#aviatrix gets lost
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aviatrix-ash · 1 year ago
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Was looking for something to get me out the house & keep my mind occupied last evening and I stumbled upon a PFlag hangout last night, it's the oldest organizations helping LGBTQIA+ folks. Mostly was of older folks too about in their 40s thru 60s. They were very nice and made me feel at home while they shared some stories of their experiences over the decades. Going again in about 3 weeks :]
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aviatrix-ash · 1 year ago
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Dined with a friend at the pizza hut last night. They really liked black pepper
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I offered them a pepperoni but the pepper must have been more tasty.
if you learn to love bugs with all your heart the world will feel half as hostile and a thousand times as big
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missannemakes · 9 months ago
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A set for another pregnant teacher at school. Round ripple blanket + Aviatrix hat. A classic. I used Red Heart Super Saver in Tea Leaf ( the green) and Super Saver Ombré in Sand for the blanket. I think the hat was Bernat Super Saver. (I lost the label…)
I stated these several weeks ago but did most of the work to finish them yesterday. I did the last round on the blanket this morning. The baby shower is today. Nothing like a deadline to get my adhd hyper focus moving!
I know my coworker is having a girl. I used neutral colors because that’s the vibe she had on her registry. Debating adding a flower to the hat and blankie, but maybe not…
Also Marshall wants you to know he helped. He tried to get tangled in the yarn this morning. So helpful.
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popcornoncemore · 6 days ago
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ELEVATED ACCESS CAN HELP YOU ACCESS HEALTHCARE!
Just so y'all are in the know-
One of the people I follow, the fabulous @aviatrix-ash wants to spread the word about a project that aims to help people get medical care by providing free transportation.
They want to counteract the push to make abortion and gender-affirming care less accessible.
From the Elevated Access website:
We are a non-profit organization that enables people to access healthcare by providing flights on private planes at no cost. Our volunteer pilot network transports clients seeking abortion or gender-affirming care across the United States.
Most people in the United States are within thirty miles of an air strip; at least one small airport with a single runway. The aviation community has been volunteering to provide “angel flights” for cancer patients, victims of natural disasters, and domestic violence survivors for decades. Unfortunately, today there is a growing need for folks to access additional types of assistance. Individuals are facing challenges to their bodily autonomy all over this country. And for those seeking health services, it can mean days of travel, time and wages lost from work, time away from families where they are the primary caregiver, and other significant financial investments. We don’t like that we need to exist, but we know that we can help.
Whether it’s abortion or gender-affirming care, Elevated Access is here to ease the burden and provide transportation for folks to receive life-saving healthcare.
Connect with Elevated Access here:
Or hear more about them in their own words:
youtube
Please reblog or share with others who may benefit from this sort of assistance or who are in a place to help support this project!
Stay strong and don't lose hope, we will get through this.
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foxsartdump · 2 years ago
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Free pass to ramble about anything you want!
MAAM YOU ARE GIVING ME A PASS TO RAMBLE WHICH I THANK YOU BUT I APOLOGIZE BECAUSE HOMESTUCK BRAINROTS BEEN ON MY MIND RECENTLY ALSO ITS GONNA BE SUPER LONG AND MOSTLY GRIAN CENTRIC
ok so ive mostly been thinking about how the other 2 life series (+100 hours just for fun) are involved into trafficstuck which led me to something more or less like the sketch below but ALSO how they actually started playing the game
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i posted it before but after some revision i changed 3l!grian and hc!grians places which MEANS that the reasons of why dl!grian and ll!grian masquerade as rust bloods change/get swapped aka dl!g hides his identity as to not be recognized as the descendant of The Deserter/3l!g (a controversial figure in this alternias society and history, the former emperor) while ll!grian, in a similar sense, to not get found out as the descendant of The Vanished emperor, took the sign and spectrum placement of The Aviatrix (a beloved historical figure in this beforans society) without knowing that he and his ancestors are the exact same troll
SO in both sessions both grians dreamselves (derse dreamers) are awake before anyone else and both get tricked by this aus Horrorterrors aka The Watchers, outer gods residing in the furthest ring that reach out to those who dream on derse and that, unlike the homestuck horrorterrors, like to get involved in their players lives even before the game sessions start. how do they get tricked? dl!grian gets shown visions of his pre!scratch selfs life (aka hc!grian) with promises that this could become what he and his friends could have if they play the game, meanwhile ll!grian gets promised freedom, an escape for he and his friends when it comes to their faiths once they reach maturity (theyre expected to take on the roles their ancestors used to have, none of them are really Thrilled by this and grian is the least so seeing as he and his supposed ancestor have 'no relation whatsover'). in both cases tho they both accept at the price that when the session is done/won/lost they will give themselves to The Watchers, think kinda like what happened to rose when she went grimdark but also Not Really (this also ensured the existence of the dream bubbles for both sessions)
tbh i also wanted to go a bit into how the ll!session was more or less a doomed, unwinnable, glitch-filled session (think how homestucks game over timeline got by the end of it, also the boogeyman curse was one of the major glitches fucking them over) which caused grian, scar and joel having to escape to the dream bubbles before the glitches (and the watchers in grians case) caught up to them but also led to scott (the time player) to technically be the last one living of the session and having to be the one to start the scratch while also ultimately escaping into the dream bubbles BUT this post is already long enough so yeaaaah
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whumpyhouse · 3 years ago
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Location: Sunset Ocean, south of Mount Ares somewhere. Date: August 1st, 2021. Anemone was drifting. For hours, the Enchantress waged fruitless war against what a less skeptical person would consider to be the might of Zephyrus himself, the Anemoi of the west wind pushing the aviatrix ever toward his favored cardinal direction, bearing her away from the rest of the Enchanters. With each gust of wind, Anemone found herself drifting further and further, first losing sight of her squadron, and then, away from the mountains themselves. Far from the objective, far from home, far from the security of her formation. Each gale rattled her wings, sent her wobbling, one wing dipping before she righted it with a herculean push of her own against the control wheel. At first, Nem had attempted to call out, but she was met with silence. Not even a crackle over her comms signaled that anyone heard her. Not Enchanter 1, not from Tower Control, not from High Command, not from anyone. Anemone Sideris was alone, a swallow displaced during migration, one lone bird seeking its companions and finding none in their wake. A lesser-trained person might have panicked, and for one, terrifying instant, fear seized Anemone's heart. But Nem was not a lesser person. One thing Nem could not be called was weak-willed. She sucked in her breath through her mask, which suddenly felt entirely too snug and claustrophobic around her face. She willed the bunched musculature of her shoulders to relax. Her white-knuckled grip on the throttle went lax for a moment before the next gale rattled Honeybee's wings, a metallic whir that Nem could hear even within the cockpit. She frowned, giving a loving pat to her control panel, even though her fingers trembled in leftover fear. Easy, Honeybee, momma's got you. She longed to reassure the struggling LAF, in spite of knowing full well that it was no living creature, despite how it roared to life and bore her into the skies. Skies that were just beginning to lighten with the first, golden rays of the coming dawn, gilded fingers spreading skyward from a ribbon of blue, a grand portent of the arrival of Helios to carry the sun across the sky, west to east, the barrier between sea and sky near impossible to discern for those unaccustomed to it. Nem knew well what had happened- she had been blown so far off course to the west that now she was no longer on the boundary of Mount Ares at all. The endless stretch of blue below was the Sunset Ocean. It didn't connect at first. All Nem could think about was in how much trouble she was in, the tongue lashing she'd receive for not only getting blown adrift like this when an important mission was on the line, but for being unable to respond to any questions or commands that she was sure were peppered in the comms. She could only pray that her announcement that she had been blown west had come through before the grid went down. It was only once she broke through the cloud cover entirely that it hit her. Below, ships. Enemy ships. And not just a harmless fishing fleet. Spread below her like pieces on a chessboard was the entirety of the Solis fleet. It was then that she began to panic, her breath coming in terrified, hitched gasps. Her fingers curled hard against her control wheel again, just in time for the first volley of bullets to ping loudly against Bee's armored plating. All along her wings, the shells punched in, and Nem gave a savage hiss between her teeth. She pushed the throttle as hard as it would go... and began to barrel roll, sea and sky becoming one, the ribbons intertwined as she danced along the drafts, a suicidal downward dart like a crane diving for fish, embellished with the flourishing spins of a ballerina en pointe. Nem cursed heartily. She was surrounded, outgunned, outmanned, with but her Bee between herself and those shells, those missiles hurtling her way. She pulled up at the last minute, inches to spare before the Honeybee's nose kissed the water, launching herself up, up, up, toward the slowly brightening canvas of the sky, cobalt making way for azure. Her spindly arms trembled with the effort, feet dug in hard beneath her, muscles screaming with the effort, and G forces pushing her tiny body to its limit. She sucked in her breath and held it, keenly feeling the shriek of her bones and muscles as gravity fought against her, the corners of her eyes briefly painted in grey before she righted herself again. Climb, climb, albatross, dart and weave, honeybee, relevée, pirouette, en garde. All around her were bright flashes of light, plumes of smoke, the ring and rumble of battle, the scream of mortar fire. If she was going to go down, she reasoned, grimly, with more than a hint of hatred in her heart, she was going to do down swinging, god damn it. With a flick of her thumb, she engaged her anti-ship missiles. She had four; she could only pray that would be enough to take down the one currently raining more hellfire upon her than the other. Both were destroyers, well provisioned, dangerous as all Hades, looming large and foreboding as Kronos himself, and two each would not be enough. Damaging both was insufficient. No, she'd send the fuckers to Hades if she had her way. A mechanical chirp as Bee notified her that the weapons were ready. Weaving side to side, spinning and rolling and turning and pitching every step of the way, Anemone stilled briefly in the air as she lined up her shots, pale, kohl-smudged eyes narrowing from behind her mask as she aligned herself with the objective. Bam. She mouthed the word as Bee shuddered back from the recoil, her missiles seeking home, trailing white smoke as they spiraled down to the ship below. She exhaled as she witnessed her projectiles colliding exactly where she had wanted them: punching cleanly through the ship's hull, just at the waterline, taking out the mortars and a chunk of the deck with it. The control tower was burning, the guns were offline, and she was taking water. She was dead where she lie, and Anemone's lips, hidden from view, curled upward in a savage grin. Serves you right, fuckers. Anemone lavished in her momentary victory just seconds before Bee screamed all around her, the entire craft giving a hard jerk, sending Nem spiraling again. Spinning, struggling in free fall, Nem barely noticed the smoke that was obscuring her vision, or the fact that it was filling her cockpit. She was on fire, she had lost control, and she was spiraling to the sea. She peered over to her left, and found, to her horror, no wing there anymore. Bee's wing had been cleanly sheared off by retaliating fire from the other destroyer. Anemone swore again, more insistently, her vision briefly obscured by tears. Fuck, fuck, fuck! She was downed, her Bee was mortally wounded. And if she didn't eject, she, too, was done for. She peered up, to the sky just beginning to crest the horizon, as though Helios himself was mocking her, the patron deity of her enemies having clearly shown his favor, his dominion, over gentle, mysterious Luna. Her goddess was nowhere to be found. Anemone had been correct, for she had been in the domain of the gods and had found them empty. There was no favor to be granted to the forsaken. She peered down through the smoky haze, even as the flames began to climb up into her cockpit, licking along her skin, the flesh crackling and peeling like old parchment from the touch of fire. Resignation settled in. No, she decided. She would not eject. She and Bee would go down together, sinking beneath the waves. She only hoped the impact of her nose upon the waves would kill her before anything else. But once again, the depths of her forsakenness had escaped her. An air to air missile sent from one of the angry hornets above and behind her exploded along that same nose, crumpling the entire front of the craft into Anemone's lap. A pained shriek tore from her lips as she felt her bones give way, legs and torso pinned beneath the wreckage, as the gathering smoke and flame within the cockpit choked and scalded her. A scream that was cut short with the collision of Bee as the craft slammed into the ocean below. Enchanter Three had gone silent in its entirety, the fragile honeybee sliding down into the depths below, scattering her wings along the wreckage.
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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years ago
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Anonymous asked: My granddaughter is 16 and in the us navy sea cadet program here in the USA. She hopes to become a naval aviator. She love reading military books. Any recommendations for her. Her mom says she reads anything military from equipment to history. I could use advice on a reading list to buy books for her. William Law
Thank you William for sending me this. It’s certainly one of the most interesting asks I’ve ever had the pleasure to reply to because it involves my love of Classics and also being a former military aviator.
So I put some thought into it because I can sense a kindred spirit in your grand daughter. She must be a remarkable young girl if she is as focused and committed as you say she is in terms of her life goals. If I may say so she is also blessed to have a grandfather like you who recognises the value of reading books to aid her and inspire her.
I have tried to confine myself to the narrow parameters of recommending books that can appeal to a precocious teenager that have a connection to naval and maritime themes (rather than the landed military) and have a general connection to women in the navy or as aviators. So the list is broken into personal memoirs, naval and maritime history, fictional works, and finally a select Classics list.
If you will indulge me I have included the Classics because I firmly believe a grounding in the Classics (from as early age as possible) is so culturally enriching and personally rewarding. In my experience the wisest military leaders and veterans I have ever had the privilege of knowing were grounded in the Classics.
To my mind Classic history, literature and poetry belongs in any library relating to maritime affairs. It provides a flavour of sea life, helping strategists understand this alien element. Just as important, it enlivens the topic. As you will know, ships and fleets do not make history; people do.
It is by no means a comprehensive list but something to start with. I’ve decided not to give you a bullet point laundry list but add some notes of my own because I found it fun to do - and in doing so I found myself looking back on my teenage years with equal icky amounts of embarrassment, regret, foolishness, fun, and joy. 
1. Personal memoirs
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
‘Poetry in flight’ best describes this 1942 memoir from aviatrix Beryl Markham of bush flying in Africa and long-distance flight, which includes her solo flight across the Atlantic. Lyrical and expressive her descriptions of the adventure of flying continue to inspire generations of women pilots, including myself when I learned to fly.
Markham was a colonial child and was raised by her father on a remote farm in Njoro, British East Africa (present-day Kenya). After a tomboyish childhood spent roaming the Kenyan wilds, she moved upcountry to Molo, becoming a racehorse trainer. There she saw her first plane and met British pilot Tom Black, who became her flight instructor and lover. Soon Markham earned her commercial pilot’s license, the first woman in Kenya to do so, and began to freelance as a bush pilot. Much of West With the Night concerns itself with this period in Markham’s life, detailing her flights in an Avro Avian biplane running supplies to remote outposts or scouting game for safaris.
Since airfields were essentially nonexistent in Africa at the time, Markham’s flights were particularly dangerous, punctuated with white-knuckle landings in forest clearings and open fields. In fact the dangers of African flying claimed the lives of a number of aviators. Markham eloquently describes her own search for a downed pilot: “Time and distance together slip smoothly past the tips of my wings without sound, without return, as I peer downward over the night-shadowed hollows of the Rift Valley and wonder if Woody, the lost pilot, could be there, a small pinpoint of hope and of hopelessness listening to the low, unconcerned song of the Avian - flying elsewhere.”
Markham’s memoir shies away from personal details - she is rumoured to have had an affair with an English prince - and straightforward chronology, instead focusing on vivid scenes gathered from a well-lived life. Rarely does one encounter such an evocative sense of a time and place as she creates. The heat and dust of Africa emanate from her prose. Anyone interested in aviation, in Africa, or in simply reading an absorbing book will find much to like in its pages. Ernest Hemingway, a friend and fellow safari enthusiast, wrote of Markham’s memoir, “I wish you would get it and read it because it really is a bloody wonderful book.”
It is a bloody brilliant book and it’s one of the books closest to my heart as it personally resonated with my nomadic life growing up in foreign countries where once the British empire made its mark.
I first read it on my great aunt’s Kenyan tea farm during the school holidays in England. I got into huge trouble for taking a treasured first edition - personally signed by Markham herself - from the library of my great aunt without permission. My great aunt - not an easy woman to get on with given her questionable eccentricities - wrote a stern letter to the head teacher of my girls’ boardng school in England that the schools standards and moral Christian teachings must be in terminal decline if girls were encouraged to pilfer books willy nilly from other people’s bookshelves and thus she would not - as an alum herself - be donating any more money to the school. It was one more sorry blot in my next school report.
Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History by Keith O’Brien
For pioneering pilots of the 1920s and 1930s, the challenges were enormous. For women it was even more daunting. In this marvellous history, Keith O’Brien recounts the early years of aviation through a generation of American female pilots who carved out a place for themselves and their sisterhood. Despite the sensation they created, each “went missing in her own way.” This is the inspiring untold story of five women from very different walks of life - including a New York socialite, an Oakland saleswoman, a Florida dentist’s secretary and a Boston social worker - who fought and competed against men in the  high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s — and won.
Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly and deadly pursuit. The derisive press dubbed the first women’s national air race “The Powder Puff Derby.”
It’s a brisk, spirited history of early aviation focused on 5 irrepressible women. Florence Klingensmith, a high-school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota, and who trained as a mechanic so she could learn planes inside and out but whose first aviation job was as a stunt girl, standing on a wing in her bathing suit. Louise McPhetridge Thaden a girl who grew up as a tomboy and later became the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee was determined to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart was of course the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled. Ruth Nichols who chafed at the constraints of her blue-blood family's expectations of marrying into wealth and into high society.
In 1928, when women managed to get jobs in other male dominated fields, fewer than 12 had a pilot’s license, and those ambitious for prizes and recognition faced entrenched sexism from the men who ran air races, backed fliers, and financed the purchase of planes. They decided to organise: “For our own protection,” one of them said, “we must learn to think for ourselves, and do as much work as possible on our planes.” Although sometimes rivals in the air, they forged strong friendships and offered one another unabated encouragement. O’Brien vividly recounts the dangers of early flight: In shockingly rickety planes, pilots sat in open cockpits, often blinded by ice pellets or engine smoke; instruments were unreliable, if they worked at all; sudden changes in weather could be life threatening. Fliers regularly emerged from their planes covered in dust and grease. Crashes were common, with planes bursting into flames; but risking injury and even death failed to dampen the women’s passion to fly. And yet their bravery was only scoffed at by male prejudice. Iconic  oilman Erle Halliburton believed, “Women are lacking in certain qualities that men possess.” Florence Klingensmith’s crash incited a debate about allowing menstruating women to fly.
And yet these women still took off in wooden crates loaded with gasoline. They flew over mountains, deserts and seas without radar or even radios. When they came down, they knew that their landings might be their last. But together, they fought for the chance to race against the men - and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all. And When Louise Thaden became the first woman to win a national race, even the great Charles Lindbergh fell curiously silent.
O'Brien nicely weaves together the stories of these five remarkable women in the spirit of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff who broke the glass ceiling to achieve greatness.
Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot by James Stockdale
Thoughts on issues of character, leadership, integrity, personal and public virtue, and ethics, the selections in this volume converge around the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity- lessons just as valid for the challenges of present-day life as they were for the author’s Vietnam experience.Vice Admiral James Stockdale, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, served in the U.S. Navy from 1947 to 1979, beginning as a test pilot and instructor at Patuxent River, Maryland, and spending two years as a graduate student at Stanford University. He became a fighter pilot and was shot down on his second combat tour over North Vietnam, becoming a prisoner of war for eight years, four in solitary confinement. The highest-ranking naval officer held during the Vietnam War, he was tortured fifteen times and put in leg irons for two years. It’s a book that makes you think how much character is important in good at anything, especially being a thoughtful and wise leader in the heat of battle.
Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life And Maybe The World by Admiral William H. McRaven   On May 17, 2014, Admiral William H. McRaven addressed the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin on their Commencement day. Taking inspiration from the university's slogan, "What starts here changes the world," he shared the ten principles he learned during Navy Seal training that helped him overcome challenges not only in his training and long Naval career, but also throughout his life; and he explained how anyone can use these basic lessons to change themselves-and the world-for the better.
Admiral McRaven's original speech went viral with over 10 million views.
Building on the core tenets laid out in his speech, McRaven now recounts tales from his own life and from those of people he encountered during his military service who dealt with hardship and made tough decisions with determination, compassion, honour, and courage.
The book is told with great humility and optimism. It provides simple wisdom, practical advice, and words of encouragement that will inspire readers to achieve more, even in life's darkest moments.
Service: A Navy SEAL at War by Marcus Luttrell with James D. Hornfischer 
Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell is more known for his other famous best seller Lone Survivor but this one I think is also a thrilling war story, Service is above all a profoundly moving tribute to the warrior brotherhood, to the belief that nobody goes it alone, and no one will be left behind. Luttrell returned from his star-crossed mission in Afghanistan with his bones shattered and his heart broken. So many had given their lives to save him-and he would have readily done the same for them. As he recuperated, he wondered why he and others, from America's founding to today, had been willing to sacrifice everything - including themselves-for the sake of family, nation, and freedom.
In Service, we follow Marcus Luttrell to Iraq, where he returns to the battlefield as a member of SEAL Team 5 to help take on the most dangerous city in the world: Ramadi, the capital of war-torn Al Anbar Province. There, in six months of high-intensity urban combat, he would be part of what has been called the greatest victory in the history of US Special Operations forces. We also return to Afghanistan and Operation Redwing, where Luttrell offers powerful new details about his miraculous rescue.
Throughout, he reflects on what it really means to take on a higher calling, about the men he's seen lose their lives for their country, and the legacy of those who came and bled before. I did rub shoulders with the US special forces community out on my time in Afghanistan and whilst their public image deifies them I found them to be funny, pranksters, humble, brave, and down to earth beer guzzling hogs who cheerfully cheat at cards.
The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles A. Lindbergh
Being one of the classics in aviation history, this well written book is an epic aviator’s adventure tale of all time. Charles Lindbergh is best known for its famous nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927 as it changed the history of aviation. “The Spirit of St. Louis” takes the reader on an extraordinary trans-Atlantic journey in a single-engine plane. As well as provides insight into the early history of American aviation and includes some great fuel conservation tips!
20 Hrs. 40 mins by Amelia Earhart
How can any woman pilot not be inspired by Amelia Earhart?  Earhart's first transatlantic flight of June 1928 during which she flew as a passenger accompanying pilot Wilmer Stultz and co-pilot Louis Gordon. The team departed from Trepassey Harbor, Newfoundland, in a Fokker F.VIIb/3m on 17 June 1928, landing at Pwll near Burry Port, South Wales, exactly 20 hours and 40 minutes later. The book is an interesting read but I much prefer her other book written in 1932 The Fun Of It. The book is Earhart's account of her growing obsession with flying, the final chapter of which is a last minute addition chronicling her historic solo transatlantic flight of 1932. The work contains the mini-record of Earhart's international broadcast from London on 22 May 1932. Earhart set out from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland on 20 May 1932. After a flight lasting 14 hours and 56 minutes Earhart landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland. The work also includes a list of other works on aviation written by women, emblematic of Earhart's desire to promote women aviators.
2. Naval and military history
The U.S. Navy: A Concise History by Craig L Symonds
Symonds’s The U.S. Navy: A Concise History is a fantastic book from one of the doyennes of US naval history. I cannot think of any other work on the US Navy that provides such a thorough overview of American naval policy, navy combat operations, leadership, technology, and culture in such a succinct manner. This book is perfect for any reader - young or old -  just wading into the waters of naval history and not knowing where to start, or for someone who wishes to learn a little bit about each era of the navy, from its founding to its modern-day mission and challenges.
His other distinguished works are more in depth - mostly about the Second World War such as the Battle of Midway and the Normandy landings - but this is a good introduction to his magisterial books. His latest book came out in 2019 called World War II at Sea: A Global History. I have not read this yet but from others who have they say it is a masterful overview of the war at sea.
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy by Ian W. Toll
Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military became the most divisive issue facing the new government. The founders - particularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adams - debated fiercely. Would a standing army be the thin end of dictatorship? Would a navy protect from pirates or drain the treasury and provoke hostility? Britain alone had hundreds of powerful warships.
From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliff-hanger campaign against Tripoli, to the war that shook the world in 1812, Ian W. Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of Founding Brothers and the narrative flair of Patrick O’Brian.
The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson by Roger Knight
The starting point of Roger Knight’s magnificent new biography is to explain how Nelson achieved such extraordinary success. Knight places him firmly in the context of the Royal Navy at the time. He analyses Nelson’s more obvious qualities, his leadership strengths and his coolness and certainty in battle, and also explores his strategic grasp, the condition of his ships, the skill of his seamen and his relationships with the officers around him – including those who could hardly be called friendly.
This biography takes a shrewd and sober look at Nelson’s status as a hero and demolishes many of the myths that were so carefully established by the early authors, and repeated by their modern successors.
While always giving Nelson his due, Knight never glosses over the character flaws of his heroic subject. Nelson is seen essentially as a "driven" personality, craving distinction in an age increasingly coloured by notions of patriotic heroism, traceable back to the romantic (and entirely unrealistic) depiction of the youthful General James Wolfe dying picturesquely at the moment of victory in 1759. Nor does Knight take Nelson's side in dealing with that discreditable phase in 1798-99, when he is influenced, much for the worse, by his burgeoning involvement with Lady Hamilton at Naples and Palermo. Knight accepts that this interlude has left an indelible stain on Nelson's naval and personal record. But he traces the largely destructive course of Nelson's passion for Emma with appropriate sensitivity.
Nelson was a shrewd political operator who charmed and impressed political leaders and whose advancement was helped by the relatively weak generation of admirals above him. He was a difficult subordinate, only happy when completely in command, and capable of great ruthlessness. Yes he was flawed, but Nelson's flaws, including his earlier petulance in dealing with higher naval authority - only brought fully under control towards the end of his career - pale before his remarkable strengths. His outstanding physical and moral courage and his inspired handling of officers and men are repeatedly and effectively illustrated.
1812: The Navy’s War by George C. Daughan
When war broke out between Britain and the United States in 1812, America’s prospects looked dismal. British naval aggression made it clear that the ocean would be the war’s primary battlefield - but America’s navy, only twenty ships strong, faced a practiced British fleet of more than a thousand men-of-war.
Still, through a combination of nautical deftness and sheer bravado, a handful of heroic captains and their stalwart crews managed to turn the tide of the war, besting the haughty skippers of the mighty Royal Navy and cementing America’s newly won independence.
In 1812: The Navy’s War, award-winning naval historian George C. Daughan draws on a wealth of archival research to tell the amazing story of this tiny, battle tested team of Americans and their improbable yet pivotal victories. Daughan thrillingly details the pitched naval battles that shaped the war, and shows how these clashes proved the navy’s vital role in preserving the nation’s interests and independence. This well written history is the first complete account in more than a century of how the U.S. Navy rescued the fledgling nation and secured America’s future. Daughan’s prose is first-rate, and his rousing accounts of battles at sea will certainly appeal to a popular audience. 
I was given this book as a tongue in cheek gift from an American friend who was an ex-US Marine officer with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was obviously trying to rib me as good friends do. But I really did enjoy this book.
Among the most interesting insights is Daughan’s judgment on the effect of the American invasion attempts in Canada; all ultimately defeated. Demanded by enthusiastic War Hawks unencumbered by knowledge or experience who predicted that the Canadians would flock to U.S. banners, these incursions became the groundwork for a unified Iraq Canada - Ha!
What I liked was the fact that Daughan places the war in its crucial European context, explaining in detail how the course of the Napoleonic Wars shaped British and American decision making and emphasising the North American theatre’s secondary status to the European conflict. While they often verbally castigated Napoleon’s imperial ambitions, American leaders were in the uncomfortable position of needing Napoleon to keep winning while they fought Britain, and his defeat and (first) exile to Elba prompted an immediate scramble to negotiate a settlement. Despite its significance, few historians have bothered to systematically place the War of 1812 in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, and Daughan’s book does exactly that.
Empires of the Seas: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Centre of the World by Roger Crowley
In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, the great Muslim ruler of the Ottoman Empire, dispatched an invasion fleet to the Christian island of Rhodes. This would prove to be the opening shot in an epic clash between rival empires and faiths for control of the Mediterranean and the center of the world.
In Empires of the Sea, acclaimed historian Roger Crowley has written a thrilling account of this brutal decades-long battle between Christendom and Islam for the soul of Europe, a fast-paced tale of spiralling intensity that ranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar.
Crowley conjures up a wild cast of pirates, crusaders, and religious warriors struggling for supremacy and survival in a tale of slavery and galley warfare, desperate bravery and utter brutality.
Empires of the Sea is a story of extraordinary colour and incident, and provides a crucial context for our own clash of civilisations.
One hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander by Admiral Sandy Woodward RN
Written by the man who masterminded the British victory in the Falklands, this engrossing memoir chronicles events in the spring of 1982 following Argentina’s takeover of the South Atlantic islands. Admiral Sandy Woodward, a brilliant military tactician, presents a complete picture of the British side of the battle. From the defeat of the Argentine air forces to the sinking of the Belgrano and the daring amphibious landing at Carlos Water, his inside story offers a revealing account of the Royal Navy’s successes and failures.
At times reflective and personal, Woodward imparts his perceptions, fears, and reactions to seemingly disastrous events. He also reveals the steely logic he was famous for as he explains naval strategy and planning. His eyewitness accounts of the sinking of HMS Sheffield and the Battle of Bomb Alley are memorable.
Many in Whitehall and the armed forces considered Woodward the cleverest man in the navy. French newspapers called him “Nelson.” Margaret Thatcher said he was precisely the right man to fight the world’s first computer war. Without question, the admiral’s memoir makes a significant addition to the official record.
At the same time it provides readers with a vivid portrayal of the world of modern naval warfare, where equipment is of astonishing sophistication but the margins for human courage and error are as wide as in the days of Nelson.
3. Fiction
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
The majestic novel that inspired the classic Hollywood film The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart. Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life-and mutiny-on a US Navy warship in the Pacific theatre was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II.
The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
It’s a fantastic novel that inspired a Steve McQueen film of the same name. Watch the movie if you haven’t, but read the book. It’s impossible to do a story of this sweep justice in two hours, even with the great McQueen starring.
Naval friends tell me The Sand Pebbles has been a fixture on the US Chief of Naval Operations’ Professional development reading list, and thus all mariners should be encouraged to read. And it’s easy to tell why. Most American seafarers will interact with the Far East in this age of the pivot, as indeed they have for decades.
Told through the eyes of a junior enlisted man, The Sand Pebbles recounts the deeds of the crew of the fictional U.S. Navy gunboat San Pablo during the turbulent 1920s, when various parties were vying for supremacy following the overthrow of China’s Qing Dynasty.
It’s a book about the mutual fascination, and sometimes repulsion, between Americans and Chinese; the tension between American missionaries and the sailors entrusted with protecting them; and China’s descent into chaos following the collapse of dynastic rule.
How do you separate fact from fiction or myth when writing a historical novel. Wisely, McKenna lets the reader to conclude there’s an element of myth to all accounts of history. Causality - what factors brought about historical events - is in the eye of the beholder. The best an author of historical fiction can do, then, is devote ample space to all contending myths and leave it up to readers to judge. Sailors, missionaries, and ordinary Chinese get their say in his pages, to illuminating effect. Authors report, the readers decide.
Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P.W. Singer and August Cole 
The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic–drone strikes to old warships from the navy’s “ghost fleet.” Fighter pilots unleash a Pearl Harbor-style attack; American veterans become low-tech insurgents; teenage hackers battle in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilise for cyber-war; and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on blending the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future.
The book’s title, Ghost Fleet, comes from an expression used in the U.S. Navy that refers to partially or fully decommissioned ships kept in reserve for potential use in future conflict. These ships, as one might imagine, are older and naturally less technologically sophisticated than their modern counterparts. Singer and Cole cleverly use this concept, retiring older ships and weaponry in favour of newer versions with higher technological integration, to illustrate a key motif in the book: while America’s newest generation of warfighting machinery and gear is capable of inflicting greater levels of punishment, it is also vulnerable to foreign threats in ways that its predecessors were not. The multi-billion dollar, next generation F-35 aircraft, for instance, is rendered powerless after it is revealed that Chinese microprocessor manufacturers had implanted malicious code into products intended for the jet.
I’m a huge sucker for intelligently written thrillers and I found Ghost Fleet to be a page-turning speculative thriller in the spirit of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, it is unique in that every trend and technology featured in the novel - no matter how sci-fi it may seem - is real, or could be soon.
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian (Aubery-Maturin series)
This, the first of twenty in the splendid series of the famous Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship’s Irish-Catalan surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson’s navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
I have the first editions of some of the series and I have treasured them ever since I read them as a teenager. I felt like stowing away on the first ship I could find in Plymouth. The Hollywood film version by Peter Weir with Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey is a masterful swashbuckling film and perhaps a delightful way into the deeper riches of the other novels in the epic series.
Beat to Quarters by C.S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower series)
Horatio Hornblower remains for many the best known and most loved of these British naval heroes of Napoleonic Age. In ten books Forester recounts Hornblower's rise from midshipman to admiral, during the British navy's confrontation with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. For readers, the books work as a window into history because of the outstanding details that appear in these books. Through this singular series, according to critics, C.S. Forrester - like Patrick O’Brian - has contributed his own uniqueness to the confluence of fact and fiction.
They are above all ‘ripping good yarns’, with fast-moving plots, stirring battle scenes, lively dialogue, and vivid characters, but they also offer a picture of the British navy during the period; and Hornblower himself is an original and memorable literary creation as fictionally charismatic as James Bond.
Young Hornblower is introspective, morose, self-doubting. He is crippled by the fear that he does not have the qualities to  command other men. He is harder on himself than anyone else would dare to be – and is, simply, one of the most complete creations of character in fiction. This is why many teenagers love Hornblower because they can see something of themselves in his adventures from from chronic self-doubt to soaring swashbuckling self-confidence. Hornblower is much more relatable than the brooding seasoned Jack Aubrey for instance.
I recommend reading the books in the order they were written rather than chronologically. In the first written novel, Beat to Quarters (also published as The Happy Return), we find Hornblower in command of a frigate in lonely Pacific waters off Spanish Central America. He has to deal with a mad revolutionary, fight single-ship duels with a larger vessel, and cope with Lady Barbara Wellesley (who provides a romantic interest to the series).
In A Ship of the Line Hornblower is sent into the Mediterranean, where he wreaks havoc on French coastal communications before plunging into a battle against the odds. Flying Colours is mostly set in France: in it Hornblower escapes captivity and returns to England a hero. In The Commodore he is sent with a squadron into the Baltic, where he has to cope with the complex politics of the region as well as helping with the siege of Riga. And in Lord Hornblower a mutiny leads to involvement with the fall of Napoleon — and brings him to prison and a death sentence during the Hundred Days. Forester then went back and described Hornblower's earlier career. Lieutenant Hornblower is perhaps my favourite of the Hornblower books.
Piece of cake by Derek Robinson
It’s an epic tome covering the opening twelve months of World War Two, from the phony war in France to the hasty retreat back across the Channel and then the valiant stand against the might of the Luftwaffe in what became known as the Battle of Britain.
The book follows the exploits of the fictional Hornet squadron and its members, a group of men who work hard and play harder. Though fiction, this immaculately researched novel based on an RAF Hurricane fighter squadron in 1940 highlights the ill-preparedness of Britain in the early stages of Word War Two.
Its British black humour is on full throttle with its nuanced observations of class politics and institutional ineptness. The manic misfits, heroes and bullies of Hornet Squadron discover that aerial combat is nothing like what they have been trained for. The writing sears the reader’s brain and produces some of the finest writing on the air war ever put to paper.
Be warned, though, this story isn’t about one specific character or ‘hero’. Indeed, just as you get to know a pilot, they are either chopped or killed; such is the nature of war in the air. Even though this is initially frustrating, you soon come to realise just how authentic Robinson’s storytelling is, and that this is exactly what it must have been like to be part of an RAF squadron on active service, never knowing who of your comrades would be alive from day to day. And, although the war proper for Hornet squadron doesn’t start until late in the book, when it does come the rendition of the dogfights in the air are so gripping that you’ll feel like you are actually there, sat next to the pilot in his cramped Hurricane cockpit, as Messerschmitt 109s scream by spitting death from all points of the compass.
All in all, this is a thoroughly entertaining (and educational) novel, and a must read for anyone interested in the RAF and how so few stood against so many. It has the dark humour of Heller’s Catch 22 but with a very distinctive British humour that can be lost on other foreigners. I recommend it as a honest and healthy antidote to anyone thinking of all pilots and the brave deeds they do in some deified light when in fact they are human and flawed as anyone else. Anyone who’s ever been a pilot will recognise some archetype in their own real life in this darkly comic British novel.
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim has it all. It's not just a novel of the sea but a work of moral philosophy.
Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In my humble opinion the greatest aviation fiction book ever written. It made the celebrated French aviator famous and Antoine de Saint-Exupery would go on to write the timeless classic The Little Prince.
Saint-Exupéry, though born into French nobility was always the odd one out as a child. Portly but jovial, he had bags of courage and curiosity to match his thirst for adventure and travel. He doggedly pursued his dream of becoming a pioneering pilot. In the 1930s he was an airline pilot who flew the north African and south Atlantic mail routes. During the long lonely hours in the cockpit he had enough time to accumulate experience and reflections which could be fit into Night Flight.
The novel itself narrates the terrifying story of Fabien, a pilot who conducted night mail planes, from Patagonia, Chile, and Paraguay to Argentina in the early days of commercial aviation when it was dangerous and pilots died often in horrendous accidents. The book romantically captures the danger and loneliness of these early commercial pilots, blazing routes in the days before radar, GPS and jet engines.
Night Flight is a good gateway into his other aviation themed books. Each of them are magical in capturing the austere feelings of seeing the world and its landscapes from above. Southern Mail, The Aviator, and Wind, Sand and Stars are fantastic reads.
Night Flight is inspiring for every pilot by sharing a unique magic of piloting an airplane.
These books changed my life as it inspired me to fly as a late teen. I still re-read Saint-Exupery’s writings sometimes as a way to tap into that youthful joy of discovering the wonders of flying a plane and when the impossible was only limited by your will and imagination. I cannot recommend his novels highly enough.
4. Classical
The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson
Homer should the read at any age and for all seasons. I’ve chosen Emily Wilson’s recent translation because it’s good and not just because her publication was billed as the first woman to ever translate Homer. Wilson is an Oxford educated Classicist now a professor of Classics at Pennsylvania. Every discussion of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is prefaced with the fact that hers is the first English translation of the poem by a woman, but it’s worth noting that Caroline Alexander’s Iliad (Ecco 2015) was also published as the first English translation by a woman to much less hoopla (to say nothing of Sarah Ruden’s Aeneid, Yale University Press 2009).
While a woman translating Homer’s epic is certainly a huge milestone, Wilson’s interpretation is a radical, fascinating achievement regardless of her gender. Disregard the marketing hype and the Wilson’s translation of Odysseus’ epic sea voyage home still stands tall for its fast paced narrative.
Compared with her predecessors’, Wilson’s Odyssey feels more readable, more alive: the diction, with some exceptions discussed below, is straightforward, and the lines are short. The effect is to turn the Odyssey into a quick-paced page turner, an experience I’d never had reading this epic poem in translation.
The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians by Thucydides translated by Jeremy Mynott
This is the classic treatise about what is essentially rowboats and spears of one of the most important and defining wars of Western civilisation. A long story of people killing one another, cynically justifying their cruelties in pursuit of power, making gross, stupid and fatal miscalculations, in a world devoid of justice. It's a long, drawn out tragedy without any redeeming or uplifting catharsis. If you are not already an extreme pessimist, you will lose all illusions about the inherent goodness of human beings and the possibility of influencing the course of events for the better after you read this book. You will be sadder but you will be wiser. Thucydides called his account of two decades of war between Athens and Sparta “a possession for all time,” and indeed it is the first and still most famous work in the Western historical tradition.
People look at me in a shocked way when I tell them that you can learn 90 percent of what you need to know about politics and war from Thucydides. Maritime strategy falls among the remaining 10 percent. If you want to read about the making of strategy, Clausewitz & Co. are your go-to works. If you want big thoughts about armed strife pitting a land against a sea power, Thucydides is your man. Considered essential reading for generals, admirals, statesmen, and liberally educated citizens for more than 2,000 years, The Peloponnesian War is a mine of military, naval, moral, political, and philosophical wisdom.
Finding the best and most accessible translation (and commentary) is key otherwise you risk putting off the novice reader (especially the young) from ever taking an interest in the Classical world e.g. I would never give the Thomas Hobbes translation to anyone who is easily bored or is impatient with old English. There are many good modern translations to choose from and here you have Strassler, Blanco, and Lattimore that are more used in America. Richard Crawley’s is the most popular but also the least accurate.
My own personal recommendation would be to go for Jeremy Mynott’s 2013 work which he titled The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. Mynott was a former publishing head at Cambridge University Press and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, as well as a leading expert on birds and natural history. Mynott’s aim is to re-introduce Thucydides to the reader in his “proper cultural and historical context”, and to strip back the “anachronistic concepts derived from later developments and theories”. Hence the name of the book: The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, not, as it is usually called today, The Peloponnesian War.
But what is in a name? In this case, a great deal, since it contains Mynott’s mission statement in miniature. He has dropped the conventional name for the work, for which he correctly says there is no evidence from antiquity, in favour of a less one-sided title derived from Thucydides’s opening sentence. This is just one example of the accretions which Mynott’s edition aims to remove, so that the reader can come closer to being able to appreciate Thucydides’s work as it might have been received in classical Greece. In my humble opinion it is a minor miracle that Mynott has achieved in conveying in modern English the literary qualities of this most political of ancient historians.
The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
I’m deliberating ignoring Victor David Hanson’s book on the Peloponnesian War (A War Like No Other) not because it’s not good (because it is in parts) but because I prefer Prof. Donald Kagan’s book.  Professor Kagan at Yale is one of the foremost scholars of Ancient Greek history. He has written a concise but thorough history of the Peloponnesian War for a general audience It's not the least bit dry for those with an interest in ancient history. The book’s an easy read. Kagan’s writing style is clear and straightforward.
Like any scholar worth his salt, Kagan is conversant with the scholarly consensus, with which he is for the most part in step, though he occasionally offers alternative scenarios. Much of the book is simply riveting. Like when the Spartan general Brasidas retakes Amphipolis, or the naval battle fought late in the war for control of the Hellespont. Woven throughout is the longer story of the Athenian turncoat, Alcibiades. Kagan’s analysis of the tactics and strategy of the conflict always seems on target. Interestingly, despite their reputations, the aristocratic Spartans usually come across as vacillating and indecisive while the democratic Athenians are aggressive and usually seize opportunity with successful results. Kagan refrains from drawing analogies to modern politics, although there’s certainly plenty of opportunity for it.
Professor Kagan preceded this one-volume history with a four-volume history of the war that took him around 20 years to write. That four volume series is a much more detailed and academic consideration of political motives and military strategy. But with this single volume, Kagan was able to produce a fast-moving tale, full of incident and colourful description easily readable for the general reader.  
Lords of the Sea by John R. Hale
This book spans the history of the Athenian navy, starting with its founder, Themistocles, and carrying the story through to the fall of Athens - its real fall at the hands of Alexander the Great, not the brief unpleasantness at Spartan hands - in 4th century B.C. Along the way Hale furnishes a wealth of details about naval warfare in classical antiquity. Lords of the Sea profiles Athens' seafaring culture fascinatingly, probing subjects on which Thucydides remains silent. An invaluable companion to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and a rollicking read to boot.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161–180 CE, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations in Koine Greek as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. It is possible that large portions of the work were written at Sirmium, where he spent much time planning military campaigns from 170 to 180. Some of it was written while he was positioned at Aquincum on campaign in Pannonia, because internal notes tell us that the second book was written when he was campaigning against the Quadi on the river Granova (modern-day Hron) and the third book was written at Carnuntum.
It is not clear that he ever intended the writings to be published, so the title Meditations is but one of several commonly assigned to the collection. These writings take the form of quotations varying in length from one sentence to long paragraphs.
When US Vice-Admiral. James Stockdale was shot down and became a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he attributed his survival to studying stoic philosophies, particularly Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” Aurelius, the Roman emperor, wrote his simple rules for living by candlelight and they have been a source of strength for the thoughtful man of arms or the cultured citizen ever since. I also think teenagers would gain a lot from reading Meditations than endure reading angst-ridden nihilism of many tacky teenage books out there.
SPQR by Mary Beard
Anything by Cambridge Classics professor Mary Beard is worth reading. Everyone loves Mary Beard, fast becoming one of Britain’s national treasure. I’m not just saying all this because she was one of my teachers at Cambridge. I think SPQR is a wonderful book. Ancient Roman history is so very dense and intricate that it can be difficult to teach and learn about. Mary Beard makes it accessible- and she goes through it all, from the early days right up until the present day.
Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? Mary Beard provides a sweeping revisionist history to get to grips with this thematic question.
‘SPQR’ is just four letters, but interwoven in those four letters are thousands of years and pages of Roman history. Cicero used to talk about the ’concordia ordinum.’ He said there was a harmony between all the orders in Rome. It’s like a pyramid hierarchy structure. At the top you have the ′senatus′ or the Senate—the aristocrats, the rich men who make decisions. Underneath that you have the ’equites’ who we don’t talk about as much , but they have their own spheres of power. They’ve got a bit of money and are a lower level. And underneath that you’ve got the ’populus’ or the people. SPQR is the harmony between the senatus and the populus and how they work together. That’s where Rome comes from: it’s not just about the Senate. The Senate can’t work without the people and vice versa. So ‘SPQR’ is basically a four-letter summation of the Roman constitution. It’s what it should be, though often isn’t. One of the reasons why - and she writes about this very well - Rome falls apart is because that relationship of harmony and hierarchy does fall apart under Caesar and Pompey in the 1st century BC.
Imperium by Robert Harris
This is one of my favourite novels, even if it weren’t classical, because like all Harris’ books it’s written like a smart thriller. I’m a huge Robert Harris fan. A lot of Robert Harris’ books are quite similar: they have a protagonist and you see the story - all the machinations - through his eyes. In Imperium we see the life of Cicero through the eyes of his slave, Tiro. We know Tiro was a real person, who recorded everything Cicero wrote.
The late Republic is one of my favourite periods of any period of history ever. You get all the figures: Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Octavian, Antony and Cato. Robert Harris paints compelling portraits of these people so nicely that even with Crassus, say, who comes up every so often, you get a sense of who he is. There are actually two more books in the trilogy: Lustrum and Dictator. Once you get to Dictator, you know who Julius Caesar really is, you know why he’s doing it.
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aviatrixdj · 5 years ago
Audio
(Ramnus Label)
Aviatrix started out on the late night air waves playing an emotional mix of experimental, electronic, chillwave, nu-disco, and house music for New Brunswick, NJ-based 90.3FM in 2012. After building a radio audience her blending became more groove-based and she moved into live dance floor mixing of house and techno. Having lived a nomadic lifestyle throughout her twenties have shaped a genre-bending sound to her monthly Now Boarding mixes which are often inspired by travel and the energy of the world around her. The energy of sounds and the feeling that music creates is her primary drive for mixing. She has been living in NYC and NJ for the past two years and has played for the 5th of Nov. Collective, Éveil Productions, Grown Folk Only, Mad Liberation Festival, MASHT NYC, Psiberactive Entertainment, and QXT's. Her love of eclecticism and darker electronic sounds primarily focus on where house meets techno; where one gets lost in the other through deep, hypnotic and haunting blends. To her a DJ mix is not just a bunch of tracks mixed together but is meant to be a sonic, dreamy trip from start to finish. For her first mix of the decade she wanted to bring out the cold and piercing atmospheric sensations felt during the darkness of winter as well as the chaotic sense of doom as the world is changing faster than ever before.
Playlist:
EQD - Untitled Hector - Fazer Joachim Spieth - Sensual Brett Jacobs - Ozone Gruvi - AAA Unknown Artist - Autoroute du Soleil Blagoj Rambabov & Igor Kostoski - Twenty Seven and Relove Hidden Spheres - Waiting Mall Grab - Can't (Get U Outta My Mind) DIODE - Between Us Jesse Bru - Tonite Joss Moog - Late Nite Beat Mind Street - Inside (Groove Assassin Classic Remix) Etur Usheo - Together Robert Owens - I'll Be Your Friend (Glamorous Mix) Fresh & Low - New Life Federal State - All To Myself Rootstrax - Harlquin Sensible House - Give A Little More (Tribal Mix)
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ryanmeft · 5 years ago
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Movie Review: The Aeronauts
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Much like The Current War, another of this year’s movies about very adventurous times in history, The Aeronauts becomes too wrapped up in the inherent wonder of its subject to deliver the kind of movie that subject deserves. It concerns a record-breaking balloon ride of 1862, and glories in the kind of lavish attention to detail often taken when technicolor was the great new technology. It focuses on this much more than story or character, which are both shortchanged as a result.
It begins with a child running through crowds to find himself at a fairground, where a balloon painted in whites and blues and reds is anchored. There, James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) is taking readings, then re-taking them and re-re-taking them. His friend John (Himesh Patel) thinks he is being overly cautious, but you can hardly blame him: he aims to break the record for how far up in the air a person has ever gone. His partner is late. This is Amelia (Felicity Jones), who at present is heavily rouged, in a large, showy dress, and standing atop a carriage galloping through the streets. She’s the pilot, he’s the scientist. She swings onto the dirigible’s platform on a rope from horseback; he rolls his eyes and returns to his measurements. They must not only break the record, she insists. They must impress the audience.
That is, of course, the entire mantra of film, especially the Golden Age of Hollywood epics this movie clearly seeks to capture the spirit of. It is also emblematic of both the film’s strengths and its flaws. Other than flashbacks, in which Glaisher’s colleagues at the Royal Society haughtily laugh off his claims of being able to use balloons to predict the weather and we learn why Amelia mourns her husband (Vincent Perez), we spend most of the rest of the movie in the air. Once the need to impress the audience is dispensed with, the pair argue in the proper way of the British. It transpires that the reason Glaisher is so careful with readings is that he is far more obsessed with breaking the record than Amelia is. They rise beyond the previous highest recorded point---23,000 feet---but Glaisher insists they keep going, and eventually their instruments stop working. They begin to freeze. The balloon is in serious danger of not making it.
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At this point what we have is for all intents and purposes a survival film. The key to a good survival film is minimalism: you must be right there in the moment with the people trying to survive, feeling their peril as they feel it, locked in with them. Take as an example All is Lost, in which Robert Redford is alone on a sinking boat, and we get no relief from his predicament. Director Tom Harper is understandably lured away from this approach. The temptation for action shots taking place in the rigging, on the sides and eventually on top of the balloon itself are just too great, and when Glaisher becomes unable to act, Amelia eventually finds herself in a situation most superheroes would balk at. These scenes are melodramatic, but could also be effective if they were cut with some patience and care. Instead, the cameras, manned by George Steel, jump constantly, shift regularly, and generally are not content to simply settle on a shot and let us absorb the terror of it. This is only heightened by the flashbacks, which take us out of the moment. I am not a fan of flashbacks in general. They have their uses, but are most often used lazily, to fill in information rather than play with the story structure. Here, they rip us out of the parts of the film we want to be in.
Amelia in particular ends up feeling more like an action star than a real person in real peril. This was, per the filmmakers, done to have an empowering female hero, which is also why Amelia exists at all. James Glaisher was a real person, one of two men who actually broke the record. The other was Henry Coxwell, who has been edited out of the story entirely. I have my doubts that he performed the mid-air acrobatics pulled off by Amelia, his replacement, as they seem designed to heighten the low thrills of the film. To be clear, I have no complaints with either female heroes, something of which I am actually a big booster, or historical revisionism; if I objected to the latter, I would never go to the movies. Yet the fact that Amelia has been invented by screenwriter Jack Thorne is reflected in her portrayal. Simply put, at no point during the film does she feel like a real person who existed. She comes off more like Jack Sparrow, a collection of tropes surrounding a romantic historical stock type---in this case, the daring aviatrix---than a person with doubts and fears. She feels like she isn’t really there, maybe because she isn’t. Glaisher doesn’t fare a whole lot better, but he feels more existent.
The movie only manages to draw us into the plight of the characters when they are descending, which becomes a close-quarters, face-to-face bout with imminent death. Jones and Redmayne, among the finest actors we currently have, give this their all, shivering as ice forms on their skin, panicking as they realize they can’t make it back to earth as they are, and forming a bond that tries as mightily as it can to overcome the thin characterization. These closing scenes hint at the promise the movie as a whole has not quite delivered.  
It is easy to forget the history of flight does not consist of humanity being one day without it, then it suddenly existing at Kitty Hawk. Glaisher and Amelia cannot measure with broken instruments, but they are eventually thought to have reached 38,000 feet, roughly the maximum altitude of most modern airplanes. Much like the battle for electric power, this is a historical story that is both in need of telling and especially suited for film. It is also one that is sadly shortchanged by the treatment it has gotten.
 Verdict: Average
Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.
Must-See
Highly Recommended
Recommended
Average
Not Recommended
Avoid like the Plague
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rosecorcoranwrites · 5 years ago
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True Life Adventure Reading List
All synopses are taken from either the Flagstaff Public Library catalog, Novelist.com, or my own fevered imagination.
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Beryl Markham spent most of her life in East Africa as an adventurer, a racehorse trainer, and an aviatrix―she became the first person to fly nonstop from Europe to America and the first woman to fly solo east to west across the Atlantic.
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
Forced to cut the rope that attached him Joe Simpson, who had fallen off an ice ledge, Simon Yate’s returns to his Andean base camp consumed by guilt. Meanwhile, Simpson, who had miraculously survived, must deal with injuries, starvation and frostbite in an effort to make his own journey back to the camp before Yates leaves.
View from the Summit by Edmund Hillary
The remarkable memoir of Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with Tenzing Norgay, was one of the first men to reach the summit of Mt. Everest.
Touching My Father's Soul : A Sherpa's Journey to the Top of Everest by Jamling Tenzing Norgay
Told by the son of Tenzing Norgay, Touching My Father's Soul is the first modern account of the Everest experience from the unheard voice of its indigenous people, revealing a fascinating and profound world that few--even many who have made it to the top--have ever seen.
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhikes to Alaska and walks alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body is found by a moose hunter. How Chris McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board by Bethany Hamilton
The teenage surfer who lost her arm in a shark attack in 2003 describes how she has coped with this life-altering event with the help of her faith, the changes in her life, and her return to the sport she loves.
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda
Hero profiles T.E. Lawrence—soldier, strategist, scholar, and adventurer—discussing his Oxford education, contradictory nature, and role in uniting the Arab tribes against Turkish adversaries.
Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
Six scientists risk their lives on a 4,300 miles journey aboard a raft to test a theory about the origin of the Polynesians
Endurance : Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age.
Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves by Arthur Burton
Bass Reeves, who had spent his early life as a slave, became a lawman exceptionally adept at apprehending fugitives and outlaws; his life story reads like a larger-than-life drama of the Wild West.
The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh
Lindbergh takes readers on an extraordinary journey, bringing to life the thrill and peril of his 1927 trans-Atlantic travel in a single-engine plane.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Interweaves the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished during a 1925 expedition into the Amazon, with the author's own quest to uncover the mysteries surrounding Fawcett's final journey and the secrets of what lies deep in the Amazon jungle.
A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert by Gertrude Bell
During World War I, Bell worked her way up from spy to army major to become one of the most powerful woman in the British Empire. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, she was instrumental in drawing the borders that define the region today, including creating an independent Iraq.
In The Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
After their ship is sunk by an eighty-ton sperm whale, the twenty-man crew of the Essex attempted to make the 3,000-mile-back to land in three tiny boats, as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.
Longitude : The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
Longitude is the of John Harrison's forty-year obsession with building a clock that would keep precise time at sea, as well as a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clock making.
Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint- Exupéry
The experiences and philosophy of French airline pilot—and author of The Little Prince—Saint- Exupéry, whose flying career began in 1926 and ended when his plane disappeared in 1944.
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aviatrix-ash · 1 year ago
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I got lost again today in Indiana. But I found a tea shop that has named all their teas airplane themed!
And I found a "Jetfire Cinnamon Spice" tea. It's absolutely amazing too!! It's canon in my head forever now that he has a little tea making hobby. "It's a delightful form of chemistry" he'd probably say. :3
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thephantomcasebook · 6 years ago
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Character Inspirations: Lady Sybil Afton Branson
So trying to get back on track, rather than being known as the guy that almost got embroiled in the Henry V. Matthew debate. I decided to do a post series of the inspirations that goes into the writing of the characters for my Story Series which takes place between (1936 - 1940) and deals with Sybbie, Marigold, but mostly George and his quest to restore Matthew and Sybil to life through an ancient Artifact lost during the Crusades. 
So without further ado ...
Lady Sybil “Sybbie” Afton Branson
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“Lord Flintshire made a B-line for the figure that stood behind the retaining wall of the tower ruins, looking over the field with binoculars. When the boys were underground they heard the Scottish soldier say something about “The Lady of Shallot” and a “Princess” who was hard to miss. They had seen enough war movies to know that sometimes soldiers and sailors called items of great importance after women. Deep down, they figured that he was referring to the Howitzer cannon. But they found that the man wasn’t selling a bill of metaphor. At the edge of the battlements, in personal command of the cannon, was an actual young woman.    
She had long raven tresses that were up in a messy bun, loose glossy black curls hung on either side of her temples. Her skin was creamy porcelain, fine like a doll, but the soot of battle contradicted her delicate appearance. She wore tough and tight trousers tucked into knee high boots. Her lithe frame was covered by an aviatrix leather bomber jacket with a wool lined collar. On her perfect hips was buckled a weapons belt with a large pistol that was strapped to her thigh. Her svelte and sleek frame had a lady like grace to the way she stood and carried herself. One might have thought that type of training and upbringing would be hidden amongst a volunteer force of young male soldiers. But she didn’t seem to care what they thought of the upper-class, Grand Lady, among them. It was who she was, what her mama and granny taught her to be, as it was the genetics from her real mother that informed her daughter’s uncaring of who was “appropriate” on the field of battle. She was a beautiful young woman, she was of class, and she liked being these things. Without words, with just one look of her confident and commanding presence, it said all she had too of not changing in order to impress or hide from others who she really was. One might have thought that the men of the rag-tag expedition would chastise …
But all it did was make them fall in love with Lady Sybil Afton Branson ever more.”
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(1923-1927)
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(1928-1934)
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(1935 - 1937)
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(1938 - 1958)
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(1958 - 1985)
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Inspirations 
When I came up with the concepts of what I wanted out of Sybbie in the series I had several ideas. The first was that she was going to be George’s partner. And since George was imagined as a Pulp adventure hero akin to Indiana Jones, Tin Tin, and Joe Sulivan “Sky Captain” I only thought that Sybbie would be molded into a sort of Adventure Heroine that sticks by George’s side. 
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I also had the idea that, instead of Sybbie following in Sybil’s footsteps as a Nurse or Doctor, that she’d follow Tom’s vocation as a mechanic. And since George was one of the best pilots in the world, I decided to make Sybbie his mechanic, an engineering genius ahead of her time. So I was really inspired by Asami Sato from Avatar: Legend of Korra. Not only by her look, but by her mechanical engineering savvy.
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The last inspiration was the fact that Sybbie has a dark, dark, past. She did a lot of bad things in the eight years that George was in America. She was also sexually abused by Mary’s fiance and helped him peddle Nazi influence into the Aristocracy, being sold as a very high end prostitute before George came back home and chased Mary’s Fiance away. So with that I always saw Sybbie as a heroine of a Gothic Romance novel, both in her look, dress, and vulnerability mingled with strength. She also has a lot of issues and tendencies to put herself in bad situations so that George can rescue her ... she kinda gets off on being rescued by George, which troubles people in their family, feeling the sense of something not right between the two, especially as they get older. 
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Anyway, all I got ... if you don’t read the story series, probably won’t mean much. But if you do, just something a little extra.
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thedistantstorm · 6 years ago
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A Shipwright Worth Her Salt Chapter 04
She does her best not to think of him anymore, high above her in the Tower. All it does is make her chest burn and her eyes sting. It’s a cruel world. She’s lost everyone else she’s cared for, why would he be any different? He isn’t. She’ll adapt, she always does.
It’s what she tells herself, but she still dreams of the stoic mask covering the Speaker’s face when he says that following the dedication of the watch atop the wall, civilians will be barred from entering. And worse, she dreams of his face, stoic and unfeeling, when she screams and cries and tries to pull from his grasp: because he brought her up there, he showed her the hangar and the ships, he spent time with her, he told her all that he wanted for her, he told her he - no, she thinks, don’t even think about what he said. He did it on purpose. Because he knew. He knew it would be the last time.
“My place is in the Tower. My duty is to protect the Traveler, and the remnants of humanity. I cannot bend the rules in the way I might have in the past. The Vanguard looks to me to lead them. I cannot - this cannot continue.”
It’s stupid, really, she thinks, when she wakes with tears leaking from her eyes and a hollow ache in her chest. What did she expect? It wasn’t like he was indebted to her. If anything, it was the other way around. It was hard though, to see him come through the City on occasion, a fireteam at his back, looking for all the world like the Commander he’d become and nothing like the kind man who’d bring her food, who would regale her with tales of heroism, who sent work her way when he knew scrap prices were down.
Eventually, though, the tears stop coming, and the hole he’s left in her heart is plugged by work. There’s a lot of it. Less guardians meant more smugglers, more crime. Up in their tower, the guardians watched the horizon, but lost touch with what was happening in the City beneath their feet, and Amanda Holliday grew up fast.
-/
“Sir, I have intel from Ikora.”
He nods. “Proceed.”
“There is a crime syndicate responsible for the theft of our shipment from Hakke. One of her Hidden got eyes on an aircraft running directly from the manufacturer to their base. Apparently they sign off using stolen codes. The reason Hakke had no idea why we were missing the weapons is because their logs say we picked them up.”
Bright eyes met hers and he nodded. “We have the location of their base?”
“Yes. Hakke has been instructed not to interfere with the pickup, only to notify us on a secure line the next time someone picks our shipment. I have a fireteam on standby to intercept and obtain the shipment.”
“I see. And do we know what this crime syndicate is all about?”
“Unconfirmed, but there are a few possibilities. The Hidden have eyes on the operation, they’re greedy. It’s likely they’re selling our weaponry to guardians with a steep markup, or keeping them to incite their own wars. Either way,” She pauses long enough to look at the blurry images on the screen in front of them, “Andal says one of his Hunters has a contact that can get us in the warehouse they use as their base of operations. I’ll get a recovery team together to go in, and a containment team to stop the rest. Care to run tactical?”
“Indeed.” His posture says more than anything that he’s pleased. “Excellent work, Sloane. I’ll leave the rest to you. Let me know when I am required to participate.”
She salutes, eyes glimmering brightly. “You got it, Commander.”
-/
She never had time to look back from the smoldering rubble that had been her makeshift home in the Last City. There was something about that, she supposed. Forward momentum. Guilds had become common amongst the citizens, and not even they were immune to the decay of crime and corruption. She’d been in her shop when they appeared that day, close to sunset, though it had been cold and raining too hard to tell.
Two of them held her down while the rest of them went through her paltry belongings, taking anything they felt was of worth, breaking the rest. They dragged her out just as the smell of smoke started making her eyes water, and just before one of the mostly empty cans of fuel exploded, likely taking with it most of the first story.
She remembered only bits and pieces of the rest, whether that was a blessing or a curse, she wasn’t sure. The names they called her faded into white noise after a while, though the burning pain of their blows and otherwise stayed with her long after. She’d kept her eyes scrunched closed, let her mind wander, and prayed for it to end, clawing and screaming until they’d pinned her to the ground from the neck down, tears stung her eyes, and breath left her lungs.
When it was over, they’d thrown her into an alley in a shameful state, threatening to repeat the process if she attempted to take work from them again. She’d laid there all night, and for the first time in her life, she wanted it all to end. There was nothing left. When she woke up the next morning and it hadn’t, she sighed, scraped herself up off the wet ground and started again.
Two months later, she took on a job from a bigger group on the other side of the city, having started selling salvaged scrap to them for far more than the pitiful rates the mech guild that dominated where she’d been living before. The area was a bit more damaged, the cracks in the wall bigger, but she’d learned how sneak around. No one was coming to save her, and she lived each day knowing the next day was the only gift she’d get. Safety was a luxury she just couldn’t afford.
The job was to recover supplies from a guild they were feuding with. She’d gone in with a sidearm she had no plans to use unless a gun was pointed at her first, and a sparrow that she repaired hastily after realizing the clutch stuck.
“It’s a suicide mission,” The old barmaid had said to her, when she first looked at the posting tacked to the counter of a dingy bar. “You’re a bit young to throw it all away.”
She shrugged, throwing her head back and looking up at the ceiling before looking back at her. She was a kind looking woman, with dark eyes and white hair. “Either I take this mission and make enough money to get a room ‘fore this winter freezes me to death, or I don’t, and I die of hunger or hypothermia, whichever’s quicker.”
The old woman sighed. She had seen plenty of others go down this same road of desperation. She poured teen a glass of ale, served her a meal she couldn’t afford, and let her sit there for a while before radioing in her acceptance. When the girl admitted she couldn’t pay, the woman shrugged.
“You can pay me if you make it back. If not, I won’t lose sleep over providing you with your last supper.”
-/
Five years, countless missions, and one repaid meal later, Amanda Holliday had established herself under the pseudonym of Aviatrix. She knows enough about the politics to stay out of it. None of it matters, so long as she’s got enough money for a drink when she gets to where she’s going, and a roof over head when she comes back to the Last City in between.
She knows it won’t last forever, because nothing in her life ever does, but she’s got several small stockpiles of glimmer spread around and an old sparrow hidden away. This time, starting over won’t be hard, if it comes to that. She knows a thing or two about any ship she can get her hands on and can run circles around most sparrow racers, guardian or otherwise. She tinkers for fun and for personal benefit. Her friends are misfits and outcasts, who might stab her in the back, but she’ll turn on them if she has to, too. She's the only one who'll put herself first. So they’re even.
It’s not the most ideal situation, but it’s leagues above anything else she’s had since, well, let's not think about that. She even has the luxury of being somewhat selective about her work. She receives plenty of messages daily on her tablet, has her finger on the pulse of the city.
ACEOFHEARTS>>I’m looking for a pilot. You know anybody? ;)
She knows the sender. His crew ran all sorts jobs in their free time and she just so happened to know she was the best pilot he'd met, and she'd more than established herself as his first call when the good loot was at stake. That, and he was a guardian. So he’d get her out of trouble if push came to shove.
AVIATRIX<<Details.
She leans back and takes a sip of her beer, pushing her tablet back onto the clip of her cargo pants. His messages mean he’s already found her. A cloaked figure takes a seat on the stool next to her.
“Armory ship from the Tower to the Trostland. Drop two teams in. They transmat some goods back to base, secure the area and any baddies while you provide some air support.” His voice is a molten synthesizer, and he leans forward, holding a rocks glass of green liquid. “Bring it all back safe and sound and obviously you’ll get some loot and a buttload of glimmer.”
“You gonna smuggle me into the tower, pal?” She leans against his cloak as she speaks low. He smells of pine and campfire, with an undertone of gunpowder. “I don't exactly work for the Vanguard, y’know.”
“Nah. I’ll bring the ship to you.”
“That it then?”
“Just about. You’ll get me to keep you company, I’ll be going ‘bang bang’ while you’re going ‘pew pew,’” He makes finger guns and mimics the button pushing of a ship’s laser charges to correspond with his sound effects. “Andal practically left me in control of this whole thing. It’ll be great, you’ll see.”
She shakes her head at his antics. He’s ridiculous, but she likes him well enough. “You know my terms.”
He nods. “Oh yeah, I know I know I know,” He gushes, knocking elbows with her in a way that’s strangely friendly. “Sparrow at the rally point and no unnecessary questions. Anything goes wrong and I owe you a favor.” He looks at her, optics growing sceptical. “But seriously, nothing’s going to go wrong. This is, like, SO EASY of a mission. And when have I ever steered you wrong?”
An eyebrow arched. She gives him a cool glance. “When was the last time I listened to your picks for a race?”
“Oh come on! That was months ago and I paid for your dinner after you lost your glimmer. Let it go already.”
-/
As with most things with Cayde-6, Andal is expecting there to be yelling. And there is yelling. Honestly, he can't blame Zavala, no matter how cleverly worded Cayde had been to conceal this - in Cayde's words - minor detail. Just as Andal himself had concealed who would be running tactical. Minor details all around, then.
There was a civilian piloting a trooper class Vanguard ship. Zavala was having kittens. It wasn’t a destroyer(or the basic armory ship Cayde had initially requisitioned), but it was still not a ship that the general public was supposed to have access to. Ever. The civilian said very little - actually he hadn't heard her over the comms at all, and if Cayde hadn't slipped up and spoke to her precisely seventeen minutes into the flight, he could've prevented the whole thing because other than the stellar flying, it was like no one was there with him.
“Look - c'mon, Big Blue - Commander Big Blue - erm Zavala, it's not that big of a deal.” Cayde’s voice crackles with static. “Aviatrix here has done like a bazillion flights.”
To his left, Zavala was pinching the bridge of his nose and sighing through his rage. Andal did his best to keep from invoking that rage by laughing at his friend's antics. Sometimes it was just funny.
“And how many of those have been for the Vanguard?”
Silence.
“I. See.” His words are tight lipped and highly agitated. Andal winces. Cayde’s dead in the water.
Sloane, diligent worker that she is, has already looked up the name and is handing over her tablet to her superior, muting the comms. “No intel on the actual identity - that name’s just what she goes by, but she is a competent flyer. Several of our weapon suppliers have used her to deliver sensitive cargo. It could be worse.”
Zavala flicks his eyes down at the tablet, and freezes. The face is unmistakable. Older, harder, but it’s obvious enough and explains the silence. Andal can just barely read the change in the Vanguard Leader’s body language. He looks subtly uneasy, but composes himself quickly.
Zavala’s eyes meet Sloane’s and she doesn’t flinch away from the intensity. Titans, Andal thinks with a shake of the head - always trying to prove they won’t back down.
“This is your mission, Sloane. You think they can do it, I’ll trust you.”
She nods and presses the button again to allow the field teams to hear them. “Anything goes wrong and I’ll hold you personally responsible, Cayde.”
“That makes the two of you, if the glaring I’m getting over here is any indication.”
-/
Aside from the regular tongue-lashing song and dance he’s going to get from Zavala, Cayde thinks the mission couldn’t have gone smoother. He knew he picked the right pilot for the job, regardless of non-guardian status. Besides, she agreed to the deed, so no big deal. Wasn’t like he held his gun to her head and told her to fly.
She sets the ship down like she’s cutting into butter with a hot knife. It’s smooth and gentle, nothing at all like the lurching mayhem that happens when he tries to put one of these things back on the ground. He pats her back in celebration as she flips off the controls. She’s ready to get out of here, and he can tell. Her eyes dart all over and she’s almost twitchy.
“I know this didn’t quite go the way you were expecting -”
“Does it ever?”
He continues talking over her. “- totally do something like this again if you’re -”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Well, why don’t you think about it over a drink with me?” He jogs behind her as she exits the the vessel with an agile jump to ground level. “I could take you back to the tower and show -”
“Amanda.”
“ - hangar after. Wait, what?” The Vanguard Commander’s presence gives him pause. “What did you say? Why are you here? Actually, doesn’t matter. The mission was a success!” Cayde went to give a playful one-two punch to the commander’s arm, but immediately sensed the change in the atmosphere when maelstrom green eyes met arc blue ones. Andal swore he had good instincts, even if no one else readily acknowledged them. Or Cayde-6 in general, most of the time.
Her posture is rigid for a moment, but she forces herself to relax, shifting her eyes to look at the exo. “I’ma have to pass, Cayde. Not a big fan of knights and their castles.”
“I’m not a knight, I’m a Hunter!” Said hunter throws his hands in the air in exasperation, muttering, “Titans are way more like knights than I am -”
“I know,” she interrupts slinging the bag with her payment over a narrow shoulder. “See y’around, Cayde.” The barest nod is all the acknowledgement she gives Andal, and that’s plenty for him.
“And it’s not like I even like-” As she hops onto the back of her sparrow and it roars to life, Cayde sighs dramatically, throwing his hands out in an exaggerated shrug. “Why do I feel like that she wasn’t actually talking to me? Anybody?”
No one answers. Not that he’s expecting them to, because he’s still carrying on.
Ever vigilant, Andal watches the situation unfold from afar, withholding his judgement. He’s going to have to yell at Cayde a little, that much he’s sure of. But for right now, the clench and unclench of fists - an old tell of Zavala’s - is a bit more important.
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docholligay · 8 years ago
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A Tragedy in Four Acts
THE UNPROMPTED FIC NOBODY ASKED FOR. I’ve alluded to this moment a bunch of times in the fic verse but never really sketched it out to now, and I, after receiving my shitty news, decided I really did want to finish this. So, 3,000 words, and I really hope you enjoy. Entire OW verse is here. 
Tracer
The shots rang through the still air, one, two, three, and Tracer felt a shock of hot pain run through her. She gasped with the surprise of it, more than the pain, the idea that the sound of the gun could ever be connected to her own welfare a shock to her, even after seeing so much in this world.
She looked back at the darkness, and saw a cowboy hat receding, as if he could not stay to see.
Tracer looked down at the hand she had clasped to her stomach, and rubbed her fingers together, the hot dark blood smooth between them.
She gave a half-smile to herself. “Well. That’s unfortunate.”
She could hear her teammates in her ear, telling everyone to get back to the rendezvous, that they had been successful, good job, and the calming replies of her safe team.
She hadn’t been paying attention. Normally, such a thing would not have been unusual, as the phrase, “I’m sorry, what?” was intimately known to her, and had been all her life, lost sometimes in a daydream of her own. No, it was the nature of it that was unusual, she was generally quick and keen on the battlefield, if nowhere else, and this was the first time she had ever stopped, stock-still, just to stare. A woman’s silhouette in the moonlight, who must have been Widowmaker, who Tracer knew so little about, a woman from a thousand years away, before she had even been lost to time.
Her wound became less amusing as she began to feel weak, growing chill in the cool of the night. There would be time to wonder about how she came to this later.
She stumbled against the wall, barely holding herself up, and tapped her earpiece. “Tracer ‘ere. I’m down, and I need assistance.” There was no reply, and Tracer tapped it again. “Tracer down,” she took a shuddering breath, “can you ‘ear me? I--I need ‘elp.”
Tracer hit the earpiece again, and realized she could not even hear herself. It must have malfunctioned. Had she checked it before the mission? Jack had told her a thousand times, but sometimes, when she was busy, things slipped her mind and now...
I am going to die.
She was deep in enemy territory, in one of the side alleys where she made her trade, flitting in and out of the light, and they would never find her in time. After a lifetime of near-misses, this was the final chapter for Lena Anne Oxton, callsign: Tracer, Overwatch agent, adventurer, and noted aviatrix.
She looked down the alleyway and saw a stone fountain, bathed in moonlight.
I might have to die, but at the very least, I can do it by a lovely little fountain, and there’s worse things, aren’t there?  I know there are.
She closed her eyes and gathered up her strength, and half walked, half fell to the fountain, laying down on the cold side of the stone, moonlight glittering off the water.
There. Much better.
She looked down at the water gently dripping into the fountain, cool and burbling in the silver rays of light, and dipped her hand into the water, the blood drifting into the clear of the water, cloaked in the dark. She shivered, a chill coming over, her deepest breath less satisfying than she’d like.
“Do you know what I do when I’m afraid, Lena?” Her father had drawn her onto his lap as they sat in the waiting room.
“What, daddy?” She leaned back against him.
The voices echoed down the alleyway and bounced off each brick, surrounding the small round fountain in the spotlight of the night.
“I sing a little to meself. Anything what comes to mind, doesn’t matter.”
“Then you’re not scared.”
“Gives me something to do, any’ow.” He gave a hollow laugh and began to hum a tune.
She felt herself begin to struggle and float, and sang softly to herself. “Fortune’s always hiding...I’ve looked everywhere. I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.”
___
Winston
There was always a worrying moment when the group reassembled, as Winston practically held his breath, hoping everyone would come through the door and he could relax.
There had been plenty of times, in the older organization, where people had not come back, and yet, it never got any easier for Winston, any of those times.
Tracer wasn’t back yet, but that wasn’t unusual, necessarily--she went further out than most of them, down back ways and side streets, and the thrill of victory sometimes distracted her, and so she took a bit more time to get back than usual.
Pharah, it seemed, was not really in the mood for Tracer’s dallying.
“Tracer, return to the rendezvous.” She tapped at the earpiece again. “Tracer, this is Pharah. Do you copy?” She sighed heavily and tapped it one more time. ‘Tracer. Rendezvous. Immediately.”
WInston looked at Pharah, a strange, wavering feeling rising in his stomach. “Maybe she’s ...hurt.”
“She had better be. Seriously.”
“Fareeha!” Mercy scolded, scowling at her. Missions made her nervous.
“Oh, I am only joking.” She looked over at Winston. “I am sure she is distracted.” A beat passed, and Pharah looked around the rendezvous. “Is everyone’s radio working?” She examined them as they nodded assent.
Winston was not at all like Tracer, and, in many ways, he thought this might be why they were so compatible. But it did not help him at all as he tried to think like her, tried to imagine where she would go and down what side alley she might have sped.
It’s fine, Win. You worry too bloody much. Her voice rang inside him, high and cheerful as a bell.
The air was cold, and the streets were quiet, and he felt a shadow come over him, the memories of the day on the moon like glimpses at the corner of his eye, and he tried to ignore them. That was then. That was before. That wouldn’t happen to Tracer.
If it was going to happen, it would have happened by now, of course. She can be careless. But she’s born under a lucky star. She always says so.
A man of science is not necessarily a man of truth.
A sliver of moonlight caught his eye through a side street, glowing like a blade of silver in the night, and he followed it.
It was almost idyllic as a painting, the light off the water glittering like diamonds, the blue and silver of the stones in the moonlight playing against the orange of her uniform, the dark burgundy seeping into the shadows.
“Lena!” It escaped his throat like a wild bird from a cage, the letters barely intelligible, more a cry than a name.
He ran toward her, and all the old prayers from that day came up. Please no, please not this, please not her, I don’t want to be alone, please help, please no, please not her...And the fountain could never get close enough fast enough.
He reached her, and she was breathing. That was all that mattered, in one moment. But only for a moment, as he noted the dark red spreading over the stone and dripping into the water, writing warnings in its curled script.
Tracer looked up at him, eyes wide. “Win…”
He put his hand under her back. “It’s okay, Lena,” He lied, though mostly to himself, “you’ll be all right.”
“Don’t think so.” She said weakly. “Love you, Win.”
“Lena, stop it.” he gritted his teeth. “You’re here to stay. You told me that.”
“What day is it?” She had looked over through the glass, as Winston put their plates on a tray to take into the timelocked room Tracer called the Bug Jar. “Innit something?”
“American Thanksgiving.” He had answered, holding the tray in his hand. “I brought us turkey from the cafeteria!”
Tracer ignored the food, just kept looking at him. “Aren’t you American, then? Should ‘ave the day off, you should.”
Tracer had started speaking again a month ago, and she seemed to be making up for lost time.
“I’m--” he pushed his glasses up on his nose, “I don’t--I don’t take holidays off, usually.”
“Well, why not?” She pushed at him as he stammered his way through the first double sealed door. “Cafeteria’s food not brilliant as you think, Dr. Winston,” she laughed, “Proof you ought to leave the lab, so it is.”
“I don’t have any reason to.” He set down the tray.
“Cooking that bad in your family, love?”
He sat down, practically muttering into the gloppy potatoes. “I don’t have anyone. No family. No friends.”
She had been uncharacteristically quiet for a few minutes, and then sat down and placed her hand on his.
“Well, that isn’t true, now is it love, what am I then? Oxtons are a rowdy bunch, they are, and they’ll ‘ardly note another body at the table, if we get me out of ‘ere ever.” She smiled and rocked forward, bouncing with excitement. “And me Nan never met an ‘oliday she didn’t like, so we’ll give you a proper American Thanksgiving, next year, when I’m out.”
He shook his head. “It’s--”
“You took care of me, now didn’t you? You do, still now. We’re friends, Win. ‘ope you don’t mind if I call you Win, us being such firm friends and all.” She patted his hand. “”Ere to stay, I am.”
You weren’t supposed to move someone who’d been seriously hurt, but the slick red over the stones made Winston think there was no waiting for Mercy to get here, and he scooped her up into his arms, and ran as fast as he could, but like the fountain had, the tactical van seemed further and further away, no matter how fast he ran, a treadmill that was set too high for him.
“I found her! She’s been shot!” It was all he could say, over and over, and the words that came back to him seemed garbled and nonsense.
He had never felt simultaneously more and less human in his life, the pain of losing Tracer  tearing like a wildfire through his chest.
___
Mercy
“Winston. 76. Hold her down.” Mercy’s voice took on an air of command it lacked in all other situations, at the sight of blood, slipping an oxygen mask over Tracer’s face,  and Winston obediently laid her down and pressed down her shoulders, 76 following suit at the other end.
She looked down at Tracer’s wound, her mind calculating exactly what she was going to have to do and precisely how unpleasant it was going to be. She grabbed a compress and looked at Tracer’s face.
“This is going to hurt badly, Lena, I’m sorry.” She pressed down as hard as she could, trying to stop the bleeding.
Tracer screamed the pained, senseless cry of a trapped animal, twisting against Winston and 76, who held her fast.
“I need blood!” she barked at Pharah, who moved quickly to the cabinet affixed to the wall of the tactical vehicle, flinging it open and grabbing a bag of cool red blood.
Pharah knelt down next to Mercy, awaiting further instruction--it was not the correct moment to be thinking all of this, but still Mercy did--that what she loved most about Pharah, both individually and as a commander, was her ability to follow orders if the person giving them clearly knew better. She would not lose a teammate for pride’s sake, however individually proud she was, and Mercy cherished this about her.
Mercy looked at the bag. ‘This is O positive. She is negative. I can’t use it.”
Pharah opened her mouth to say something, but shook her head and sprang back to the cabinet, rifling through it with renewed vigor. Tracer took a shuddering breath, her heart racing with all its might against the cruel insistence of the bullets that it simply stop trying. She was beginning to decompensate. Tracer was very tough, Mercy had learned over the years, but there is no human body that does not have its limits, and Tracer was rapidly finding hers.
Tracer gave a soft, tearful moan. “Daddy, ‘elp me.”
Mercy closed her eyes against the sound of it, but there was a dull and decidedly non-professional ache in her chest. Where was Pharah?
“Fareeha!” She called desperately to the cabinet.
“That is all there is!” She turned to Mercy, a look of apology and frustration on her face. “There is nothing else.”
“Es kann nicht sein,” she mumbled to herself, but, as her mind wandered, she found it must be very possible, for it happened, and all it took was one mistake, one person at the hospital misstocking her tactical vehicle, and mistakes happened, and it seemed, now, that mistakes were happening to Tracer, and she was bleeding to death on a cold metal floor.
And Mercy could not stop it.
Mercy shook her head at Pharah, and looked back down at Tracer’s body, never taking the pressure off the bleeding, her mind whirling through a thousand different options in each of the four languages she spoke. Nichts. Rein. K’lum. Nothing.
Pharah’s face grew soft, and she reached down and gently touched Tracer on the shoulder. “Oh, Lena, no.”
The vehicle was quiet save for the sound of of Tracer mumbling incoherently to anyone who would help her, struggling for breath.
There was a dark moment, Mercy had found, where you realized the game was over, and there was nothing that could be done, and those final moments as life left someone drug on like hours, a reminder of how she had failed someone who depended on her, and her face fell.
“Jack?” she asked softly. “I need you to--” she stumbled over the words, “I need you to get me the morphine.”
___
Pharah
Pharah looked up at Mercy, and her face changed, the tenderness replaced by determination.
“No. Not like this. Not today” She reached under Tracer’s collar and grabbed the ID tags, snapping the chain from her neck. She looked at the tags, and then tossed them to the side of the van. “It is what I thought.” She rolled up her sleeve. “However much you can take from me without killing me, you should do it. And quickly.”
“Fareeha, it might n--”
“I am not speaking to you as your wife, I am speaking to you as your commander!” She regretted the snap instantly, and she softened. “Angela. Please do it.”
Mercy looked over at D.VA. “Come here. Press this down as hard as you can. She will not be liking it.”
D.Va nodded and came to Tracer’s side, kneeling down next to her, overlapping Mercy’s hands and quickly pressing down, Tracer bucking against it with renewed force.
“Settle down!” Pharah scowled down at Tracer.
Mercy quickly pulled apart the packs of needles and line. She was a deft hand, and though Pharah had seen many talented medics on the battlefield, she had never seen Mercy’s equal. Pharah was no medic, but she knew Tracer would already be dead but for Mercy’s skill.
Mercy slipped the line into Pharah’s vein so quickly she barely felt it, and she looked at Pharah softly.
“I will have to watch you. It is fast.”
Pharah nodded. “I will be honest with you.” She looked back at Tracer, searching for something to say, something that would make everything feel less dire. “If you waste this opportunity, I am writing you up.”
She thought Tracer would laugh at that, if she could. If she were not calling for her parents and struggling to stay alive.
Mercy broke the horrible soundtrack of an uncertain future, quietly singing a prayer as she bent over Tracer.
“yimalei rahamim aleha…”
People loved Pharah because of the things she was sure of. She was sure, as a commander.
“L’hahlimah, u-l’rap’otah,”
She knew the way people moved, and she knew how to move them, and she was always sure as she opened her mouth to issue the words. If she was not sure, she would not send them.
“L’hazikah, u-l’hay-otah...”
But of some things, Mercy seemed ever more sure than Pharah.
V’yishlah lah bim-hera, refuah shlemah...”
Pharah’s eyes moved back over to the wall of the van, where Tracer’s tags lay on the floor, the light gleaming off them, the raised text bouncing into the air.
“Religion.” Pharah looked up from the form at Tracer.
“You mean, what do I believe?” Tracer kicked back on the couch. “That’s rather a difficult question now, innit? I’ve seen so much, in me life, and its left me with a lot of questions, mind, but I think there’s some possibility--”
“Tracer this is not a philosophical question. It is more,” she shrugged, “what do you want us to do if you are dying?”
“Not dying, not necessarily, Fareeha. Badly hurt, maybe.” Mercy’s eyes grew soft as she reprimanded Pharah.
She looked back over at Tracer. “Correction. What do you want me to do if you are badly hurt?”
Tracer thought for a moment. “I dunno. ‘Old me ‘and maybe. Be nice to me, for once in your bloody life.”
Pharah sighed and wrote down ‘no preference.’
She looked back over at Tracer, lying on the ground, and the thin red line that connected them, just barely holding her to this earth.
Pharah slipped her hand around Tracer’s. and held it tight. 
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moviessilently · 8 years ago
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When a railroad paymaster and the $25,000 in cash he was carrying disappear, returning WWI ace Billy Stokes is put on the case. This independent feature has an all African-American cast and is the only complete surviving feature of the Norman Film Manufacturing Company, a Florida-based studio that specialized in so-called race films.
Home Media Availability: Released on DVD and Bluray.
Up, up and away. Ish.
Richard E. Norman is not a household name these days but he left his mark on motion picture history. Like so many filmmakers operating outside the studio system, Norman tried various approaches until he found one that worked. He started with “home talent” pictures—that is, films shot by itinerant filmmakers in smaller cities and towns that made use of non-professional local talent (you can read my review of one such picture, The Lumberjack, here) but then discovered his niche in making films aimed at African-American audiences.
Poster for the film touting its cast.
Norman was a white Southerner but he did not seek to include the sort of insulting, dangerous, condescending stereotypes that D.W. Griffith was spreading in his films. Black audiences of the day were sick and tired of seeing white performers in blackface acting like monsters, fools or infants; they wanted to see themselves as they really were. There was a strong demand for positive African-American pictures and Norman sought to fill that demand. The Flying Ace is the only extant Norman film and it was the second-to-last feature he made. Like so many independent concerns, the cost of converting to sound proved to be a fatal blow.
Movies were mad for airplanes and Norman aimed to join the fad.
(If you would like more detail on Norman’s life, career and place in African-American film history, I recommend Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking by Barbara Tepa Lupack, which traces Norman’s career through personal correspondence and shooting scripts.)
The story opens with three disparate men standing outside a railroad station. Finley Tucker (Harold Platts) is a local sheik with a mysterious source of income, Dr. Maynard (Sam Jordan) is a respectable dentist and Jed Splivins (Lyons Daniels) is the buffoonish local constable. The trio observes the arrival of Blair Kimball (Boise De Legge), the railroad paymaster.
A dentist, a cop and a sheik walk into a speakeasy…
It seems that Kimball has decided to deliver the payroll early. Because no one will be expecting him, he has left his guards behind and is carrying $25,000 in cash all alone. Kimball waits for the next train with stationmaster Thomas Sawtelle (George Colvin).
The stationmaster has a charming daughter, Ruth (Kathryn Boyd), and she is just crazy about airplanes and flying. Tucker has been courting her and he offers to take her up in his plane but nefarious deeds go down while she is home changing into her flight suit.
He wants to get serious but she’s having none of it.
Sawtelle is knocked out by some mysterious substance and both Kimball and the cash disappear. This looks like a job for… Captain Billy Stokes (Laurence Criner)!
Stokes is an ace pilot who has just arrived back home from service in the First World War. Before the war, he was a railway detective and his old job is open to him; he heads over to Sawtelle’s station with orders to solve the mystery. He is assisted by engineer Peg (Steve Reynolds), a fellow veteran who lost a leg in the war. (Reynolds really was an amputee and his ability to still move with balletic grace was a popular feature of his stage show. It’s refreshing to see a disabled part played by a disabled performer, something that modern Hollywood would do well to learn.)
A decidedly unimpressed Stokes.
Stokes asks Peg to disguise himself as a hobo and reconnoiter the situation. Meanwhile, Stokes takes the more direct approach and introduces himself to Sawtelle as the railway detective on the case. Ruth is interested in the dashing pilot while Tucker tries his best to use reverse psychology to throw the blame on Sawtelle. You see, this is not really a whodunit as the film makes it very clear that the money was stolen by Tucker, Dr. Maynard and Jed. The fun is watching Stokes and Peg unravel the clues with tidy efficiency. These fellows are great at what they do!
Impossible in the real world but this is the movies!
The story of The Flying Ace can be viewed as existing in an alternate 1920s, one that contains no white characters, no racism and absolutely no content that would have been considered political (interracial romance, passing, Jim Crow, and so forth). Norman chose to avoid overt political statements in his films (and complained when other filmmakers, such as Oscar Micheaux, did) and instead sidestepped the topic entirely by attempting to portray aspirational African-American characters, heroes and heroines who would never have been allowed within a hundred yards of a mainstream Hollywood production. Captain Stokes certainly would not have been able to earn the title of ace in the heavily segregated U.S. military of WWI. Norman’s approach has been variously described as utopian, savvy and cowardly. Perhaps it was touches of all three.
Stokes knows his stuff.
Now we will compare The Flying Ace to other mystery/adventure productions of the time and see how it holds up in direct competition. First, the bad news.
When viewing any independent silent production, there are usually a few pitfalls to watch out for. In order to save money, low-budget films would often use an enormous number of title cards—it was cheaper to write more cards than to shoot more movie. The Flying Ace uses this trick with cards here, cards there, enough cards to open a casino. They also lack the professional snap of Hollywood intertitles and instead have stiff, formal sentences with plenty of semicolons and an honest to goodness, unironic use of the “I have you now, my beauty!” chestnut. Oh my. Further, there are clunky moments of exposition, like when the film screeches to a halt so that Tucker can show Ruth the mechanical workings of an airplane.
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While the title cards are about as poor a lot as I have ever seen, I am delighted to report that the actual plotting of the film is excellent, if hardly original. Far too many movie mysteries of the period would force their investigators to be stumped by a puzzle that the audience solved an hour before. For example, many mystery films would have had Stokes fret about just how Sawtelle was knocked out, stretching it out for a big reveal. Meanwhile, the audience is shouting, “The dentist! He has all kinds of drugs! The dentist!” Well, Stokes walks in, figures out that drugs were used on Sawtelle, finds a small vial on the floor, meets Dr. Maynard and puts it all together. It’s highly satisfying to watch a detective keep pace with the audience and even get ahead of us.
Don’t take your eyes off Jed!
I was also a bit worried about the characters of Peg and Jed as they are both introduced as broad comedy stereotypes. While this is not entirely done away with, both prove to have more depth than I expected. Peg is shown to be a clever gadgeteer who can innovate new uses for his crutch on the fly and ends up capturing two villains single-handed. Jed soon shows that his Keystone Cop routine is all an act and he proves to be the wiliest of the conspirators with his concealed handcuff key and trusty pistol. I would have preferred the dialect title cards to have been eliminated but at least the characters have some dimension to them.
Peg and his versatile crutch.
Norman had been in talks with Captain Edison McVey, a pilot who billed himself as the King of Stunts, and with famed aviatrix Bessie Coleman. However, McVey pulled out of negotiations and Coleman was killed in an accident before a deal could be closed. Norman finally cast a group of experienced stage actors to serve as the lead performers in the film.
A real charmer!
Without a doubt, the standout of the cast is Kathryn Boyd, who is a perfect charmer as Ruth. With her cute body language and infectious smile, she is exactly what the doctor ordered for a 1920s heroine: sporty, sweet, flirty and loyal. Laurence Criner (Boyd’s real-life husband according to Lupack) is fine if a bit stiff as Stokes, the two-fisted railway detective. He certainly throws himself into the fight scene with Harold Platts, which is always appreciated.
That’s gotta hurt!
Good though the cast turned out to be, the loss of experienced pilots meant that Norman’s options were limited. (Assuming he ever had the budget to include much airplane stuff, which is doubtful.) The Flying Ace rather famously shows no flying. Tucker and Stokes both taxi their planes around the airfield and then we are shown closeups of the cockpits against a sky backdrop but very few shots of planes in the air. It’s not really a dealbreaker but it’s another element that exposes the picture’s micro budget.
Totally up in the air.
In fact, Peg’s pursuit the villains on bicycle is far more dynamic than any of the airplane stuff. He peddles with his crutch and once he gets a good speed built up, he fires at the fleeing car with the gun he has concealed inside that same crutch. It’s exciting and the scene is unusually well-shot and edited for a budget picture. Great work there!
All in all, The Flying Ace is a fine bit of unpretentious silent entertainment and even without its historical importance, it works as a diverting detective yarn. This is a must-see for nerds and casual fans alike.
Where can I see it?
The Flying Ace was released on DVD and Bluray as part of the Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set. It’s accompanied by a fine score performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
The Flying Ace (1926) A Silent Film Review When a railroad paymaster and the $25,000 in cash he was carrying disappear, returning WWI ace Billy Stokes is put on the case.
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comiccrusaders · 7 years ago
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Unravel the mystery behind Amelia Earhart’s fabled disappearance in this teen-friendly series
“Get lost in this other world and you’ll be in the best company.” —Kieron Gillen (THE WICKED + THE DIVINE)
Comics/TV writer Jay Faerber (COPPERHEAD, Zoo) teams up with rising star artist Sumeyye Kesgin for an all-new fantastical series, ELSEWHERE, coming this August from Image Comics.
What really happened to famed airwoman Amelia Earhart? As it turns out: a lot.
Somehow transported to a strange new world filled with flying beasts and baffling alien civilizations, Amelia desperately struggles to return home. Along the way, she forges alliances and makes enemies as she goes from aviatrix to freedom fighter in a rebellion against a merciless warlord!
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“ELSEWHERE is the kind of series I’ve wanted to tackle for a long time, with exotic characters, fantastic creatures, and huge scope,” said Faerber. “But I needed a relatable character to hang everything on. I found that character in Amelia Earhart—she’s inspiring, courageous, and most of all, real. And I’ve found the perfect partner to help me navigate this thrilling adventure: artist Sumeyye Kesgin. She’s incredible, and absolutely vital to bringing this world to life.”
“It’s an incredible experience working with Jay Faerber!” said Kesgin. “He’s one of the best writers I’ve ever known, and I was really fascinated when he first showed me the outline of the story. I am having fun while creating the entire ELSEWHERE universe because of my love for fantasy and aerial concepts, and I feel really honored, as a female artist, to draw Amelia Earhart.”
ELSEWHERE #1 Cover A by Sumeyye Kesgin (Diamond code: JUN170635) and Cover B by Andrew Robinson (Diamond code: JUN170636) arrives in comic book stores Wednesday, August 2nd. The final order cutoff deadline for comics retailers is Monday, July 10th.
ALL-NEW FANTASY ADVENTURE SERIES ELSEWHERE ARRIVES THIS AUGUST Unravel the mystery behind Amelia Earhart’s fabled disappearance in this teen-friendly series “Get lost in this other world and you'll be in the best company.” —Kieron Gillen (THE WICKED + THE DIVINE)
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