#DAVID MACHINE BROKE

[ingravinoveritas]

How did u feel with the age gap question was it pr or do u really think he meant it and this was the truth

This is referring to the question asked on The Assembly last night. I'll post the clip here, for those who haven't seen it yet:

A lot of what I felt while watching this was touched on in this incredibly thoughtful post from @body-face-words, so I encourage folks to give that a read. But I think for me, when it comes to Michael's answer, it's not a matter of whether he lied or told the truth. It's that his response was sweet, but it was also a version of the truth that sounded convincing because it needed to, because this was not a time or place where he could say what he actually felt.

I'm really not sure what people expected him to say, in all honesty, as he was never going to say anything that would make him or Anna look bad, and especially not anything that could potentially negatively impact the kids, so he instead gave a very perfect PR answer. This again does not come as a surprise because we know Michael has scripted his answers about AL/their relationship in the past, but I noticed how careful he was in his response, which seems to contrast with how off-the-cuff he normally is when discussing every other subject. Part of what so many of us love about Michael is how unfiltered he is and always has been, with the exception of how much he filters and edits himself when talking about Anna.

It also seemed like, at least from my perspective, that Michael answered the question without answering the question. What the girl asked wasn't so much about the age gap, but about AL being five years older than Michael's daughter Lily, and it would've been a perfect opportunity for him to mention her, or how the relationship with AL affected his and Lily's relationship. He could've talked about the falling out he had with her (and Kate) in 2019 once AL's existence/pregnancy came to light, and what has happened in the years since, or how Lily now gets along with Anna/her half-sisters. But instead Michael deflected from all of that and talked about everything while saying nothing at the same time.

It was also the things Michael didn't say that stood out as much as the things he did. In the entire answer to the question, Michael never once used the word "love." Prior to the show airing, I saw a lot of people online confident that he would say that he loves Anna, but he never did. He never praised her, never talked about the things he loves about her, or how glad he is to be with her. He never once mentioned her by name. The pivot and focus was on the kids, and there was a clear distinction made between how happy he is to have the family he does, rather than to be in the relationship that he is in. Michael's use of the phrase "very happy" was also identical to the wording of a comment AL wrote on Instagram the other day, which added to the whole "reinforcing a public narrative" feeling of his response.

I think what struck me most of all, though, was how somber and heavyhearted Michael sounded while saying how happy he is. It reminded me of the song "I Am a Rock" by Simon & Garfunkel, where the upbeat and cheerful music contrasts starkly with the fraught, angry lyrics. There was no sparkle in Michael's eyes when he said it, no enthusiasm for what he was saying (which is particularly jarring when we know Michael has the capacity for incredible enthusiasm), and his face never lit up while he was talking.

There was one specific moment (which is also highlighted in the body language post) where he seemed to visibly wince and the micro-expressions were in overdrive, and it immediately made me think of a moment from Good Omens:

Time and again, I have seen fans talk about Michael's micro-expressions as an actor and how he uses them to such devastating effect (especially in the role of Aziraphale). And while these two moments are not completely identical, the idea of ignoring how Michael uses those same micro-expressions in real life makes no sense to me at all. In this instance, what we're seeing could be either because he has put so much of himself into Aziraphale that we can now recognize those "Michael" moments...or it could be because in both clips he is performing, albeit for different reasons.

The difference between Michael when he is doing this vs. when he is being genuinely himself is made even more apparent by the question immediately following this one. Unprompted, he brings up David, and the change in his expression and demeanor is swift and dramatic:

Having the mention of David happen so soon after the AL question seemed to highlight so many things. I can't help but feel that David is a security blanket for Michael, something he hides behind when he is feeling anxious or sad or overwhelmed. I wondered if perhaps he was even already thinking of David while answering the AL question, which would explain why he named him so readily--as if his mind needed to drift to someplace else just to finish answering that question.

To me, this made it abundantly clear that David is Michael's safe place. Here was where we saw Michael's eyes sparkling. Here was where we saw him light up from the inside. And it was David he kept returning to and bringing up during the rest of the show in response to other questions. So if that doesn't speak volumes about where Michael's heart seems to be, I'm not sure what does.

So yes, those are my thoughts on Michael answering the age gap question on The Assembly. As always, this is just my interpretation, but I am glad to hear from my followers with your take as well. Thanks for writing in! x

[ourtubahero-blog]

They broke us and they broke us good.

[beetleinyourfloorboards]

So happy

I love that 10 (or 14 I guess), gets to stay with Donna oh my god. I can just imagine him navigating everyday life like: “Donna, where’s the jammy-dodger machine??” And he’s just searching every nook and cranny of the kitchen

[jellogram]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.

That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services. Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.

Now, rents: "rent" is the money a rentier makes by owning a "factor of production": something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.

For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.

The "moral philosophers" that today's self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo – hated rents. For them, profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.

When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.

The "free markets" of Adam Smith weren't free from regulation, they were free from rents.

The moral philosophers' hatred of rents was really a hatred of feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn't merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the "free labor" who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).

But that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.

Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there's always a young gun out there looking to "disrupt" their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that "creatively destroys" the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

That's a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with "moats and walls" – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-moat-principle-164442359.html

Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over ideas. The "patents royal" were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.

Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country's number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

But the 21st Century's defining source of rent is "IP" – a controversial term that I use here to mean, "Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.

Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this "shared success":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP's triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now "technofeudalist" rather than "technocapitalist":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Once you start to think of "IP" as "laws that let me control how other people use their real property," a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make terrible law.

Five years ago, some anti-fascist counterdemonstrators hit on the clever idea of blaring top 40 music during neo-Nazi marches, on the theory that this would prevent Nazis from uploading videos of their marches to Youtube and other platforms, whose filters would block any footage that included copyrighted music:

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/

Thankfully, this didn't work, but not for lack of trying. And it might still work, if calls for beefing up video copyright filters are heeded. Cops all over the place are already blaring Taylor Swift songs and Disney tunes to prevent their interactions with the public from being uploaded:

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

The same thinking that causes progressives to recklessly argue in favor of upload filters also causes them to demand that web scraping be treated as a copyright crime. They think they're creating a world where AI companies can't rip off their creation to train a model; they're actually creating a world where the Internet Archive can't capture JD Vance's embarrassing old podcast appearances or newspaper editorial boards' advocacy for positions they now recant:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

It's not that Nazi marches are good, or that scraping can't be bad – it's just that advocating for the use of IP to address either is a cure that's not just worse than the disease – it's also not a cure.

A problem can be real, and still not be solvable with IP. I have enormous sympathy for gamers who rail against cheaters who use aftermarket hacks to improve their aim, see through buildings, or command other unfair advantages.

If you want to tell a stranger how they must configure their PC or console, IP ("any law that lets you control your competitors, critics or customers") is an obvious answer. But – as with other attempts to solve real problems with IP – this is a cure that is both worse than the disease, and also not a cure after all.

Back in 2002, Blizzard sued some hobbyists over a program called "bnetd." Bnetd was a program that provided a game-server you could connect to with the Blizzard games that you'd bought. It was created as an alternative to Battlenet, Blizzard's notoriously unreliable game-server software that left gamers frustrated and furious due to frequent outages:

https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

To the public, Blizzard made several arguments against bnetd. They claimed that it encouraged piracy, because – unlike the official Battlenet servers – it didn't check whether the copies of Blizzard software that connected to it had a valid license key. Gamers didn't really care about that, but they did respond to another argument: that bnetd lacked the anti-cheat checking of Battlenet.

But that wasn't what Blizzard took to the court: in court, they argued that the hobbyists who made bnetd violated copyright law. Specifically, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans "circumvention of access controls to copyrighted works." Basically, Blizzard argued that bnetd's authors violated the law because they used debuggers to examine the software they'd paid for, while it ran on their own computers, to figure out how to make a game server of their own.

Blizzard didn't sue bnetd's authors for pirating Blizzard software (they didn't – they'd paid for their copies). They didn't sue them for abetting other gamers' piracy. They certainly didn't sue them for making a cheat-friendly game-server.

Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers.

Imagine if Walmart – one of the biggest book-retailers in America – had a policy that said that you could only shelve the books you bought at Walmart on shelves that you also bought at Walmart. Now imagine that Walmart successfully argued that measuring the books you bought from them and using those measurements to create your own compatible book-case violated their IP rights!

This is an outrageous triumph of IP rights over real property rights, and yet gamers vocally backed Blizzard in the early noughts, because gamers hate cheaters and because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

It's more than 20 years since bnetd, and cheating continues to serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle in batshit new IP laws. In Germany, Sony is suing the cheat-device maker Datel:

https://torrentfreak.com/sonys-ancient-lawsuit-vs-cheat-device-heads-in-right-direction-sonys-defeat-240705/

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

Yes, this is batshit, and thankfully, Sony has been thwarted in court to date, but it is steaming ahead to the EU's highest court. If it succeeds, then it will open up every tool that modifies your computer at your direction to this kind of claim.

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages:

https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-infringes-copyright-ancient-sony-cheat-lawsuit-may-prove-pivotal-240729/

Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of.

Axel Springer's war on browsers is a particularly pernicious maneuver, because browsers are the best example we have of internet software that serves as a "user agent." "User agent" is an old-timey engineering synonym for "browser" that reflects the browser's role: to go out onto the web on your behalf and bring back things for you, which it displays in the way you prefer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Want to block flickering GIFs to forestall photosensitive epileptic servers? Ask your user agent to find and delete them. Want to shift colors into a gamut that accounts for your color-blindness? Ask your user-agent:

https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/

Want to goose the font size and contrast so you can read the sadistic grey-on-white type that young designers use in the mistaken belief that black-on-white type is "hard on the eyes"? That's what Reader Mode is for:

https://frankgroeneveld.nl/2021/08/24/most-underused-browser-feature/

The foundation of any good digital relationship is a device that works for you, not for the people who own the servers you connect to. Even if they don't plan on screwing you over by directing your user agent to attack you on their behalf right now, the very existence of a facility in your technology that causes it to betray you, by design, is a moral hazard that inevitably results in your victimization:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

"IP" ("a law that lets me control how you use your own property") is a tempting solution to every problem, but ultimately, IP ends up magnifying the power of the already powerful, in contests where your only hope of victory is having a user agent whose only loyalty is to you.

The monotonic, dangerous expansion of IP reflects the growing victory of rents over profits – income from owning things, rather than income from doing things. Everyday people may argue for IP in the belief that it will solve their immediate problems – with AI, or Nazis, or in-game cheats – but ultimately, the expansion of a law that limits how you can use your property (including your capital) to uses that don't threaten neofeudalists will doom you to technoserfdom.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

[dailycass-cain]

As promised many months ago to end this day, here's a 🧵of the insanity Cassandra Cain's "human" body can do due to what David Cain put her through (besides the two obvious ones of body language and various forms of killing he trained her in).

The best issue that showcases that is of course Batgirl Vol. 1 #14 where various government agencies look at the footage Cass got caught filmed in.

The first few pages are literally showcasing how inhuman, but still bordering on human she is due to what David Cain put her through.

This is always fully covered throughout Batgirl Volume 1 and is usually forgotten when writers and editors tend to have their job. Not saying any names or storylines of any RECENT kind where a WAR broke out in GOTHAM.

is still salty YES

We've seen Cass's speed all the time throughout the Puckett run. To just showcase the prior issue's bullet dodging or her issue of Tim (#18) be child's play (along with her taking several shots up close and dodging each one from a certain corrupt government bastard).

Nah the best example of Cass's true "speed" is in #34 facing the mob boss Ving and his gang.

Yeah, you're seeing that right she is faster than a freaking bullet. Surprising how SOME seem to forget that in other comics. 🙄

Something even Batgirls remembered (#15) when Cass was playing shogun dodge with Cluemaster who was trying to shoot her with a shotgun.

But what of Cassandra's strength? Just how strong is she really?

#19 where Cass is faced with the obstacle of three-inch quartz preventing her from escaping a gas chamber. So let's examine just how thick three-inch quartz is.

Well, let's google just that.

A SEVEN on the hardness scale. Further research says that it can only crack due to "extreme impacts" which wouldn't ya know:

As for her body itself, Batgirl/Ghost: The Ressurection Machine #3 suggests this about Cass being immune to A LOT of poisons:

Something Batgirl Vol. 1 "sort of" delves in #50 when both she and Bruce are doused with a new batch of super drug but it turns out they were both immune to it due to them being built differently than normal humans.

This is all the more surprising because a few issues prior to (#46) Cass is doused with a version of it, but you could say given what she "sees" Cass is under A LOT of stress (the building tension with Bruce, Babs breaking up with Dick, Superboy/Black Wind stuff). Plus she does "sort of" snap out of it to beat the bad guys in that issue.

Just like in #51 she avoids the pheromones to Poison Ivy even though she is showing signs of falling under the hormones but snaps out of it due to willpower (something Bruce was almost succumbing to before he fully snapped out of it too).

It really feels like "this anti-poison" ability Cass had was all but forgotten once the series ended. Of course, naturally with a certain "infamous" story ONE YEAR LATER, but also Batman & Robin Eternal as she is affected by Fear Toxin (among other stuff too).

#9 & #59 showcase that David Cain shot Cass regularly so much that she can not even feel it. This could explain also HOW she was eventually able to dodge bullets and become so fast.

#22 also showcases this as well so this is not something simply just randomly put in. This was something the writers wanted to show the sickening lengths David Cain put Cass through.

Again, #14 brought up Cass's metabolism and how off the charts it was. I think something we just overlooked is that in #26 Cass slept for 20 hours a day for four days (or perhaps longer) straight until she fully recovered from fighting Lady Shiva.

That's not even going under the amount of food she consumes. This little detail was first showcased in #39 when Cass ate like she was freaking Goku.

This little bit of detail was brought back in #66 when she ordered THREE burgers (I'm assuming with everything on it) with three sides of fries and a BIG milk.

Amusingly, this detail was recently brought back in Nightwing #106 & #108 where she FEASTED on who knows how many pancakes.

Lastly, I feel this bit is worth mentioning as well from #47 with Doctor Lewis Friedman who started the theory on body language that David Cain made a frightening reality with Cass (shame he was never brought up again after this issue).

All this isn't even counting on the extremely LONG hours of shower time Cass picked up in the Gabrych run that even Willingham's Robin (which went on during this) teased (something again Batgirls kept up on).

So there you have it. The utter anomaly that is the body of one Cassandra Cain.

[aggro-my-beloved]

Shaw Pack HC’s (1/?)

note: I promise after this I’ll get some sleep…and dream about more redacted audio HC’s, that is

• Sweetheart has made it their mission to teach Aggro the most random tricks, without Milo’s knowledge. We’re talking fetch, speak, high fives galore. Sweetheart still isn’t sure how Milo hasn’t noticed the cat’s recent weight gain from all the treats he’s been given for “motivation”. It wasn’t until one fateful night that Asher and Baaabe were invited over to break in their new house and Asher left his mode of transportation lying around (him and Baaabe arrived separately since she was working late) that the result of their secret training lessons were exposed.

“Uh, sweetheart,” Milo begins, voice curious and steady.

“Hmm?” His mate hums, craning her neck to peer at Aggro flawlessly passing over the hardwood floor of the living room. It’s yet to be adorned by a rug of their choosing.

“Why is our cat on a skateboard?”

♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡

• Baaabe has never encountered a physical fight in their life. Always one to stay out of trouble, they keep to themselves and never enter any altercation that involves a clean uppercut or south paw, because they’d surely fail.

Or so they thought. Hell, even Asher did when he begged them to join him in his adventure to the arcade and purposefully led the two of them up to the Boxing Punch Game. It’s the first time Baaabe is seeing the name of the machine, but they are familiar with it. The player decks the red punching bag dangling before them and watches the score tally up to deduce whether they are as strong as they thought or indeed a weakling.

Too afraid of what their results may yield, Baaabe volunteers Asher to go first, which he does without complaint. The sound of his fist colliding with the bag echoes across the arcade hall and perks a few ears, and his score grazes the seven hundreds. Baaabe feels her toes curling in anticipation while Asher keeps on encouraging them to just give it a shot, and that “the score doesn’t matter. You’re unempowered after all, I have a bit of an advanta—“

The rest of his sentence gets caught in his throat, his jaw slack as her numbers climb and climb to over a thousand total points. But even more shocking—to Baaabe’s total disbelief and Asher’s amusement, the punching bag lie on the floor, disconnected from its machine.

Yup. Baaabe broke the fucking game. All from a single hit.

It made Asher hard a little scared of his mate’s true strength. He did the dishes that night without complaint.

♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡♥︎♡

• Clumsy as they may be, I think Angel is secretly good as secretly good as sewing. Perhaps they worked as a part time seamstress for a past job, maybe a uniform store that involved hemming a measurements. This is a wonderful tool to have for emergency instances, like that broken zipper on Baaabe’s wedding attire which Angel resolved with ease. Baaabe would claim the rest of the night that Angel really is a saint sent from higher deities out of our control. Everyone will blame these babbles on the mate’s alcohol intake.

But in the comfort of their home, Angel uses this power for pure, ungodly chaos. Including, but not limited too:

1. Slightly hemming Davey’s tank tops to fit him slimmer around his waist. His mate loves how it shows off his physique.

2. The clothes he hasn’t worn in a while will be cropped to better fit Angel. How they gaslight David into believing his security hoodies keep shrinking in the wash and he needs a better vendor who uses less cotton is still a mystery.

3. Three Words: Ugly. Matching. Sweaters.

4. The entire pack has one designed by Angel personally and almost everybody loves them. Milo pretends not to be offended when he is gifted his sweater that’s two sizes too small. David rarely wears his unless Angel pulls out the puppy dog eyes, which he can never deny pleasing. Baaabe and Asher wear theirs religiously, even if it’s the dead heat of summer.

[usafphantom2]

‘It’s just black sky up there’: 50 years on, the transatlantic flight speed record remains unbroken

Two men flew between New York and London at three times the speed of sound. No other aircraft has since been as fast as the Blackbird SR-71, explains crew member Noel Widdifield

David Barnett

Noel Widdifield and Jim Sullivan, each holding a case attached to their space suit by a hose, stand next to their wives in a 1974 photograph

Noel Widdifield, far right, and Jim Sullivan with their wives after the airmen made their record-breaking flight in 1974. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

On 1 September 1974 two men made the fastest ever journey between New York and London. The astonishing trip – at three times the speed of sound – took less than two hours and set a record that still stands 50 years later.

Even the mighty Concorde, which set the record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight in 1996, straggled in almost an hour behind.

The US air force Lockheed Blackbird SR-71 jet had a crew of two – pilot James Sullivan and reconnaissance systems operator Noel Widdifield – who completed the journey between the two cities in one hour, 54 minutes and 56 seconds before triumphantly landing to a fanfare welcome at the Farnborough air show in Hampshire.

Widdifield, now 83, splits his time between Virginia and Florida in the US. “In a way, this was a standard flight for us,” he said, reflecting on the momentous day. “There was nothing different about it or the way we flew the plane. But we had been told in July 1974 that we would attempt the world record for flying between New York and London, which had previously been set by Royal Navy pilots. There was a lot of media interest.”

It wasn’t just air force bragging rights at stake. America was undergoing something of an international public relations crisis – just three weeks earlier, the disgraced president Richard Nixon had resigned after the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford had been sworn in to the White House. There was still a hangover from their disastrous involvement in the Vietnam war. The country needed something to cheer on.

There were other machinations, too. Widdifield told the Observer: “We didn’t know anything about this at the time, but behind the scenes there had been negotiations between the US and the UK to base Blackbird SR-71s on British soil.

“There were concerns about this in Britain because it was considered the move might ruffle a lot of feathers, especially in the Middle East. But after we broke the record and flew into the Farnborough air show, that seemed to seal the deal, and the UK allowed SR-71s to be based there.”

Widdifield was 33 years old when he made the historic flight. He had originally wanted to be a train driver, but after seeing a USAF jet fly low over his house when he was 12, he decided he would be a pilot.

After his training and flying B-52 bombers, Widdifield joined the Blackbird SR-71 programme at Beale air force base in California from 1971 to 1975, after which he stopped flying and became involved in the US space programme until 1982.

Flying the Blackbird was akin to being an astronaut. The crew wore space suits and flew at an altitude of 80,000ft (the maximum approved altitude for most commercial aircraft is 42,000ft). Widdifield said: “It’s just black sky up there. You see the stars, and either the moon or the sun, depending on what time of day it is.”

Their plane took off from Beale and had to fly around the coast to New York to avoid causing a sonic boom over populated areas and extensive damage to property. High above the city was an invisible “gate”, which would mark the start of the journey. Reaching speeds of Mach 3.2 – three times the speed of sound and about 2,455mph – the Blackbird tore through the gate, and the record attempt was under way.

The aircraft had to take on fuel twice: when it took off, linking with a refuelling plane above California to fill it to capacity, and partway during the journey near to Greenland.

There was also an incident which would have looked terrifying from the outside but which the crew took in their stride. The Blackbird began to suddenly “yaw” – moving swiftly from side to side – after losing thrust.

The Blackbird took in air from the front to give thrust to the engines, and it was common for a device in the inlet to become displaced, causing one engine to lose much of its power momentarily.

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Noel Widdifield and James Sullivan, in trim hats and short-sleeved jumpsuits, stand with their arms behind their backs in front of the Blackbird SR-71 with a sign reading “SR-71 Bele AFB”

Widdifield and Sullivan in front of the Blackbird SR-71. Photograph: Noel Widdifield

Widdifield said: “The automatic restart systems kicked in, repositioning this cone that had become misplaced, and the engine restarted. It wasn’t particularly a worry other than wondering what effect it might have on the record speed run.”

The plane crossed over the London “gate” without further incident and the Blackbird came into Farnborough, where there was a huge crowd waiting and a press conference was held, during which Widdifield and Sullivan were connected by phone to the new president. “There was a lot of international coverage for a year afterwards,” says Widdifield, who has six scrapbooks of cuttings. “One thing Jim and I always tried to emphasise, though, was that although it was the two of us who got the glory, there was a huge team behind every flight.

“When you take into account all the support staff and admin workers and everybody who does their bit to get us in the air, you’re talking about a thousand people. They need as much credit as Jim and me.”

Widdifield, who has been married to his wife, Ann, for 63 years and has two children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, mourns the loss of both his co-pilot Jim Sullivan, who died in 2021, and the Blackbird SR-71 itself, which was officially retired from service in 1998.

He said: “Jim and I stayed in touch, but later on we only saw each other a few times at SR-71 reunions, as we lived so far apart.

“I was sad, of course, when the SR-71 programme ended. And am I surprised that nobody has beaten our record in 50 years? No. Because there’s been no other aircraft developed since that could beat it.”

@TheGuardian.com via X

[j0elmill3r]

isn’t it lovely?

Pairing/s: Ellie Williams x Miller!Reader, Joel Miller x Daughter!Reader, Tess Servopoulos x Daughter!Reader (Brief)

Request: Ellie x Miller reader ANGSTTTTT lol

Ellie finds out that the reader lied to her about what happened with the fireflies and ignores her? Just like Joel, but instead of Joel going golfing the reader does, or maybe they both I don’t know lol THANKS🫰

Summary: Ellie regrets being so cold and harsh towards you after finding out the truth about what happened at St Mary's Hospital.

CW: Angst, heart break, character death, Abby's golf skills are incredible

Word Count: 2.2k

A/N: Here we go, another fic were Miller reader goes golfing!

My Masterlist

You knew why Ellie wasn't talking to you - You had lied to her, betraying the trust that was crucial in your relationship; You had a feeling you deserved it, but you did what you did to protect her, to save your at the time 'best friend'.

You panted as you ran through the hospital, clutching your gun tightly as your feet smacked off of the linoleum flooring, the flashing red lights illuminating the halls of St Mary's hospital. Following the trail of bodies left by your dad, you made your way up to the room where they were operating on your best friend, deciding to take the backdoor, you nudged it open, just as your dad did at the door opposite you.

"Unhook her." Your dad demanded, aiming his gun at the surgeon in front of him. You looked over, noticing Ellie lying on the operating table, various machines beeping beside her, all sorts of wires coming in and out of her.

"No, I won't let you take her," The surgeon said to your father. No. You couldn't let this happen, you wouldn't let them take away your best friend, not today, not ever. Acting quickly, you shot the two nurses standing beside you in the chests, swiftly jumping to your feet from your crouching position. The surgeon had no time to react before you fired a shell into his head - Joel looked over at you, you couldn't tell if he was scared of you, or for you.

"Dad," Joel hugged you wordlessly, placing his chin on the crown of your head for a minute before turning to Ellie. "What do we do now?" You looked up at him, fear evident in your eyes. Joel sighed, looking at Ellie and then at you.

"We leave, go back to Jackson and stay with Tommy," You nodded, however, you couldn't ignore the feeling of guilt which bubbled in your stomach - the emotion was obviously clear on your face, since you could make out from the little light provided in the room. "We tell her that there were other's like her, okay? Now come on, we need to move. You shoot if you have to, understand?" You mulled the thought over and nodded, you hoped that you'd never crack if Ellie asked you - As bad as it sounded, some memory loss at this moment in time didn't actually sound too bad. It didn't make sense, you had come all this way for nothing - You watched your mother die for nothing, watched as Sam and Henry both died, been through the whole David situation with Ellie, had that all been in vain?

Sighing, you followed your dad - Just as you knew that you always would.

"Ellie, come on," You followed your girlfriend as she grabbed her stuff from your room, shoving it into her backpack harshly. She had found out about the hospital and what you and Joel had done. "I don't know what you want me to say, Els." She huffed, stopping shoving things into her bag as she stared you down.

"You lied to me, Y/N. You fucking lied to me," She spat. You looked away from you, unable to meet her harsh gaze, which you ultimately knew you were deserving of. "I don't know if I can ever forgive you, or your dad. I don't wanna talk to you for the time being, understood?" You nodded, tears filling your eyes as you looked away from her.

"Okay," Your voice broke as you spoke, still unable to watch as Ellie made her way out of your room. "I love you." You told her, your heart breaking as she just walked away wordlessly. You sighed in acceptance, realising that you had fucked up majorly this time. You watched through your window, making sure that Ellie got away safely.

In the days after, you noticed Ellie getting closer with her friend Dina, who you knew had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Jesse. Dina was gorgeous, and you saw the way that Ellie looked at her, she used to look at you the same way. But you and Ellie hadn't officially broken up, and you knew that Ellie wouldn't cheat on you, right? Maybe, not so right - Joel had dragged you to the small gathering in the church, which unbeknownst to him, Jesse, Ellie and Dina were attending.

"Dad, this is so stupid, I'm fine," You tried to convince him, furrowing your eyebrows and pouting as your dad chuckled.

"You haven't left the house in 4 days, you needed air and to talk to other people," Joel smiled, trying to get you to reciprocate the gesture - It however, didn't happen, since you were focused on the fact that Ellie and Dina were now locking lips - Thanks to Ellie's initiation.

So, this was why she had been ignoring you for the past 4 days. She had been planning her relationship with Dina? Your mind spiralled, had she been with Dina the whole time? Were you the other girl? Did she ever actually love you? Your stomach dropped, your heart cracking in two as the two girls pulled apart, you put your drink down on the table beside your dad, Joel looking over and realising what had upset you so much. "Baby girl." He called out for you, watching as you left the church. Ellie and Dina looked over to the doors which you stormed out of, and then looked over to Joel as he came over to them.

Joel loved Ellie as if she were one of his own - but you were his baby girl, and he couldn't stand by and let Ellie get away with hurting you like that.

"What?" Ellie asked him, her tone as if she were offended by Joel's very presence. Joel scoffed and raised his eyebrows at the girls audacity.

"Seriously? You do this to Y/N and you have the audacity to act like this? I know that you're not happy with her, but you never broke up with Y/N," Joel seethed. Dina excused herself and made her way back over to Jesse, who walked away from her - their relationship, similar to yours and Ellie's, had barely ended, and now she was here kissing Ellie. "I thought you were better than that." This time it was Ellie who scoffed, shaking her head at Joel.

"Really? That's really fucking ironic, Joel, since all you and Y/N did was lie to me for 5 years. I thought you were better than that," She spat. Joel sighed, he thought Ellie was being too harsh on you. You were still a child at the time, you just wanted to do good by your best friend and your father, you did what you did to protect Ellie just as he did - But he would take all of Ellie's anger towards you and take it himself, he would do it to see you happy with her again, but after this, he was unsure if he would be able to see you happy again. Joel shook his head and walked away from Ellie, saying goodbye to Tommy and Maria, and that you and him would see Tommy tomorrow for your patrol.

You grunted as you were thrown to the floor, your dad and uncle Tommy forced into the same position as you. The room was cold and dark, illuminated only by the soft white glow of the falling snow outside - You looked up at the girl in front of you, she couldn't have been much older than you were, but she was taller, more muscular. She looked down at you, anger in her eyes as she met yours but quickly looked away, making her way over to your dad, who sat by the window, a torniquet around his leg.

"Joel Miller," She seethed, crouching down in front of Joel.

Oh.

Oh, fuck. You knew this girl - She was in the hospital when you rescued Ellie, you heard her crying out for your father when you were clearing out the floor for supplies, which you had insisted on doing since you were the smallest and quietest, meaning you were less likely to get caught - Her dad was the surgeon you had killed. Your breathing picked up as you saw her pick up a golf club and inspect it, looking at it and then at your dad.

"Stop! I know why you're doing this," You called out, all eyes turning to you. "I killed your father in that hospital, not my dad." You told her. Joel's heart stopped - Were you trying to get yourself killed?

"Get her over here, get him down there." Abby demanded. You struggled and grunted as you were picked up by two strong men.

"Don't you fucking touch her!" Joel yelled out as he was held down, watching as you were punched in the face, near enough knocking you out. Heaving, Abby turned to Joel, looking down at him with the same golf club still in your hands. "I'll kill you if you lay a fucking hand on her, you hear?!"

"You don't get to rush this, old man," She said through gritted teeth, watching as Joel struggled in vain. He watched in trepidation, his heart pounding against his chest, the dull ache in his temple becoming stronger and stronger. He watched as Abby let out a grunt, swinging the golf club down onto your head, cracking it open with a sickening thud.

"No!" Joel cried out, watching as the spray of your blood stained the window behind you and you fell to the ground, groaning quietly. "I'll fucking kill you! I promise!" Joel threatened her, watching as she continuously kicked you in the stomach, then in the head to add insult to the crack in your skull.

Ellie followed the sound of Joel's screaming and threats down the stairs, gently opening the door - Her heart stopping at the sight in front of her. You lay on the ground, your head and face in a pool of your own blood, a woman standing in front of you holding a golf club which Ellie assumed she had used to crack your skull open.

"Y/N?!" She cried out, not caring about the others in the room. Abby turned to look at Ellie, and then looked at her crew.

"Pin her down," She instructed them, turning back to you as you lay on the floor, able to make out the form of Ellie, even as she struggled, you weakly smiled, your shallow breathing being the only sign of your fading life.

"No! Y/N!" Ellie cried out for you. "Y/N, please get up!" She begged, over and over she begged for your life to be spared, just as your father did before Ellie's arrival. "Please, please don't do this." Ellie pleaded with Abby, hoping that the girl would have a last minute change of heart.

But Ellie's hopes were crushed as she watched Abby raise the golf club above her head, and strike it down onto your head, delivering a fatal blow to your skull.

"No!" Ellie and Joel cried out at the same time, both noticing your blood dripping from the golf club. Abby tossed the golf club aside with a huff, sparing a glance at your sobbing father and friend as they made threats to end her life. Tired of what she assumed to be empty threats, she had Owen knock the two out so the group could move out and head off away from the scene, leaving you on the floor to continue bleeding out.

Ellie rubbed her eyes as she lay the flowers down at your headstone, guilt flooding her as she sat down cross-legged in front of your grave. Since your small funeral, Ellie had gone to see you once every day, the first day was when she forgave you for lying to her - She now realised that you were still a kid then, just as she was, you just wanted your dads approval so did whatever he thought was best. She also apologised for the ordeal at the party, but guilt constantly gnawed at her, she hoped that you hadn't died thinking that she didn't love you - Ellie loved you so much, but she was just so angry that it blinded her.

Despite her daily visits, Ellie couldn't find the words to speak to you - She also couldn't face Joel, but no one had seen or heard from him in the days since your death, his grief had consumed him entirely. At least there was one thing that could comfort Joel, that you were back with your mom.

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[lostloveletters]

A Long, Lonely Time (David Webster x Reader)

Summary: You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, but when Webster returns to Easy Company, you find it difficult to reckon with the very real possibility of losing him again, maybe even for good.

Note: Gender neutral reader, and no descriptors are used. The draft script of episode 3 provides more background on Webster transferring into Easy Company, which isn’t explained in the show for some reason (a shame because they cut out some pretty great scenes), but I included a handful of the details here. This is based on the fictional portrayals in the HBO miniseries and not the real individuals. Do not interact if you’re under 18, terf or radfem, or post thinspo/ED content.

Word count: 2.5k

Warnings: Hurt/angst with comfort. Mentions of Eugene Jackson’s death. Playing with the timeline of episode 8 a little bit. Probably some other historical inaccuracies. Do not interact if you’re under 18.

Two days. David Webster had only been back for two days, and you kissed him.

Your crush on him had hibernated in his absence, frozen in a forest with the rest of you. It thawed as soon as you saw him for the first time in months.

The other members of Easy weren’t so quick to warm up to him again. No matter, it just gave you more time to spend with him. You appreciated how from the moment the two of you first bonded over your shared love of literature, he was genuinely interested in your thoughts and opinions, assuaging your fears that you’d be a lackluster companion to the Ivy Leaguer.

He could’ve taken the easy route as others with a privileged background like his had done and allowed his social status to get himself a cushy position. However, he, like Caption Nixon, inexplicably chose the rest of you. Unlike Nixon and yet just as inexplicable, he rejected any promotions. Odd, yet admirable, like when he’d approached Winters in Aldbourne after D-Day, requesting to transfer from Fox to Easy to put his skills as an assistant machine gunner to better use.

None of that mattered to your comrades anymore, but as a medic, you appreciated that he took recovering from being wounded seriously. You told him such, and he smiled, confessing that he had used his stint in the hospital for one selfish indulgence. Later, when the two of you were alone; he pulled a brown paper package from his pack, privately presenting you with a gift he got his hands on for you. Ripping back the wrapping, you beamed when you saw the cover of a brand new ASE copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Your worn copy of Jane Eyre had been waterlogged from the snow and rendered illegible. New books were low priority in the Bois Jacques, so you were left without reading material for longer than you would’ve liked.

The book was the first time in what felt like years you’d received a gift. You had almost forgotten how nice it was, especially something so thoughtful. So you kissed him, impulsively, passionately, threading your fingers through his hair to pull him closer, your other hand gripping the book tightly. 

He kissed you back with a tenderness that had long since become foreign to you and felt almost too overwhelming as a result. His lips were soft and warm compared to yours, chapped from weeks of unrelenting cold, but he was undeterred. His hands held your waist, his fingers gently pressing against the skin that’d been exposed as your untucked shirt had ridden up. You shuddered against him, feeling goosebumps rise on your skin–either the cold air, or his touch. Probably both.

Hearing the clamoring of nearby voices, you reluctantly broke the kiss.

“I don’t have anything to give you,” you lamented breathlessly.

His blue eyes seemed to sparkle when he smiled. “I think we’re even.”

“You know,” you began, turning the book over to glance at the synopsis, “all I ever heard when this came out was that it was dirty. Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Books aren’t dirty. It’s embarrassing that Boston even bans them the way they do.”

“Have you read it?”

“I haven’t, but that’s not the point. They’d ban Shakespeare if he were publishing today.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” you said, suppressing an amused smile, “but I only asked because I thought we could read it together, if you don’t mind the company.”

His expression softened. “I’d love that.”

Smiling, you leaned in for another kiss when the door opened, and the two of you jumped away from each other like the other was on fire.

You relaxed when you saw Roe standing in the doorway. He gave you an almost exasperated look, but that was all. For the moment.

“Webster,” Gene said, giving him a nod of acknowledgement before shifting his attention to you. “Will you sort through those supplies Luz got earlier? I gotta check on Lipton.”

“Sure,” you said with a nod. “Thanks again, Web–David, the book’s great.”

He smiled. “Of course.”

You followed Gene out of the room, walking side-by-side down the hallway until you were a decent distance from Webster and out of earshot from anyone who might otherwise eavesdrop. When your best friend stopped in his tracks, you mirrored him, flattering a bit beneath the weight of his disapproving glare.

“Are you crazy?” Gene scolded.

“He gave me a book. It’s not–don’t look at me like that.”

“However wounded he gets, it’s gonna be a lot worse for you.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know. This ain’t the time or place.”

“There might not be another time or place,” you argued.

He sighed, either conceding to your argument or not finding it worth wasting any more breath over. For how long you’d known him, he could be impossibly difficult to read. “Just be careful, alright?”

Gene brought you to the recently delivered boxes of medical supplies, desperately needed weeks ago. Better late than never. You rifled through bandages and morphine, hands shaking a bit as you tried not to think about who might have still been there if it’d come in sooner. But Webster came back, even though you’d long been convinced you’d never see him again. At least if the worst happened, you wouldn’t have to wonder if your feelings for him were reciprocated.

The worst. You weren’t sure what, out of everything you’d seen the past few months, could have been considered the worst. Slow deaths, blown off limbs, or men whose bodies and psyche were trapped in that place between life and death. But you couldn’t let yourself spiral, not when so many people were relying on you. Hope seemed increasingly hard to find, and if indulging in whatever you had with David gave you the slightest bit more, you’d take it.

As if materializing from your thoughts of him, he walked into the room, silent concern etched in his face.

“There’s a patrol tonight,” he said. “We’re going across the river to bring back prisoners.”

“Who all’s going?” You figured if he was breaking the news to you, he’d be included. A sinking feeling dropped in your stomach when he answered, nevertheless.

“Most of 2nd platoon, except Liebgott and Malarkey.”

“It’s always 2nd platoon,” you muttered. “So you’re going as translator, then?”

He nodded. “The Krauts won’t expect us, at least that’s what they say.”

“I’m still gonna worry,” you said softly. “Just got you back.”

“Comes with the territory, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“I’ll find you as soon as we’re done,” he promised.

“Can I give you a kiss for good luck?”

“I’ll never say no to that.”

You pressed your lips to his, craving the tenderness he’d given you earlier like it was missing from your veins. You hadn’t realized how much you needed it, soft words and tender touches that made you finally feel something other than numb and tired. Desire that would long remain unfulfilled had settled deep inside of you, and you desperately wished you and David were somewhere, anywhere else. 

Holding onto him just as tightly as you were trying to keep your restraint, you went as far as he led you, open-mouthed kisses burning into your skin until a moan escaped your lips, nearly giving the two of you away.

“You’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met,” he said, giving you a quick kiss that felt achingly insufficient for what you wanted from him.

“Wait ‘til you get me in bed,” you joked.

He laughed, caressing your cheek. “I mean it. I’ve never known anyone like you.”

“Shame we had to meet this way, huh? But then we probably would’ve gone the rest of our lives not knowing each other at all.”

“That’d be a real tragedy.”

“You’re telling me.”

Far too soon for your liking, though you weren’t sure how much time had passed in all honesty, he made his leave as the sound of approaching footsteps grew louder and darkness began to fall. 

You tried to keep your mind off of the patrol, assure yourself that you were worrying for nothing. Sitting on an empty couch, you finally got a better look at the book he presented you with, not having a chance to before. He’d written on the blank cover page, filled the whole thing and then some.

Beneath your name, carefully written in pencil, an inscription, detailing the longing he felt from your absence, his heart growing fonder of you with each passing day but struggling to assuage the loneliness and doubt that began to coil around it. The sound of your voice, your laughter, so vivid in his dreams that he’d wake up looking for you. He’d taken your friendship for granted, he claimed, but though the two of you met during less than ideal circumstances, getting shot was worth meeting you. Your vision began to blur with tears by the time you reached the end of his confession, ‘I missed you before we ever met, and now that we have, I miss you even more.’

You slammed the book shut, choking out a sob. It wasn’t fair. You’d just gotten him back, and in the blink of an eye you could lose him again, possibly for good. In that moment you understood better than ever why medics were supposed to keep their emotional distance, but the pain in your chest, the salty tears that stung your eyes were all worth it for the brief comfort you had found with him. You’d been so lonely otherwise, constantly surrounded by people but still feeling something missing until he returned.

Your name sounded muffled to the ringing in your ears, until Gene sat next to you, putting his arm around your shoulder. 

“Don’t get too stuck in your head. Won’t be able to help no one like that,” Gene said, holding you in the hug. “Don’t think about it.”

“How can I not? It’s all around us–I can’t–”

“Yes, you can. You wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t.”

You let out a shaky breath. “I don’t feel like it sometimes. I feel like I’m just–”

“Just one person and it’s never gonna be enough.”

Something had happened in Bastogne, the last time he went back to the town. He never spoke of it, even when you offered to be an unjudging ear to spill his thoughts to, but you could tell it affected him deeply, even still. Knowing he was speaking from experience was an almost painful comfort.

“Why don’t you get some rest? I’ll be up,” he said.

“You sure?”

He nodded. 

When he left, you set the book aside, silently promising yourself that you wouldn’t read it without Webster. If he didn’t return, it’d stay with you, unread until you met your own demise. An unnecessarily dramatic gesture to only yourself, you hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

The following hours found you in and out of sleep, almost unable to discern your erratic dreams with troubling reality. Footsteps and voices muddled together into unintelligible ramblings that you couldn’t help interpret as the worst in your near fugue state. Your worry was laced with frustration at letting the situation cause you so much distress. You were a medic, after all. You were supposed to be prepared for this.

Still, you couldn’t help but feel a momentary wave of relief crash over you when Webster walked into the room.

“Thank god,” you whispered, throwing your arms around him and kissing his cheek. 

His embrace was stiff, awkward, and the far away expression on his face gave you pause.

“David, what happened?”

“Jackson’s dead. It was his own grenade. He didn’t wait long enough. It just…”

“Oh my god.”

“He didn’t die right away.”

“Why didn’t someone get me? Maybe I could’ve–”

“By the time Sergeant Martin got Doc Roe it was already too late. There was nothing Doc could do—nothing you could’ve done,” he said quietly, before adding, “I’m glad you didn’t see it.”

“I’ve seen worse by now.”

“Why add onto it?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. That I didn’t write to you, that I didn’t tell you sooner how I felt about you, but it’s no use dwelling on all of that now,” he said. “It can’t change anything, and no matter how sorry we are, it won’t bring Jackson back, or anyone else, for that matter.”

It was settling in, that same bitterness that’d made its home in the bones of your comrades. A taste in your mouth that could be mistaken for blood by anyone else, but you knew it all too well. Your heart ached at seeing it finally get to Webster, too.

“Do you wanna just sit for a while?” you asked.

He nodded. The two of you settled onto the couch, his head in your lap as you ran your fingers through his hair, gently tracing the soft lines that ran across his forehead, betraying that despite his closed eyes, his mind was still racing. 

“This isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of the night with you,” he mumbled after a while, his eyes fluttering open.

“David, it’s alright,” you said, your thumb brushing back and forth across his cheekbone, trying to pull his mind out of the depths you knew too well. “I’m glad just to do this. I’m kind of crazy about you.”

“Kind of?”

“Yeah, just a little bit.”

“What would I have to do to make you a fully-fledged lunatic?”

“Horrible, indecent things that would get me sent home in shame.”

He laughed. “But crazy about me?”

“Absolutely wild.”

He took your hand from his face, kissing your palm before holding it in his. 

You weren’t sure when you’d fallen asleep, but you awoke the next morning with an unforgiving crick in your neck, and the thought of the recently delivered aspirin tempted you for a split second before you realized you’d woken up by yourself.

He probably slipped out at some point, returning to his bunk so neither of you would get into any trouble. It didn’t stop you from asking around for him until you finally caught him alone.

“Hey, where’d you run off to?” you asked.

“Sink wants another patrol,” Webster told you, watching cautiously as your hands balled into fists at your side.

You fought back tears of frustration. “Then I wanna go too. I’ll make sure nothing like what happened last night happens again. Where’s Captain Winters? I’ll–”

“Winters is going to tell him a phony story about how we went back but couldn’t get any more prisoners.”

You paused, your brain taking a moment to process the information before you let out a weak laugh in disbelief, the tears that’d welled up in your eyes rolling down your cheeks regardless. Maybe you were delirious. Or sleep deprived. And your neck still hurt. “That man is a fucking saint.”

Webster smiled, putting his arm around you and pressing a kiss to your temple. “He is. Especially since that leaves me free the rest of the night.”

“You know, this handsome guy just gave me a brand new copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

“Sounds like he has good taste.”

You smiled. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

[n3kk1tty]

Soul Eater x The Lost Boys: Star

Star has major confidence issues after being the boys meister for a while and the constant bickering and insults tore down her self image.

Luckily her new weapon partner Mura is more than happy to be her personal hype girl.

Mura was Michael's old partner but because Michael couldn't figure out how to master the weapon that Mura is to the fullest potential Mura broke their arrangement off peacefully stating they were just holding each other back.

These two may not be the brute force power machine like Michael and the boys are but the girls over exceed in there technically abilities.

More suited for sneak attacks or taking opponents out in style these two can perfectly resonate there souls together.

It always looks flashy when Star fights and like she's dancing across the battlefield.

Mura is always telling Star to sing the song her souls trying to play and let Mura amplify it for the world to here.

Mura first met David when he was bullying Star not realizing the girl had a new weapon partner and was doing better without the boys.

"Talentless Meister! Now you're weaponless because you're so weak who'd wanna pair with someone as shy as you!" A furred boot heel came swinging between David's legs hitting him right in the family jewels as a stylish woman snuck behind him. "who are you calling weaponless, DICKLESS!? Back off my Meister or I'm gonna make you weaponless where it counts!"

Michael feels jaded about Star and Mura working together as he sees what he could never achieve with his past partner. There's no I'll will between the two but he now knows how much he held her back.

Needless to say though Star and Michael are always having to separate Mura and David as they will get physical.

Mura scares Paul and Marko as she's attacked them for comments before and Paul doesn't want a heel to the face again.

Dwayne admires the girl's tenacity and her ability to fight even when not in weapon form.

[fagcrisis]

my friend ellis @jonny-dykeville wants to get into njpw, and i thought id write her a little summary of whats been going on lately! im posting it here in case its useful for anyone who wants to get into nooj but finds it a little too confusing (understandable) or has stopped watching in the last couple years and now wants to get back into it

this will include a list of matches at the end from 2023 that i think were good and/or are important to storylines! this is accurate to the day im writing it which is 2023/05/15

LINKS TO BE UPDATED

The landscape of New Japan Pro Wrestling has changed enormously in the past couple of months. For example if you told someone a year ago that Kazuchika Okada would hold a non singles belt, theyd laugh in your face.

So how did we get here?

google doc version

Your current champions

Sanada beat Kazuchika Okada for the IWGP heavyweight championship at Sakura Genesis, and has since defended it against Hiromu Takahashi, the current junior heavyweight champion. 

Hiromu won the belt at Wrestle Kingdom in a four-way match against Master Wato, El Desperado, and former champion Taiji Ishimori.

The IWGP women’s title was created last year and won by Kairi at Historic X-over. She lost the belt to Mercedes Moné, who was champion until Mayu Iwatani dethroned her recently.

Aussie Open hold the tag titles after defeating Bishamon, and they’ve gone on to win the Strong openweight tag team championships from the Motor City Machine Guns.

David Finlay is the NEVER openweight champion, bringing the belt back in to Bullet Club after Tama Tonga defeated Karl Anderson for it at Wrestle Kingdom.

Intergalactic Jetsetters (Kushida And Kevin Knight) finally ended the reign of Catch 2/2 (Tjp And Francesco Akira) as junior heavyweight tag team champions during the road to Wrestling Dontaku tour, thank god.

Kazuchika Okada, Hiroshi Tanahashi and Tomohiro Ishii are the NEVER openweight six man champions winning the titles from Strong Style (El Desperado, Minoru Suzuki And Ren Narita). If you think that sentence is insane, don’t worry I’ll explain whats happening.

Zack Sabre Jr became the inaugural NJPW World TV champion, winning the tournament at Wrestle Kingdom by defeating Ren Narita, and he’s had some incredible defenses since (you might’ve seen him on ROH).

the KOPW trophy graduated to a belt after El Phantasmo broke it, and Taichi is the current provisional champion having defeated Shingo Takagi for it. 

Kenta lost the strong openweight championship to Hikuleo in the first defense of the belt in Japan, after winning it from Fred Rosser (with Juice interference).

at the time of writing this the Strong women’s title does exist but the tournament to decide its first owner has yet to be held (Resurgence may 21st).

Karl Anderson will pay for his crimes

Those who have been following me since november last year know that Suzuki-gun, a heel faction in NJPW led by Minoru Suzuki, has come to an end. I was inconsolable. There are multiple reasons for this happening, but the main one is Karl Anderson.

While Anderson is a member of Bullet Club, and in fall of last year was still the NEVER openweight champion, he is contracted to WWE and was on a handshake deal with NJPW, essentially promising he’ll appear at shows they book him for. There was a scheduling conflict with one of WWE’s saudi shows, and Anderson essentially ghosted the company not appearing for his title defense against Hikuelo, which meant I had to watch Yujiro Takahashi wrestle. anyway this all meant that New Japan lost faith in their freelancers, and because the majority of Suzuki-gun were on handshake deals, this meant the faction had to go. Their last match was on december 23rd (njpwworld) (bilibili link) and it was very emotional and beautiful, and I was incredibly sad.

Shota came back!

Shota Umino, who you may know as the protege of Jon Moxley, returned from excursion in the fall of last year. Young lions (NJPW trainees) are sent abroad to foreign promotions by the company to train and gather experience in different environments to Japan. Shota was in Britain for a time and he returned, challenging Will Ospreay for the US title he still held at the time. He lost but with this high profile title shot he joined the ranks of the young stars NJPWhas much faith vested in. 

This also includes Ren Narita, who you may not know because he was never adopted by a mean american man. he was trained by Katsuyori Shibata, earning the nickname Son of Strong Style and wearing similar gear to Shibata as well. The company seems to be trying to set him up to be Shibata’s successor, and he wrestles a similarly, clean technical style.

A recent addition to their ranks is Yota Tsuji, whose return I will explain later.

The IWGP women’s title

Women’s wrestling promotion Stardom and NJPW are both owned by Bushiroad. Because of this last year there was a crossover between the two promotions, which saw the first mixed tag matches in an NJPW ring. Great show, you should watch it. (njpwworld link) (bilibili link)

For this event, the IWGP women’s championship was created and won by Kairi. Now I have some thoughts about how Stardom is already full of accomplished talented women, and putting a women’s match on the card once in a blue moon isn’t a win for women in wrestling and you should maybe try watching Stardom instead (guide on how to do that). But I digress. Regardless of whether or not this is pandering, every match for the belt was undoubtedly incredible and I will be linking them all in the rec section.

A brief Wrestle Kingdom aside

You fucking know what happened at Wrestle Kingdom I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. Kenny Omega returned and defeated Will Ospreay for the US title, and Okada won his beloved IWGP belt back from Jay White, starting him down the path of leaving NJPW.

What you might not know is what happened at Wrestle Kingdom Night 2, which confusingly was held some weeks later. Wrestle Kingdom traditionally is a show between NOAH and NJPW, so Night 2 saw the two promotions pitch their most popular wrestlers against each other. Okada was set to fight Kaito Kiyomiya in a tag team match, but he thought this challenge beneath him and attempted to murder Kiyomiya ruling the match a no contest.

Later in february, at Keiji Muto’s retirement show, Okada did have to face off Kiyomiya in a singles bout, despite his protests that he is not some cheap whore (his words not mine). That entire show is incredibly good but not extremely relevant to NJPW storylines, as crossover events usually are not. (njpwworld) (unoffical link)

After Wrestle Kingdom, New Japan holds New Year’s Dash and the New Beginning shows where they set up new storylines that will likely last the whole year. Jay White challenges Hikuleo to a loser leaves Japan match, because he blames him and his brothers (Guerillas of Destiny) for Bullet Club weakening and his loss at Wrestle Kingdom. He promptly loses this match. Bummer. 

El Desperado refuses to accept that Suzuki-gun is over and joins Minoru Suzuki in defending Ren Narita from House of Torture’s dastardly attack, leading to the formation of their trios team; Strong Style. They then go on to defeat House of Torture for the NEVER openweight six man tag team titles. Now this is crazy but we dont have time to dwell on it because the other remnants of Suzuki-gun are also making moves that are considerably more insane.

Its time for: faction madness

There are a lot of factions in New Japan Pro Wrestling. like a lot. Every storyline is heavily driven by who is in what faction and where their allegiences lie. This might be confusing to you if you only watch AEW, a promotion where factions matter less than what Tony adds to commentary.

TMDK

Naturally ex-Suzuki-gun member and best technical wrestler in the known universe Zack Sabre Jr couldn’t simply remain in Hontai, the main body of New Japan where factionless members of the roster belong. Luckily he was a free agent for all of five seconds before his old australian buddies snatched him and his fresh tv championship up. TMDK, known as an australian faction despite a solid half not being from Australia, has suffered some losses in the past year. Jonah, their strongest member, a man who defeated even Kazuchika Okada, left Japan for WWE. Shane Haste and Mikey Nicholls, founding members of the faction and a tag team under the same name, have failed to succeed in winning Tag League in fall of last year. Safe to say, they needed a win. Zack has teamed with them during his time in NOAH, so it was only logical that he would return to his old friends. They even recruited a young lion, Kosei Fujita, who became the first young lion in a faction if you don’t count Hikuleo which was a slightly different situation. TMDK also includes Bad Dude Tito (or Big Teets) over in the States.

The addition of Zack really reinvigorated the faction. Shane and Mikey challenged and failed to defeat Aussie Open for the tag titles, and Robbie Eagles left Chaos for more australian pastures, joining the faction when he challenged Hiromu Takahashi for his championship. Robbie also lost but TMDK didn’t let these setbacks stop them from cutting the weirdest promos after every match and staunchly insisting Fujita (who they’ve nicknamed Big Fooj) will be the first young lion to win a championship.

United Empire

Will Ospreay is no longer the IWGP US heavyweight champion. After losing to Kenny Omega he threw a hissy fit and declared that he would give professional wrestling one more year. He also entered the New Japan Cup, a tournament for the right to challenge for the IWGP championship. Unfortunately in a match against his friend and stablemate Mark Davis (of Aussie Open and ass size fame) he injured his shoulder which put him out of action until about last week. He won the 1pw world title though, so he’s fine.

Other than that, the faction has been doing fairly well for themselves. After a titanic struggle against Bishamon, Aussie Open won the tag titles and have gone on to defend them against TMDK and somehow, Best Friends on AEW television. They also won the Strong tag titles, and Kyle Fletcher managed to botch a moonsault in both matches. You’ve definitely seen them even if you don’t watch NJPW, their schedule is insane and they have a banger of a match practically on a weekly average. 

Also tag champions in the faction were Catch 2/2, who held the junior titles until fairly recently. They’ve had great defenses against YOH and his new tag partner, Lio Rush (more on that in a second) and Douki and Yoshinobu Kanemaru. What you need to know about Catch 2/2 is that TJP is a PragerU weirdo and Akira is good albeit italian.

UE also includes Jeff Cobb, who you might’ve seen challenging for Kenny Omega’s US title on Dynamite. He is incredible I don’t have anything else to say. He also kind of thinks flat earthers have a point. He’s really good though.

Also in the faction are Aaron Henare, men’s rights weirdo who challenged and lost to Shingo Takagi for the KOPW belt and Great O Khan who is somehow the Revpro champion. He is notable for having a nice bow in his hair and screeching. The most recent recruit to the faction is Dan Moloney, who unfortunately is fairly unknown to me. He joined the faction as a junior heavyweight and subsequently entered the Best of Super Juniors Tournament, which I will explain later.

Chaos

I’ve previously described Chaos as Hontai 2.0, because that’s really what it is. Lead by Kazuchika Okada, Chaos was the original heel faction in NJPW, founded by Shinsuke Nakamura. Nowadays it is a loose collection of allegiances that confusingly includes the entire Best Friends faction in AEW. Yes, that includes Trent’s mum Sue. Since becoming faces, Chaos members regularly team with Hontai because it all doesn’t really matter. 

Kazuchika Okada defeated Hiroshi Tanahashi at Battle in the Valley, and then asked him to tag together. They named themselves the Dream Team, and I only briefly pondered how well it ended the last time Tana teamed with a younger star. Anyways I’m sure this will go fine. They challenged Okada’s fellow Chaos members Bishamon for their tag titles they still held at that time, and sadly lost that match. They defeated the team of Shota Umino and Ren Narita, and then once again failed to obtain gold in a 3-way match against the Motor City Machine Guns and Aussie Open (who won). After Okada lost his belt, they recruited Tomohiro Ishii, who doesn’t like Tanahashi and doesn’t want to team with him because he isn’t in Chaos. Despite this, they managed to defeat Strong Style for the NEVER openweight six man championships.

Bishamon I’ve covered sufficiently enough I think, they are the team of Hirooki Goto who recently celebrated his 20th anniversary in professional wrestling and YOSHI-HASHI who used to be incredibly horrible and is less bad recently. They are fun and I like them.

YOH and SHO were a junior tag team in Chaos until SHO turned heel, joining Bullet Club. This left YOH in a sort of strange limbo, where he contemplated quitting wrestling and pursuing his more artistic ambitions (he is a musician and an artist). Rocky Romero, also a member of Chaos, got him and Lio Rush together to team for Junior Tag League, and they ended up winning the tournament! Although they failed to defeat catch 2/2 at Wrestle Kingdom, and Lio got injured, teaming with him seemed to bring YOH’s confidence back. He’s been wrestling slightly differently and with more self-assurence. The pair both separately challenged and lost to Hiromu Takahashi, two incredible matches that I will link below. Not even these losses brought YOH’s confidence down though, and he’s entered BOSJ alongside Lio although they are in different blocks.

Also members of Chaos are Rocky Romero, Best Friends (including Kris Statlander, Orange Cassidy, Sue, and I think quite possibly Danhausen), Toru Yano who is kind of a funny little man, and Tomohiro Ishii.

Los Ingobernables de Japon

Led by Tetsuya Naito, the tweener group is more of a loose collection of talented individuals than your regular faction. LIJ has a policy of letting their members forge their own paths and create their own success, instead of letting them fall back on the power of the group. 

Maybe the only exception to this rule is Hiromu Takahashi, who owes a lot of his success to the faction as well as his mentor Tetsuya Naito. Hiromu is very talented and has a very unique style both in his wrestling and his fashion sense. Unbiased corner ahead I like him a lot. He holds junior wrestlers in very high regard and recently organized the All Star Junior festival to showcase junior heavyweights from all around japan (njpwworld ppv) (vk link). He has a plush cat named Daryl. Hiromu is kind of the ace of the junior division right now, he is on his fifth title reign and is trying to defend the belt 12 times to beat the current defense record of 11 held by Minoru Tanaka. Currently he is 4 defenses into this streak, having defeated YOH, Lio Rush, Robbie Eagles and Yoshinobu Kanemaru. Despite being champion he entered BOSJ, a tournament he’s won four times, three times in a row. If he wins, he’ll get to hand pick his opponent at Dominion.

I have no clue what to say about Tetsuya Naito. To quote my friend Jay, “it’s naito. he is an indescribable force of non-functional knees and the driest hair you've ever seen. he takes ten years to remove his entrance gear. he is naito”. You fucking know who Tetsuya Naito is.

This year, the main thing he’s done is defeating his mentor Keiji Muto at his retirement show in Febuary (njpwworld link) (vk link). He has a very hands off approach towards leading his group, sort of letting everyone figure their things out, which is why he didn’t really seem worried about his match against his stablemate Sanada in the New Japan Cup. You can imagine his surprise when Sanada not only defeated him but then declared that he would be leaving the faction, but more on that later. He also recently had a singles match against DOUKI, which was incredible.

Also members of LIJ are Shingo Takagi, winner of KOPW 2022 and former KOPW 2023 provisional champion, and also living legend. He made his name in Dragon Gate, a different japanese promotion you should also watch (I’m not at all being held at gunpoint by people whose names start with J), Bushi and Titan, who are both junior heavyweight luchadors I don’t know as much about as I should. They’re really good and they are both in BOSJ this year.

Bullet Club

Do I even need to explain. Don’t worry I will. 

Jay White lost his loser leaves Japan match to Hikuleo, but there was hope. He promised Gedo he would go to America and wrestle on Strong and right his wrongs. So obviously he immediately lost a loser leaves New Japan match to Eddie Kingston, barring him from ever wrestling in a New Japan ring ever again. After weeks of radio silence, he showed up on Dynamite, forming Bullet Culb Gold (2 bullet 2 club) with Juice Robinson and you all know what happened after that.

It’s spring which means it’s Bullet Club infighting season. After Jay’s loss, his long time rival David Finlay waltzed into the ring all goth and angry, cutting a promo about how the japanese fans never appreciated him and he is an outsider wherever he goes. If this didn’t make it clear to you that he was the new leader, don’t worry it wasn’t clear to me or El Phantasmo either. 

ELP was friends with Jay White, and made the rest of the Club agree that they will let Jay ride off into the sunset. A peaceful transfer of power is however impossible in Bullet Club, which is kind of a Stanford prison experiment for closeted gay men. It started bothering Phantasmo, that everyone in his faction so readily accepted Finlay as the new leader, like they weren’t fully behind Jay only a week ago. And anyone who questions the leader has to go.

Then came a months long game of gay betrayal chicken. Every postmatch, Phantasmo would assure Finlay that they were doing it for the club, refuse to too sweet the new leader, and the two slapping eachother in place of a tag. Meanwhile the faces in Hontai were increasingly more accepting towards ELP, Shota Umino even gave him one of his bracelets. The tension came to a boil at Sakura Genesis, where in a tag team match against Guerillas of Destiny and Master Wato, Phantasmo refused to commit the clubs usual heel antics and was brutally kicked out in response. Despite his close friendship with Taiji Ishimori and Kenta, both men readily betrayed him for David Finlay.

Phantasmo returned as a face to beat Finlay up after he defeated Tama Tonga for the NEVER belt, and the two have a title match set at Dominion.

As I mentioned Kenta and Taiji Ishimori are both members of Bullet Club, and Finlay recently recruited Clark Connors to be the clubs newest junior. He entered BOSJ alongside Taiji. Gedo, the head booker of NJPW is also a member of BC but he mainly stands ominously in the background and in kayfabe doesn’t have a massive role in storylines.

HOUSE OF TORTURE

I have to explain what’s going on here. Bullet Club has sort of a subesction? Called House of Torture. They’re only really part of BC in name only, and merch sales. Their thing is gratuitous cheating, if one HoT member has a match, the rest of them aren’t far behind making every match a handicap. Their members are EVIL, the leader of the group and former LIJ member, Yujiro Takahashi the incredible slow motion man whose joints creak audibly with every move, Dick Togo and SHO, who joined after betraying YOH and turning heel. SHO is actually pretty good but the presence of HoT at every match really ruins. Everything. I try not thinking about them.

JUST 5 GUYS

NOW baby. The reason I’m even writing this. The worst faction name in the history of pro wrestling. This faction is made of four ex-Suzuki-gun members and Sanada. Originally called Just Four Guys when Taka Michinoku, Taichi, Yoshinobu Kanemaru and DOUKI announced they would be forming a faction at New Year’s Dash. Taka made some baseless claims about how they will defeat everyone and change the landscape of New Japan. He also came up with their new catchphrase “You already die”. Commentary and everyone else immediately dismissed them as a joke that will last maybe a couple of months. Oh how wrong we were.

Initially, the group did not have much success. Douki and Uncle Nobu lost to Catch 2/2 in their title match against them, Taka kept getting pinned and they failed to deliver on their promises to destroy everyone who stood in their way.

Taichi, as their only heavyweight, entered the New Japan Cup. His first match was against Sanada, a man he’s had some history with when he was still tagging with Zack Sabre Jr as Dangerous Tekkers. Sanada was a man not really renowned for anything, he hasn’t seen any singles success since joining LIJ by helping Tetsuya Naito cheat, except for a US title run cut short with no defenses due to an injury. He had blonde hair and the best or the worst move in pro wrestling history, depending on if you ask my friend Ryan or me. He never hits a moonsault. I don’t think Naito even knew who he was.

Safe to say, absolutely no one expected Sanada to defeat Taichi, much less his superior Naito. What we expected the least is for him to announce he is leaving LIJ for Just 4 Guys, which was now to be renamed JUST 5 GUYS. With dark hair, a clean shaven face and soon, new gear as well, Sanada really found his footing among this motley crew, the way he never managed in his seven years during LIJ. He went on to blaze through the competition in the Cup, winning it and subsequently defeating Kazuchika Okada for the IWGP world heavyweight championship. Absolutely no one has expected this to happen, ever. Yet somehow, it is also one of the coolest things to happen, ever.

His former faction members in LIJ mostly seemed to just sort of accept he left, except for Hiromu. He said while he understood Sanada’s reasons for leaving, he felt betrayed. Hiromu challenged Sanada to a match for the heavyweight championship. No junior heavyweight has been able to defeat the heavyweight champion in the history of the company, although this match is not the first of its kind. 

When Sanada defeated Hiromu, the returning Yota Tsuji walked out into the ring and beat him up, held up the LIJ fist and carried Hiromu out of the ring. We don’t really know if this means he’ll be joining the faction, but it’s very likely, and the two have a match set at Dominion.

Obviously other stuff has happened but this is already 4000 words long and I still have things to explain to you. 

Whats happening right now

As I’m writing this, the 30th Best of the Super Juniors is just beginning. BOSJ is a round robin style tournament, just like the G1 where wrestlers are divided into two blocks and everyone fights everyone in their block. Usually, the winners of the two blocks face off against each other to win the tournament, but this year, the winner of each block faces off against the person who came second in the other block, and the winners of those matches are the finalists. The winner has the right to challenge for the IWGP junior heavyweight championship at Dominion.

This year’s participants are as follows.

I think this is absolutely the perfect time to get int New Japan. The junior division is full of incredibly talented wrestlers who focus more on fast paced high flying style matches and every one of them is easy to watch and very entertaining. The entire tour will be broadcast with full english coverage.

How do I watch all of this

New Japan conveniently has a streaming service called NJPW world, membership is 999 yen per month. Dont forget to toggle it to english in the upper left corner! Most shows have english commentary and in my opinion it is pretty good commentary. Even if you don’t want to pay for the site, it has a schedule page (upper right corner) which even displays multiple timezones, and links to the card for every upcoming show.

The site also has some free content, for example the backstage comments after every show. Backstage comments are essentially short interviews with the wrestlers directly after every match, which makes for very fun adrenaline fuelled nonsense. Search backstage comment on the site, or check the njpwworld youtube channel. The videos always have subtitles, but it takes the transcribers time, subs are usually out a day after shows air.

PIRACY 

In case you’d like to sail the high seas, you have a couple of options.

Watching show’s live I would recommend watchprowrestling.org for. They upload the shows and you can watch them live as well with a bit of delay.

If you’re looking for older stuff, you should try searching on bilibili (dont be intimidated by the language barrier, its quite easy to use) or this specific user on vk.com.

MATCHES TO WATCH

Title changes and defenses:

Kazuchika Okada vs Jay White (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Kenny Omega vs Will Ospreay (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Hiromu Takahashi vs Master Wato vs El Desperado vs Taiji Ishimori (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Zack Sabre Jr vs Ren Narita FREE MATCH

Zack Sabre Jr vs Tomohiro Ishii FREE MATCH

Zack Sabre Jr vs Shota Umino FREE MATCH

Zack Sabre Jr vs Tom Lawlor FREE MATCH

Zack Sabre Jr vs Jeff Cobb FREE MATCH

Catch 2/2 vs YOH and Lio Rush (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Catch 2/2 vs Intergalactic Jetsetters (njpwworld) (unofficial link 2:35:08)

Hiromu Takahashi vs Lio Rush (njpwworld) 

Hiromu Takahashi vs YOH (njpwworld) (unofficial link2:48:13)

Hiromu Takahashi vs Robbie Eagles (njpwworld)

Hiromu Takahashi vs Yoshinobu Kanemaru (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Kazuchika Okada vs Shingo Takagi (njpwworld)

Kazuchika Okada vs Sanada (njpwworld)

Sanada vs Hiromu Takahashi (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Aussie Open vs Bishamon (njpwworld)

Aussie Open vs TMDK (njpwworld)

Aussie Open vs Motor City Machine Guns vs the Dream Team (Okada & Tanahashi) (njpwworld ppv)

Kairi vs Mayu Iwatani  (njpwworld)

Kairi vs Tam Nakano (njpwworld)

Kairi vs Mercedes Moné (unofficial link)

Mercedes Moné vs Kairi vs Hazuki (njpwworld)

Mercedes Moné vs Mayu Iwatani (njpwworld)

Tama Tonga vs El Phantasmo (njpwworld)

Tama Tonga vs David Finlay (unofficial link)

Taichi vs Shingo Takagi (njpwworld) (unofficial link 1:44:00)

Strong Style vs Kazuchika Okada, Hiroshi Tanahashi & Tomohiro Ishii (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Hikuelo vs Kenta (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Story matches

Tetsuya Naito vs Sanada (njpwworld)

Jay White vs Hikuleo (njpwworld)

Jay White vs Eddie Kingston (njpwworld) (unofficial link 1:04:00)

Bullet Club (David Finlay, Kenta, Taiji Ishimori & El Phantasmo) vs Guerillas of Destiny (Tama Tonga, Hikuleo & Jado) & Master Wato (njpwworld link)

just fun

Mark Davis vs Will Ospreay (njpwworld) (unofficial link)

Mark Davis vs EVIL (njpwworld)

Tetsuya Naito vs DOUKI (njpwworld) (unofficial link 2:11:32)

El Desperado vs Tomohiro Ishii (njpwworld ppv)

Shota Umino vs Tetsuya Naito (njpwworld)

Hiromu Takahashi vs Speedball Mike Bailey FREE SHOW

Taichi vs Will Ospreay (njpwworld)

[todaysdocument]

Copy of affidavit of W.R. Rutland filed in case of United States v. Columbus C. Nash, etal

Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United StatesSeries: Case FilesFile Unit: 12: United States v. Columbus Nash, et. al.

State of Louisiana vs ..li H. Flowers et al Affidavit of W. R. Rutland Copy Copy State of Louisiana Parish of Grant Personally appeared before me the undersigned authority, W. R. Rutland, who after being by me duly sworn, deposes and says That on Tueday 1st day of April he was violently and forcibly driven from his house in Colfax of this Parish and that he barely escaped with his life by flight in the woods. He further deposes and says, After he was driven from his house and in the night time of said day, one Eli H. Flowers together with Ethan Ellsey, James Williams, Lit Sadler, Lewis Michen, Edmond Ware, Baptiste Ellsey, William Ward, Reason Michen, aided and assisted by R. C. Register, Green D. Branbly, Thomas Railey, W. L. Calhoun, Kinared Harvey and numerous other persons not now known to affiant, forcibly broke open and entered his house and carried away therefrom, household furniture, clothes, provisions, bed and bedclothes, one piano, one guitar, one sewing machine, money and valuable papers and books to the value of Two Thousand Five Hundred Dollars, and converted the same to their own use contrary to law and the Peace and dignity of the State. Wherefore he prays for a Warrant for issue commanding the Sheriff or Constable or any of their lawful deputies to apprehend the said persons and cause them to appear before the Hon'l Daniel Kelly Parish Judge for the Parish of Winn, there to be dealt with as Law and Justice may require because the Civil Authority in this Parish is not able to enforce the Laws by reason of violence and lawlessness. Signed W. R. Rutland Sworn and Subscribed Before me on this 4th day of April A.D. 1873 Signed A. V. Ragan Justice of the Peace Parish of Grant State of Louisiana Parish of Grant I, David Hardy, a Notary Public in and for the Parish and State above written duly Commissioned and Sworn, do Certify that the above and foregoing is a true Copy of the Affidavit of W. R. Rutland, and signed and written by him, before A. V. Ragan, Known by me to be an acting Justice of the Peace in and for the Parish of Grant, duly Commissioned and entitled to be respected as such. In witness whereof I have signed this officially and affixed the stamp of my Seal, on the 14th Day of February A. D. 1874 David Hardy Notary Public [seal]

[caxycreations]

Just saw someone say "Friends with benefits implies the existence of it's opposite, friends with consequences" and

That is Trace

A prime example, and a very canon interaction with Trace and David below the cut

Trace: So I accidentally broke your coffee machine by punting it through your window.

David: My-...The cof-...MY WINDOW?? WHY?

Trace: You said I could use it.

David: TO MAKE COFFEE.

Trace: Look, I asked if I could use it for something, and you said "Of course! What are friends for?"

David: ...

Trace: Your fault for letting me do whatever just because we're friends.

[starbucks-with-a-twist]

INTRO POST

This is an ask blog for an indulgent AU called the Nth Dimensional Interdimensional Starbucks au. Also just called the Interdimensional Starbucks au. The Interdimensional Starbucks is a sub-space created within the monolith that orbited the planets. It features David Bowman as a 24/7 Starbucks barista who doesn't get paid, and HAL 9000, the sentient coffee machine and David's companion (lover??). Everything went smoothly at first, until Frank Poole showed up. All hell broke loose as more and more AIs from different realities showed up to take a spot in the singular Starbucks. David Bowman copes (see: tries to) with the influx of ridiculous orders from ridiculous characters. Hal provides commentary of varying degrees of helpfulness. Frank's here too. Hijinks ensue. Literally every AI you can think of, and some extra people to boot. MOD INFO BELOW (pictures)

[Image ID: Monolith (TMA-1) | they/them | Most least sane mod]

[Image ID: Mod David | he/they | The only mod that can program]

[Image ID: Mod Hal | she/he | The only mod that gets shit for colonialism even though the others did it too]

[justforbooks]

Mike Sadler, who has died aged 103, won both the military medal and the military cross as an honorary “founding member” of the wartime SAS before going on to a long career in the British secret intelligence service MI6. He was the last original member of the SAS, whose exploits were dramatised in the BBC series SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022), based on the 2016 book of the same name by Ben Macintyre.

When the second world war broke out, Sadler was working on a tobacco farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He joined the Rhodesian army and was promoted rapidly to sergeant, but established an early willingness to question the wisdom of his officers’ orders.

When his commanding officer threatened to strip him of his rank if he did not apologise to an officer with whom he had disagreed, he told him in no uncertain terms that he would reduce himself to the ranks.

As a result, he was highly receptive to an invitation in a Cairo bar to join the recently formed Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), which had been set up by the British in 1940 to mount behind-the-lines attacks on German and Italian forces on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier.

During the long journey from the Egyptian capital to the LRDG’s base at Kufra, in south-east Libya, Sadler became fascinated by the group’s use of stars and the position of the sun to navigate their way across more than 700 miles of largely featureless desert.

“It was a voyage of discovery because the maps, except in the very coastal regions, had nothing much on them except longitude and latitude lines and the odd dotted line marking a camel track or something,” he said. “It was entirely like being at sea.” As a result, when they arrived at Kufra, he was offered the role of unit navigator. “The idea of navigating by the stars was so fascinating I couldn’t resist.”

Sadler’s involvement with the newly formed SAS began some months later, in the immediate aftermath of its disastrous first mission. The regiment had tried to parachute into the desert in the dark during a fierce storm, and 34 of the 55 men taking part were killed or captured.

David Stirling, who had founded the SAS, needed to mount another operation quickly or see the unit disbanded, and asked the LRDG to ferry them on the next mission, in December 1941. Sadler was attached as navigator to the mission commander Blair “Paddy” Mayne, an Irish rugby international with a similar lack of respect for poor decision-making, and they got on well.

The raid, on an airfield at Wadi Tamet, on the Libyan coast west of Sirte, destroyed 24 aircraft, blew up a number of fuel dumps and killed or wounded around 30 Italian and Germans, ensuring the SAS survived.

During another raid on a German airfield at Sidi Haneish, 235 miles west of Cairo, in July 1942, Sadler, now officially transferred to the SAS, navigated 18 jeeps across the desert without headlights or maps. Storming across the airfield firing tracer bullets from their machine-guns, the men destroyed an estimated 37 aircraft.

Sadler was told to wait at the edge of the airfield and make sure everyone got out. “So I only got away from the airfield at dawn, after the raid, and found myself driving through a German column that had set out into the desert to look for us,” he recalled. “I drove through the column from the back and nobody noticed. I don’t think they expected anyone to be behind. They’d stopped to have a cup of tea on the roadside, and I drove on and out.” As a non-commissioned officer, Sadler was awarded the military medal for his bravery.

In January 1943, now a lieutenant, he was part of a small team led by Stirling looking for a route for the British forces to outflank the Germans and link up with allied forces in Tunisia.

They were captured by the Germans but Sadler and two colleagues escaped, crossing 100 miles of desert with little water and no compass or maps to meet up with US troops. An American journalist, Abbott Liebling, who saw Sadler when he arrived, said: “The eyes of this fellow were round and sky blue and his hair and whiskers were very fair. His beard began well under his chin, giving him the air of an emaciated and slightly dotty Paul Verlaine.”

Sadler reprised his nonchalant approach to driving past German vehicles during an operation in France in August 1944. He was in the first of two jeeps crossing a busy road east of Orleans when they encountered a heavily armed German patrol.

Rather than abandon his mission, Sadler drove slowly up to the patrol, waved to them and crossed the road, less than 6ft from the Germans. It was only when they had passed that the Germans realised they were British, and opened fire.

Sadler whipped his own jeep around and fired on the Germans, giving the second jeep time to escape before withdrawing himself, having knocked out two German machine-gun crews. As an officer, he could now be awarded the military cross.

Born in Kensington, central London, Mike was the son of Wilma and Adam Sadler. When his father became director of a plastics factory in Stroud, Gloucstershire, the family moved to the nearby village of Sheepscombe.

Sadler was educated at Bedales, an early co-educational private boarding school in Petersfield, Hampshire, that was founded on Montessori principles, with children freed from rigid educational methods and encouraged towards independent thought. He left in 1937 for Rhodesia, to work on a farm.

By the end of the war, he was adjutant to Mayne, now the SAS commander, and with the SAS being temporarily disbanded, they both volunteered to go to Antarctica with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (later the British Antarctic Survey).

Sadler was awarded the Polar medal for his work setting up a new base on Stonington Island, which was connected to the mainland by a glacier. When the glacier melted, the area it vacated was renamed Sadler’s Passage in his honour.

On his return to the UK, he briefly worked for the US embassy in London, before being recruited into MI6 to help plan cold-war operations. During the Falklands conflict he was involved in a deception operation over the sale of Exocet missiles to the Argentinians.

He stayed with the intelligence service until the mid-80s, spending his retirement indulging his love of sailing.

Sadler married twice, first, in 1947, to Anne Hetherington, a former driver with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Fany) whom he had met when she drove him to an airfield. They divorced after two years. In 1958 he married Patricia Benson, who worked for the Foreign Office, and they had a daughter, Sally. Patricia died in 2001. Sally survives him.

🔔 Willis Michael Sadler, SAS navigator and intelligence officer, born 22 February 1920; died 4 January 2024

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