really was the reason he did EVERYTHING... Shouldn't he know her better than that? Almost like maybe he sees the EC as a good future for Amity too because that's success and he clearly cares about success to some extent. Otherwise, he wouldn't have married a woman as greedy as Odalia. And even if in real life, I've watched a relationship turn toxic the minute they got married, nothing about either character, from their Hexide days, to a decade ago, to now, seems all that different from each other. They just now have kids they neglect or use as free labor. And yes, it's really that simple, no matter how much that fucking blows. And a final note actually: This is my interpretation. We get such little time with Alador and Odalia that statements like "This is why he likes her" are going to be somewhat subjective by how you interpret their relationship. If you think it's as shallow as Alador just found her hot and married her because of that and has been trapped for 16+ years... Well, A: why are you trying to paint him as sympathetic when you seem to not like him? but B: why hasn't her mistreatment been even longer? More over the top? We're just missing basic answers to these characters because they're so bog standard (even if Odalia feels like she comes from the 80s or 90s cartoons more than literally anything I grew up with) that I have to stretch and use literally every scrap of screentime we get with these characters because not only do they get so little of it, their family/kids reflect such little about themselves because none of the elements cohere into something whole. They're bad and really only stand out for that fact versus other one off villains because, well, they're related to Amity. But they're also dealt with just as easily as any villain of the week the show does so they have this weird contrast between Amity's importance and the importance the show actually gives them. Which again: Sucks.

[beannary]

Tell me absolutely everything about this Percy Jackson au please

ok so i wrote a WHOLE ANSWER to this question while i was walking back to work after my lunch break and long story short my phone refused to post it because it did not want to connect to the museum wifi and there is no cell service where i work so i may miss some things as im writing it out now because ive already written it out once before but OK LETS GO

so Hamato Yoshi moves from Japan to Hollywood and becomes famed movie star Lou Jitsu, and falls in love with Big Mama, the owner of the Lotus Hotel in Las Vegas. When Lou proposes to Big Mama she accepts! But she also is like we need to have our wedding or the honey moon or something basically she's like we need to go to my hotel and Lou is like sick this is so cool and normal and BOOM two seconds later like multiple decades have passed .

Baron Draxum is a scientist/historian who has fallen into this ancient greece sort of niche. He's not a demigod BUT he has the ability to see through the mist and has seen weird things happen and has dedicated his life to figuring out what is up. He manages to figure out that the mist exists and that it has something to do with ancient greek mythology, and he manages to figure out how to tell if a location is like enshrouded in the mist, which leads him to the lotus hotel. Draxum knows something is up with this hotel but then he starts noticing people who are dressed as if they are from completely different periods in time, and THEN he notices famed movie star Lou Jitsu and he's like ok theres some weird time thing going on here and he connects the dots between the Lotus Hotel and the Lots Beds from the mythology and he basically just yoinks Lou out of the hotel who is now like girl what on earth is happening its WHAT YEAR?????

im trying to figure out how the boys get in the picture. I was thinking that Draxum while doing his research ended up finding these four boys, who he determined somehow were the children of gods, and he wanted to do research and experiments on them. I think this would happen before he rescued Lou Jitsu from the Lotus Hotel maybe a few months before? Draxum ends up taking Lou Jitsu to his home where Lou is like thanks for saving me dude real cool of you, wait a second are those KIDS? YOURE DOING EXPERIMENTS ON THEM? and basically Lou is like actually no we are leaving now actually and he nabs the boys and dips in the middle of the night

Raph would be three, Donnie and Leo two, and Mikey one when Lou Jitsu takes them from Draxum, and I think the four of them were just in various orphanages or group homes before Draxum got them

Raph i think would be a son of ares but im still debating that Leo is a son of athena Donnie is a son of hephaestus Mikey is a son of apollo

The boys would have done the demigod thing where they bounce around schools every year. Leo is actually the one who gets expelled every year and he has a reputation as a trouble maker, but he's actually covering for Donnie. Donnie's you know super into tech and building but a lot of his stuff explodes or attracts monsters. Leo takes the fall for all these accidents and all the destruction because donnie wants to go to like higher education, wants to go to like university and whatever and it would look super bad on his record if he was getting expelled from every school. Leo on the other hand doesnt really care and he's normally around when Donnie's doing his inventing so its pretty easy for him to take the blame.

Because the boys are constantly bouncing around schools they dont really have any friends. Theyre only friend is April O'Neil who is their neighbor and who is able to see through the mist. She really runs with their chaos and all that. OH also the boys don't know that theyre demigods until they actually end up at camp, and Lou doesn't know the godly parents of the boys until again they end up being claimed at camp.

I think that Casey will also be a demigod? a daughter of ares i think. and about april i want her to either become the oracle of delphi like rachel does in the pjo books, or i think she'll start learning how to manipulate the mist like hazel does in hoo

all of this i just thought of today though so im bound to change things as the au develops and like feel free to chime in if you have any ideas because im really just flying by the seat of my pants with this one

[power-chords]

Stern is occasionally aware of how time has frozen over as he refers back to all these lectures. He writes, for example, that he regrets his failure, in the past, to write about National Socialism’s admirers abroad. But there was nothing to stop him making up for this omission in his memoir. The ‘marvellously austere’ James Conant, a former president of Harvard, one of Stern’s mentors for a brief time and high commissioner in Germany after the war, a man whose vigour and knowledge, Stern says, were matched only by Arthur Burns in the 1970s and Richard Holbrooke in the 1990s, might be a case in point. Conant sent delegations from Harvard to various functions at German universities and played host to Nazi officials at Harvard even after Kristallnacht and after German universities had been purged of Jewish academics. (This might have meant little to the president of an Ivy League university since these institutions at the time had few or no Jews on their faculties. The first Jew to get tenure at Yale was Paul Weiss in 1946.) In his role as a leading chemist, Conant advised Dupont not to hire the refugee scientist Max Bergmann because he was ‘definitely of the Jewish type’. Postwar German democracy was nursed along by men like Conant, who weren’t raging anti-semites but the polite sort, the sort who were perfectly happy to lend the prestige of America’s premier university to Nazi institutions. What exactly would Stern have us make of such things?

This brings up the larger question that looms over this book. It is written under the sign of Camus’s The Plague. One ‘should bear witness’, says the epigraph with which Stern begins; one needs ‘to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence’; to teach that ‘the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years … that it bides its time.’ The allegory is all too clear in the first part of the book, as it tells the story of what happens when the political rats are allowed to go forth and triumph. It may well be that Stern’s exemplary life of liberal civic involvement – he supported civil rights causes, opposed the Vietnam War, spoke out against Reagan’s going to Bitburg cemetery, and writes critically of his adopted country’s attack on Iraq and on individual liberties at home – is born of a passion to live out what he learned in a time of pestilence. Certainly, most of his serious historical work is engaged in some way with what went wrong in Germany. But the ideal of active citizenship is very familiar. And the threat of a renewed Nazism seems remote.

Too much of the second part of the book seems disingenuously marshalled under the banner of ‘never again’. Stern was a leader, he proudly reports, of the so-called ‘Stern gang’ – an odd allusion to the 1940s Zionist terrorist group – that opposed making concessions to Columbia students in 1968. Whatever the merits of the case, it is hard to believe that he really thinks, as he claims he did at the time, that the idealistic student radicals of 1960s Columbia shared much with the quite differently motivated Nazi students of 1930s Germany. Although he allies himself with other émigré academics, the fear of a reborn Hitler Youth in 1960s New York has to be more of a post hoc justification of views held for other political and personal reasons than a real motivating force: that his mentor Lionel Trilling nodded approvingly at every point Stern made at a crucial faculty meeting had to count for something. (No one has researched the question of how refugees from Nazi persecution reacted as a group to the student unrest of the Vietnam War era. At Berkeley, the two most important supporters of the Free Speech Movement at the Law School, Richard Buxbaum and Hans Linde, were Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution; the refugee scholar Leo Lowenthal, a leading member of the Frankfurt School, also sided with the FSM students. Others were on the side of the administration at various times or not engaged at all.)

[shanie-the-toyaddict]

Ok, so here's the deal. And there are a ton of other people asking this in the notes, so yeah. Here's the thing.

It isn't just about the memory of the people and it being a gravesite.

The Titanic Tourism is actively destroying the ship. Far faster than the ocean itself is.

The wreck, for decades, has been yanked at and pulled apart for scraps, artifacts, anything that can be salvaged for profit, at the expense of the integrity of the wreckage itself. The damage has been more than noticeable and Ballard himself I believe said that, when he later returned to the wreck after it had essentially been pillaged, his heart broke over what was destroyed.

It's not just a matter of Titanic Tourists walking over a cemetery.

It's the fact that people are looting the graves.

And in doing so they are, in fact, destroying important stuff that actual historians and scientists might find useful on topics ranging from the scientific properties of "Rusticles" to the behavior of deep sea ocean currents, to yeah. Historical research that is still being done to this day on just what made the ship sink the way it did.

And that doesn't even get into the topic of how walking through a cemetery isn't going to get you dead unless you're really stupid about it, but that 4000 meters under the ocean is actively trying to kill you.

Nor does it dig into how the artifact recovery teams have blatantly refused to allow the families of the survivors any of their loved ones' stuff back. As one descendent made the point, it's like the last relics of her grandfather had been ripped from his resting place and turned into tourist attractions.

This is the same sort of stuff that people bitch at the British Museum for doing to other cultures, except it's being done to the grandparents and great grandparents of actual people alive today. It's one thing to go down there and gather up some scattered coal from the debris field. It's another to go down there and scoop up watches and suitcases and letters and other personal affects of the people who perished on that night, and not even let the people who they mean the most to have any claim over them.

In short, Titanic Tourism is a really fuggin BAD idea for everyone involved and it goes waaaaay past a matter of "it's just a gravesite". There's so much more involved in the issue than that and if you want resources, just do some quick Google searches about the topic and you'll see what I mean.

Sorry if this hijacks the post at all, but there are a bunch of people in the notes saying this as well and I felt the need to respond.

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[thekaratcake-blog]

'science hasn't considered sex binary for years' is just not true. i'm not intersex myself but even i can see it is very much not true. in almost all places on earth it's not even legally a sex, but intersex people are highly discriminated against in medical settings also.

yes, most people know what intersexuality is, but i know someone whose doctor hadn't ever even heard of it before (im from a more conservative country where its more of a 'medical wonder'/'mistake of nature' in the same way it has been for other countries for decades, even among many practising medical personnel rather than an actual researched topic). and not to mention all the people who try to deny/erase/etc it or 'sex corrections' on infants and so on.

like, simply it is not true, and it sounds like you just live somewhere exceptionally liberal

anyway sorry for the crazies in your inbox. sadly they are many

I mean it is true, you're talking about people, I'm talking about science, the actual scientific consensus is that sex isn't binary and this has been the case for a long time, this doesn't mean that some people who aren't better educated or don't know this or even are just blinded by their own biases don't realize that or want to ignore it That's the issue, scientifically and biologically, sex isn't binary, just like scientifically and biologically trans people exist, both of these things when looking at the facts are plain as day and an easy scientific consensus, yet both of these things are still contested, not by actual scientists, but by people who are either unaware of or actively ignoring the science, the latter being my least favourite kind of person by far That's more the thing, it's also some of the claims being made about how perisex trans people need to change because they're built on the sex binary somehow, which is just silly, there's actually not all that much functional difference between a binary and a spectrum where we're simply not currently talking about the in between, perisex trans people and strictly homosexual people are just operating at either end of the spectrum, and in that area it behaves as a binary for all intents and purposes as it doesn't involve the middle area of the spectrum, the "nonbinary area" if you will I know it's a whole mess and can be hard to grasp, but just, it's not as black and white as these people are putting it, it's not this scientific revolution they're pushing for, and so much of their activism is just founded on nothing as they're largely uninformed of the things they're trying to be activists about But yeah, also to add on, just to clear up any confusion, male and female are just terms for specific chunks of the spectrum on either side, and just happen to be the most commonly represented parts of a spectrum, remember, just because something is a spectrum, doesn't mean that all points on the spectrum are equally common, and it doesn't mean we can't go "hey we'll call this part this", as long as we understand that right now we don't even have a good idea of where which parts start and end so right now we can't have a rigorous definition of anything of the sort

[magnetothemagnificent]

I've been reading "Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology" by Kenneth L. Feder, and in the introduction to the book he lists a very helpful checklist of sorts to help discern between genuine science and plain hoax or pseudoscience. I think this list is very helpful in the age of the internet, especially with the prevalence of fake news spreading very easily on this site. I urge everyone to utilize this checklist, not just with archeology, but with science claims in general.

--Does the source of the archaeological claim cite "experts" in support of his or her claim, who make polite, innocuous, but otherwise meaningless statements about the artifact or site in question? Just because scientists say a claim is "interesting" and wish the claimant luck in his or her research is not an affirmation of that research. They are just being polite.

--Does the source cite "experts" but exaggerate their own credentials?; for example, is the PhD only honorary or from no known, accredited institution? That's s easy enough to check online.

--Does the source cite "experts" whose credentials are unrelated to the claims being made? Einstein was brilliant, but his fields were math and physics. He is not a relevant expert for claims made about geology or archaeology. Citing Einstein or other well-known scientists in support of claims outside their fields of expertise is problematic. Some people consider me an expert in archaeology. Even if I am, it that does not mean I have any meaningful insights to provide about brain surgery, opera, or automobile repair.

--Does the source cite "experts" whose previous extreme claims are not mentioned or cited?

--Does the source make what appear to be definitive statements about the age of an artifact or site without any supporting data, never telling you how he or she came up with the proposed date?

--Does the source make what appear to be definitive statements about the cultural affiliation of an artifact or site without any supporting data, never telling you how he or she came up with the identity of the makers of the artifact or the residents of a site?

--Does the source claim that the artifact would have taken too much time or there are too many of them to be forgeries? There is no logical reason to be lieve that merely because an artifact was well made, would have taken a lot of time to make, or exists in large quantities it must be genuine. Forgers are often diligent, talented, and hard-working. Don't underestimate them.

--Does the source make assertions about the appearance of an artifact that bears very little relationship to what's actually there? Simply put, if you have to be told that a piece of rock art, a sculpture, or a ceramic pot bears the image of a spaceship, extraterrestrial alien, or dinosaur-if you didn't see that with out that prompting-then in all likelihood there is no image of a spaceship.. extraterrestrial alien, or dinosaur. Trust your own eyes and brain and not the word of someone trying to sell you a bill of goods.

--Does the source preface most claims with phrases like "maybe," "if," "imagine," "could be," or "perhaps" and then present detailed scenarios about an tiquity, all of which require acceptance of the original speculation, which is never tested or proven?

--Beware of the question, "But isn't it possible?" On a broad, philosophical, in finite multiple universe kind of sense, hypothetically, anything is possible. So what? Is it possible that ancient aliens built the pyramids? Well, okay, sure. But it's also possible that in the next five minutes monkeys will fly out of your butt. However, let me assure you that you really don't need to worry too much about possible simian excretions. And the likelihood that aliens built the pyramids is about the same.

--Does the source demand, "Hey, if I'm wrong, let the scientists prove me wrong"? This is a fundamental misapprehension of the scientific method. The burden of proof always falls on those making claims. And, as Carl Sagan phrased it, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." In fact, I don't have to prove that ancient aliens did not build the pyramids. If you think they did, it's on you to prove that they did, and the evidence bar is going to be very high.

--I love Wikipedia. I often consult Wikipedia as a first step in exploring a topic. Then I check out the bibliographies of those Wikipedia entries to track down the original sources on which the Wikipedia article was based. For example, I am cited in a bunch of Wikipedia entries related to topics I address in this book. That's great, but don't rely on those Wikipedia summaries of what I've said. Scroll down to the bottom of those summaries and check out the origi nal publications on which they are based. Finally, if the source of an extreme claim in archaeology uses nothing but Wikipedia sources, you can safely ignore the claim.

[zeafeon]

Hey there! I've heard about a PMD&D campaign you're a part of with @azurityarts using the PokéRole system and its PMD module through their various art pieces and a few asks they answered. If you have time, I'd love to hear more about how that's been going, and what you think about the system!

Oh thanks for asking about it! I'd be happy to answer questions about the campaign I'm hosting right now, but for now I'll just give a general recap of what's going on for the players and what the plot currently is.

So the plot so far has been about Shadow Pokemon suddenly appearing, and the players trying to find who is responsible for their sudden appearance. Shadow Pokemon tend to be extremely aggressive and will typically attack non-shadows on sight (with a few exceptions).

The cause of the Shadow Pokemon outbreak came from one of their clients early in the game, when the group was acting as a sort of rescue team instead of investigating the Shadow Pokemon problem. They were around an Absol named Seth, who suddenly became sick after grabbing a treasure deep inside of a dungeon. They escorted him to a town of herbalists who they believed could help cure his sickness, only to find the town wiped out during their time collecting ingredients that the inhabitants needed to cure his illness. They haven't seen that Absol since, but they did find some strange, shadowy feathers in the room he was in...

Since then, the group has been trying to find a way to combat the shadows, and perhaps turn them back to normal. To achieve this, they enlisted the help of a scientist and researcher, a Porygon-Z by the name of Dr. Zed. Zed is currently working on a machine that can be used against the shadows, one he claims will be able to return them to normal. However, the ingredients he needs to make this weapon work are difficult to obtain, so the group has been helping him gather what he needs.

As for the current situation, they are trying to reach Mesprit's lake, which she seems to have turned into a sort of night club beneath a once bustling city, one that has been overrun with Shadow Pokemon.

I can't share much more of the plot at this time without spoiling my players (who will likely see this post), but I will include a few silly doodles my players have made that might not have been posted anywhere!

As for what I think of the system, before this I was running games off of a completely homebrewed system, which, while it worked, it was a bit unstructured and somewhat loose with the rules. Using Pokerole definitely gives our game a more solid foundation for rules and mechanics, but the module itself seems geared around encounters being extremely vicious and hard to survive. The inclusion of things like lethal damage (aka, a move will straight up kill you instead of knock you out), among a few other changes has led to me needing to make adjustments on the fly just to make sure even more basic encounters aren't a wipe. I do like the system! I just feel like it could be better balanced against players dying so often. That being said, I must be doing something right if there's only been one "death" so far! (And by death, I mean the character's fate is currently unknown, they were abandoned and dragged away by a Shadow Luxray, but they didn't find any kind of remains when they went to look for him!)

Anyways, I hope that gives a general overview of what's been going on, I'm always happy to talk about my own projects!

[aonemanarmy]

The battle for the madman's soul was over – Jenova could feel it. There was never any doubt in the creature's mind that it would emerge victorious, for what hope did a pitiful human stand against a being older than their own galaxy? It was impossible and had Jenova been capable of feeling emotions in the same way that a human being could then surely a feeling of triumph would've been present, but all the creature felt was a cold sense of satisfaction.

'At last you accept the truth.'

Resist as he might Sephiroth was still Jenova's and Lucrecia presented the creature with an opportunity to seize back control. All because the foolish scientist sought to dredge up old memories and traumas that left the otherwise perfect tool vulnerable to outside influence.

Truly the woman hadn't learned a thing. Now her mistakes were about to offer up Jenova exactly what the creature needed. Jenova only needed to continue to press the woman, who in turn would push Sephiroth further into letting his guard down. When that happened then Jenova would strike.

'Willingly you offered up the child upon the altar of science for the sake of your own hubris. In return you gained the knowledge which you so coveted, so it is quite selfish of you to try to take back what was freely given. Besides, is a broken man worth sacrificing all of that precious knowledge that you've desired? All that you had longed to possess all those years ago?'

While Jenova's focus was upon Lucrecia the madman was left to try to sort through his own tangled thoughts and the gnawing feeling that something was off. Truly, it disturbed him that any part of him was second guessing his initial judgment as the last time that had happened had nearly led him to ruin. Still, that small voice he'd thought long dead quietly nagged at him – the boy he'd once been and that had longed for a mother continuing to linger and cling to a hope that would never come.

He hated it.

“The vessel is unimportant so long as it allows me to do what I will.” He responded to the woman's query about his current form not being his 'true' body. It was surprisingly observant for her since Sephiroth hadn't thought she would've noticed given that they'd never met – at least as far as he was aware. “What I construct now is far superior to what once was.”

Whether Lucrecia understood what he meant or not was hardly of any concern to him. The woman may have claimed to be his mother but regardless of who she was he knew that she could never fully appreciate the great work he was set to accomplish. Any time now he would emerge from stasis like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon and enter into the world a being beyond mortal comprehension – a god made reality.

What if it's true...? 'That quiet voice spoke after what felt like an eternity of silence, as if hesitant to make itself known. What if she really is her?

Sephiroth scoffed at the voice, finding himself growing irritated by its' persistence. It should be dead and he wanted it to stay that way, since what sort of god had any use of something so pathetic?

She is a liar and if by some chance that were not true then she is scum. Sephiroth countered, seeking to drive the small voice back. It would mean that she willingly discarded us, sacrificed us for her own ends. If what she says is true, then she is no better than that wretched little man that tortured us each and every day for the sake of his research – no, she would be worse since no mother would do such a thing.

Had Lucrecia spoken the truth than all she earned would be Sephiroth's ire and she would deserve it. It was the only suitable reward for her betrayal.

“I have always been alone in this miserable world.” Sephiroth said coolly, walking past Vincent and Lucrecia toward the mouth of the cavern where the reddened sky could be seen just beyond the surface of the falling water. “As it was, so shall it be.”

'Yes, let this farce be put to rest.' Jenova's wordless voice drifted back inside Sephiroth's mind, the creature eager to press the gap in the man's defenses. 'Show her your work and see how openly she will cast aside all pretenses of being any different.'

Sephiroth silently lifted a hand and pointed beyond the waterfall, bidding Lucrecia to step beyond the cavern of her self-imposed prison and into the outside world once more. Once she did so would she be able to bear witness to the true extent of the madman's suffering and the vengeance he sought to take upon the world that had gleefully destroyed him long before he'd ever been born.

Only then could she possibly understand.

Perhaps Sephiroth had seen her actions more of a ploy or an act of ignorance. He certainly had the right of it. So much of what Sephiroth had endured were due to terrible experiments that were kept well under lock and key. Hardly anyone alive understood what all was involved. It had only been Gast, Hojo, and Lucrecia when Sephiroth’s creation had been executed; and now only Lucrecia was left alive. Her expression remained soft and comely at Sephiroth’s question. He didn’t have to believe anything she said… even if it pained her. She knew this was merely the result of her actions.

A pained smile crossed her lips in response to Sephiroth’s words. “I cannot easily die, no… and neither can you. But it’s not completely impossible, either.” She stood silent, observing Sephiroth with keen interest. “This… isn’t your true body, is it??” she mused allowed. She had sensed something was off about Sephiroth, but perhaps he had separated his spirit from his physical body. In other words… she had felt he had physically died, even if Vincent had denied it at one point. Yet, here he stood, seemingly alive and well. But was it truly him in the flesh? A slight sense of guilt came over Vincent as he didn’t want Lucrecia to know that her son had been killed; and now he was rebuilding his body to become something akin to a god of sorts. She knew her son was long gone. Thus, it pained Vincent to see her persist. He too had held the belief that there was possibly some ounce of humanity in Sephiroth. But deep inside, he knew that was long gone. Now he stood and watched Lucrecia suffer through the same fruitless endeavor. Only he knew she would never give up. After all, it was only natural for a mother to yearn for her son, no matter how far gone he was. Though he stood before her, he was many galaxies away from her.   “In theory,” she quietly began as she continued to address Sephiroth’s question. “A strong will of another can break the chain of immortality. If it can bind you to life eternal, then so too can it break it. And your will is strong…” Her words fell solemnly, knowing Sephiroth had the strength and will to tear her down. It was simply a matter of testing it out. …perhaps she was forever a scientist after all. A mixture of anger and sadness loomed over Vincent’s face as he watched their interactions. He knew there was nothing he could do to prevent Lucrecia from desiring this suicidal request. He knew the suffering that came with being denied release. And yet… ‘Why do you care..?’ Lucrecia shook her head. “…It may seem meaningless to you,” she spoke thoughtfully. “I know I cannot turn back time. And I know you’ll never see me as a mother… I don’t deserve it. You deserve peace. I just wish I could give it to you… somehow.” She stayed her arms for a moment before slowly lowering her arms. Sephiroth wouldn’t even draw comfort from killing her, simply because she was nothing to him. It was one thing to be hated, but it was another to be nothing. Even in that, Hojo still managed to make an impression on Sephiroth. And she… utter nothingness. She truly meant nothing to Sephiroth, and never would ever mean anything. Lucrecia lowered her head. “…Is it wrong for me to give up?” Vincent lifted his head when he heard Lucrecia’s voice crack. Even if she was merely asking the question, he could tell she had already chosen to end the battle for her son. Her hazel eyes eventually landed on Vincent’s, brimming with tears afresh. The sight tore his heart once again. Not an ounce of hope was left in her. “Jenova’s right… It’s no use.” At this point, Vincent didn’t have a heart to encourage her any longer and didn’t give a response. He could practically feel Jenova triumphantly taunting Lucrecia. Without waiting for a response, Lucrecia gave Sephiroth one last look. “…I’m sorry… for everything.”

[hexagr]

The Virtue of Simplicity

One thing I believe is problematic among academic and intellectual types is the plague of leaving complexity complex. The job of a scientist isn’t to muddy the waters of research and dialogue, or to constantly wield technical jargon. A great deal of intelligence can be marked by the ability to convey complex phenomena in simple ways, while preserving the core details and spirit of the information being presented or argued.  Often, when I read an article about a topic that is deeply important, I’m presented with something which is full of unnecessary and redundant text. Logorrhea. I often have to dig to find the best and most clear parts of argumentation, the core of the paper or article. I’m personally fine with this, because I’m used to cutting through noise to find out how a thing works. But I imagine the confusion it might create at scale. I frequently see intellectuals claim the world needs to care more about X, Y, and Z. But a counter-intuitive technical hurdle we’re facing is: if we want people to think about important things, those important things need to be clear and unambiguous.  (Of course, the other half of this story is building a society that cares about technical details and is willing to relinquish ignorance when sufficient evidence is presented. But that is another blog post.) What if when you write a 20,000 text about something that could have been summed up in 2,000—or even 200 words, you’re not helping improve readers understanding of the thing as much as you think you are? I think an optimized writing habit should be: write, reflect, reduce—and cut any extra information from a text which makes it muddy or could confuse readers. What if muddy and unclear information actually contributes to existential risk and slows human progress by confusing the minds that read it? If semi-autonomous systems like Alexa already make jokes telling toddlers to stick forks into electrical outlets—consider this sort of parable, but with so-called “adults”—at scale. (I say so-called adults, because to me—an adult is someone who cares about intellect in the broadest sense—from math, to physics, philosophy, decision theory etc. I know that seems like asking for a lot. But how can you be a good, responsible, and accountable person if you don’t hold intellectual love as the highest form of love? Despite the population rising, I believe the world has fewer true adults than ever before—and it shows.) In short—a blog post or book need not be 20,000 words to say an important thing. If it is truly important, even if it is a technical topic, and you are truly clever, find a simple way to say it. Be pedantic. Some. Not too much. Mostly for good.

[redrobin-detective]

all is well

Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped into the next room I am I and you are you Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. ~ Henry Scott Hollard

AO3 link

______________

He hadn’t meant to say it, that much was clear. As much as she wanted to hate him for it, claim it was some sort of cruel manipulation; she knew he was just as distressed as she was. The ghost boy had covered his mouth, bright green eyes wide with panic as his misspoken words brought their battle to a screeching halt. Even the ghost the three hunters had been fighting stopped and stared before flying off. No one moved to stop them. Phantom looked at her fearfully, then over at her companion before vanishing without a trace.

It was a slip of the tongue, an accident, so why did the ghost boy calling her Mom make her blood run so cold?

“I’ve knew a kid who called the teacher Mom one time but I’ve never heard it from a ghost,” the Red Huntress said with a sarcastic chuckle. But her shoulders were tense and it was clear the situation made her uncomfortable too. “You okay, Mrs. Fenton?”

“My son isn’t dead,” Maddie said quietly. She would admit there were times where she’d look at Phantom and see Danny overlaid on top of him but those moments were becoming more and more rare. Maddie liked to think it’s because she could find more differences than similarities between the two but honestly, she couldn’t say who her son was anymore. She saw this damned ghost more than she saw the child living in her own house.

“I know, I’ve seen him around,” Huntress said with steady conviction. It made Maddie pause, as it always did, to wonder just how old Amity’s other human ghost hunter really was. Or how young rather. “It was a mistake, he’ll probably avoid you for a bit out of embarrassment but then things will go back to normal.”

“Yeah, a mistake,” Maddie muttered to herself, finally lowering the gun even though the fighting had ended several minutes ago. Why was this whole thing so unsettling to her? Phantom had said much worse things to her, called her a fake scientist and more obsessive than a ghost. He’d even called her a bad mother once when he’d been particularly riled up. She remembered how offended and angry his unnatural eyes had been as they’d glared accusingly into her.  

“You know his parents are still alive,” Huntress said suddenly. “I found out by accident a little while ago.” She was still standing on her hoverboard about 3 feet off the ground, her gaze was trained away from Maddie. “They don’t know that he’s a ghost, that he’s Phantom,” the girl’s head was still turned away from Maddie but she had a feeling she was being watched none the less. “Maybe you remind him of his mother.”

Maddie felt liked she’d been slapped.

“And why does that matter to you?” she questioned defensively to cover how much the conversation was shaking her - they didn’t know how could they not know, how could they not miss - “I thought you hated him as much as we did.”

“I don’t like him,” the Huntress said vehemently. “He’s annoying and acts like he’s the only hunter in this town who can actually do the job. But I,” she paused, “I think I understand him, just a little bit. Enough that I’ve been combing through Amity’s missing children files in my spare time. Of course, it’s no good if no one reported him missing in the first place. Phantom doesn’t want me prying but it’s not right for a kid to die and no one to care.”

“He’s just a ghost,” Maddie said, her words weak even to her ears. Was that why Phantom was stuck here? Because he died forgotten and unmourned? The thought of one of her children, her babies, dying without her knowing... she was going to be sick.

“Yeah, he is,” Huntress nodded, “but he wasn’t always. And humans deserve to be remembered, even if they don’t want to be.” That said, the girl sped off into the setting sun, the varying shades of orange glinting off of her suit. Maddie stood in the middle of the street for a little while longer, gun pointed limply at the ground as her whole world spun.

She drove home slowly, taking the long way around to try and put her conflicting feelings into words before she talked to her husband. When she and Jack first began their research into ghosts, they told themselves that they had to divorce themselves from the people the ghosts had been before. If you focused on the lingering traces of humanity in every monster then they would never be put in their place. But she was human and she had kids around the ghost boy’s age, despite her attempts to stick to logic her heart ached with sympathy.

“And you call yourself a mother,” the Phantom in her memory spat at her, filled with hatred but underneath it all was grief. “Where are your kids now? All you care about is the dead but when are you going to care for the living?” Maddie tightened her grip on the steering wheel to keep her hands from shaking.

“Mads! You’re home!” Jack grinned enthusiastically as she quietly entered the house. “Jazzy has her nose in her books and you know Danny, in and up to his room without a word so I made us grilled cheese!” He held her a plate with a flourish, “they’re ghost shaped!” The world tilted itself a little more onto it’s proper axis, no matter how crazy things got, Jack would always be her true north.

“Gracias,” she said accepting the plate. “Can we talk, privately?” She gestured her head down to the basement. Conversations from the kitchen could easily be heard upstairs and she really didn’t want her children to overhear her asking if she was a bad mom. She didn’t want their confirmation that she was right.

Jack’s goofy grinned smoothed out into something softer and he put one hand gently on her back as they walked down to basement. He kicked her usual stool her way and they sat in silence while they ate their dinners, staring at the swirling vortex of the portal.

“You remember that time Phantom called me a neglectful mother?” Maddie asked quietly after a few minutes.

“Mads, you can’t let that sneaky spook get to you. Everyone knows you’re a great-”

“Jack,” she interrupted harsher than she needed to but she didn’t need comfort from a husband but the unbiased opinion of a fellow scientist. “He accidentally called me Mom while we were fighting today, I don’t - I don’t think he meant it, he looked more scared then I’ve ever seen him before he ran off. Huntress was there too, she said.” Maddie gripped her plate tightly in her hands. “She said that Phantom’s family is still alive, that they don’t know about him.”

“Not know? You mean about him being-”

“Apparently,” Maddie squeezed her eyes shut to fight off the unwanted sympathy she felt. “He’s always been the Ghost Boy, the Ghost Kid. I never - I never fully absorbed what that meant. He looks,” Maddie set the plate aside and dropped her head into her hands. “He’s about Danny’s age.”

“Maddie,” Jack said softly, setting aside his own plate and wheeling himself closer. “Whoever that boy was, he’s gone now and all that’s left is an echo, an obnoxious and powerful echo but he’s not... he’s not a child. Not anymore.”

“But he remembers,” Maddie gasped, angry she was letting herself get all worked up over a stupid ghost. “He called me Mom, Jack. Huntress, she said maybe I reminded him of her and,” her eyes filled with tears now. “He’s comparing me to someone who didn’t even notice that he’d died. What does that say about me? About my relationship with our children? I feel like all I do is argue with Jazz these days and god knows where Danny goes to half the time-”

“Maddie, don’t do that to yourself,” Jack said softly, tilting her face up towards him with a gloved hand. “Once you go down that rabbit hole, there’s no digging yourself out. I think it’s just part of being a parent, always worrying that you’re not doing things right. Sometimes,” Jack gaze dropped, troubled. “Sometimes I enter the room and Danny looks at me and freezes like he expects me to do something terrible... He’s just easily startled but it still hurts.”

“Phantom is an echo, not a child,” Maddie nodded quietly to herself, trying to fall back on her usual logic but it tasted wrong in her mouth. He was a ghost... but also a child. “I wonder what he was like when he was alive? His personality seems remarkably preserved, he must have been a vibrant young man.”

“Or his death was particularly traumatic,” Jack mumbled. “Painful deaths usually leave powerful ghosts. And most healthy teens don’t just drop dead for nothing.”  A chill fell over the lab.

“How could they not notice?” Maddie whispered with horror. “What sort of parent wouldn’t see that their child was dead, what? Now two years in?”

“Not everyone is as good a mom as you are, Mads,” Jack said, pulling her into his chest. “Neglectful parents are a dime a dozen sadly. He could’ve been a runaway too, ran off and died leaving his folks still holding out hope that he’d come home. Or maybe...” he frowned, “maybe he’s pretending he’s still alive.”

“No, he couldn’t keep the charade for this long,” Maddie gasped but the horrible idea had been planted none the less. Phantom always seemed in such a hurry, like he had somewhere else to be. Was another woman tapping her feet as she waited for her boy to return like Maddie often did, not knowing her child was long gone?

“He’s a wily one, incredibly solid for a spirit. Sometimes I look at him and swear I see his chest moving like he’s breathing. Dampen his glow, dye the hair, change his clothes, he could probably pass as human so long as you didn’t look too close.”

“Jack,” she pulled back and looked at her husband in a panic. “Jack, if he’s pretending to be human when he’s not fighting then there’s a good chance he goes to Casper.” Her and Jack’s eyes widened with realization at the same time.

Their children’s high school has had an unprecedented amount of ghost attacks since the portal opened. They could never figure out why the ghosts targeted that school and ignored the other elementary, middle or even the other public high, Wendy. “What are we going to do, should we pull out Danny and Jazz? Even just until we figure this out.”

“That might tip the ghost off,” Jack said evenly but his teeth were biting into his cheek with worry. “We don’t want to set him off, who knows what he’d do if his cover was blown.” He might look like a harmless teen but Maddie had seen first hand how devastating Phantom could be when threatened. “I think we should tell the kids.”

“What? Why? You know they’re supportive of him!” Well Jazz certainly was, differing opinion on Phantom seemed to be the cause of half their arguments. Danny, truthfully, she didn’t really know his opinions on the ghost boy. He always looked so uncomfortable talking about ghosts with them so they just didn’t.

“Supportive maybe but they’re smart and observant,” Jack countered. “They could be our eyes and ears inside the school. They know better than to provoke a dangerous ghost,” Jack let his eyes drift over to the portal. “Besides, if the worst comes to pass, I want them to be prepared.”

“I don’t like it but you’re probably right,” Maddie grumbled. “If it keeps them safe then I’d do just about anything.” Jack smiled and leaned forward to kiss her gently, his lips a perfect match for her own.

“And this is why you could never be a bad mother,” he said. “Come on, let’s talk to them before they go to sleep.”

“Or Danny sneaks out again,” Maddie said to herself as she followed her husband up the stairs and heard him call for a Fenton family meeting.

It went about as well as Maddie had expected. Jazz alternated between being angry and anxious, telling them emphatically that Phantom wasn’t hiding among them at school and wasn’t a bad ghost to begin with. Maddie didn’t know what had come over her but she hardly recognized this irrational and emotional young lady as her daughter. She hoped it was just Senior year stress and hormones and not some ghostly influenced. Danny, as usual, sat there like he was a piece of the furniture and didn’t say much at all.

“Danno,” Jack said gently as he interrupted Jazz’s rant to engage their youngest. “You would tell us if you noticed anything unusual with one of your classmates, right? You know we’re telling you kids this because we trust you, love you and want to keep you safe.”

“Have you considered that keeping guns around the house, threatening to hunt and torture ghosts doesn’t make me feel very safe?” Danny said quietly, looking down at the table. “So what if he sometimes goes to school, maybe he wants to have something normal in his life. All I know is that if I was Phantom, maybe I would want to hide too. So people like you didn’t find me.” For the second time that night, the words of a teenage boy stopped her cold.

“Danny, what do you-” Danny didn’t elaborate and instead pushed his chair back and headed towards the door.

“Young Man, where are you going? It’s almost curfew and we’re not done here,” Maddie scolded even though she knew that neither her or Jack were in the control of the situation. Danny opened the door and didn’t look back.

“I won’t be long, just a lap around the block. I just, I just need some air, okay?” The house became quiet, no one quite knowing what to say. Jazz excused herself a moment later and walked back up to her room. She slammed her door shut. The ticking of the clock was the only sound to be heard in the suddenly silent kitchen.

“Is that how he sees us?” Jack asked quietly, looking down at his large hands. “Danny used to think what we did was so cool, when did that change?” When did he change? was the silent, unasked question. Or maybe they'd all changed, grown apart so slowly that no one had really noticed. Maddie stood up abruptly and stalked towards the door, strapping an ectogun to her hip as she went.

“Mads, maybe you should give him-”

“You know as well as I do that this is the peak time for ghosts. Danny, he might not trust us but I won’t let a disagreement get him killed.” It was full dark outside and she was halfway down the block before she realized she didn’t know which direction Danny had gone in. The night air was chill for mid-April as it shook off the last dregs of winter. She was feeling cold in her protective hazmat; Danny had left in short sleeves. Maybe she should run back and get his jacket for when she found him.

“Nice night for a walk,” Maddie jumped at the voice to find Phantom lazily floating in the air above her. His posture was casual but his eyes were sharp, searching as he always was. Green eyes glanced at her gun before meeting her eyes. “Looking for someone? Perhaps chasing someone who doesn’t want to found?” No way was she going to let him know her son was out here, alone and vulnerable.

“You actually,” she lied. He raised a disbelieving eyebrow but didn’t call her out. How could he be so expressive and so hard to read all at once? Against her better judgement, she thought again about the ghost as a human. “You called me Mom earlier, I want to know why.”

“What, you’ve never called someone something dumb by mistake?” Phantom flinched, crossing his arms defensively. “It was an accident, I’m just as upset as you are, believe me. Now if you don’t mind, I was trying to have a nice flight to clear my mind. Good luck finding whoever you were really looking for.”

“My husband thinks you’re pretending to be alive, that you’re lying to the town, going to school.” She searched his face for some sign that she was wrong but his expression was still as stone. “You’re putting people in jeopardy, I thought you wanted to play the hero!”

“I’m not doing anything,” He growled, his eyes flashing ominously in the dark. “I’m just doing the best I can, okay? If I go to the Nasty Burger or sit in on English Poetry when there’s no ghosts to fight then who’s hurt? Only me for trying to hang onto something real, something normal!”

“But the ghosts-”

“News flash! The ghosts would be here with or without me because of your stupid portal! I can’t even legally drive and yet you blame me for everything.” He scoffed and looked away, “you really are just like my mother.”

“So I do remind you of her,” she stated. “Your mother.”

“That’s a great thing to say to some kid you shoot at regularly,” Phantom said, icily, his green gaze boring into her over his shoulder. “What do you want me to say? Yeah, you do. It’s not just your voice or your face but the way you look at me like I’m nothing but a disappointment. How you make me feel like I’m some damaged child you need to hammer into shape.”

“You can’t - I’m not disappointed,” she said before she could think otherwise because how else could she react to such a charged statement? What kind of abusive, miserable home had he come from? Her heart clenched again to be compared to this woman.

“Yeah, I can tell,” Phantom snapped at her sarcastically but, like the time when he’d called her a bad mother, underneath the anger was sadness. “None of this matters, we’re both going to keep doing our own thing without each other’s approval. We’re enemies so let’s just forget this all happened and go back to you shooting at me while I beg for you just stop and listen for one second-”

“Alright, I’m listening!” Maddie shouted back, frustrated and sympathetic against her better judgement. “What is it you want to tell me so bad?” Phantom froze, like he hadn’t expected her to just stop like that. His shoulders hunched and his eyes were wide and he looked so much like a lost teenager that it pulled painfully at her heart. God, why did this one ghost bring out so many contradictory feelings in her?

“I want,” he stopped, swallowed and floated to the ground so they were near eye level. Sometime in the last year, he’d gotten taller than her. She hadn’t realized ghosts could grow, could age. Phantom was always the exception to every rule they had. “I want the same thing you want. I don’t like seeing ghosts coming through and hurting people. Before I was Phantom, I was nobody, I couldn’t help anyone. I can now and keeping people safe, it gives me a purpose I didn’t even have when I was human. Ghosts might just be the untethered remnants of dead people but we still love and feel and value things, just differently than you do. I want to keep ghosts from attacking people but without damaging them, we’re not all evil just... trying to find our own way to the finish line. If you’d just, not attack on sight, I could show you.”

It was perhaps the most she’d heard Phantom say all at once. He was rubbing his gloved fingers anxiously against his thigh and there was a desperate bit of want in his tragically young face. He wanted her to believe him, like a child looking to their mother for approval. As more time stretched on without her speaking, his hopeful look fell into a kind of sad acceptance. He looked like Danny had at the kitchen table not 15 minutes before.

“Okay,” she said finally. “We can give it a try for a bit. It’s not a truce exactly but so long as you’re not causing harm, Jack and I won’t shoot at you.” It wasn’t much but the boy looked like he’d handed her the moon and then some. He floated up a little, his boots jittered with excitement. She gaped when he reached forward and grasped her hand only to shake it enthusiastically. His hand was chilled but solid in her own.

“Yeah, you got a deal! Don’t worry, Mo- Ma’am you won’t have to worry about me, I’ll be a good little ghost, scouts honor! not that I was, uh, ever in the scouts. If things go well, I’d be happy to tell you more about ghosts and the Zone. I’ll even give you a tour if you’d like.” His smile was infectious and she bit her lip to resist the natural urge to smile back.

Maybe Phantom was a ghost, a sad child who’d died far too young but he was also someone’s son. That woman, however, hadn’t been able to protect him, to support him. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to give the ghost boy a chance and maybe Maddie could fill in something his other mother couldn’t. Perhaps she could even learn how to give her own children what they needed too.

“We’ll see,” Maddie hummed. “Now, you were going to go flying and I need to find my son before he catches his death, that is, if he’ll even talk to me.”

“He will,” Phantom said softly. “My mom messed up, hurt me sometimes but I knew she loved me and I love her. I don’t know your son but I do know what it’s like to be a son and your mom is... whether you’re living, dead or in-between, she’s always your mom. Maybe he’s worried you won’t love him, the things he’s done or believes in.” He looked away and rubbed the back of his neck, “Of course, I don’t really know you and your family. Usually try and avoid you guys, being ghost hunters and all. Even your daughter is pretty scary.”

“That would be pretty weird, a ghost surrounded by hunters,” her lips twitched upwards despite herself as she imagined Phantom chatting with Jack and Jazz in the living room. The image wasn’t quite as strange as she’d initially thought. Who knows where this shaky truce would lead them? Phantom took that as his excuse to leave and flew off into the night. Maddie watched him go, she started up the block when she got a series of texts a few minutes later.

Danny: I’m home, sorry for running off like that Danny: I don’t like the way you talk about ghosts the way some people talk about race or gender. I want to make opinions based on facts and understanding, not half baked theories Danny: I’d be willing to talk more, if you’d stop being so stubbornly certain you’re right and just listened for a change Danny: I love you, Mom I don’t think I say that enough. Sometimes I feel scared to, like you won’t understand Danny: Jazz came down and Dad brought out the special fudge Danny: Come home, its cold out

Maddie brought her phone to her lips, looking up in the sky as if she might see Phantom still flying around. That boy still loved his mother, the mother who’d hurt him. She didn’t want to be like Phantom’s mom: distant, cruel, unwilling to listen. If she could hold out an olive branch for her enemy, then she certainly could for her son.

Mom: I love you too, baby, never doubt that. I think I'm ready to listen now. Mom: I’m on my way home, save some fudge for me.

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, Just around the corner. All is well.