#theory residue

[rottmnt-residuum]

"Leo's... being influenced by Donnie a little bit more than you think"

You saying that made me reread the entire comic and holy shit did I notice more this time. Leo and Mikey were RIGHT THERE in the moment of Donnie being lobotomized and even then Leo's eyes turn purple which may be a mind meld thing or go into his subconscious somehow. It's seen again when Donnie pushes Leo away from the chair - every time with the same line "get out". Then Leo ends up chanting the same line for the same reason - protecting his brothers.

thank you for noticing <3

[lorettafryingpan]

I just don’t have it in me to be excited for the new dragon age, guys. Did we all forget about bioware laying off a shit ton of people (many of them VETERAN devs and writers) and then making sad eyes and saying they couldn’t pay the contractually agreed upon severance because that would hurt the budget of dreadwolf/veilguard? Did we forget about that pageant of disrespect and corporate greed????

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

I kinda hate anyone who introduces a new concept by saying shit like

Residuality is defined here as the property of having residues when exposed to stress. That is, when exposed to a certain stressor, some part of the system will remain. We call this remaining part of the system a residue, which is expressed as a collection or set of components, infrastructures, people, and information flows - a flow being the transfer of data from one actor in a system to another.

This is close to the most general thing you could say! Which means it isn't anything!

[aikoiya]

DP HC - Ambient Psychomagnotheric Residue Theory

I just saw a picture that really fits with my hc of Ambient Psychomagnotheric Residue.

It appears to be by @menta-art.

The fact that it looks like this suggests that something bad must've happened there... possibly multiple times... & the emotional residue in the area hadn't been purified or filtered in a long time, leading to the negative emotions caused by whatever happened to fester there & become a sort of spiritual rot.

Which is usually the reason why places without specific ghosts or spirits haunting them become haunted.

It's basically what I mean when I talk about how natural portals are necessary as they filter out used up ambient emotional & psychic energy so that things like this don't happen.

Like, you know how some places just instill you with a feeling of dread or hopelessness at the scenes of murders or great, tragic battles? It's due to a portal not having opened in the area in a long time or in the case of a huge & particularly tragic battle or multiple tragedies over a long period of time, not enough portals have opened there to fully purify the area or even keep up with the level of tragedy.

And, if this residue remains for too long, it can fester & become what the Japanese refer to as On'nen (怨念) or Malice. On'nen is a feeling of unresloved hatred, malice, grudge, & resentment that can make ordinary spirits furious & evil ones even more so.

If it remains like that longer & grows, it can further process itself until it manifests into an ever purer form known as Miasma or Shōki. Shōki being a sort of harmful, malignant spiritual pollution. It is never a good thing when this happens.

Anyway, it's extremely likely that places like Chicago, Gotham (especially places like Crime Alley & Arkham Assylum), Bludhaven, Salem, the concentration camps of the Holocaust, prisons with bloody histories, & places where frequent executions took place, are known to have a lot of really bad spots.

Lazarus Pits being in the area also tends to exacerbate the situation if said pits aren't cleaned regularly or has been purposefully corrupted such as is the case with Nanda Parbat's Lazarus Pit. It having been suffused with a complex, dark, necroturgic energy via multiple blood sacrifices & dark animantic (soul magic) spellwork in an attempt by an ancient evil necroturgist to create beings that he could control, but were more durable than living humans & corpses.

Not to mention the isomorphic blood bonding ritual that made him & his kin all-but immune to these effects. Thus allowing them to use said pits as an artificial fountain of youth & 'healing.'

The dark necroturgic & animantic curse upon the waters is supposed to steal the soul of any corpse not related to the warlock & make them his puppet while said souls are used as the fuel for the continued enchantment.

As one might guess, Ra's Al Gul is a descendant of this warlock. The Demon Head originally found it upon reading his great grandfather's journal about it.

He's always wondered; if the pit was supposed to keep members of his family alive & young, why had his great grandfather died? The truth is that prolonged exposure to the pit waters causes a warping of the mind that eventually leads to a type of insanity that reduces one to something not unlike the Joker if he were also a rabid dog.

The warlock had either realized what was happening early on & decided to have his fun while he could & accept his natural death (if with a fallback so that he could come back & continue his reign of terror) or he was reduced to little more than an animal & was put down by someone when he attacked them. In such a case, he would've entirely forgotten that he could use magic or any other form of defensive measures other than attack, attack, attack!

Or, maybe the warlock has a sickly son or daughter besides Ra's grandparent that he regularly put into the pit in order to sustain them, but the frequent use of it eventually lead to them going feral, so he had to put them down. As such, he knew to just accept death (with a back up as mentioned above).

Going back to the spiritual rot thing, most places in Gotham & Bludhaven look like this at least to a degree.

Something similar can happen in places where a lot of good things happen, but in the reverse direction. This is partially why places like churches & other sacred places often fill one with a sense of peace or calm.

If you walk into a church & you feel a fear or dread that is unrelated to your personal concerns regarding the safety of your soul due to committing sins, then it's very likely that that particular church has experienced more tragedies than joys or miracles.

Though, whether it's due to external troubles or internal corruption is something that you normally can't just know unless either you investigate or you are spiritually gifted. In such a case as being spiritually gifted occurs, some are able to better discern the nature of the negativity. Whether bad things happen here because of outside forces, thus giving the place a more sad or frustrated atmosphere, or if bad things happen here because of internal forces such as a serial murderer for a pastor, thus giving the area a much deeper sense of fear & dread with an edge of maliciousness.

If you want to see more of my Ghost hcs, go to my full Ghost Zone Masterlist.

[bmblboop]

You ever come up with a fan theory so tense, emotionally resonant, and perfect for your blorbos that you just:

[bklynmusicnerd]

"Those were the acts of a desperate man, a caged animal"

Since everyone is feeling properly pessimistic anyways, I feel like now's as good a time as any to bring this line Cyrus gave to Spencer back up because it felt important when I watched it.

It was presented as Cyrus trying to get Spencer to understand where his head was at the night he held Trina hostage, but I also think it might be foreshadowing for where Spencer is headed. I think the more Spencer feels he's losing the important parts of his life, that which keeps him happy and steady, the more desperate he will become until he lashes out. One form of "lashing out" I could see happening is him using the pandora's box evidence and things escalating from there.

I think we're gonna see Spencer feel like he's in the position of a "caged animal" because he is not going to be able to hold onto everything (or everyone) he wants no matter how badly he wants to. Too many people in Spencer's life keep playing with him like he's not a mentally fragile Cassadine, and I think that's a situation that's gonna eventually explode.

[adopocalype]

I mean…

It might just be something he does on occasion.

why is galacta knight sometimes blue

[death-rebirth-senshi]

"Greathood increases intelligence and faith" then why in god's name does the reduvia wielder who drops lord of blood's exultation wear it

[sophiesrambling]

the entirety of season 1 for ricky and gina is just the. finding out that they make each other's lives better, every time gina and ricky talk she just makes his life better!! same thing for gina like ricky shows up and she sees a future where she can be more open, be herself and that people will like her for her AND YOU CAN'T CHANGE MY MIND ON THIS

[rottmnt-residuum]

Theory time: Donnie did not want to say anything that would put his brothers at risk, so like ancient souls live in the Hamato ninpo, Donnie hid his consciousness (mind) there,he is still connected to his body but not present, he is using the ninpo to contact them like the ghosts, but his brothers must be in an appropriate mental phase to perceive him? When you sleep and are in meditation the brain waves in certain phases are similar, it would explain why Leo and Mikey can contact him, and explain why Donnie is not influenced by their ninpo

[aikoiya]

This is a cool idea! I feel like he's getting a glimpse into the spiritual plane. Though, if it were my au, I'd say that the fact that it looks like this suggests that something bad must've happened there... possibly multiple times... & the emotional residue in the area hadn't been purified or filtered in a long time, leading to the negative emotions caused by whatever happened to fester there & become a sort of spiritual rot.

Which is usually the reason why places without specific ghosts or spirits haunting them become haunted.

It's basically what I mean when I talk about how natural portals are necessary as they filter out used up ambient emotional & psychic energy so that things like this doesn't happen.

Like, you know how some places just intill you with a feeling of dread or hopelessness at the scenes of murders or great, tragic battles? It's due to a portal not having opened in the area in a long time or in the case of a huge & particularly tragic battle or multiple tragedies over a period of time, not enough portals have opened there to fully purify the area or even keep up with the level of tragedy.

It's extremely likely that places like Chicago, Gotham, Bludhaven, Salem, the concentration camps of the Holocaust, prisons, & places where executions took place, are known to have a lot of areas like this. Some are even worse.

my finished spread for @dpauzine!! the au for this piece is liminal space/dreamcore, where even danny’s reality is unnatural. the empty hallways are not so empty, and the eyes that watch you are always judging. your decisions have consequences, and you can’t go back.

[catsconflictscopicsandchamomile]

I'm just gonna say it

the only reason "The Coffee Theory" (as opposed to any other season finale fix-it/explanation theories) has gotten so big so fast is because this fandom is 95% autdhd and we all have a pre-existing understanding that coffee does weird shit to your brain

[fratboykate]

I'm totally in support of the writers in theory but I'm trying to understand more of what you're fighting for because I've seen some people on twitter claim writers make more money a week than most of us make in a month so I'm trying to understand what the issue is. Also if that info is accurate. This is a genuine question. Not trying to have a "gotcha moment". I really want to hear from a writer.

people have always had wild misconceptions about how much a writer earns because of their lack of understanding of how the industry actually works. there's so many posts about how "you guys make 5k a week. what more do you want?!" yeah...let's do some math on that.

5k a week for 14 weeks (and that's a long room. a lot of rooms these days are 8-10 weeks. those are the dreaded mini-rooms we're trying to kill) is $70,000. for roughly three months of work. you'd think we're cooking with gas...BUT HOLD UP. that's gross! let's see everything that has to come out of that check:

10% to our agent

10% to our manager

5% to our entertainment attorney

5% to our business manager (not everyone has one but a lot of us do. i do, so that's literally 30% immediately off the top of every check)

most of these breakdowns ive seen downplay taxes severely. someone made one that says writers pay 5% in taxes and i would like to ask them "in what universe?". that doesn't even cover state taxes. the way taxes work in the industry is really complicated, but the short of it is most of us have companies for tax reasons so we aren't taxed like people on w2s/1099. if we did we'd be even more fucked. basically every production hires a writer's company instead of the writer as an individual. so they engage our companies for our services and then at the end of the year we (the company) pay taxes as corporations or llcs (depending on what the writer chose to go with). my company is registered as a "corporation" so let's go with those rates. california's corporate rate is 9% and the federal corporate tax rate is 21%. there's other expenses with running a business like fees and other shit so my business managers/accountants/bookkeepers have recommended i save between 35-40% of everything i make for when tax season comes.

you see where the math is at already??? 25-30% in commissions and then 35-40% in taxes. on the lower end you're at THE VERY LEAST looking at 60% of that check gone. 70% worst case scenario. suddenly those $70,000 people claim we make are actually down to $28,000 as the take home pay. and that's if you're only losing 60%. it goes down to $21,000 if it's 70%.

lets pretend you worked a long 14 week room (that's the longest room ive ever worked btw) and let's also be generous and say you only have 60% in expenses so the take home is $28,000. average rent in los angeles is around $2,800-$3,000. if you're paying $2,800 in rent that means you need AT LEAST $4,000 a month to have a semi decent life since you need to also cover groceries, gas, medical expenses, toiletries, phone, internet, utilities, rental and car insurances, car payments, student loan payments, etc etc etc. and again, this is los angeles. everything is more expensive so you're living BARE BONES on 4k. and these are numbers as a single person. im not even taking having children into account. so those $28,000 you take home might cover your life for 6-7 months. 3 of which you're in the room working. the reality is that once that room ends, you might not work in a room again for 6-9-12 months (i have friends whose last jobs were over 18 months ago) and you now only have about 3 months left of savings to hold you over. we have to make that money stretch while we do all the endless free development we do for studios and until we get our next paying job. so...3 months left of enough money to cover your expenses -> possible 9 months of not having a job. this is how writers end up on food stamps or applying to work at target.

this is why we're fighting for better rates and better residuals. residuals were a thing writers used to rely on to get them through the unemployment periods. residual checks have gone down from 20k to $0.03 cents. im not joking.

they've decimated our regular pay and then destroyed residuals. we have nothing left. so don't believe it when they tell you writers are being greedy. writers are simply fighting to be able to make a middle class living. we're not asking them to become poor for our sake. we're asking for raises that amount to 2% of their profit. TWO PERCENT. this is a fight for writing even being a career in five years instead of something you do on the side while you work retail to pay your bills. if you think shows are bad now imagine when your writer has to do it as a hobby because they need a real job to pay their bills and support a family. (which none of us can currently afford to have btw)

support writers. stop being bootlickers for billion dollar corporations. stop caring about fictional people more than you care about the real people that write them. if we don't win this fight it truly is game over. the industry as you know it is gone.

[audreycritter]

every time i see a post talking about how alfred pennyworth failed bruce for not getting him into therapy as a kid i want to scream.

it did not exist. the idea that children could have PTSD was just starting to be discussed in the late 80s/early 90s at the FRINGE of child psychology, and then trauma therapy even for adults spent an unhelpful 2ish decades dominated by forced-conversation talk therapy. that's a thing that is detrimental to trauma recovery, because if someone doesn't feel safe or in control of the dialogue about their trauma and is repeatedly asked to describe their trauma when they're uneasy, it COMPOUNDS TRAUMA AND FEELINGS OF DANGER.

when bruce was a kid, even the best psychs available would have had training that taught them kids bounce back, that kids don't respond to or handle trauma the way adults do, and that any behaviors post-trauma were almost certainly unrelated mental illness.

i see this esp in fandom circles but a gentle reminder that therapy even when it's good doesn't fix everything. even if bruce had HAD access to good childhood PTSD therapy, he would still have grief, he would still potentially be socially awkward or withdrawn, he might have still decided to be Batman because it's a comic book where being a vigilante isn't as wild as it is irl.

therapy requires honesty, readiness, safety, sound application of theory, an accurate picture of life outside the therapy room (self-reporting is often flawed!), consistency, and more! it can help but it doesn't erase trauma or grief. it's dismissive of the history of trauma therapy to say an adult "should have" had a kid in a therapy approach that didn't exist, and it's dismissive of the actual work of therapy to act like therapy would have made everything ideal. bruce isn't going to be a normal, well-adjusted adult because his parents were murdered in front of him. he could be happy! he could have coping skills! but honestly it would be weirder if he didn't wrestle with residual trauma and grief throughout his life.

and maybe this is just because i love Batman, and love specifically Batman as a symbol/figure of hope and sacrifice and the belief that every life matters, but I don't think the worst ending here is Bruce deciding to give up a lot of his time, energy, and health to work in Gotham AND then choose to parent a traumatized child and actively meet his needs. like you think the alternative is that Alfred is a better parent by getting him into non-existent therapy and then he stays comfortably wealthy at home and is just another rich dude? that's the ideal version? the one who can't help Dick Grayson because Dick Grayson wants to run away and murder a man?

anyway tl;dr alfred should have flaws, yes, but there's a big gap between "flawed human parental figure" and "man who massively failed Bruce in multiple ways, one of which was not putting him in therapy."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy”

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Here's a cheap trick: claim that your opponents' goals are so squishy and qualitative that no one will ever be able to say whether they've been succeeded or failed, and then declare that your goals can be evaluated using crisp, objective criteria.

This is the whole project of "economism," the idea that politics, with its emphasis on "fairness" and other intangibles, should be replaced with a mathematical form of economics, where every policy question can be reduced to an equation…and then "solved":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math.

For example, if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful. Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire."

The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

The neoliberal revolution was a triumph for economism. Neoliberal theorists like Milton Friedman replaced "political economy" with "law and economics," the idea that we should turn every one of our complicated, nuanced, contingent qualitative goals into a crispy defined "objective" criteria. Friedman and his merry band of Chicago School economists replaced traditional antitrust (which sought to curtail the corrupting power of large corporations) with a theory called "consumer welfare" that used mathematics to decide which monopolies were "efficient" and therefore good (spoiler: monopolists who paid Friedman's pals to do this mathematical analysis always turned out to be running "efficient" monopolies):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

Friedman cloaked his hymn to sociopathic greed in the mantle of objectivism. For capitalism to work, corporations have to solve the "principal-agent" problem, the notoriously thorny dilemma created when one person (the principal) asks another person (the agent) to act on their behalf, given the fact that the agent might find a way to line their own pockets at the principal's expense (for example, a restaurant server might get a bigger tip by offering to discount diners' meals).

Any company that is owned by stockholders and managed by a CEO and other top brass has a huge principal-agent problem, and yet, the limited liability, joint-stock company had produced untold riches, and was considered the ideal organization for "capital formation" by Friedman et al. In true economismist form, Friedman treated all the qualitative questions about the duty of a company as noise and edited them out of the equation, leaving behind a single, elegant formulation: "a manager is doing their job if they are trying to make as much money as possible for their shareholders."

Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent. Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).

It's easy to see why shareholder supremacy was so attractive for investors and their C-suite Renfields: it created a kind of moral crumple-zone. Whenever people got angry at you for being a greedy asshole, you could shrug and say, "My hands are tied: the law requires me to run the business this way – if you don't believe me, just ask my critics, who insist that we must get rid of this law!"

In a long feature for The American Prospect, Adam M Lowenstein tells the story of how shareholder supremacy eventually came into such wide disrepute that the business lobby felt that it had to do something about it:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/

It starts in 2018, when Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett decried the short-term, quarterly thinking in corporate management as bad for business's long-term health. When Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote a column agreeing with them and arguing that even moreso, businesses should think about equities other than shareholder returns, Jamie Dimon lost his shit and called Pearlstein to call it "the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/07/will-ending-quarterly-earnings-guidance-free-ceos-to-think-long-term/

But the dam had broken. In the months and years that followed, the Business Roundtable would adopt a series of statements that repudiated shareholder supremacy, though of course they didn't admit it. Rather, they insisted that they were clarifying that they'd always thought that sometimes not being a greedy asshole could be good for business, too. Though these statements were nonbinding, and though the CEOs who signed them did so in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their companies, capitalism's most rabid stans treated this as an existential crisis.

Lowenstein identifies this as the forerunner to today's panic over "woke corporations" and "DEI," and – just as with "woke capitalism" – the whole thing amounted to a a PR exercise. Lowenstein links to several studies that found that the CEOs who signed onto statements endorsing "stakeholder capitalism" were "more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had 'higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,”' emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and buybacks."

One researcher concluded that "signing this statement had zero positive effect":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/companies-stand-solidarity-are-licensing-themselves-discriminate/614947

So shareholder supremacy isn't a legal obligation, and statements repudiating shareholder supremacy don't make companies act any better.

But there's an even more fundamental flaw in the argument for the shareholder supremacy rule: it's impossible to know if the rule has been broken.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it's good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it's good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it's a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it's an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they're expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they're saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they're doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it's a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it's a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there's a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.

Right wing economists criticize the left for caring too much about "how big a slice of the pie they're getting" rather than focusing on "growing the pie." But that's exactly what Boeing management did – while claiming to be slaves to Friedman's shareholder supremacy. They focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie, screwing their workers, suppliers and customers in the process, and, in so doing, they made the pie so much smaller that it's in danger of disappearing altogether.

Here's the principal-agent problem in action: Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within. Now, long-term shareholders are paying the price. Far from solving the principal-agent problem with a clean, bright-line rule about how managers should behave, shareholder supremacy is a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing. It's the squishiest rule imaginable: if someone calls you cruel, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. If someone calls you feckless, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. It's an excuse for every season.

The idea that you can reduce complex political questions – like whether workers should get a raise or whether shareholders should get a dividend – to a mathematical rule is a cheap sleight of hand. The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things you want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics. Facts don't care about your feelings, man.

But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

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/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics/a>

[versias]

Demon Twins AU

- Maddie was trained by the League of Assassins and was sent back to America to pursue her theory that Lazarus water was ectoplasmic residue. She joined the only paranormal studies course in the country and met likeminded scientists Jack Fenton and Vlad Masters.

- Maddie fell in love with Jack and they pursued their research together, attempting to break into the “ghost zone”, the hypothetical in-between where the energy of death collected in order to collect pure ectoplasm samples. (And possibly capture a ghost for study.)

- They Sort-Of succeeded (sorry Vlad but science marches on) and Maddie proved ectoplasm and Lazarus water were related. LoA allowed her to stay and continue her research, providing her with funding so long as she sent reports. Occasionally she had to do a mission since she was in the area, but it was usually simple and low stakes.

- Then, when Jazz is 2 years old, Maddie is called back to the League to witness the birth of the Demon’s Heirs. The babies were grown in LW using her data so she basically has to become a physician for the babies.

- The younger twin’s heart stopped when he was pulled out of the water. She rushed to save him, using pure ectoplasm from her research and it worked. Even though Danyal is deemed the inferior twin, he’s kept alive and trained to act as a benchmark/motivation for the true heir Damian.

- Maddie falls in love with the little boy whose health she’s in charge of. Talia notes that this researcher cares for her child as if it was her own.

- When Ra’s decides to have Danny and Damian duel as a sort of initiation and trial to prove his worth as the heir (something that leaves psychological scars on both Danny and Damian, thanks Ra’s.), Damian kills Danny and Maddie is devastated over the body.

- Talia grabs her and the body and sneaks them into the Lazarus pits to bring her child back. Then she hands Danny to Maddie and tells her to raise him as her own, protect him as her own, and she will erase Maddie’s debt to the league.

- Maddie runs with her new son back to America and tells her family that the job she had is completed and “hey Jack sorry I forgot to mention our son I was so caught up in my work! Yeah, whenever I visited five years ago I got pregnant and forgot to mention it! Whoopsie daisy!”

- Jack believes this because he’s forgetful sometimes and also why would his lovely, beautiful, brilliant wife lie to him. He welcomes five year old Danny into his life as his son despite him only superficially looking like him and for some reason having much darker skin. Who knows, genetics isn’t his area of expertise!

- Besides even if Maddie lied to him she probably had a good reason! He’s always wanted a son anyway!!

- Jazz is far more suspicious of this but she’s all of seven and also this poor kid looks terrified and traumatized so. She’ll let it go. And also help him settle in, as is right for a Big Sister.

- Danny has psychological and physical scars but grows up loved and cared for. He misses his brother, but he wasn’t worthy to stand beside him—grandfather said so and it must be so. He didn’t want to be a weight on his brother’s neck, dragging him down

- He makes friends with Tucker and then Sam who don’t judge him for strange mannerisms and who like him for who he is.

- Maybe it’s not the life he would have chosen for himself, but it is a good life. He decides he can be happy here in Amity Park, secure in the knowledge that his brother was off conquering and thriving.

- Then Maddie and Jack finish the Portal, which would theoretically allow travel into the Ghost Zone to continue their work. The pinhole fractures they can now reliably create to power weapons and technology prove the theory and this is the next step!

- Danny Dies In The Portal and a hole is ripped open between worlds. DP series takes place as normal!

- Mixed Reveal since Maddie and Jack are researchers first and foremost. They don’t want to hurt their children but they want to study! They capture a different ghost so they can learn more about how the anatomy works, because they need to take care of their half-ghost son.

- Danny is appalled and horrified to find them dissecting some struggling specter. They are so fucking earnest about it, trying to tell him that they want to make sure they understand how he’s put together so if he gets hurt they can help and it’s not like they can Kill ghosts so it’s only a temporary necessity in pursuit of knowledge!!

- Danny releases the ghost and later, steals their research and destroys the portal. He flees. He knows they won’t hurt him but he thought they wouldn’t Do That either and they did so he’s terrified.

- Danny’s friends help him escape and set up a fake id and passport. His plan is to get to Gotham and find the Bat who will hopefully be able to Adult this situation. He’s not expecting to be welcomed as his son; by all accounts the Batman has no idea Talia even made children with his DNA so he isn’t even going to mention being his son.

- Meanwhile Damian has been Robin for four years and slowly adjusting to his new normal. He doesn’t think about his dead brother; he isn’t allowed to, and though he’s left the league, the league has not left him entirely.

- He is patrolling with his father when an unknown teenager flags them down. Batman is suspicious of course but the kid seems to be earnestly calling for help. He has Robin hang back out of caution and approaches the unknown himself.

- Holy Fuck He Looks Like Damian

- He doesn’t act like a clone or anything. He has an impressively obvious midwestern accent and uses slang like a typical teen. He tells him, a little hysterically, about his parents being scientists and the fucking portal to hell they opened in their basement, about finding them experimenting on an inter-dimensional being that may or may not be an actual human spirit, and briefly details taking his sisters car across four states in a manic road trip to find the Batman.

- Batman is like, why me? There are closer heroes. Why not call the justice league hotline?

- “Hoo boy Mr. Batman see the thing is Amity Park is Dangerous and full of ghosts so I didn’t want metas showing up where they’d get overshadowed and I’d have to? Like? Fight a possessed Superman or something.”

- Why would you be the one fighting??

- Danny is impressively bad at keeping his mouth shut about secrets but to be fair, he’s meeting his father for the first time and the Batman is super cool and intimidating and also he’s remembering his mom and his brother and that’s reminding him of his new family and how everything has probably irreparably fallen apart and oh no

- Oh no he’s crying in front of Batman. Oh fuck, he’s sobbing in front of his father and this is his first impression. Oh ancients he’s never gonna want anything to do with Danny after this mess and it’s not like he was going to say anything but apparently there was this small hope at the bottom of his heart that he’d be welcomed and loved. That somehow his Father would just know this was his son and hug him and make everything better.

- Batman is awkwardly trying to decide if he wants to risk hugging a dangerous unknown, unstable possible-meta-adjacent teenager while he’s having a breakdown on a rooftop when Robin lands next to him and says something that freezes the blood in Bruce’s veins:

- “Brother?”