#safety issue

[noohyah]

Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class Fuel Tank Recall: What You Need to Know!

If you own a Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class, you might want to pay attention to this important safety recall.  The fuel tank on some of these vehicles may not have been welded properly during manufacturing, which could result in a fuel leak and increase the risk of a fire.  This recall affects more than 105,000 vehicles in the US and is part of a larger recall of 2.3 million vehicles from various…

[king-galaxius]

Question of the Day: Mall Security

Do you think that Mall security should be set up like the security in national/international airports? There was a shooting that happened Friday, December 29th, 2023: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fox4news.com/news/arlington-parks-mall-shooting-arrests.amp And, guess what ? It happened in the middle of the fucking mall!😱🤯

[adastra-sf]

The Robot Uprising Began in 1979

edit: based on a real article, but with a dash of satire

source: X

On January 25, 1979, Robert Williams became the first person (on record at least) to be killed by a robot, but it was far from the last fatality at the hands of a robotic system.

Williams was a 25-year-old employee at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. On that infamous day, he was working with a parts-retrieval system that moved castings and other materials from one part of the factory to another. 

The robot identified the employee as in its way and, thus, a threat to its mission, and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to remove the worker with extreme prejudice.

"Using its very powerful hydraulic arm, the robot smashed the surprised worker into the operating machine, killing him instantly, after which it resumed its duties without further interference."

A news report about the legal battle suggests the killer robot continued working while Williams lay dead for 30 minutes until fellow workers realized what had happened. 

Many more deaths of this ilk have continued to pile up. A 2023 study identified that robots have killed at least 41 people in the USA between 1992 and 2017, with almost half of the fatalities in the Midwest, a region bursting with heavy industry and manufacturing.

For now, the companies that own these murderbots are held responsible for their actions. However, as AI grows increasingly ubiquitous and potentially uncontrollable, how might robot murders become ever-more complicated, and whom will we hold responsible as their decision-making becomes more self-driven and opaque?

[critterbitter]

Did you know route 10 has a history of landslides? I like to think that this route has always been a point of contention within Unova’s pokeleague, especially with such crumbly cliffs so close to their victory road.

(Anyways the Patrat and Pachirisu children find out the hard way about Route 10’s… unfortunate quirks.)

((On the plus side! Behold! A bouffalant calve!))

Masterpost for more pokemon nonsense

[canis-rex-lupus]

KOSA AFFECTS US ALL

there will be no room to call for a free palestine, congo, sudan, or yemen when imperialists control what stays on the internet.

there will be no room for sharing queer joy, safe binding and tucking guides, or tutorials on how to safely navigate kink when queerphobes and puritans decide what kinda of relationships and identities are "acceptable".

there will be no room for anticapitalism, protest organizing, pirating, or sharing anti-establishment resources when the establishment can erase whatever ideas are too threatening to them to stay.

there will be no room to be someone who doesn't conform.

DOWNLOAD ALL THAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU. CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. PROTEST AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE. SIGN PETITIONS. BUILD ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS. AND DO IT NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.

[theautisticfroglord]

anyways parents who record/post their autistic child having a meltdown are awful people :)

[transsexualfiend]

Repeat after me: kink is not a "gateway" to committing a crime.

[staring-at-a-blank-pagee]

IMPORTANT: KOSA MASTERPOST

Please, don't just scroll past! Share, reblog, and check out the content on these links! I will be adding things as I find (so make sure you reblog the original post, you can do this by clicking on my name and going to the pinned post which is this!!) and/or as the situation changes, and if there are resources you want to see added, send them to me.

LATEST UPDATES: HERE (as of 5/1/24)

INFORMATION

What happens if KOSA passes?

What's at stake?

KOSA isn't designed to help kids.

How will KOSA passing affect you?

KOSA is a privacy nightmare.

Banning kids from social media isn't the answer.

American Action Forum

90+ LGBTQ organizations oppose KOSA

Popular Apps affected by KOSA

Rally for the Internet Archive

KOSA changes don't make it less dangerous

Senate Schedule

Current KOSA status (sign up to get alerts from this if you're able!)

KOSA will actively target trans and LGBTQ+ content

The TikTok ban isn't about China, it's the fact that it's largely pro-palestine and has other content the government doesn't want us talking about.

KOSA applies to EVERYONE here.

Israel is revealed to be behind the infamous Tiktok ban

Read the bill itself

Call Script for KOSA

An actually helpful alternative

RESOURCES

Huge list of resources

Tell Congress

Tell Lizzo

Linktree

Bad Internet Bills

StopKOSA.com

Petition - we need 35k signatures and we're almost there!

Contact list

Fight for the future

Speak out against KOSA

Censorship won't make kids safe

Internet red alert

EFF Action Center

More Petitions List (check and sign as many as you can!)

Fight against the TikTok ban as well

Another petition - 123,000/130,000 signatures

Share your story of how social media has helped you

Help keep the ACP alive

Another masterpost

WHERE ELSE CAN YOU FIND MORE RESOURCES?

The Stop Internet Censorship discord server has a ton of useful resources that I pulled from some of to make this post, even. Following and looking at tags like #stop kosa will help make sure you stay informed and they stay trending, as well.

EVERYTHING HELPS!! Let's make sure this bill doesn't pass! Reblogs > likes!!

last updated: 8:18 pm EST, 5/9/24

[cubbihue]

I remember a time where Timmy asked for an older brother named Tommy, now he is the older brother he wished he had. Has Timmy ever protected Peri from a bully?

Timmy HAS!! Sometimes older fairies thinks they can mess around with Peri because he's younger than them. But they quickly learn to regret it for many reasons.

Between Peri's magical outbreaks when he's upset, and Timmy's feral drive to fight without magic, the Fairywinkle-Cosmas haven't had to deal with bullies except on social media.

But even then, you're never safe.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[overlyrighteousangel]

“the submarine trip was stupid and rooted in classism”, “it’s absolutely hideous how much more manpower was put into saving and reporting on them vs the 500 migrants who died in a similar horrible fashion”, and “despite their actions, no human being (especially not a nineteen year old) should deserve to die like this, especially when their death will not actually herald any positive change/abolishment of the billionaire class” are three thoughts than can and should coexist. you don’t have to mourn their deaths, but you don’t need to celebrate them, either.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Don't let republicans fool you with their national populism cause they do not give a single care for veterans who died and suffered for America. They would hollow out the VA and fill it corporate and political stooges who would blindly follow the GOP's bidding. Our government doesn't care enough for veterans and here we have Republicans confirming it, remember it was Biden who passed the CARE act. So remember a future where our soldiers suffer more than they already do is what the Republicans want.

[sweetpumpkinmouse]

Do lawmakers even know how stupid KOSA truly is as a bill, if not dangerous. Think about it: having to give ID containing SENSITIVE INFORMATION (literally against Internet Safety 101) just to go on the internet. Being a minor having to do that is so dangerous and would put them in more danger at the hands of predators.

People who have to use the internet for educational uses will have to go through stupid, unneeded steps just to look up the purpose of the mitochondria!

Trans and Queer youth are in danger. Fandom spaces are in danger. Children, the very group of people that this bullshit bill is claiming to protect, are in DANGER!

The States having full monopoly over the internet is so, so ungodly stupid and dystopian. I can’t imagine being someone not from the States and having to witness all of this.

The bill doesn’t protect kids, it only puts them in more danger.

CALL YOUR REPS! SIGN PETITIONS! KEEP KOSA TRENDING! LET PEOPLE KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING!

THIS IS AN ISSUE FOR ALL OF US! NOT JUST A SELECTIVE!

SIMILAR BILLS HAVE HAPPENED BEFORE AND BEEN STOPPED THANKS TO THE INTERNET! LET’S DO THAT AGAIN!

STOP KOSA!

[atelierlili]

I always wondered why Katniss factored marriage and children into the equation when it came to reciprocating Peeta’s feelings for her. It’s a rather large leap, especially when Peeta himself never expresses wanting children at any point in the story. He uses children as a tool to persuade Katniss and the Capital to save her life, but the only time we see him express any desire/feelings of having one of his own is when he’s crying after the baby bomb. But we never hear his real thoughts.

But you wanna know who does express wanting children? Gale.

It’s one of the first thing he mentions in chapter one. And it pisses her off so much.

(I also want to add that Gale reframes/establishes the dynamic of Katniss and him caring for their siblings from something that is sibling-sibling to parent-sibling. And he is not wrong. Katniss doesn’t refute him. Both Katniss and Gale are surrogate parents to their siblings. Which is also why Katniss love and affection of Prim, is not just sisterly. I’ve seen people say Katniss is only sisterly to Prim- but she’s not. She’s parentified their relationship to the point she subconsciously see Prim as her child, which makes this a tragedy because she’ll loose her first child no matter what she does by the end of the story.)

But Gale’s phrasing here elevates himself as a potential suitor to Katniss by placing them both as the parental roles to these children. (Which irritates her a lot ). Which is why she brings the topic up with her relationship with Peeta. Because she’s subconsciously aware of Gale’s efforts and knows it will be a point of contention between them. It hangs over her head in a way.

With Gale, children are extra mouths to feed. (But Gale will do fine. He can work. He can hunt.) It’s all framed with calculated survival in mind. But it’s also not something she had planned in the future at any point.

But Peeta’s children? Oh they deserve to be born because Peeta deserves to be a father. He would be such a good father. They deserve to exist in a world where they can be safe and happy. (Even if it’s not with her.)

This is also why I think she subconsciously sees Peeta’s baby as her own. And I don’t think of it as a cruel/heartless thing, it’s just you’d be more protective of your own child compared to someone else’s. Katniss sees Gale as a reliable person who’s equipped to look after a kid. She doesn’t express the same kind of maternal instinct/yearning for the Baby Hawthrone’s safety as she does with the idea of Baby Mellark, because she doesn’t think of Gale’s child as her own. She never hopes for a better future for them, but she does with Peeta because he and that baby gives her hope. And she loves him that much.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

[starry-bi-sky]

i need to get this out of my head before i continue clone^2 but danny being the first batkid. Like, standard procedure stuff: his parents and sister die, danny ends up with Vlad Masters. He drags him along to stereotypical galas and stuff; Danny is not having a good time.

He ends up going to one of the Wayne Galas being hosted ever since elusive Bruce Wayne has returned to Gotham. Vlad is crowing about having this opportunity as he's been wanting to sink his claws into the company for a long while now. Danny is too busy grieving to care what he wants.

And like most Galas, once Vlad is done showing him off to the other socialites and the like, he disappears. Off to a dark corner, or to one of the many balconies; doesn't matter. There he runs into said star of the show, Bruce who is still young, has been Batman for at least a year at this point, but still getting used to all these damn people and socializing. He's stepped off to hide for a few minutes before stepping back into the shark tank.

And he runs into a kid with circles under his eyes and a dull gleam in them. Familiar, like looking into a mirror.

Danny tries to excuse himself, he hasn't stopped crying since his parents died and it's been months. He rubs his eyes and stands up, and stumbles over a half-hearted apology to Mister Wayne. Some of Vlad's etiquette lessons kicking in.

Bruce is awkward, but he softens. "That's alright, lad," he says, pulling up some of that Brucie Wayne confidence, "I was just coming out here to get some fresh air."

There's a little pressing; Bruce asks who he's here with, Danny says, voice quiet and grief-stricken, that he's with his godfather Vlad Masters. Bruce asks him if he knows where he is, and Danny tells him he does. Bruce offers to leave, Danny tells him to do whatever he wants.

It ends with Bruce staying, standing off to the side with Danny in silence. Neither of them say a word, and Danny eventually leaves first in that same silence.

Bruce looks into Vlad Masters after everything is over, his interest piqued. He finds news about him taking in Danny Fenton: he looks into Danny Fenton. He finds news articles about his parents' deaths, their occupations, everything he can get his hands on.

At the next gala, he sees Danny again. And he looks the same as ever: quiet like a ghost, just as pale, and full of grief. Bruce sits in silence with him again for nearly ten minutes before he strikes a conversation.

"Do you like to do anything?"

Nothing. Just silence.

Bruce isn't quite sure what to do: comfort is not his forte, and Danny doesn't know him. He's smart enough to know that. So he starts talking about other things; anything he can think of that Brucie Wayne might say, that also wasn't inappropriate for a kid to hear.

Danny says nothing the entire time, and is again the first to leave.

Bruce watches from a distance as he intercts with Vlad Masters; how Vlad Masters interacts with him. He doesn't like what he sees: Vlad Masters keeps a hand on Danny's shoulder like one would hold onto the collar of a dog. He parades him around like a trophy he won.

And there are moments, when someone gets too close or when someone tries to shake Danny's hand, of deep possessiveness that flints over Vlad Masters' eyes. Like a dragon guarding a horde.

He plays the act of doting godfather well: but Bruce knows a liar when he sees one. Like recognizes like.

Danny is dull-eyed and blank faced the entire time; he looks miserable.

So Bruce tries to host more parties; if only so that he can talk to Danny alone. Vlad seems all too happy to attend, toting Danny along like a ribbon, and on the dot every hour, Danny slips away to somewhere to hide. Bruce appears twenty minutes later.

"I was looking into your godfather's company," he says one night, trying to think of more things to say. Some nights all they do is sit in silence. "Some of my shareholders were thinking of partnering up--"

"Don't."

He stops. Danny hardly says a word to him, he doesn't even look at him -- he's sitting on the ground, his head in his knees. Like he's trying to hide from the world. But he's looking, blue eyes piercing up at Bruce.

Bruce tilts his head, practiced puppy-like. "Pardon?"

"Don't." Danny says, strongly. "Don't make any deals with Vlad."

It's the most words Danny's spoken to him, and there's a look in his eyes like a candle finding its spark. Something hard. Bruce presses further, "And why is that?"

The spark flutters, and flushes out. Danny blinks like he's coming out of a trance, and slumps back into himself. "Just don't."

Bruce stares at him, thoughtful, before looking away. "Alright. I won't."

And they fall back into silence.

Danny, when he leaves, turns to look at Bruce, "I mean it." He says; soft like he's telling a secret, "Don't make any deals with him. Don't be alone with him. Don't work with him."

He's scampered away before Bruce can question him further.

(He never planned on working with Vlad Masters and his company; he's done his research. He's seen the misfortune. But nothing ever leads back to him. There's no evidence of anything. But Danny knows something.)

At their next meeting, Danny starts the conversation. It's new, and it's welcomed. He says, cutting through their five minute quiet, that he likes stars. And he doesn't like that he can't see them in Gotham.

Bruce hums in interest, and Danny continues talking. It's as if floodgates had been opened, and as Bruce takes a sip of his wine, it tastes like victory.

("Tucker told me once--") ("Tucker?") ("Oh-- uh, one of my best friends. He's a tech geek. We haven't talked in a while.")

(Danny shut down in his grief -- his friends are worried, but can't reach him. When he goes back to the manor with Vlad, he fishes out his phone and sends them a message.)

(They are ecstatic to hear from him.)

It all culminates until one day, when Danny is leaving to go back inside, that Bruce speaks up. "You know," He says, leaning against the railing. "The manor has many rooms; plenty of space for a guest."

The implication there, hidden between the lines. And Danny is smart, he looks at Bruce with a sharp glean in his eyes, and he nods. "Good to know."

The next time they see each other, Danny has something in his hands. "Can you hold onto something for me?" He asks.

When Bruce agrees, Danny places a pearl into his palm. or, at least, it's something that looks like a pearl. Because it's cold to the touch; sinking into Bruce's white silk gloves with ease and shimmering like an opal. It moves a little as it settles into his hand, and the moves like its full of liquid.

Bruce has never seen anything like it before, but he does know this; it's not human. "What is it?" He asks, and Danny looks uncomfortable.

"I can't tell you that." He says, shifting on his foot like he's scared of someone seeing it. "But please be careful with it. Treat it like it's extremely fragile."

When Bruce gets home, he puts it in an empty ring box and hides the box in the cave. He tries researching into what it is. he can't find anything concrete.

Everything comes to a head one day when Danny appears at the manor's doorstep one evening, soaking wet in the rain, and bleeding from the side.

[nihildenial]

i totally understand the disappointment of the yondr pouches at rituals, but situations like this aren't what rituals are about or make it fun for anyone--especially tobias. also security people probably dont want phones flashing at them the whole concert as people try to capture every moment.

tobias wants to perform for us, not to phone cameras and i think he has a good reason for it

gif by @demonlayercake