#because it’s so rare

[shelyue99]

That's when the rumor blew through the tents. "The news is out!" men called from field to field and hedgerow to hedgerow. "They've chosen the drop zone."

The C.Q. came around shortly afterward, and we left the area in formation and assembled, one platoon at a time, in the closely guarded battalion briefing tent. Our platoon leader told us that a real beauty was waiting for us here.

Two large sandtables stood on yard-high legs in the center of the tent.

Maps and diagrams hung from the rear wall. Our instructor, the S-2 captain, watched us come in and look around. Yale men, his face seemed to say as he stared at us dully with a studied air of unshaven indifference, must remain poised and blasé in the presence of the unwashed. When the last man had ducked in, the guard secured the door flap and the captain started to talk.

"I have something here," he said, "that may interest you: a sort of field problem... These are sandtables, one for the big picture and one our own size. You've seen other sandtables before at other airfields before other jumps, but these are different.

"We're jumping behind the enemy lines on the peninsula of Normandy.

Don't look blank. Surely you've heard of Normandy? It's a large peninsula on the coast of central France about a hundred miles southeast of here." He stepped to the back wall, unrolled a map of southern England and central France, and taking a pointer, indicated Normandy.

"Here's where we are, and here's where we're going. Normandy's rather a large peninsula, but we're not going to take it all—at first.

"We're going to jump behind the beaches ahead of the infantry. We'll go in about midnight, they'll hit the beach at six a.m. So we'll be all alone that night.

"There are two beaches: Utah, here, and Omaha, here. We drop behind Utah. The 4th Division is supposed to pass through us on D-Day.

"If they take the beach.

"The 82nd's jumping up here around St. Mere Eglise, and the British 6th Airborne Division will go in ahead of their infantry here. But let's not worry about those people. We'll have enough worries of our own."

The captain stepped from the map to one of the sandtables. Nobody breathed. Normandy? Normandy? I said to myself. All I know about Normandy is William the Conqueror, and that was 1066.

"Gather around me here, so everybody can see. If I point it out to you on the sandtable, then perhaps you will be better able to visualize the op-eration.

"See this bend, where Normandy joins the mainland? See the flat green land at the bend? That's the estuary of the Douve River. It divides the two beachheads. Carentan is the key city.

We have to take the bridges to it and the high ground along the Douve, but we'll land north of the river behind Utah Beach, here.

"The main purpose of jumping at night, aside from the obvious ones of dodging flak and surprising the Germans, is to give us plenty of time to clear the roads to the beach, so the 4th Division can get in. The 101st has to take the four southern causeways from Utah Beach to the high ground and hold them open at all costs. We'll also have to take the key villages and strongpoints and knock out a couple of gun batteries and any odd Jerrys who get in our way.

"Our Regiment must take the two causeways, Exits One and Two, here.

The Germans may flood the low ground behind the beach and confine the infantry to these causeways so they are A Number One on our list of objectives. They have to be taken and held.

"Those gun batteries I just mentioned have to be wiped out. If they're not fully destroyed, we may be all alone in Normandy, because they can stop the infantry right in the water. Somebody will also have to blow up the communications lines to the beach and somebody else will have to take these little villages: St.

Marie du Mont, St. Martin de Varreville, Foucarville, St. Germain de Varreville, Audouville, La Hubert, Pouppeville, and a couple of others you needn't worry about.

"As far as we know, not too many Germans are waiting for us down there. We have information coming in from the Underground every day and photo-reconnaissance planes over the area right now, and we don't think the Germans are expecting us.

There's a tank school in Carentan, which is the biggest city in our sector and one that we'll probably have to take later, but they're training with beat-up old 1939 Renault tanks and shouldn't cause us too much trouble.

"The other Germans are mostly static-defense troops, low-grade Poles and White Russians with German officers and noncoms. Most of them were forced into the Wehrmacht after they were captured on the eastern front, so they shouldn't put up a very enthusiastic fight.

They're formed into two divisions: the 709th and the 243rd. The 243rd has a lot of veterans who were transferred from the Russian front to Normandy for a rest. We won't give them much rest, I can assure you. Oh yes, G-2 says that elements of the 716th Infantry Division are also roaming around down there. But don't worry about those three divisions. A German division is lucky nowadays if it has three thousand men in it.

"Just a few more words before you go. Our mission, as I said before, is to jump behind the enemy lines on the peninsula of Normandy. Now for the timing.

"We'll leave at 11:30 p.m. The 2nd Battalion will drop and assemble on radar and a string of three white lights set up by the Pathfinders in an orchard near a crossroads village named Hébert. We'll march to and hold the two southern causeways from Utah Beach. We'll kill any Germans who get in our way.

"And don't forget that word kill! Hitler has ordered the Wehrmacht to treat all Allied parachutists as spies and shoot them on the spot. So you know what to do with the Germans. We're not playing with flags and umpires anymore."

Glancing disdainfully at his wrist-watch, the captain ended his monologue and looked around the tent, dull-eyed and absolutely uninterested.

—Parachute Infantry by David Webster

[swan2swan]

Whoever conceived and animated this moment, I hope they're doing well and thriving. This is S-rank romance stuff here.

[kesopan]

warmth in the cold

[liones-s]

a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up

[novelconcepts]

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept 11 attacks:

15 were from Saudi Arabia (a powerful/oil-rich country the U.S. works hard to maintain diplomatic relations with)

2 were from the United Arab Emirates (also a powerful/oil-rich country the U.S. works hard to maintain diplomatic relations with)

1 was from Egypt, 1 from Lebanon.

None of the hijackers were from Iraq.

None of the Sept 11 hijackers were Iraqi.

None of the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq.

[xandrikart]

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[artificial-ascension]

Being transmasc means you will hear people say shit to you with their whole chest that, if they said to a cis woman, would get them on a block list of raging misogynists instantly also you are also on that block list for bringing this up.

[xulips]

smells just like him

[thefloatingstone]

Appleseed PDA montage to save you from reading endless pages of unimportant politics that don't amount to anything

also because I have nothing better to do, I'm bored, I'm moody, my gaming laptop is still broken so no BG3, and it's too late at night to start drawing after doing animation clean-up all day.

[somewhereincairparavel]

'i hate jason grace because he thought he was worthy enough to compete with percy' I'm sorry have y'all SEEN jason. this man defeated a TITAN without weapons and his bare hands to the point the titan wanted to rise from the UNDERWORLD with the help of a GODDESS to seek vengeance over him. I think we can cut him slack for having some well deserved self respect bc I'd brag too wtf

[mavigator]

i talked about it a little bit already but i have things to say about it. for context, i was born with amniotic band syndrome. the amniotic band wrapped around my left wrist in utero and stunted the growth of my hand. i was born with about half a palm, four nubs for fingers, and a twisted half of a thumb. i can open and close my thumb and pinkie joint like a claw.

yesterday at work i had a shift in the room with 5-10 year old kids. i had my left hand hidden in my sleeve (a bad habit of mine). a kid asked if he could see my hand, and even though internally i was debating running into traffic, i said “sure you can” and showed him my hands. he stared for a moment, looking disturbed, and then said “i don’t want to look at that anymore”. that hurt to hear, but i understand that kids are new to the world and he probably didn’t mean it out of malice. i put my hand away again, told him that it was okay, and that i was just born that way.

he then went on to talk about how he knows a kid with a similar hand to mine and called it “ugly”. i told him that wasn’t a very kind thing to say and that he wouldn’t feel good if someone said that to him, and he replied that no one would say that to him—because he has “normal hands”, and he’s glad he does because otherwise he’d be “ugly”. i tried to talk with him for a bit about how everybody is born differently, but he just started talking about a girl he knows with a “messed up face” and pulled on his face to make it look droopy. i went on some more about how it wasn’t very kind to talk about people that way, but the conversation moved on to something else.

i’ve told my supervisors about it and they’re going to have a talk with his mom. what i wanted to say is this: i’m genuinely not upset with the kid. kids are young and naturally curious, and he clearly simply hasn’t been taught about disabled people and kind ways to speak to/about others. which is why i am upset with his parent(s). i know he’s encountered visibly deformed/disabled people before (he said so himself!), yet his parent(s) clearly haven’t had any kind of discussion with him about proper language and behavior. i knew from birth that some people were just different than others, but my parents still made a point to assert to be kind to and accepting of others. i wonder if adults in his life are the type of people to hush him and usher him away when he points out someone in a wheelchair. that kind of thing doesn’t teach politeness. it tells children that disabled people are an Other than can’t be acknowledged or spoken about; which, to a child, means disability must be something bad.

i’m lucky enough that this was a relatively mild incident, and that i’m a grownup with thicker skin. i’m worried about the other kids he mentioned to me. has he been talking to them this way? when i was a kid, i had other kids scream, cry, and run away at the sight of my hand. or follow me around pointing at me and laughing at me. or tell me i couldn’t do something because i was ugly or incapable or whatever. one time a girl at an arcade climbed to the top of the skeeball machine, pointed at me, and screamed at me to put my hand away and wouldn’t stop crying until she couldn’t see me anymore. another time, a kid saw my hand, screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran into my friend’s arms, crying hysterically about how i was scaring her. that second incident made me cry so hard i threw up when i got home. i can kind of laugh it off now, but having people react to me that way as a child is something i’m still getting over. why do you think i have a habit of keeping my hand in my sleeve? it just irritates me to see children that have clearly not been taught basic manners and kindness—their parents Clearly missed something pretty important .

[sporeclan]

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This one goes out to all the Finchpaw fans out there

[sesamestreep]

I really feel like one of the best details in “A Scandal in Bohemia” that I never see people fixate on enough is that the story starts with Watson stopping in to see Holmes at Baker Street on a complete whim, because he happens to see that he’s home (and Watson is now married and living elsewhere). Like he doesn’t send word first, he’s not invited, he just shows up and surprises Holmes. Which is not that weird but then Holmes is like “oh good, I’ve got a case anyway, you might as well hang out!” which just makes it funnier when the King shows up and is like “I’d really rather speak to you alone, actually” and Watson tries to leave and Holmes is just like “anything you can say to me, you can say to my best friend John Watson, and if you ask him to leave, I would consider it a grave insult, you would be my enemy and I will not help you ever!!” And the king is like “…ok” and just moves on.

like, that is crazy behavior. Holmes is talking about how there’s probably lots of money in this case, and then almost turns away the client for…not knowing who the fuck Watson is?? He’s not even supposed to be there?? He just came to say hi?? “It is both or none”… girl, GET UP.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

why aren't there more mysteries that take place in nursing homes & retirement communities. i want to watch a group of deranged retirees-cum-amateur-detectives combine their powers of:

decades of life experience

boredom-fueled busybody shamelessness

access to the most gossipy next-door-neighbors in existence

"I am too old to be arrested and/or give a shit" attitude

and solve crimes. this should be an enormous subgenre.