#learning degrees

[batsyheere]

"So, handling your archnemesis," Danny starts. The room falls quiet, heads slowly turning to look at the man as he writes the words on the chalkboard. When finished, the characters somehow both messy and neat at once, Danny places the chalk back down and claps his hands.

"I typically call them fruitloops. Often they're in a better position than you are- older, richer, more powerful. They may have some sort of status that protects them when facing the public."

Tim wondered where Dick was right now, and if he was laughing. His brain was lagging like a computer as he tried to process what Danny was saying, and how seriously a few of his fellow teen vigilantes were taking this.

"Some of their more common tactics are-" the chalk was picked back up, and Danny writes as he speaks.

"Manipulation, isolation, conditioning, and empathy."

MICE.

Tim stares at the board, and quietly slips put his phone.

-What have I done to deserve this.

Enjoy your lessons Tim-

His head thumps against the desk. Conner leans over, gives him a pat on the shoulder but returns to taking notes as Danny goes on to explain the conditioning tactic.

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Dale

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily

² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.

³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.

⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.

⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.

⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.

⁷ ...What did you expect it to say?

[mokeonn]

"But if college was free, then people would abuse that and get useless degrees" hell yeah I would! If I could go to college without debt I would make it my job to get a degree in every little thing that interested me. I'd get a doctorate in film studies. I'd have a bachelor's degree for every science I like. I'd try to learn at least 5 languages with varying results. I would learn something "useful" like coding and then follow it up with a ""useless"" degree like art history. I'd be the world record speed run holder for getting every degree possible.

But I can't afford college without going into massive debt, so instead I spent the last 5 years trying to figure out what I am passionate enough about to consider going into debt over, because unfortunately being passionate about everything is extremely expensive to pursue.

[starry-bi-sky]

don't you want to be a cult leader? - danyal al ghul au

this is mostly a joke post but i thought it was funny and had to share so--

his first mistake was, obviously, inheriting his father's inability to see an injustice and stand still. -- actually, danyal's first mistake was his lair being so big. a mountainous island with a large temple in the center resembling his old home in Nanda Parbat? With sprawling foliage and rivers and streams and waterfalls galore? What was he going to do with all that space? Let it go to waste? He had plants there! Native trees of the ghost zone growing from the soil! He couldn't let it all be left unchecked!

So naturally after helping a fellow teenage assassin ghost -- who he later learns is named Akihiko, -- from Walker of all people, he sent them over to hang low at his lair until it was safe enough for them to wander around the Zone. Walker couldn't get through Danyal's astrofield if his life depended on it, and trust him -- he's tried. Danny was clearing out debris from his stupid transport vans for weeks.

Honestly it wasn't so bad, he and Aki really quickly became fast friends and Danny loves having a sparring partner close to his level again -- he hasn't had this much fun fighting since he left the League. Aki was very dedicated and levelheaded, the both of them clicked really well because of it.

Nonono, the real trouble began after Danyal met some long-passed League members and allowed them to come join his island as well. Apparently they had made a few enemies of the zone, and maybe Danyal still felt some loyalty to the League. He couldn't just let them be left to rot. Their zealotry could be overlooked so long as they kept it contained and helped him take care of his island.

And it.. snowballs from there? He meets a teen squire aptly calling himself Ambroise -- whether that was his living name or not is yet to be seen -- who died during feudal france, who is just about as dramatic and passionate as every french stereotype makes them out to be. He calls Danyal "my moon and great muse" -- which is both flattering and little uncomfortable, but Danyal's grown up in the League as the Grandson of the Demon Head, he is used to mild worship. he passes it off as nothing more, nothing less. -- and while his energy is overwhelming on the worst of days, he helps Danny draw out of his shell more in ways that Sam and Tucker still struggle with.

Him and Aki butt heads a lot, but the two seem to hold the other in at least some positive regard, so Danny doesn't worry too much about them fighting while he's gone. It only becomes a mild issue when Aki also begins calling Danny "my moon". It's a little sweet, so Danyal brushes it off.

Then he takes in a troupe of ghosts some time after he defeats Pariah Dark and they begin calling him "great one" just as the yetis do in the far frozen. This is where he meets the twins -- a pair of sibling ghosts who call themselves Trixie and Missy (short for Trick and Mislead) -- who aren't quite as passionate as Ambroise but more energetic than Aki. Eventually they also start calling Danyal "my moon" and attach themselves to his hip, even within the living. They like to hide in his shadow and cause trouble for the rest of the students. He makes sure they don't hurt anyone.

He's pretty sure Aki is jealous, same with Ambroise, but he can't be too certain other than the fact that they become much more lingering (re: clingy) whenever he visits the island.. Something he's trying to do much more often these days due to the increasing amount of people living there now. Since when did he become so popular?

Then there's Pēnelópeia from the Greater Athens, who ran away from home and joined his Island after he ran into her while she was being chased by Skulker -- and he's pretty sure the reason was because of her chimeric appearance. Her strange eyes and mismatched wings and lion's tail and talons. She assimilates into his friend group very easily, she gets along well with Ambroise and Trixie and Danny usually finds the three of them climbing the trees to pluck the most fruit from the top. They can fly and he knows it, but they prefer to climb.

Then finally there's silent poet Akkara who comes from ancient mesopotamia, who gets along most with Aki -- which is no surprise there considering their similar personality dispositions. he watches Aki and Danyal fight each other and leaves comments on this or that that he notices. He writes Danyal poems on clay tablets and leaves them by his room.

They're one big mismatched group of outcasts, and Danny's got the other ghosts on his island to tend to, because they're living on his island and he wants to be hospitable even if he struggles with that. But he spends the most of his time with them.

Sam and Tucker are making fun of him. Tucker jokingly tells him 'careful Danny, at this rate you're gonna start a cult'. Danny really wishes he had taken that joke more seriously.

He just. keeps. collecting people. Wayward souls lost in the zone, looking for shelter or refuge from something or other -- whether that be another hostile ghost, or a past afterlife, or just a purpose. Danyal finds them, he takes them in, offers them a place on his island until they are ready to leave. Many seldom do. He's not complaining -- he has the space, and it feels like it's only ever growing.

His close friends, his "inner circle" as he's heard the others call them, keep insistently calling him "my moon". He starts calling them his stars, because then it only feels fair. They're his stars, this is his constellation. It becomes a thing; little star halos begin forming behind their heads, picking them out from the rest. He loves them so much, it's hard to place. Sam and Tucker are also his stars, but they reside in the living realm, they're his tie to Life. Meanwhile, his friends here know what it's like to be dead, and sometimes its nice to relate.

Those living on his island keep calling him "Great One" and he's beginning to notice zealotry in their care for his island. He really, deeply appreciates it. His close friends gain nicknames -- as his stars, it's only natural for him to pick them out from the cluster in the skies. Akihiko, his Sirius and bright star. Trix and Missy, Castor and Pollux, the twins and troublemakers. Ambroise, his zealous Antares and close friend. Penelopeia, chimeric and loyal Vega. And Akkara, his Arcturus and strength.

It's ridiculous how long it takes for him to notice; he is, of course, a deadly trained assassin. He is meant to be observant -- and normally he is! But somehow this becomes a blind spot. One that becomes too big to be dealt with by the time he realizes it.

He should've noticed when Aki, his Sirius, stood beside him one day while Danyal looked over his island and saw the sprawling spirits carrying on about their afterlife and bowing to him as they saw him, and said: "I looked down into the depths when I met you; I couldn't measure it." They aren't one for flowing prose, it took him so off guard he was silent for over a minute before he finally spoke.

Danyal should've recognized devotion for what it is, and yet he didn't. He should've recognized it when Antares began spouting praises about him, crowing about his radiance and resplendence to the heavens. He just brushed it off as Ambroise being Ambroise. He should've recognized it when Trix and Missy nearly broke Dash's leg after he knocked Danyal's books out of his hands, he excused it as them being protective. Of them coming from times where such violence may have been customary -- after all, that's what he used to be like. What he was still like, sometimes, when his emotions nearly got the better of him.

He should've noticed it when the people living on his island followed his word like gospel, looked at him like he hung the stars in the sky. When his friends gifted him a shawl with the moon phases delicately embroidered into it, with silver, shimmering thread and moving stars lovingly stitched into it. Their constellations seen clear as day in the dark fabric. When he found small shrines dedicated to him -- but they lacked any image of him beyond stones carved to look like moons, so he ignored it. When the religious imagery began popping up.

He really, really should've noticed it when a bunch of cultists accidentally summoned Antares, and Antares had turned to him when he arrived and called them heretics. But he was so centered on the fact that they had kidnapped one of his stars, that he hadn't paid much attention to what Ambroise had said.

Sages say that faith is blind, they should also say faith in you is even blinder.

It really only hits him one afternoon while he's sitting in Sam's room studying with Tucker, Missy and Trixie lounging at his feet, Aki sat on his right, Penelopeia braiding his hair, Ambroise draped against him, and Akkara lurking over him. Its one of the rare few times they're all in one room together.

It hits him like a bolt of lightning. He looks up from his textbook. "Oh Ancients," he says in no amounting shock. Everyone looks up to him.

"I've become my grandfather."

[sweetmapple]

Trench Spotlight

[asparkinhereyes]

one of my fav headcanons for damian is that he's one of those kids who graduates high school early, and i just think it'd be funny if he was going to college at around the same time tim is, for the sole reason that it would drive tim batshit insane.

[chloroooew]

Reupload art from twotter to here

[soulmvtes]

maybe it's because there's an autumn chill in the air despite the sun but i am suddenly overcome with an excitement for golden september and the changes of the season

[canonkiller]

do it all for love

[oifaaa]

"Jason broke this guy's arm! That's bad!"

Also Bat "If you're lying, i'll break the other one" Man.

it's hindsight tainting the image of the past bby!! fun fact it happens a lot in the real world too if you have 2 people that both show violent tendencys as child but one goes on to be a serial killer and the other goes on to never commit a single crime people will look at the serial killers childhood actions and call it foreshadowing and proof they were always heading down this path while the others violence will mostly be forgotten

[merryfight]

big fan of musicians smacking sense into their listeners with songs like caramel. the way this track addresses the double-edged sword that is fame is an important reminder that neither entitlement nor idolization can lead to anything good. vessel really said tl;dr: can you people please be normal for five whole minutes

[spaceagecats]

Quick lil clip to learn how to animate with shape layers and composite in AfterEffects ft. Kurapika!!

This was fun n I wanna do more experiments with this >:)

[asterthought]

I've had this finished for days now, I posted the wip but didn't post the final piece because I couldn't find the PERFECT caption.

I still can't so whatever I'll post it anyway because I really love how it turned out 💖

[caramellody]

Yall i dont think im gonna be able to stop thinking about usha and g13, actually.

Ushas an old old woman, clueless with tech. Lived long enough to develop various bonds with a LOT of people and relies on them a lot for help. In turn, shes VERY loyal to her close conpanions (a great example would be how she tends to back paula up a LOT, the way she sets up russel and paula to 'fake date' wink and all). She's very warm and very emotionally intelligent even if she's a bit clueless sometimes. Her logic is borderline incomprehensible, but it has heart.

G13 on the other hand, is a hacking prodigy. Hes young, hes sought after for his skills for better and for worse. But in turn, he's essentially lost himself in the process. He may be able to scrape nuke codes, but he'll never make a friend. He lacks any loyalty for anyone and anything except for himself and his interests, and if they dont satisfy those two points, then its worth nothing to him. His logic may be sound, but its cold.

[katiesharms]

it’s obviously constantly talked about how langdon reacts the way he does to santos because he can see elements of himself there, but the reverse is also true. santos is jealous of the ease and warmth with which people banter with langdon, and how he’s built that rapport with his colleagues that is based on respect but has an edge of friendly meanness to it. she comes on really strong, and she knows that, and she’s used to people not liking her, but here is this person who acts exactly how she wants to and it’s met with the same energy and he’s clearly respected and liked

[flying-cat]

haven't seen the new lilo and stitch movie and i refuse to but wdym nani left lilo, and left HAWAII, to go. get a marine biology degree. why would you need to leave hawaii to get a degree in marine biology. HAWAII IS SURROUNDED BY WATER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII EXISTS.