#frederick the unstoppable force

[3rdeyeblaque]

On November 26th we venerate Elevated Ancestor & Hoodoo Saint Mama Sojourner Truth on the 140th anniversary of her passing 🕊

An abolitionist, Womens’ Rights activist, & itinerant evangelist, Mama Sojourner Truth truly lived up to her name as one of the fiercest, relentless, & unstoppable pro-abolitionist voices of the 19th Century.

Given the name, Isabella, at birth, Mama Truth was born around 1797 to Dutch-speaking enslaved parents on Colonel Ardinburgh Hurley's plantation in Ulster County, NY. The actual date of her birth remains unknown. At the age of 9 she was sold away from her parents. She was passed through the hands of several slavers across NY State before ending up with the Dumonts. As was the case for most enslaved folks in the rural North, Isabella was forcibly isolated from other slaves and suffered physical & sexual abuse at the hands of the Dumonts.

Alone in the nearby woods, she found peace. Here, she'd speak to Spirit/God. Inspired by her many conversations with Spirit, one day in 1826, she walked away from Dumont Farm to freedom. Although the journey tempted her to return to the Dumonts, she stayed the course after she was struck by a vision of a man she identified as Jesus, during which she felt "baptized in the Holy Spirit," and thus gained the strength & confidence to push on. Like countless Ancestors before her, Isabella called on Spirit & supernatural forces for the power to survive her conditions.

Eventually, she married & birthed 5 children. On July 4, 1827, the NY State Legislature emancipated the enslaved, including Isabella & her children. Yet the Dumont family who "owned" her, refused to comply. Before dawn the next morning, with her youngest baby cradled in her arms, she sought refuge 5 miles away with an abolitionist family. During her time there, she converted to Pentecostal and joined their local Methodist church.

She later then moved again, this time with one of her eldest sons, Peter, in NYC wherein by day she worked as a live-in domestic. Here she found & joined a religious cult called, The Kingdom. It's leader, Matthias, beat Isabella and forced her to take on the heaviest workload. Soon thereafter she became a Pentecostal preacher. Her faith and preaching along with her life story as an emancipated slave drew the attentions of abolitionists & women's rights crusaders. Her speeches were not political by nature. They were based on her unique interpretation - as a woman and a former slave -of the Christian Bible.

On June 1st 1863, Sojourner Truth was born. Isabella took on this new name for herself as she headed East to, “exhort the people to embrace Jesus, and refrain from sin". She lived in a utopian community called, The Northampton Association for Education & Industry, which was devoted to transcending class, race, & gender. She preached at camp meetings for a few years before the community was dissolved. Even though the community lasted less than five years, many highly influential & reform-minded individuals visited the Northampton community; including prolific abolitionist leaders such as Frederick Douglass & William Lloyd Garrison.

Through these connections, she began to speak at public events on behalf of slave abolition and women’s rights. Eventually, this compelled her infamous 1851,“Ar’nt I A Woman” speech at a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, OH. This was a significant moment in the sociopolitical climate of the country at the time because, for the first time for most, "slave" became equated to women & "woman" became equated to Black. She became increasingly involved on the issue of Women's suffrage, but eventually separated her voice from leaders such as Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton one they asserted that they would not support the Black vote if Women were not also granted the same right.

In 1857, Mama Truth purchased a house with the help of friends in a small Spiritualist community called, Harmonia, near Battle Creek, MI. Here she lived thriving the years of supporting hwrself thrift paid speaking events, selling photographs of herself, publishing her book titled, "Narrative of Sojourner Truth" which was written by an amanuensis, as she was illiterate.

Once the Civil War began, Mama Truth pushed for the inclusion of Blacks in the Union Army, which was not intitially the case. She then poured her energy into gathering food & clothing supplies for the underserved volunteer regiments of Black Union soldiers. This is when the plight freed slaves captured her attention, as many of whom were living in refugee camps in Washington D.C.. Mama Truth embarked on a round-trip journey from her home near Battle Creek,MI to D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the conditions of the freedmen refugees in D.C. & across the North.

After the Civil War, she championed the idea of a colony for freed slaves out West where they could galvanize their desires to become self-reliant. Mama Truth garnered numerous signatures for her petition urging the U.S. Government to provide land for this endeavor. Although she presented this petition to then President Ulysses S. Grant, her mission never materialized. Nevertheless, in the Fall of 1879, a large migration of Southern freedmen ventured westward to start begin life anew. Mama Truth saw this as God's Divine Plan for our people. Despite her old age, Mama Truth traveled to Kansas to help them. Four years later, Mama Sojourner Truth passed away at her home near Battle Creek, MI. She was believed to be 86.

"How came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up blessed by God and few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk an' a buzzard." - Sojourner Truth @ the 1851 Ohio Women's Convention.

We pour libations & give 💐 today as we celebrate Mama Truth her selfless service and pioneering vision for the freedom & self-determination of our people. May her life be a reminder of: the power of stillness & deep meditation, to lead with Spirit, & the grit of perseverance that's alive in our blood.

Offering suggestions: woodland soil, water, Pentecostal prayers/ scripture, read/share her speeches & written words.

‼️Note: offering suggestions are just that & strictly for veneration purposes only. Never attempt to conjure up any spirit or entity without proper divination/Mediumship counsel.‼️

[captaincanonly]

wife

[histoireettralala]

Friedland and Tilsit

Late on June 6 Bennigsen received intelligence that Napoleon was rapidly concentrating his forces for a counterattack, and so he withdrew the Russian army to Heilsberg, where another sanguine but inconclusive battle was fought on June 10. Concerned about Napoleon's possible flanking maneuvers, Russians left the battlefield and retreated to the town of Friedland, on the Alle River. Wearied and in poor health, Bennigsen, who suffered from kidney stones and had passed out from exhaustion during the Battle of Heilsberg, had barely gotten any rest before he was informed about the French outposts appearing in the woods near the town. The fighting rapidly intensified as both sides committed additional forces, and by dawn a major battle was already raging. Upon receiving news of the battle, Napoleon rapidly concentrated his army at Friedland, and, noticing how disadvantageous the Russian positions were, made quick adjustments to the French dispositions. Around 5:30 p.m. a salvo of twenty French guns signaled the renewal of the battle. The French attack against the Russian left flank proved to be unstoppable, as the advancing French skillfully employed their artillery to maintain devastating fire at the tightly packed masses of the Russian infantry. By 8:00 p.m., with its flanks threatened, the Russian army had begun to withdraw through the narrow streets of Friedland and across the congested bridges over the Alle River.

Friedland was a decisive military and diplomatic victory for Napoleon. It revealed his ability to quickly size up a situation and exploit the enemy's mistake, tailoring his tactics according to circumstances. The battered Russian army, which lost some 20,000 killed and wounded, retreated toward the Niemen River, which marked the boundary of the Russian Empire. On June 19, Marshal Murat received Bennigsen's letter seeking an armistice. "After the torrents of blood which have lately flowed in battles as sanguinary as frequent", the letter read, "[Russians] desire to assuage the evils of this destructive war, by proposing an armistice before we enter upon a conflict, a fresh war, perhaps more terrible than the first." The offer was accepted, and Alexander agreed to meet Napoleon to discuss peace. The Russian military defeats would have lain heavily on Alexander's mind as he traveled to this meeting. But so would have his bitterness at Britain, which seemed to be more interested in consolidating its interests in the wider world than in supporting its allies in Europe. Talking to British ambassador Granville Leveson-Gower, Alexander vented his frustration that "the whole burden of the war [had] fallen upon his armies... that hopes had been held out that a British force would be sent to... Germany- month after month however passed, and no troops were even embarked."

The negotiations between Napoleon and Alexander at the end of June 1807 constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of the Napoleonic era. The meeting between the leaders took place in the early afternoon of June 25, on a specially built raft in the Niemen River. The two emperors, accompanied by their retinues, approached the banks of the river and boarded the vessels that were to take them to the raft. As the boats reached the raft, the two emperors embraced each other; it was said that Alexander greeted Napoleon with "Sire, I hate the English as much as you do." To which Napoleon replied, "In that case, the peace is made."

Over the next few days, the two emperors conducted a series of conferences in which they appear to heave divided the continent. As if to heighten the drama, Frederick William of Prussia was left on the riverbank, riding anxiously up and down the shore in expectation of the outcome of the meeting, which could determine the future of his entire state. After almost two weeks of meetings, fêtes and military reviews, on July 7 Alexander and Napoleon concluded the Treaty of Tilsit, one of the most comprehensive treaties of the Napoleonic Wars. The agreement proclaimed an alliance between the French and Russian empires and effectively divided Europe into western and eastern spheres of influence dominated by the respective powers. Alexander gave his formal recognition to the Confederation of the Rhine, firmly establishing Napoleon's control in central Europe while greatly weakening Prussia, which lost the port of Danzig after the Treaty of Tilsit established it as a free city. Russia also recognized the creation of the Kingdom of Westphalia under Napoleon's youngest brother, Jérôme, and accepted the rule of other Bonapartes: Joseph in Naples and Louis in Holland. In what constituted one of most substantial concessions, the Russian sovereign agreed to the reorganization of the formerly Prussian-controlled Polish lands into the Duchy of Warsaw under formal control of King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, Napoleon's close ally.

The treaty did not stop there. Alexander agreed to offer his services in negotiating peace between France and Britain, and he pledged that if this measure did not produce positive results by the first day of November 1807, he would declare war against Britain and join Napoleon's efforts to eliminate British commerce on the continent. Russia would also force Denmark and Sweden to close their ports to the British and use its naval power against British trade in the Mediterranean. Napoleon led Alexander to believe that in return for those concessions, he was acknowledging Russia's claim to an east European empire. Specifically, Napoleon agreed not to impede Russian ambitions in Swedish-controlled Finland and offered to mediate for peace between Russia and the Ottoman Empire; if the Ottomans refused to negotiate, Napoleon pledged to "make common cause with Russia against the Ottoman Porte", and help Russia expand into the European portion of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Constantinople and the province of Rumelia (on the Balkan Peninsula).

Two days after concluding this agreement with Russia, Napoleon signed a separate treaty with Frederick William II, one that was disastrously harsh for Prussia. It effectively eviscerated the Prussian kingdom, forcing it to cede all its lands west of the river Elbe and to accept territorial changes stipulated in the Franco-Russian treaty. This meant forsaking most of the Prussian-controlled Polish lands and the port city of Danzig. These changes resulted in a net loss of half the Prussian territory, from about 89,000 square miles to just over 46,000 square miles. Prussia was required to formally recognize all of Napoleon's reorganizations in Germany, to enter into a military alliance with France and Russia in the event of war against Britain, and to support the blockade of British goods. A separate military convention reduced the strength of the Prussian army to a minimal force (no more than 42,000 men for ten years) while prohibiting any additional recruitment of militias or guards. On July 12, to add insult to injury, Frederick William was coerced to accept the occupation of all of his remaining territory by French troops pending the payment of a vast war indemnity, which was set at 140 million francs in 1808.

Tilsit marked the culmination of Napoleon's campaigns, which in just two years had reshaped the European balance of power. These wars "inordinately extended the range of Napoleon's enterprises, and so made the French Empire merely the core of the "Grand Empire" which itself began to evolve", notes the French historian Georges Lefebvre. Indeed, French hegemony now stretched from the snowy fields of Poland to the rugged Pyrénées and from the sun-swept hills of Calabria to the misty shores of Prussia. For the first time in millennia all of the German-speaking lansd were under some degree of French control, either annexed, allied, occupied, or recently defeated.

Returning to Paris in late July, Napoleon was greeted with almost universal public acclaim. The French capital celebrated his birthday with a splendor that evoked Louis XIV's era. The emperor's speech at the opening session of the Legislative Corps was one of his proudest: it spoke of the humiliating defeats of Austria and Prussia, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and a profound territorial and structural reorganization of central Europe. France's "new triumphs and peace treaties have redrawn the political map of Europe," Napoleon informed the legislators. Not since the days of Charlemagne had a ruler exercised so much power over the continent, deciding the fate of rulers and millions of their subjects. France's triumph over ancien régime Europe was a crucial moment in what German historian Reinhart Koselleck called a Sattelzeit, an epochal threshold that marked the transition from the early modern age to modernity, a moment that facilitated the rise of nationalism, modernization, and state creation.

Alexander Mikaberidze- The Napoleonic Wars, A Global History.

[a-crash-in-time-collection]

Chapter 1: The Crash

She was floating in space. Only it didn't seem like normal space, which she knew all about. It seemed to shine with different colors. She couldn't move much, it was almost as if she was forced into her current position. Voices of old filled her head. Voices she wanted to remember. Voices she never wants to forget. But at the same time, the voices brought back memories of a different time. A different time...

"Us kids should stick together, not stalk one another. I mean, Mafia Town can be a really dangerous place" "If you want it, we'll have to settle it in true Mafia style!" "You Moon Penguins are just gonna write some loud, noisy drivel!" "This last time piece is all for me, darling." "Your contract has expired, sleep now in the fire!" "And do it quickly pup."

Her face formed a smile, before tears started to fall. Wait... why was she...

"Don't leave us!" "Hey kiddo, let's make another contract!" "Don't you dare leave, lass!" "Let's watch our movie, darling!"

That's why... she couldn't have just stayed. She at least needed to try and get home. And her kind weren't keen on creatures from other planets... who knows what would have happened to them? But with the end result, did it even matter-

A large ringing brought her out of the space-like place, finding herself sitting on the soft surface of her bed. Glancing around as she stopped the ringing of the clock, everything was in place. Her relics on their podiums, toys she made based on her time on that planet on the shelves in her room. Most of her badges she bought from the strange badge guy on a pin board beside her bed. Her umbrella was next to her dresser with the mirror.

A glance out the nearby window showed the mostly green and blue planet. It reminded her a lot of the planet that she could now only visit in her dreams. Unlike that planet, there was little if any magic. Talking animal creatures were only heard of in movies. Ghosts were just tall tales. So similar, yet different at the same time...

She got up, yawning as she stretched and walked over to her closet. Opening it, she grabbed a purple blazer and yellow scarf. She paused, looking at them both slightly. The blazer was taller than she used to be, when she first found herself crashed on the planet...

She remembered checking the vault as she passed by, only one time piece was left. She knew that wouldn't be enough to make it home, and she didn't know if she would pass another planet she could survive on in between them. So she grabbed it, and braced for impact. The ship crashed on 'Earth' in the middle of the night, and looking back on it now, she was lucky no big place caught sight of her. She remembered bleeding, maybe having a broken or fractured bone with the sharp pain coming from the left side of her body. She found herself being too hurt to move on her own right away... it was possible that she would have died...

But then two people entered her vision as she picked herself up. Both wore hats like she did, one of them actually had two. Apparently the two hat man, Reginald, had seen the ship pass in front of his airship while it fell from the sky. The two were naturally confused on why she was there, and concerned if she was alright. She remembered them offering to take her to the airship's medbay, but she was more worried about her relics, which were not the only things she had of her time with her old friends. The one with his orange hair in a ponytail that hung over his shoulder, who called himself 'Right Hand Man', offered to do it for her. However, she took liberty and carried them all herself to the airship. Needless to say, the two were surprised by the child's strength.

She now called these two 'Dad' and 'Papa', and they called her their daughter.

She allowed herself to exit her thoughts as she pulled her brown shoes over her purple socks and pants, standing up and walking over to the door of her room. It was a new day.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake up." An energetic voice spoke as soon as she opened the door. She was met with a more-humanoid Topbot, with a face that smiled at her, and silver hair that helped make them seem more like a teenager. He wore a blue and orange jacket, with the faintest hint of a green shirt being seen, and dark dull indigo pants that ended in his metal shoes that were literally his feet.

A few years ago, Hat Girl had found herself more lonely. Her dads, while they made time for her, were often busy at work. Most of the younger kids aboard the airship didn't let her play too often, and the teenagers were often on training missions or just plain avoided her. In an attempt to give her someone to hang out with, Reginald took aside a random Topbot, redesign and reprogrammed it to act as a brother to Hat Girl. He spent so long and hard on it that it felt like part of his soul belong to the machine in the end. Which could possibly explained how Platinum wasn't just following an interactive script, but was fully self aware and alive. He did have a small panic attack at first due to the sudden self awareness, but soon after he was able to cause trouble with Hat Kid.

"You ready for today, brother of mine?" Hat Girl asked, a smile forming on her face.

"Uhh, yeah." He said, a smirk forming on his face as well.

"Good, we can get started on our prank plans after breakfast." She stated, passing him and walking down the hall, humming a slight tune as she glanced out at the seemingly-night sky.

"Aww, come on!" Platinum said, racing next to her quickly, rolling his bright orange eyes. "You always have to eat before we can have fun. I don't see what the big deal is."

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, Brother." She said, sticking her tongue out playfully. She never fully grew out of her childish phase. "I pity you sometimes, food is great and you're unable to experience it."

"Please. I got my Tanks and Family, that's all I need." Platinum replied, rolling his eyes as the two walked into the cafeteria area, which was currently a bit busy as you would expect from it early in the morning. "I honestly don't see why your body decides you need food. Just seems inconvenient in my option."

Hat Girl shook her head slightly with a chuckle as she walked over to the sideboard, where Burt and Fredrick were talking.

"I'm starting to get concerned over your coffee obsession, Burt." The Cheese wearing Toppat said, arms crossed as he glared at the man in front of him. The man always sounded like his throat was sore, at least to Hat Girl it did. She remembered questioning if he was alright when they first met.

"Coffee is nice, Fredrick." Burt said, the dyed orange part of his black hair covering one of his eyes, as per the usual. He always seemed to act like he had no emotions, and spent most of his days in his office or grabbing himself the drink that was currently the topic of their talk. "The fact that you never tried coffee worries me."

"I'm more of a Hot chocolate person, and besides, the smell alone is enough to turn me off." Fredrick stated, grabbing the lake of floating marshmallows in a cup along with the plate of 'Bacon, Egg, & Cheese Breakfast Bombs' he liked. "But I know all that coffee isn't healthy for you, I swear you drink more coffee then you eat actual food."

Burt rolled his eyes at the statement, before glancing around the area as he grabbed his coffee and toast. "Fine. I'll eat a little more today." With that, temporarily balancing his plate on his other arm, he grabbed one of the muffin-like items off Fredrick's plate and walked away.

Fredrick was frozen in shock for a few seconds, before huffing and glancing to the side. It was only then he realized the children of the leaders. "Oh, sorry you two, I didn't see you there. Off going to cause some trouble later I assume?"

"Possibly, possibly not." Platinum shrugged as Hat Girl chuckled, before giving her breakfast request to the cook-toppat that came by.

"I'll be taking that as a yes." Fredrick said, shaking his head. "Just uhh, do me a favor and don't go on a spree of spray-painting the inside of the vents, again. Took me and Sammy nearly the whole day to clean it last time."

"Alright, no spray paint in vents..." Platinum said, raising his arms in front of him slightly in defeat. He watched as Frederick left, before turning to his sister. "Want to finally see how many people we can surprise with airhorns tape to their chairs and doors?"

"Oh heck yeah!" Hat Girl said, giving her brother a thumbs up. And the Toppats that heard her shout began to feel a faint feeling of fear among them. They knew then that chaos caused by those two would come later that day.

-------

What they didn't know was on earth, a conversation was happening. About the true chaos.

"You sure this is... safe?" One government person asked another as they glanced at the cannon. Although cannon felt like an understatement. The place where the 'cannonball' would come out of look like it itself was 27 miles long. "For Earth I mean."

"Should be." The other replied, hoping away from the gears they were adjusting. "The material should begin to burn up after it makes contact with the toppat orbital station. The worst we should have to deal with are burning pieces of metal and stuff falling down to earth in the size of normal meteoroids."

"Am I the only one who feels this is a bit... extreme?" The first asked as they hop into the tunnel to the underground control system of the cannon. "I understand they've been a pain to deal with since they got up, but can't we just set up traps for them on earth."

"It's not just about the Toppats alone." The second stated as they followed the first, wanting to be as far away from the cannon before it blew its canon ball. "If other criminal organizations see what the clan has done, they'll likely follow in suit. Soon all crime might be unstoppable because those who caused it are up in space. Is that the world you want to live in?"

"No."

"Then we need to make a statement. And this is the only way. Now let's get to the control room, and get this party started..."

-------

Hat Girl had found herself staring out the cafeteria window as she finished her plate of breakfast, slightly blocking out what Platinum was talking about as he sat in front of her. This was a bit normal for the two, half the time they were inseparable during the day. Especially since the incident where Dad was captured, and Papa had to be turned into a cyborg to live. It was a bit of a struggle for the clan then, and even with Dad back it was a lot of work to make up all the money that had been stolen the night before they were meant to launch their station-

Her train of thought stopped as she faintly spotted something outside the window. She got off her seat and walked over to the window, placing her hand on it faintly as she glanced down at the planet they raided. There was some sort of... gray and slightly green ball thing. At first it was just a speck of dust, but it was getting bigger.. and bigger... it was coming to them, faster and faster.

"Hattie?" Platinum questioned, walking up next to his sister in confusion. "What's going on, you don't just leave a plate of food alone suddenly like that." She was a bit wordless at first, but managed to point to the strange thing. Platinum had to squint his eyes to see it. "That's... just a space rock."

"Coming FROM Earth?" Hat Girl asked, looking at her brother. "As a former space traveler, I have NEVER seen that happen, and I know that's not a normal occurrence for this planet. And not to mention it's perfectly... in the path of.. hitting... Get Dad and Papa and warn them, NOW!"

"Time to act serious for once then." The topbot said, quickly racing away from his sister and the group of toppats.

She glanced at the ball again, seeing it was getting closer and larger with each passing second. She found herself frozen like the poor souls in Vanessa's Manor, or the times she used her ice hat years ago. What was she going to do?

"Dad, Pops!" Platinum called as he reached the Cockpit of the rocket, taking an unneeded breath as he reached the door.

"Platinum?" Reginald asked, turning away from his cyborg husband as he glanced at his Robotic son. "What's going-"

"We need to move, or use Supreme Dominance." Platinum cut him off, with worry in fear shining in his orange eyes. "Now-"

At the very seconds, the 'cannonball' of metal and small bits of trash collided with the orbital station, hitting the middle of the rocket.

Hat Girl fell to her feet as the station twisted and chaos fell around her. Everything outside the window became a blur, as Toppats screamed in panic. She suddenly found her grip from the wall she'd grabbed onto slip, and she was slammed against another wall. Everything went black to her after that.

-------

It took a bit for her mind to process things as she awake, her body aching in places like she had a faint sunburn. She slowly opened her eyes with a groan, scanning the mix of dark and light. She appeared to be where the window of the cafeteria once was. Keyword there being once was because now it was a pile of glass on the grass below her. Some of the glass were close to her arms, and likely was responsible for the small cuts she saw on them. She glanced around as much as she could without getting up.

Chaos was the best word that could describe the current state of the station. Well, other then 'destroyed'. Parts of the orbital station the Toppats called home where broken and scattered across what she could only assume was a forest clearing. The earth was dragged up from a few parts finding themselves lodge into it. She was able to see a few Toppat members getting up or helping others up, while trying to take in what had just happened. Not like she could blame them, she knew exactly what happened, but was still trying to process it herself.

Their home was attacked, and was sent far from earth. Yet, judging by the fact none of them were suffocating, it meant this planet had oxygen or some other air humans could breathe in. Which made sense, they did land in a forest. But that meant they were out of the solar system...

Her train of thought was cut off by a sliver of a blur that entered her field of vision. At first she was a bit spooked out, until her vision adjusted, and she saw the familiar metal hand, only with a few faints scratches. She took the cold hand, although by now she was used to the chill, as Platinum helped her to her feet. "You ok, sis?"

"Y-Yeah." She said, letting go of his hand as she rubbed her arms slightly. She picked up her nearby fallen top hat, and made sure to check the side. She sighed in relief as her hand made badge, one that had the hats of her fathers on it, was still there, and placed that hat back on her head. "Some shards of glass cut me a bit when the window broke."

"Well... considering what just happened, it could have been a lot worse." Platinum looked around. "This is all so unreal..."

"Yeah..." She slowly walked past her brother as she glanced up at the sky, then around at all the greenery around them. Why... was she feeling like she had been here before? Her mind told her it was simply because it looked like earth, but her heart was insisting it was something more.

"Oi. Are ya ok, Reg?" Right Hand Man asked, as he helped the Chief onto his feet, worry in his human and robotic eyes.

"I'm fine. But... the others..." Reginald coughed slightly, before looking around the crash site, as much as he could without moving from his spot anyway.

As the leader of the Toppats, one skill he gained over the years was being somewhat-able to get a rough estimation of how many clan members were in his sight. And after seeing at least 100 Toppats in his vision, he knew others were likely on the other side of the rocket. Assuming at least 88 toppats were on that other side, it meant that a few were still stuck inside, likely injured or, worryingly, dead. Not to mention the children...

"Right Hand Man! Check the rumble for any trapped members!" He ordered, his voice and tone clear that there was no time to waste. He was still not fully used to his lover's cybernetics, watching his legs turn into a booster as he flew into one of the openings near the top. But he loved him all the same. He glanced at a nearby group of Toppats. "See if you can find anything from Medbay, and get it setup for any injured members!" The toppats seemed to be slightly surprised by his tone, but they quickly got to work, scanning the nearby areas.

"Sir." A voice appeared behind him. He turned around to see a man in a black jacket with his white shirt visible. "I know you likely don't want anyone else going into the wreckage, but-"

"Yes Quincy, go find the kids. Just be careful." Reginald answered, the fellow father wasting no time to do so in response, likely worried for his own daughter. The kids were in a pod similar to the leader's pod, it was one of the first things Reginald planned out when he made the blueprints. They would spend most of their days in there, it was the safest for them, especially if the place was to below up, they would already be in a pod and on their way to earth.

Hat Girl found herself walking near the nearby Woodline. That's when she noticed the traces of purple deeper down, and found herself frozen in realization.

Reginald noticed his daughter near the Woodline, and walked up to her. "Are you alright, Hattie?"

"I recognized this place." She said, looking at him. "I been here before."

Reginald's brown and blue eyes showed sudden confusion, tilting his head to the side ever so slightly. "You... what?"

"This was the planet I was on before I crashed onto earth." She responded. She then pointed out where the green of life and calmness turned into the creepy purple and black of dread and the unknown to all but her. "That ghost who's song Papa sings lives there."

"Really, the one with that Mafia, one of which went into space to try and get a toll from you?" Reginald question. He never thought his daughter was lying about the planet, but he figured he never find himself on said planet so he mostly just consider it stories.

"Yeah!" She exclaimed, childlike joy in her voice. She never really outgrew her childish side.

"Well... I suppose that means there's a town nearby, at least We should be able to get resources there." Reginald sighed, turning over his shoulder as Right Hand Man landed behind him. A look over the cyborg's shoulder showed some toppats in a little medbay-like area, some medically skilled Toppats using their skills to help the more injured Toppats, the 3rd in command Sven among them. He looked back at his partner in crime. "Was that everyone... alive in the rumble."

"Got everyone t'at was in t'e rubble." Right Hand Man stated. "Surprisingly, everyone lived."

Reginald was a bit surprised at this, but a smile formed on his face. "That's very relieving."

"So... what's the plan Dad?" Platinum asked, glancing at the Toppat leader slightly. "We can't just stay here with no place to rest, or prepare food." He paused for a second. "Well, you guys can't, at least."

Reginald brought his hand to his chin in thought, before dropping it and walking up a nearby rock. He cleared his throat, before calling out. "Can I have everyone's attention!?"

The clan members stopped whatever they were doing, except the few tending to the hurt Toppats, but he knew they were listening as well.

He took a breath before speaking. "As your Leader, I would be lying to you all if I were to claim I knew how to fix this, or the exact steps we should take next. We are the first of our kind to find ourselves stranded on a planet that can maintain life. But we cannot let this disturb us. It may be a long while, but I promise you, we will find our way home. But for now, survival is our goal, to watch after one-another, as clan and family." He paused briefly as he glanced at them all, lost souls unsure of what to do, before resuming. "Those of you who are well enough, see if you can move the walls detached from the station in order to make a temporary form of shelter. We do not know when a storm will come by, if this planet has storms at all. Look for supplies that fallen outside of the ship, only go in to retrieve items that are necessary for our survival. Go along the Woodline and look for wood for a fire. And trust in one another." With that, he backed up from his position on the rock.

Platinum watched as the clan members took a few seconds to process the orders, and the fact they were on another planet, before most started to look around. He spotted Burt and Fredrick walking up to a broken piece of wall, and seemed to start debating where the best place would go to serve as shelter. He saw Calla Fox, the one who stole the Ruby alongside Sven, slowly walk away from the Swedish man to help others look for supplies. He found himself glancing to where the purple part of the woods were hidden, his curiosity growing.

Reginald began to walk over to the wreckage that a few hours ago was the base of operations for the Toppat clan. "Hopefully we stolen enough we can sell in order to pay for what we need to fix the station..." He placed his head in his hands. "It's going to be so expensive..." He let out a muffle shout, not wishing to distract his clan members.

"Still t'ink ya s'ould 'ave let me 'unt after t'at pink-'aired government-kissin' t'ief." Right Hand Man grumbled, glancing at him. "Especially since we lost two members t'anks ta 'im."

Hat Girl watched her dads walked closer to the broken station, and went to follow them to help, before feeling a chilly hand grabbed her hand. "You said one of your friends lived in the creepy woods, right?"

She turned to look behind her, taking a second to glance at where the woods were before returning to her brother. "Yeah."

"And the creepy woods is in the direction of that purple stuff, riiiight?" Platinum voice showed intent, and seems to show he already knew the answer.

"Yea, The forest is kinda pretty in it's own way though, if memory serves me right-" She suddenly looked at him, processing the grin that appeared on his face. In response, she gave her own smart smirk. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"We sneak away from the clan while they take care of the crash rocket mess and chill with your old pals?"

"YES!" She said, high fiving her brother as she bounced in the air slightly. "I been wanting to see them all again, but never thought I actually could until now! I just... hope they aren't still mad at me for sweeping them off of my spaceship."

"Come on, with your cute face as a child, and you still a bit childish face now?" Platinum asked, warping an arm around her shoulder. "They'll forgive you in a heartbeat."

She nodded, a smile on her face as removed her brother's arm around her shoulder. "Catch me if you can then, brother." She said, sticking out her tongue with a 'bleeh" and raced into the woods. She heard a shout from her brother, something about 'cheating' by 'not telling him' and heard his metal feet click ageist the ground to catch up to her. She let out a giggle before shouting once they were a safe distance away from the clan. "Snatcher, here we come!"

[talietikasero]

Stability

Random prompt from 8/11 [finished 8/16]: rewrite the Strive ending / create an alternate epilogue [to line up with my story project]. I may or may not rewrite the whole thing for fun lmao.

[Main story preview here (contains 6 scenes)] // [Chapter 1 now on AO3]

"I guess... that's what they meant..." She let out between huffs. Both the voice in her head and the former Sanctus Maximus Populi said the same thing regarding her potential ability.

“When the time comes, with your seed, you hold the power to save or destroy the world.”

“You can prevent the end of it all.”

Energy drained, she fought off the sluggish pace her body was moving. Looking over to her partner, she noticed he was barely hanging on to his life, staying incredibly still, and trying to regulate his breathing while facing down. While her body contained the [Scales of Juno], he had the [Flame of Corruption] ripped out from his, reverting him to a human. "On second thought, don't move." Once she closed the distance between them, she knelt and put her arms around him. Face against the scuffed leather sleeve, and she struggled to hold her emotions in. "H-hey..." Voice cracking, she lowly muttered between sniffles, "please, don't go..."

"..."

"You... you stayed true to... your word about... a-about..."

"..."

"Fighting to... s-save the world..."

"If the world was going to disappear tomorrow... What would you do today?"

"What kind of a question is that? Stop whatever's ending the world or die trying."

Her embrace tightened as tears ran down her face. "Human, Gear, or neither. The world still needs you."

With drooped ears and saddened eyes, the wolf spirit whined. Its host and companion soothed it by scratching behind its ears and reassuring the worst had come to pass. "(It's okay, Rei. We're still alive.)." She whispered to the spirit in her native tongue. Another whine followed by a lick to the side of her face, Giovanna patted Rei's forehead. "What? Are you worried about me? I'm okay, I swear." She winced as another sharp pain ran through her body. "Ouch..." Her superior, the President, placed a hand on her shoulder. Half-expecting him to say she's no longer needed, she began, "I'm sorry-..."

"None of that." Vernon's voice was firm; however, it sounded... fatherly. He may have his doubts about the agent, but he knew she was more than capable of the job. Facing off against an unstoppable force, she did prove she's worth giving a higher position. "I can tell what you were thinking, but you're not being let go. You take as much time as you need off, Gio. Goldlewis, Erica, and I will await your return."

Saddened at the loss of someone he could consider a friend, the time traveler meekly looked down at the minty green and white guitar he held in his hands. This entire time he was unaware of her true identity. If he had to lose someone like her, it didn't have to be this way. Regardless of if she recalled who he was and why he was important to her in the first place, false memory or not. He threw away his chance to return home a while ago, and now he felt that it would've been for nothing had he gone through with it. "It shouldn't have ended like this... Megumi." Axl softly said under his breath.

After regaining control over his body and revealing the wicked goddess's weak point, the vampiric samurai pierced the ground a few centimeters with his sword. He kneeled to show his appreciation for defeating the evil force that used him as a puppet. Now, he could see why his master was fascinated by the will of a single person. This same person was stripped of his powers and still faced death head-on. "May you rest for now. The next time we meet, it won't be as enemies, but acquaintances." Drawing his blade from the ground, Nagoriyuki sheathed it and took his leave.

The King of Illyria – his lifelong rival and their son-in-law – made his way over to them, stopping a few feet short to maintain distance. "It's finally over. They're gone. We can... we can go home now." Part of him wanted to hold a hand out to help him stand, yet he held back and deemed that action unnecessary. Ky's spirits rose once he noticed the man in front of him was taking steady deep breaths -- body slowly moving to show signs of life.

Right hand maintaining its grip on the Outrage's handle, his free hand lightly grasped one of hers. Face still downward, a weak smile formed. "...You think so?"

She couldn't believe it. He's hanging by a thread and using what energy he should be saving to answer her with a question of his own.

"I know so."

The past three weeks were a blur. From the day she woke up and adjusted to this new world to the present, where she aided in bringing down a god. She never would've guessed that any of these events could've transpired. In the days leading up to September 2016, she was a terminally ill scientist who refused any life-saving alternative to live past what little time she had left, insisting she spent it with her significant other. Fast forward to December 2187, and she was brought back to life and became the partner of humanity's savior -- the very same person, albeit for the last time.

_____

The next day, another patient was checked into the hospital. This time there wasn’t a commotion caused by bringing his unconscious form bursting through the front doors. She wasn’t strong enough to carry him in her arms like he held her – that’s what the gurney from the airship’s infirmary wing was for.

“I have a request. May I stay here until he recovers? I… I don’t want to leave him.”

Three days later, word had reached his family that he's – miraculously and defying all odds – alive. His refusal to follow the light after what had happened was attributed to his stubborn nature. The Grim Reaper knocked at his door, and he slammed it shut in their face. Occupying the same bed, in the same patient room as her around a month ago, the now de-powered hero lay hooked up to the vitals system.

"Is he going to be alright?"

"Hard to say, but he'll pull through. He did wake up this morning, so there's something, yeah?"

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but has anyone seen my mother? About my height, short red hair with white underneath, and wearing a blue leather jacket? She hasn't been seen since everyone returned."

"She's in the room and hasn't left at all. I had someone stop by the house and bring her spare clothes since she spent the last four days here."

"Oh, thank god." The queen was relieved to know her mother's whereabouts. She respected her parents' privacy by not asking if she was able to go in.

---

Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring-ring-ring.

Sighing in aggravation, she answered her phone. There was only one person she kept in contact with these past few days. "What do you want now? He's still not up, so stop cal-..."

"I was going to ask something else. I'm going to regret this, but are you still angry?"

"You're a smart man to keep your distance from me, but a dumbass to ask that. Of course, I am! You ruined our lives with your 'self-righteousness' and nearly brought another apocalypse."

"...Aria, I understand your rage. If only I could rewind time and prevent your illness. I shouldn't have forcibly converted him and disappeared with your sleep capsule. It wasn't my intention to have our research weaponized, but I was figuratively and literally held at gunpoint to hand it over to the US Government. I should've known better and anticipated that Chaos -- erm, the Original's creation would sabotage your activation. Your screams still haunt me... and... I'm... I'm sorry."

"Asuka."

"I can't fix this by excessively apologizing and listing off my crimes, but I hope everything goes well for you and Frederick."

"Whatever. Enjoy the moon, or don't." She ended the call before her former friend could reply. "Asshole." Aria slumped back in the chair and opened her book to the page she left off. "We should've launched you into the sun."

"Oh my. And I thought 'Sol' was a hothead. You're pretty harsh, you know that? It's more frightening than I-No on a good day." Jack-O's voice rang through. Capable of feeling and expressing emotions herself, the Valentine was taken aback at what she heard during their calls. "If possible, can we listen to his show sometime? Please?"

"...Okay."

"Thank you. ~"

---

Forty minutes after the heated conversation, a groggy voice broke the silence.

"Is the... afterlife a sterile... hospital room?" Frederick's eyes were half-open, staring directly at the ceiling.

Aria closed what she was reading and placed it on the counter. Ignoring the monitors that once kept track of her, she looked over his body to see minimal damage sustained. "Looks like you've still got some of that healing factor. Or you're just too hardheaded to die."

He slightly turned his head to face her. "Heh. Probably both."

Running a hand through his now short hair, her lips curved into an unsure smile. "Welcome back to the land of the living?"

"This doesn't look like heaven. If you're my welcome guide, then I'll stay." His body was still sore, but he extended his arm out for her to hold his hand. The warmth from the fire magic still dwelling within them made their contact feel safer.

"I should've worn that jumpsuit and halo." Her inner voice's reaction was an exaggerated throat clear. "But if I did," she held a finger to her temple, "I don't think she would've appreciated that."

"I would've been mildly annoyed at best. Mildly annoyed yet honored that you'd wear it because of what you did."

"You're really pissed off at Asuka, aren't you?"

"How much did you hear?"

"All of it. Didn't know you were capable of that."

"I felt like you after the second day." He took that as a friendly poke at his history. "Since you've saved the world for the last time, are you still up for that 'alternate life' you mentioned the other night? We don't have to stay at Ky and Dizzy's. They can arrange something for us."

His ears perked up at the suggestion. Did she remind him about his statement regarding them settling down? Having survived an act of God, living a quiet life together a few minutes out from the capital didn't sound like a terrible idea. "What did you have in mind?"

"A fair-sized home, nothing too big or small, probably just down the way from their place. I don't want to throw everything away and live in seclusion. We're way out of our own time, but we finally have a family, people who care about us, and we care about them in return. Unless you have a better idea?"

"I'm fine with anything. Can't imagine I'd be able to go out much or at all because I'm officially a dead man."

"Not too long ago, I was a dead woman walking. Besides, the world thinks that Sol Badguy is dead, not Frederick Bulsara."

"Point there. You know, now that I think about it, this situation is just like a month ago."

"With you in my place, but I didn't have to be dragged in? This is the same room where I spent my time recovering. It was also -..."

"Where you got your new start."

"Y-yeah. That's exactly it. This is where I woke up to my new life! Not as Justice, or Jack-O, but as myself. That same day, I met our daughter and her husband, and then I saw you again. Just this time... I've been here since you were checked in. Everyone tried to get me to leave, but I refused."

He noticed the duffel bag placed near the door. There was a pant leg hanging over one side of the unzipped bag, and next to it were two pairs of footwear. "Way to tug at the old heartstrings. Stubborn as always, aren't you?" If he were honest with himself, he wanted to do the same when she was still unconscious. He had the feeling that the IRMC staff wouldn't have thought about asking him to leave the premises, even though he almost kicked the doors clean off the first time.

"One of my best qualities." She winked at him, giggling at her remark.

"Hey, Aria."

"Hm?"

He slowly sat up despite the mild pain, leaning over to bring her in for a hug. "Thank you."

Aria returned the motion, both holding onto each other, not wanting to let go. She had felt incomplete up until this moment. Preventing the end was a combined effort, and she couldn’t be any happier to have been a part of that team.

A sense of déjà vu, the song playing on the radio had neared its end.

You are all I long for All I worship and adore In other words, please be true In other words...

"I love you."

[thejudgingtrash]

Rich girl Annabeth (unstoppable force) vs White Trash Frederick (unmovable object)

The experiment I stand by. Physicists are maaaaad.

[ask-frederick]

Sir Frederick! It seems Lady L'Arachel is planning to build a gambling hall in the Askr Castle. Can you convince her to cease before Anna gets a word about this? I fear to hear what ideas Anna will have if she involves herself in this.

“As if the Order of Heroes needed to increase the number of gambling addictions within its walls...”

“I mean... Oh no. Heavens, that is simply dreadful. I shall be on my way to speak with Prince Alfonse and Princess Sharena posthaste.”

“...Oh who am I fooling with this? *sigh* My apologies for the sarcasm, good stranger, but Lady L’Arachel is both an unstoppable force and an immovable object when she has her mind set to something. Evidently, she got the idea from Prince Joshua in Magvel before they were summoned, and now she has it in her head that every castle must have a gambling parlour. Alas: I’ve seen mighty noble houses crumble to nothingness because of the reckless habits of a few brash heirs. Unless Princess Eirika or Prince Ephraim can convince her of the folly of such a plan, I fear the same may one day befall House Rausten... and perhaps even House Askr should Lady Sharena get swept up in the chaos to follow.”

“Honestly, I think Lady Emmeryn was the wisest leader in the history of our world by putting Lord Chrom and Lady Lissa on an allowance. If nothing else, my two lieges are very conscious of their purses.”

[coachbill007]

The Command & Control of The Middle Class Tax Money: International Banking Institutions Development Projects Mirror China's GeoEconomic Loan/ Debt/ Influence Schemes in Africa & Asia

The Command & Control of The Middle Class Tax Money: International Banking Institutions Development Projects Mirror China’s GeoEconomic Loan/ Debt/ Influence Schemes in Africa & Asia

What was so incredible about Frederick Douglass, and why is he not championed as he ought to be in our schools? What is it about how he approached his work that made him a formidable challenge to the status quo; such a complex force of unstoppable passion and intellect continuing the work of John Adams & John Quincy Adams: both a defense of unalloyed individual liberty and equal justice for the…

[seaweedsoup]

Garbage Language. Why Do Corporations Speak The Way They Do.

I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. During my gap year, I had missed and yearned for a bunch of things, like health care and free knockoff Post-its and luxurious people-watching opportunities. (In 2016, I saw a co-worker pour herself a bowl of cornflakes, add milk, and microwave it for 90 seconds. I’ll think about this until the day I die.) One thing I did not miss about office life was the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent between jobs. The term was parallel path, and I first heard it in this sentence: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?”

Translated, this means: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?” In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.

The expected response to the above question would be something like “Great, I’ll go ahead and parallel-path that and route it back to you.” An equally acceptable response would be “Yes” or a simple nod. But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

In theory, a person could have fun with the system by introducing random terms and insisting on their validity (“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”). But in fact the only beauty, if you could call it that, of terms like parallel path is their arrival from nowhere and their seemingly immediate adoption by all. If workplaces are full of communal irritation and communal pride, they are less often considered to be places of communal mysticism. Yet when I started that job and began picking up on the new vocabulary, I felt like a Mayan circa 1600 BCE surrounded by other Mayans in the face of an unstoppable weather event that we didn’t understand and had no choice but to survive, yielding our lives and verbal expressions to a higher authority.

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Anyhow, I left the parallel-path job after six months — unrelated to the standard operating language, although I used a wad of it in my resignation.

Photo: Sam Edwards/Getty Images

In January, a very good memoir called Uncanny Valley was published. The author, Anna Wiener, moved to San Francisco from Brooklyn around 2014 to work at a mobile-analytics start-up, and one of the book’s many pleasures is how neatly it bottles the scent of moneyed Bay Area in the mid-2010s: kombucha, office dog, freshly unwrapped USB cable. Wiener talks about the lofty ambitions of her company, its cushy amenities, the casual misogyny that surrounds her like a cloud of gnats. The book hit me in two places. One of them was a tender, heart-adjacent place that remembered growing up in San Francisco, with its fog-ladled neighborhoods and football fields of fleece. The other was closer to my liver, where bile is manufactured. This was the part of me that remembered working at places much like the one Wiener describes — jobs that provided money to pay rent in a major urban area while I freelanced for magazines and websites that did not. Writing, it turns out, is an economically awkward skill. Despite the fact that it can’t yet be outsourced or performed cheaply by robots, it isn’t worth much. In the case of Anna Wiener (and maybe only Anna Wiener), this is a good thing, because it forced her to embed in a landscape that cried out for narration and commentary.

The status pyramid at most start-ups is roughly this: The C-suite sits at the pinnacle, followed by senior data and tech people, followed by non-senior data and tech people, followed by everyone else except customer service, and then, at the very bottom, customer service. Which, by the way, has been rechristened “customer support” or “customer experience” at most companies — as though the word service might remind the college graduates recruited for these roles that they will in fact spend their days pacifying irritable consumers over phone, chat, text, and email. Wiener worked in customer support.

Being the lowliest worm at a company offers observational advantages in that it renders a person invisible. Wiener describes watching her peers attend silent-meditation retreats, take LSD, discuss Stoicism, and practice Reiki at parties. She tries ecstatic dance, gulps nootropics, and accepts a “cautious, fully-clothed back massage” from her company’s in-house masseuse. She encounters a man who self-identifies as a Japanese raccoon dog. She’s a participant and an ethnologist; she’s impressed and revulsed.

Wiener writes especially well — with both fluency and astonishment — about the verbal habits of her peers: “People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.” She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. “It was garbage language,�� Wiener writes, “but customers loved him.”

I know that man, except he didn’t ride a scooter and was actually a woman named Megan at yet another of my former jobs. What did Megan do? Mostly she set meetings, or “syncs,” as she called them. They were the worst kind of meeting — the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it. Megan’s syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don’t think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn’t know while everyone else was on the same page. (A common reference, this elusive page.)

The hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose.

In Megan’s syncs, I found myself becoming almost psychedelically disembodied, floating above the conference room and gazing at the dozen or so people within as we slumped, bit and chewed extremities, furtively manipulated phones, cracked knuckles, examined split ends, scratched elbows, jiggled feet, palpated stomach rolls, disemboweled pens, and gnawed on shirt collars. The sheer volume of apathy formed an energy of its own, like a mudslide. At the half-hour mark of each hour-long meeting, our bodies began to list perceptibly toward the door. It was like the whole room had to pee. When I tried to translate Megan’s monologues in real time, I could feel my brain aching in a physical manner, the way it does when I attempt to understand blockchain technology or do my taxes.

I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporatespeak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.

But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.

Another thing this language has in common with garbage is that we can’t stop generating it. Garbage language isn’t unique to start-ups; it’s endemic to business itself, and the form it takes tends to reflect the operating economic metaphors of its day. A 1911 book by Frederick Winslow Taylor called The Principles of Scientific Management borrows its language from manufacturing; men, like machines, are useful for their output and productive capacity. The conglomeration of companies in the 1950s and ’60s required organizations to address alienated employees who felt faceless amid a sea of identical gray-suited toilers, and managers were encouraged to create a climate conducive to human growth and to focus on the self-actualization needs of their employees. In the 1980s, garbage language smelled strongly of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add. The rise of big tech brought us computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, the concept of talking off-line, the concept of leveling up.

Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.

One of the most influential business books of the 1990s was Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen is responsible for the popularity of the word disruptive. (The term has since been diluted and tortured, but his initial definition was narrow: Disruption happens when a small company, such as a start-up, targets a limited segment of an incumbent’s audience and then uses that foothold to attract a bigger segment, by which point it’s too late for the incumbent to catch up.) The metaphors in that book had a militaristic strain: Firms won or lost battles. Business units were killed. A disk drive was revolutionary. The market was a radar screen. The missilelike attack of the desktop computer wounded minicomputer-makers. Over the next decade and a half, the language fully migrated from combative to New Agey: “I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, urging readers to seek their truth and find personal fulfillment. In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh described making conscious choices and evolving organically. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries pitched his method as a movement to unlock a vast storehouse of human potential. You can always track the assimilation of garbage language by its shedding of scare quotes; in 1911, “initiative” and “incentive” were still cloaked in speculative punctuation.

At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors (holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood (ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase), nouns shoved into verbhood (whiteboard, bucket), and a heap of nonwords that, through force of repetition, became wordlike (complexify, co-execute, replatform, shareability, directionality). There were acronyms like RACI, which I learned about in this way:

CO-WORKER: Going forward, we’ll be using a RACI for all projects.

MOLLY: What’s a RACI?

CO-WORKER: RACI stands for “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.” The RACI will be distributed around so that we’re all aligned and on the same page.

ME: But what is this thing, like, physically? Is it a chart?

CO-WORKER: It’s hard to explain.

I never found out what a RACI was because we never ended up using one, but according to its Wikipedia page, it’s a “matrix” with over a dozen popular variations, including RATSI. I can imagine a world in which all these competing references might combine into a jaggedly interesting verbal landscape, but instead they only negated each other, the way 20 songs would if you played them at the same time.

And yet it should be possible to gaze into this alphabet soup and divine patterns. Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.

In August, WeWork — recently rebranded as the We Company — submitted its prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document is just under 200,000 words long, or nearly the length of Moby-Dick, and it reads like something a person wrote in the middle of an Adderall overdose with a gun to his head. Here’s how the company describes itself on page one:

We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. We have built a worldwide platform that supports growth, shared experiences and true success.

You can probably imagine the rest. In the words of a lecturer at Harvard Business School, the prospectus “reads like a Marianne Williamson self-help book,” which might be insulting to Marianne Williamson. As with any public-facing statement issued by a company, the prospectus maps the distance between what the company is and how it sees itself. What is beautiful — almost spiritual in its grandeur! — about WeWork is not the vastness of the distance but how easy it is to measure. WeWork’s real-estate arbitrage can be summarized in plain English, yet the prospectus is so baroquely worded that it requires a kind of medieval exegesis — a willingness to pore over the text, assess its truth claims, elaborate on its explanations, and unmask its hidden values. In its fidelity to incoherence, WeWork’s majestic PDF revealed a now-obvious truth about the organization, which is that its ratio of ingenuity to bullshit — a ratio present in every organization and, indeed, every human — was tipped too far in the wrong direction.

The collision of corporate self-actualization with business realities was at the center of a story about the luggage company Away that came out in December. (Disclosure: I worked with both of the Away founders in the early 2010s, before the company existed, at a different company. They seemed nice.) A piece in The Verge by Zoe Schiffer reported on Away’s work environment, which looked like a mixture of punishing hours, dangled career opportunities, and an “until morale improves, the beatings will continue” theory of management cloaked in wretchedly obtuse language. A 9 a.m. message from the company’s CEO, Steph Korey, to customer-experience employees went like this:

I know this group is hungry for career development opportunities, and in an effort to support you in developing your skills, I am going to help you learn the career skill of accountability … To hold you accountable — which is a very important business skill that is translatable to many different work settings — no new [paid time off] or [work from home] requests will be considered from the 6 of you … I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career development opportunity and that you’re all excited to operate consistently with our core values to solve this problem and pave the way for the [customer experience] team being best-in-class when it comes to being Customer Obsessed. Thank you!

You could run down Korey’s leaked messages — this and others — with a checklist. Did she revert to the passive voice in a way that seemed to divest herself of responsibility? Yes. Did she Capitalize words Arbitrarily? Yes. Did she type phrases like “utilize your empowerment”? She did.

The internet went nuts. Here, finally, was proof of a maddening experience that many people had undergone: the weaponization of language by a person in power that bewildered, embarrassed, and penalized the people beneath her. Did Korey really believe that withholding paid time off from lower-level employees counted as a career opportunity? Was her mind a ticker tape of sentences like this, or had she run it through an internal executive-translation plug-in?

There’s an early Edith Wharton story where a character observes the constraints of speaking a foreign tongue: “Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time, not what one wants to, but what one can?” To put it another way: Do CEOs act like jerks because they are jerks, or because the language of management will create a jerk of anyone eventually? If garbage language is a form of self-marketing, then a CEO must find it especially tempting to conceal the unpleasant parts of his or her job — the necessary whip-cracking — in a pile of verbal fluff. Korey wouldn’t have sounded any nicer if she’d said exactly what she likely meant (“I am disappointed in your work, and there will be consequences, fair or not”), but I doubt she would have gotten in trouble for saying it. Meanness doesn’t inflame people as much as hypocrisy does.

As the leaked Slacks make clear, Korey, as well as her employees, were working under the new conditions of surveillance-state capitalism (or, from the company’s perspective, a culture of “inclusion and transparency”). One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself.

And so Korey’s problem was less her strategy than her execution. Away was founded by two women who saw, in a climate where Glossier was thriving and a book called #GIRLBOSS was a best-seller, that the language of empowerment could be a terrific brand asset for, of all things, a suitcase manufacturer. It made sense that Korey spoke to her employees in terms of opportunity and growth. Her mistake was in trying to extract their gratitude for it. I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career-development opportunity.

Language had gotten other people in trouble at Away, too. About a year earlier, a handful of employees started a private Slack channel to talk candidly about being marginalized at the company — using, presumably, indefensible non–garbage language. The channel was reported, and six people were fired. For Korey’s misdeeds, she resigned as CEO, suffered a few weeks of embarrassment, then changed her mind and reclaimed her old job. Nobody observing the two outcomes could mistake the lesson here.

In 2011, I was dropping printouts on a co-worker’s desk when I spotted something colorful near his laptop. It was a small foil packet with a fetching plaid design.

My co-worker’s assistant was sitting nearby. “Caroline,” I said, “do you know what this is?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Jim belongs to some kind of runners’ club that sends him a box of competitive running gear every month.”

The front of the plaid packet said UPTAPPED: ALL NATURAL ENERGY. The marketing copy said, “For too long athletic nutrition has been sweetened with cheap synthetic sugars. The simplicity of endurance sports deserves a simple ingredient — 100% pure, unadulterated, organic Vermont maple syrup, the all-natural, low glycemic-index sports fuel.”

It was a packet of maple syrup. Nothing more. Whenever I hear a word like operationalize or touchpoint, I think of that packet — of some anonymous individual, probably with a Stanford degree and a net worth many multiples of my own, funneling maple syrup into tubelets and calling it low-glycemic-index sports fuel. It’s not a crime to try to convince people that their favorite pancake accessory is a viable biohack, but the words have a scammy flavor. And that’s the closest I can come to a definition of garbage language that accounts for its eternal mutability: words with a scammy flavor. As with any scam, the effectiveness lies in the delivery. Thousands of companies have tricked us into believing that a mattress or lip-gloss order is an ideological position.

In 2016, Jessica Helfand, an author and a founder of the website Design Observer, was invited to teach at Yale School of Management. The idea was that Helfand could instruct grad students in the art of creative thinking, which they could then use to start companies and make money. She immediately developed a contact allergy to the way her students spoke. “It started the first week I was there. After the lecture, a student said, ‘Well, my takeaway is …,’ and I thought, ‘Takeaway’ is what you do with food in London. Maybe instead of a takeaway, you could sit with the ideas for a while and just … think.” Helfand compiled a list of commonly bandied-about words and divided them into categories like Hyphenated Mash-ups (omni-channel, level-setting, business-critical), Compound Phrases (email blast, integrated deck, pain point, deep dive) and Conceptual Hybrids (“shooting” someone an email, “looping” someone in). All of these were phrases with “aspirational authority,” she told me. “If you’re in a meeting and you’re a 20-something and you want to sound in the know, you’re going to use those words.” It drove Helfand nuts. This wasn’t a teaching position; it was a deprogramming job. She left before the contract was up.

The problem with these words isn’t only their floating capacity to enrage but their contaminating quality. Once you hear a word, it’s “in” you. It has penetrated your ears and entered your brain, from which it can’t be selectively removed. Sometimes a phrase will pop into my head that I haven’t heard in years — holistic road map — and I will feel as if someone just told me that in July 2016, I ate a bowl of soup that contained a booger. I’m overcome with aversion; I’m too late to do anything.

This hints at the futility of writing about irritating words. Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When Megan spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul. Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense makes swift, excoriating work of language as a whole, but it exactly predicts the extravagant inanity of garbage language:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

He proposed (I’d argue) that we just give up on functional speech altogether — drop the charade that our personal realities share a common language. Choosing to speak poetically (by which he meant intentionally calling things what they are not) was his ironic solution. Language is always a matter of intention. No two people could have less in common than when they are saying the same thing, one sincerely and one with snark. And so with every exchange, you have to acknowledge a reality where words like optionality and deliverable could be just as solid as blimp and pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.

By Molly Young at Vulture

[plusorminuscongress]

The Nazi War Atlas of Operation Barbarossa

The Nazi War Atlas of Operation Barbarossa By Neely Tucker Published December 19, 2019 at 10:00AM

The cover of the German atlas of Operation Barbarossa. Geography and Map Division.

Hitler’s armies were nearly at the gates of Moscow in December of 1941, 78 years ago this month. Victory seemed assured. The German high command decided to celebrate and document the six months it had taken its armies to reach the outskirts of the Soviet capital. Echoing the grand scale of their invasion, they created a huge commemorative atlas: 2 feet wide and 2 feet tall, with a “Balkenkreuz,” a black and white bar cross, dominating the cover.

In the narrow picture, the atlas contains 123 battlefield situation maps that document Germany’s wildly successful first six months of operations on the Russian front. In the larger frame, it tells, like some massive bible of war and brutal conquest, a story of a German victory that almost was.

The oversized book chronicling Operation Barbarossa (the invasion’s code name) resides in the Library’s Geography and Map Division. It is without peer and may be the only one ever made. How this historical gem came to reside here is lost to history. Map librarians speculate that American troops captured the atlas in 1945, during the fall of Germany, and brought it stateside along with a large volume of German military documents.

The atlas is titled Der Feldzug gegen Sowjet-Russland: Band I. Operationen Sommer-Herbst 1941 vom 21. Juni-6. Dezember 1941. This translates as The Campaign against Soviet Russia: Volume 1, Operation Summer-Fall 1941, from June 21 to December 6. The atlas was printed by the German general staff in 1942. The table of contents lists a foreword, but it is missing and does not appear to have been included, suggesting the atlas may be a proof.

It wasn’t unusual for the German military to make such huge maps, which they called campaign atlases. Dating at least back to the time of Frederick the Great, German officers created them to document and celebrate military actions. They also used the information for planning, post-combat study and critical analysis by officers and cadets. Whether Hitler and others in the German high command saw this atlas in its finished form is not known.

This is how it came to be.

In August of 1939, the Nazis and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact and secretly agreed to divide Poland between them. A few days later, World War II began with the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1. The Soviets invaded from the east on Sept. 17. Poland was swallowed.

But on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Barbarossa, a massive surprise attack on the Soviets. It employed more than 3.8 million men, mostly German but also Croatian, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, Romanian and Hungarian. They fielded a front that was some 1,900 miles long, stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Opposite the Germans stood some 150 Soviet divisions. To deal with a territory and an enemy so large, the Germans divided responsibilities among what they called Army Groups North, Centre and South. These formations relied on speed and firepower to execute blitzkrieg, the German word for lightning war.

The atlas of June 26, 1941, shows the German troops (blue) overtaking Russian troops (red). Note the progress of the Third Panzer Division (3.Pz) as it drives east. Warschau, the occupied Polish capital, is at the middle left edge of the frame.

The formula was seemingly unstoppable: Shock troops, armored vehicles and ground attack planes hit hard and fast, bypassing heavy pockets of resistance, which they left to a second wave of forces to surround and destroy. The plan worked brilliantly in the early days. The Germans raced eastward at breakneck speed, as the maps attest.

Soviet divisions surrounded by Nazi forces, as shown on July 5, 1941, in what is now Belarus.

Just a month into the invasion, Hitler’s forces had overrun a swath of Soviet territory twice the size of France. They were capturing Soviet troops by the hundreds of thousands. In the battles of Minsk and Smolensk, some 600,000 Red Army soldiers surrendered; in Kiev, more than 650,000 Soviet troops raised the white flag. German confidence in Hitler soared.

The Fuehrer was interested in every aspect of the invasion. A frontline veteran of World War I, he remembered Germany’s victory over Russia and was resolute that, with his modernized tank army, victory could be achieved once more. To direct the fighting, he relocated from Berlin to a headquarters called Wolf’s Lair located in Rastenburg, East Prussia (now Poland). He occupied Wolf’s Lair on June 23, 1941, and largely remained there until November 1944, only departing as the Soviet forces approached. It first appears on the atlas on June 25, 1941, represented by a flag with an Iron Cross.

Wolf’s Lair’s first appearance in the atlas, marked by the Iron Cross in the center of the map.

Hitler’s assault on Russia was aimed at eliminating communism, as well as extending racial war against the Jews, Slavs and other “non-Aryans.” The atlas indirectly notes the killing fields in the Soviet Union, where Nazis and their sympathizers gunned down “enemies of the Reich” and left the bodies in hastily covered ditches. To catch these details, however, takes an informed historical eye. The giveaways are the presence of SS units and paramilitary forces — noted with the abbreviation “Sich,” a shortened form of the German word for security, “Sicherheit.”

Just two days into the assault, for example, the atlas shows a heavy concentration of SS troops around Lublin, Poland. Nazis executed large numbers of prisoners in nearby forests that summer. By October, they had established the Majdanek concentration camp, one of the largest of the Holocaust, just southeast of the city. It eventually had seven gas chambers and a crematorium with five ovens. Some 360,000 people were killed there during the course of the war.

Atlas of June 24, 1941, documenting SS activity around Lublin, Poland. The Majdanek concentration camp was built there within four months.

The atlas closes with the Nazi high watermark in the Soviet Union, with troops positioned within sight of Moscow. But winter fell. The Soviets regrouped and counterattacked. The Germans would never threaten Moscow again. Hitler tried alternate strategies — the siege of Leningrad, the battle at Stalingrad, the world’s largest tank battle at Kursk — but the Soviets held and then began to force the Nazis to retreat.

German forces (blue) blockading Soviet troops (red) as the siege of Leningrad takes shape in this situation map dated June 25, 1941. The siege lasted until Jan. 27, 1944.

The city never fell, but the impact on the civilian population was devastating. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 800,000 to one million, as bombs, bullets, starvation and disease ravaged the population.

The tide of war changed with the Allies landing in France and advancing in Italy. By April of 1945, the Russian siege of Berlin had commenced. Desperate – if not fanatical — German resistance could not stop the Soviet onslaught. Hitler realized the end was at hand and committed suicide. The unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies followed on May 8.

This unique atlas of Germany’s first victorious months lay somewhere in the ruins of Hitler’s Third Reich and eventually made its way to the Library of Congress.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Read more on https://loc.gov

[pikespendragon67]

13-17, 19-22 for the Awakening ask!

13. Overrated character

Gods forgive me, Chrom. Do I hate him? No. I just think I’ve been overexposed to him, so I’m starting to grow a distaste. Again, I don’t hate him. Gotta emphasize that.

14. Underrated character

The Spotpass characters that aren’t Gangrel or Aversa, and Say’ri

15. Character you’d never use

It’s a chore to use Pegasus Knights for me in Awakening, since they’re weak to bows, Wind magic, AND beast damage. Like, it’s a miracle Dark Fliers have Gale Force and Falcon Knights have Lancefaire or I’d never touch the classes with a 3-foot pole. I also find it difficult to use Knights because of their limited mobility.

16. Favorite couple

me with Priam I like Olivia x Virion, Vaike x Lissa, Miriel x Frederick, Ricken x Nowi, Libra x Tharja, Inigo x Gerome, Brady x Noire, Cynthia x M!Morgan, and Lucina x Laurent

17. Favorite couple, you and your spouse excluded

^ Answered above

19. Most crazy couple

In terms of creating an unstoppable M!Morgan, Vaike!Gerome x MU or Ricken!Laurent x MU are pretty good. 

20. Overrated couple

nope, not touching this. Nope nope nope, you can’t make me, nope

21. Underrated couple

Uh, what’s considered underrated? Say’ri’s an underrated character but her ship with Tiki’s probably one of the more popular ships of Awakening.

22. A couple you’d make happen if at least one of the characters wasn’t in a more preferred relationship

I’m guessing this was made for Chrom x Cordelia. Hm, not sure myself. 

[popehilarius]

The Civil War, Episode 2: A Very Bloody Affair

Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and women’s suffrage activist, wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which became the anthem of the Union army. 

It’s 1862. The casualties of war are getting massive. And Winchester, Virginia would change hands 72 times during the war.  

Politics. 

We get a brief introduction to Lincoln’s cabinet. Which consisted of his main rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination. William H. Seward was the Secretary of State. He’ll help deter Britain and France from joining the war. He’ll also be a target of Lincoln’s assassination plot. And he’ll negotiate the purchase of Alaska. Salmon P. Chase was Treasury. And he’ll replace Roger Taney as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Simon Cameron was Secretary of War. And he’d get fired for corruption. But it could be argued that if Lincoln picked Cameron in that position, he must not have really expected a civil war. Edwin Stanton would be the new Secretary of War. He’d organize the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. And his dismissal would lead to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Then he’d die four days after being confirmed onto the Supreme Court. So there’s that too.      

Lincoln began to get frustrated that General George B. McClellan wasn’t moving fast enough. And McClellan certainly loved calling Lincoln a baboon or a gorilla.  

Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever in 1862. Possibly because the White House shared its water source with thousands of soldiers and horses. He was only 11 years old. Both Abraham and Mary Todd were very deeply affected. Mary shut down for 3 weeks after he died. And they had to employ a nurse to look after her in the following months.    

Ironclads.  

The Confederate navy created the CSS Virginia, an ironclad ship, out of the hull of the USS Merrimack. And it was the most unstoppable ship in the history of warfare. So the freaked out Union responded with their own state-of-the-art ironclad, the USS Monitor.

At the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862, the CSS Virginia was demolishing a Union naval blockade, just murdering wooden ships, until the Monitor showed up and they blasted each other for hours until the Virginia/Merrimack turned away. The battle rendered every other navy on earth obsolete.  

Lincolnites.

While General McClellan hesitated, the Union army in the Western Theater won victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, gaining access to the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, allowing them to go further south and making Grant a hero in the Union press. They called him “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. 

The Peninsula. 

McClellan finally headed out slowly with his massive army to take Richmond. But he was surprised by a tiny line of Confederate troops at Yorktown. Like, they didn’t even have a tenth of the numbers McClellan did. But John B. Magruder had his Confederate soldiers march in big circles to look like they had more men. And that shit worked. So McClellan decided to prepare for a siege of Yorktown. This makes McClellan look so bad.      

Our Boy

So we get an overview of all the types of young men (some not even 15-years-old) who made up the soldiers of the war. They wrote letters. Some took their families with them. It was a lot of tedium, interspersed with moments of sheer terror.

Shiloh. 

While McClellan sat in Yorktown, Grant’s and William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces fought the attacking armies of Albert Sidney Johnston and PGT Beauregard in Tennessee. It sounds like one of the bloodiest clusterfucks of all time. Johnston was shot through the leg and bled to death. Over 2400 men died in battle and 23,000 were dead, wounded or missing by the end of the two-day battle. And they were in a peach orchard, so pink peddles fell on the men. And at night, lightening strikes revealed the pigs feasting on the dead. It sounds cinematic. It sounds insane. And Shelby Foote keeps blowing his hero, Nathan Bedford Forrest. But this apparently sobered up the nation to what this war was actually going to look like in reality.

The Arts of Death. 

These were the best-equipped armies in history. American industry cranked out weapons and innovations. The minie ball, with its range and accuracy, made bayonets obsolete. And the war’s high death tolls can be credited to the weapons being ahead of the tactics.   

One of Grant’s rivals, Henry Halleck, became jealous of his success and began accusing him of various things, including alcoholism. After Shiloh, Halleck relieved Grant of his field command. And Grant considered resigning, until he was talked out of hit by Sherman.   

Frederick Douglass continued lobbying the government for emancipation.

The Union took Memphis, which meant they controlled the Mississippi River. Then David Farragut took New Orleans. When that happened, Great Britain and France were much less likely to recognize the Confederacy, diplomatically.

Republics.

In the South, everyone was contributing to the war effort but the Confederate army was shrinking. So they passed conscription acts (the first of their kind) to require all men ages 18-35 (and then 45) to serve for 3 years. Men were exempted if they owned 20 or more slaves. Maybe it was practical, due to fears of slave rebellions. But it was extremely unpopular with the troops, most of whom could not afford to own slaves. The feeling in the South was that it was a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.

On to Richmond. 

The Union Army Balloon Corps existed and served at Yorktown. So that’s funny.  

Anyway, McClellan sat at Yorktown for a fucking month while people got sick. And when he finally decided to attack, the Confederates slipped away. McClellan declared victory, anyway. Then the Union army reached the outskirts of Richmond. And he just sat there. Convinced again he was outnumbered. Everything would culminate with Antietam. 

And we end with another quote from Frederick Douglass asking for emancipation. 

[bornfromscarletcords]

Wolf Of Hearts

(A hypothetical conversation between characters from stories I have written.)

Faris and August taking a break from training. 

August: So someone called my dad Cupid, care to explain what that was about? Faris: Oh, that. Well, from how I understand the situation it started long before I was born, in a place where people indulged in the more interesting aspects of their personalities. Your father was in a cynical mood. August: I thought that was his default setting. Faris: This led him to offend what at first appeared to be an irrelevant party. As their conflict evolved it came to your father's attention that the entity before him had a peculiar interest in the subject of love. He considered himself a caretaker of it, some might have even called him a lord of it. August: Or a God of it. Faris: So you’ve heard this story? August: Bits and pieces, but please, continue. Faris: The entity demanded that your father make amends in some form. The entity stated that he could just curse your father but he would show clemency if he served him instead.

August: Dad, serve?

Faris: There is no shame in the sacrifice of assisting another. Some might consider leadership to be one of the greatest services of all. Your father knew this, and being of a perverse humor at that point he decided to indulge in the entities devices.

August: I’m sensing a twist of some sort.

Faris: Twist might be an understatement, it was more akin to a thousand and one necks snapping. Your father, clad in the armors of amor, courtesy of his beguiling patron, set out serve the hearts of the world, and woe to those who would stumble upon his path. The general nature of the dispute between your father and his rather...resilient adversary, was that your father expressed disbelief towards the existence of Love, and if it did exist it was only in lies, destructive desires, crude attempts at control, etc.

August: That sounds like him, but he really didn’t  believe in love?

Faris: Your father has experienced much tragedy in his life, even without considering the...gruesome entanglement he had with his own parents . The ridiculous nature of these events occasionally softened their melancholic effect but sometimes they only further embittered him. He had just lost more of his children and a human woman who he had become close to perished when he tried to change her into a wolf. He knew that relationships with humans could only go so far given our longevity but the added disturbance that even those who shared our nature were not immune to the world’s cruelties troubled him greatly. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he encountered that...creature, where and when he did.

August: That sounds...spooky.

Faris: You should have seen your father in his first week of service. He carved out a “hunting ground” and set about to test the hearts the lovers and the loved. His intention was to prove to his patron that people were not capable of true love, and if it couldn’t be found, or produced then it didn’t exist.

August: He aimed to do this while serving the God of love?

Faris: Alleged God, and your father was a deeply troubled man.

August: Was?

Faris: Some might say the depths of these troubles were only rivaled by the bitterness which had grown far and wild within his own heart. Perhaps he sought to terminate his service by eliminating the legitimacy of his patron, or maybe he wanted to torment the being and change it to his liking. For if love existed, it had scarred and tormented your father across the world. It owed him its suffering.  

August: A thousand and one necks snapping, indeed.

Faris: Your father’s field of execution…

August: “Execution” as in the completion of tasks.

Faris: You wish. Your father’s field soon began to attract people (and other personable entities) which radiated strong feelings of desire and passion: envy, lust, greed, etc. There he worked to expose the hypocrisy or blatant falsehood of these subjects.

August: That’s f****d up….How’d he do it?

Faris: With the truth, mostly. The arsenal of blessings, (or curses depending on how you look at them) burdened upon your father by his patron allowed him to alter these emotions of “passionate desire” however they only worked to the extent that these feelings already existed within the subject. Amongst other things he was also allowed to delve into the shape that their “love” took in their minds and bring it out into or as a physical plain.

August: That sounds a little monstrous.

Faris: They were worrisome, monstrous times...So scary...So so Scary. Anyway so your father would often reveal hidden feelings at inconvenient times, or attempt to lead people astray with their own potent, yet disastrous yearnings. For example, there was a couple who were very well connected to one another. The man was a little distant and the woman a little too cruel but in general they were one of the better matches he had seen in a while. Still your father, dutiful hunter that he was, couldn’t help but sense something was amiss in this pairing, so using his tools and a bit of his own talents he examined some of the woman’s yearnings as well as well as some of the man’s doubts about his love. Using these he created, (or attracted) a suitable person who embodied the best of (or worst of depending on how you looked at it) these qualities. The result was, well, your father is a very adept hunter. The woman began to stray in the other man’s direction while her original partner’s doubt’s deepened and twisted like a gordian knot. Believe it or not these were actually some of the lucky ones. Sometimes your father would personally intervene, and to see him cloaked in the aura’s of love, soaked by moonlight, his hot blood all but setting the air to ripple…

August: Alright I get it, damn.  

Faris: Well anyway, he would haunt the minds and bodies of those he visited in such a way and his hunting ground was suitably haunted in turn.

August: Like, as in ghosts.

Faris: Well yes, he was killing a decent amount of those he beckoned. Well, to be fair, many killed themselves, unable to live with/without what they had experienced. I believe he took a particular joy in eating the hearts of those who failed his tests. There were so many hearts. I believe he even had a favorite scythe he would use in his “missions” which might be the reason some people say he bears a resemblance to the “God” of Death, but that’s a whole other can of worms. Soon the ghosts began to cling to the place, though I suppose some might have just been more elemental or emotional spirits. Occasionally he’d let a person go if they promised never to love again or to forsake the concept altogether.  When your father considered his point made he called to his patron requesting to know what he thought of his work.

August: Yikes.

Faris: You don’t know the half of it. Frederick expected a fight for his life with an enraged and powerful entity, or a chance to savor the sight of a weakened almost non existent shade of the creature he had originally encountered. What he received was something like enthusiastic applause. The entity appeared, perhaps a little different than how he first appeared. Depending on who’s telling the story, this time he was adorned in the image of wolves. He embraced your father wholeheartedly and smiled a devil’s smile as he called him a “True Beast Of Love”

August: I don’t understand.

Faris: Neither did your father at first, but like him you soon will. The entity explained that your father had challenged his subjects completely, like an unstoppable force hell bent on pushing their hearts to the limit. He weeded out those too weak to handle the awesome power of his domain and or taught the most crafty/willful how to better maneuver the minefield which is intimacy. He changed them, and made them face the worst of what they were, potentially strengthening their best portions and expanding their potential. The entity himself felt like he had been truly exercised by the ordeal and in your father he had found a worthy match. Then he told your father that a greater test awaited still, a test of his own heart. The telling gets a little obscure here but it appears as if the entity reached across space/time and spawned spectres of the loves of your father’s lives. Those that occurred and were gone like, his children, their mother’s, his human friends long deceased. Those that still existed like his pack, his ideas, and his creations. And those he had yet to discover like you, your mother, this world he now calls home.

August: He saw me?

Faris: Perhaps,  I’ve heard that he saw a child bearing his resemblance who he at once felt an adamantine need to protect and care for even if his own happiness and life needed to be sacrificed for it.

August: Wow!

Faris: Wow, indeed. your father might have even shed some tears in this moment caught between euphoria and sorrow as all that he cared for was so close yet so beyond his reach, no matter how close his hand danced towards your frames. He admitted to the entity that when they had met he had begun to think that the love never existed within him, that he had only been fooling himself into thinking that his vanities, and selfishness had a greater meaning to them. The entity then told your father that he enjoyed werewolves, because even if you bend them until they break they’ll unbreak and come back more bad a*s than before. He said hearts had that similar property, though it sometimes took them a while to realize this. Your father said that werewolves could take a while too. The entity then said that love shared many similarities with the idea called faith. Both were all but useless without being tested. Tangible signs could prove elusive or even non-existent partly because they were not entirely meant to be easily grasped. At their more fundamental origins (or destinations) they existed within the essence of people’s lives; from their daily routines to their most epic adventures. They were sparks which could be grown into firestorms of holy sunlight or damning infernos. It all depended on the person who nurtured them. Failure in these things didn’t necessarily make a person unworthy and just like how an atheist could commit the most charitable, compassionate, and almost divine of acts, a person who rejected love with every fiber of their being could be it’s greatest champion, even if they didn’t know it. The entity concluded his speech by saying that your father’s service was over if he wished it and that he would soon be leaving him. Your father then asked the entity if they would ever meet again.

August: And what did it say.

Faris: “How the f***k should I know, you’ll feel me regardless.” Then it was gone, faded away like morning mist. Though, it wasn’t the last time your father worked towards its betterment. You could say a very warped alliance had formed between them, and this closeness may be why people occasionally address your father with “lovely” titles. And before you ask, yes I’ve seen some of his acts in the entity’s name and they are...it has a very peculiar and horrifying effect on him.

August: It can’t be all bad.

Faris: Perhaps, I think it was the entity which guided him towards your mother, it seems to be unusually fond of her, or at least their relationship. If it likes her I suppose it is redeemable, crazier than a cuckoo bird in a nut factory, but redeemable.  

August: What about my dad’s other mate, Lillin?

Faris: If that wasn’t the work of the lord of death, then I’d swear the devil himself had brought those two together.               

[dry-valleys]

“If men get named for some one virtue, then What art thou, that art so many men...” Ben Jonson on Sir Edward Herbert.

At Powis Castle, a medieval castle and Grade I listed building built in 1283 for Welsh prince Owain ap Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, who successfully merged into the Anglo-Norman  marcher lord Owen de la Pole, one of the many transitions this place and its inhabitants have undergone.

Powis is located very close to the border of England and Wales and is just on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke, so the lands have been finding their way over shifting border since before the castle was even built.

Powis began its rise to prominence in the days of Edward Herbert, courtier, soldier, philosopher and poet, who was only five years old when his family acquired the castle from Owain’s descendants; his bid to establish the family on the map stalled when the Civil Wars broke out and he was imprisoned in 1642 and in 1644 forced to surrender Powis and Montgomery to Parliament, dying in 1648.

This was only a temporary setback though, as after the 1660 Restoration of King Charles II William Herbert,1st Marquess of Powis, began a restoration of the house to celebrate what in his opinion was the confident future the new dispensation offered; with the help of William Winde, he designed and installed most of the features we see today.

The Herberts, never ones for modesty, were keen to project their own image as a leading family in the area and on the national and world stage; the House of Portraits exhibition gives an excellent example of this, seen in the portraiture throughout the house and especially in (9) the long gallery, where pictures of Herberts nestle alongside Roman Emperors (!)

Although William Herbert himself spent time in exile in France for his Catholic loyalties and adherence to the Jacobite cause, the rise of Powis was unstoppable and in 1722 his son, also Willliam Herbert, became 2nd Marquess.

In 1784 Henrietta Herbert married Edward Clive, son of Robert Clive (”of India”, whose statue in Shrewsbury can be seen in (3) alongside (2) the Greek goddess Fame at Powis, and this late 18th-century opulence inspire artists such as (4) John Ingleby (1794).

Powis was now connected to a vast network of lands across the Welsh Marches on both sides of the border, and also in India; Edward was employed by the East India Company, and there is a great museum of Indian artifacts here which I’d counsel everyone to visit.

Their daughter Charlotte wrote a fascinating diary of her childhood, much of which was spent in India, and can be read if you go to the museum; in adulthood she became governess to Princess, later Queen,Victoria, who visited in 1832.

The Indian wealth, the centuries rooted in border soil, and the new royal connections, ushered in a new age of confidence at Powis and in the Edwardian age it was the place to be; George, 4th Earl of Powis (1862-1952) oversaw major reforms to the garden and the house, commissioning George Frederick Bodley to work here.

Unfortunately George faced the triple blows of his son and heir Percy being killed in World War 1, his wife Violet dying in 1929 and his newly designated heir Mervyn, an air ace, being killed fighting in World War 2 in 1943. 

Though his own life was devastated, George left the house and grounds to the National Trust in 1952 and the work they are doing adds to the many layers of Powis which are here for everyone to sample.

[borningrandeur]

10 Things to Know About...

Keiko Mizu

Daughter of emperor Osai Mizu and his empress, Natsumi Mizu.

Age: 19

Race: Asian/Japanese

Eye Color: Dark brown

Height: 161cm

Hair Color: Ink black

Habits: Keiko tends to act as if she possesses all knowledge and rarely admits to needing help or explanation. Because of her fairly sheltered and pampered upbringing, she is very lost to the outside world and its secrets.  

Special Features: Keiko never takes off the golden and emerald ring on her right hand’s index finger. Her hair is usually pinned up into one or two buns. 

Hobbies: She finds herself looking up at the sky whenever she has a moment alone. The sun and the way it commanded the skies surrounding it, reminded her of the strength and boldness of her father. She misses him.

Aspiration: Keiko wants to return to Akari. She refuses to allow another family rule over the empire in her place. It wasn’t even her decision to leave, she was abducted only a few days before her wedding night by a crazed man named Patty. If she doesn’t get back to her throne soon, it may no longer be attainable for her. 

Natalia Briare

Daughter of upper class Spaniard, Isaac Britto, and his maid, Amare.

Age: 21

Race: Black/Hispanic

Eye Color: Bright green

Height: 172cm

Hair Color: Syrup brown

Habits: Natalia jumps between Spanish and English, never caring if people understand her or not. She makes jokes out of almost everything and typically upsets others with them. She tends to curse when she’s angry... and happy... and sad... and confused... she likes to curse. If she finds herself kissing someone, her hand gentle grasps the side of their neck.   

Special Features: Natalia has one of the most unique laughs- it is husky and full and proud and demanding of attention every time it makes an appearance. Her hair is wild mass of curls falling to her elbows and she has a scar on her left forearm. 

Hobbies: Drinking, drinking and more drinking. Occasionally star gazing since that’s her job and all.

Aspiration: She finally escaped her past. Now, she only cares about her crew and the ship they sail on. Whether they find eternity or not, she’s happy.

Alice Capella

Daughter of musical prodigies Leonardo and Julia Capella.

Age: 27

Race: White/British

Eye Color: Chestnut brown

Height: 163cm

Hair Color: Icy blonde

Habits: She giggles whenever she’s uncomfortable or flustered. She hums all the time and often tugs at her hair for being ‘difficult’ and falling in her face.

Special Features: Alice has a photographic and flawless memory. She has an angelic singing voice and an incredible mind. She usually incorporates blue ribbons into her hair. 

Hobbies: She’s writing and composing music every chance that she gets. She also loves to read cheesy romance and adventure novels, though she never admits it.

Aspiration: She wants to experience new feelings and meet new people, see new places, all in order to create extravagant songs and tales. She wants to become a musical legend and eventually return home with enough money to buy the tavern she used to perform at, and transform it into a complete theater. 

Toby Jay

Daughter of bakers Lucas and Helen Jay.

Age: 35

Race: White/Scottish

Eye Color: Jade blue

Height: 174cm

Hair Color: Fiery red

Habits: She’s judges just about everyone for every little thing they do. Whether it’s your clothes or what you’re eating or how you’re talking, etc. you’re getting critiqued.  

Special Features: Her hair is always tied up and her accent is incredibly thick. 

Hobbies: Cooking always brings Toby comfort. It reminds her of home. 

Aspiration: Toby wants to find the Pool of Eternity, not necessarily to use on herself, but to sell to any fool dumb enough to believe in that ‘magical elixir’. With the money, she wants to open up an honorable restaurant, and reach out to her parents... fix her past mistakes. And build something that could support her family for generations. 

Linda Desoto

Daughter of merchants Charles and Sera Desoto.

Age: 31

Race: White/Hispanic

Eye Color: Dark brown

Height: 165cm

Hair Color: Coffee brown

Habits: Linda chews her pencils and taps her fingers along a table whenever she’s reading, which is constantly. She often trips over her skirts due to her always trying to carry huge amounts of books at a time that block her sight. 

Special Features: Linda wears big rounded glasses that make her eyes appear twice as big and sweet as usual. She adores floral clothing. 

Hobbies: She likes to read but she mostly enjoys writing in her diaries, recounting the highlighted moments of her days. 

Aspiration: Linda wants to make a discovery that would shake the world, such as the Pool of Eternity. She wants to shed light on humanity’s questions and get paid greatly in return as a grand researcher. She plans to return home to her parents one day and buy them the mansion she felt they deserved.

August Rey

Son of nobles Adam and Anna Rey.

Age: 33

Race: White/British

Eye Color: Blue-green

Height: 185cm

Hair Color: Tawny brown

Habits: He’s headstrong and stubborn when he puts his mind to something. Often times he can become so consumed by his goals, that he forgets he may be harming those he cares for in the process.

Special Features: August always wears a captain’s hat, passed down onto him from the last man that commanded the ship, Blood Diamond. He also wears a golden locket at all times, tucked beneath his shirt.

Hobbies: August doesn’t spend a lot of time winding down. To him, that’s a waste of time he could be spending checking over the crew, marking the maps, or reviewing lore on the Pool.

Aspiration: August wants to be the first to drink from the legendary Pool of Eternity rumored to be hidden within a forever moving shadowed island. By achieving this goal, he will no longer have to fear death nor the physical pains of life. He will be free to do whatever he pleases for as long as he pleases.

Poe

Son of unknown parents that he was separated from at birth.

Age: 24

Race: Black/African

Eye Color: Caramel brown

Height: 202cm

Hair Color: Coal black

Habits: He tends to keep to himself and avoid trouble or conflict whenever possible. He usually intimidates people without trying and his silence and lack of care to explain said silence leads people to believe he’s disrespectful.

Special Features: Poe has thick long dreads usually tied back in a loose ponytail. He stays completely silent except from the occasional chuckle or sigh. He has multiple scars along his chest and arms. He’s extremely tall and muscular with a build like a giant.

Hobbies: Poe likes to read and write poetry. Whenever he has a quiet moment away from the fighting and drinking, he likes to spend it by himself with his literature.

Aspiration: Poe wants to collect as much poetry as possible from all corners of the world. Eternity is not his priority.

Kidd Perish

Adoptive son of Kane and Terra Saunter.

Age: 28

Race: Black/Italian

Eye color: Honey brown

Height: 179cm

Hair Color: Onyx black

Habits: Kidd constantly likes to show off his vast vocabulary, dropping flowery words that often annoy people, especially when they don’t understand them. He also has a bad habit of describing how everyone could get killed if not cautious. Though he’s only trying to be informative, this act often just frightens people.  

Special Features: Kidd has a short curly afro that he rarely lets grow out. He is always wearing black clothing as well. Kidd carries around one dagger in particular, always strapped to his hip with a hilt covered with rubies. 

Hobbies: Kidd always surrounds himself with others. He never bothers to be alone because truly, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He always loved interacting with people and building relationships. Ranging from drinking with the Captain himself to going out into the town with the ship’s powder monkeys. 

Aspiration: Kidd’s hometown was on the brink of an all out war between rivaling gang associations, including his own. Kidd was chosen from his parents to be the one to look into the myth that is the Pool of Eternity. Kidd wants to find it, and bring it back home for his family and their followers to drink. Together, they’d become an unstoppable force that would easily destroy all of their competitors and enemies. 

Boris Graham

Son of Stephan and Evelyn Graham.

Age: 35

Race: White/Italian

Eye Color: Smokey grey

Height: 190cm

Hair Color: Golden brown

Habits: Boris talks about his past and his family back home every chance that he gets. He also likes to talks to everyone as if they’re lost children, despite the closeness in age.  

Special Features: Boris has several faint scars on his hands and wrists from accidents and mistakes he had in his profession. He usually is dirtied from his work as well, whether that be coal, gunpowder, sawdust, etc. 

Hobbies: Boris likes to walk around the perimeter of the ship, searching for aspects that could be improved upon and then figuring out ways to achieve said enhancements without costing the captain a fortune. 

Aspiration: Boris wants to locate the Pool of Eternity so that he can take some of it and bring it to his sick wife. He plans on curing her and living life forever by her side. He also wants to see his daughter, and give her the drink too. That way, he could make up for the time lost while he was away. He hopes Linda joins him when he eventually returns home; he’d miss her terribly otherwise.

Nygel Young

Son of nobles Frederick and Violet Young.

Age: 34

Race: White/British

Eye Color: Teal blue

Height: 188cm

Hair Color: Walnut brown

Habits: Nygel has a huge worrying problem. He’s always thinking of the worst case scenario which only leads him to be incredibly pessimistic and doubtful of everything they do. 

Special Features: Nygel still carries himself as the aristocrat he always was. He speaks eloquently and dresses as best as one can aboard a ship.

Hobbies: Nygel found joy in gardening. Back at home, his house was covered in exotic and gorgeous flowers from around the world... however, aboard the Blood Diamond, he can’t exactly plant anything anymore. 

Aspiration: Nygel wants to find the Pool of Eternity and drink it for himself. In his mind, it is the only way for him to honor his household and avoid bringing about shame. With immortality, the effects of the Pool are also supposed to cure all illnesses. Including illness of the mind; curing the romantic preferences that Nygel convinced himself to be mental sickness.

Tatum Parr

Son of Amy Parr and stepson to Anthony Parr.

Age: 13

Race: White/British

Eye Color: Sky blue

Height: 155cm

Hair Color: Dirty blonde

Habits: Tatum is incredibly conceited and tends to fail to realize how much of a liability he actually is. Because of his abundance of self pride, he throws himself into ridiculous situations, thinking he can handle them and thinking he’s invincible.

Special Features: Tatum has a squeaky, cracking, voice that is usually the center of many jokes cracked by the crew.

Hobbies: Tatum loves to play with animals whenever he has the chance. Especially cats. He always has time for cats. Even the strays. 

Aspiration: Tatum is determined to retrieve the man he assumes to be his father, August, back to his hometown to see his mother. He couldn’t care less about the hopes and dreams of the other people on the ship. All that matters is making his mother happy with the closure she needs. 

Haze Dalton

Son of Xavier and Kalliopi Dalton. 

Age: 41

Race: White/Scottish

Eye Color: Cloudy Grey

Height: 182cm

Hair Color: Bronze brown

Habits: Haze usually wonders off and apart from the crew. He doesn’t speak much about himself or his past to anybody and prefers to live his life in seclusion since the people he loved and trusted are gone. 

Special Features: Haze is partially blind from an accident in his childhood. Raised by a blacksmith, Haze understands the many different forms of weaponry and which to use for what occasion. 

Hobbies: Haze usually volunteers to clean the dirtied weapons of the crew so that he is provided with a moment of quiet that still connects him to the chores he had done in his youth, when he was at his happiest. Before the regrets and the loss.

Aspiration: Haze wants to find the Pool of Eternity and drink from it, so that he may live on- forever honoring the memory of his family by serving justice, or vengeance as some would say, to all the monsters of the world.

Philippe Barlow

Son of Matthew and Cindy Barlow.

Age: 44

Race: White/French

Eye Color: Copper brown

Height: 187cm

Hair Color: Golden blonde

Habits: He is completely unwilling to cooperate with the majority of the crew and because of that, however he is also not a fighter, so he only says whatever he can to antagonize the others. He quivers often as well, angry, sad, scared, he’s shaking all the same. 

Special Features: Though difficult, Philippe is incredibly intelligent and skilled in his work. He is a lifesaver. Unwillingly. 

Hobbies: Philippe would lock himself in his quarters at all times if he could. Whenever he does have free time, he spends it either reading one of the many books different crew members have in their possession, or going into the kitchen to talk to whoever he pleases. 

Aspiration: To escape the Blood Diamond and all of the worthless people aboard it. He wants to bring Toby along with him when he goes, and make a wife out of her. 

Patty

Son of unknown parents.

Age: 47

Race: White

Eye Color: Pecan brown

Height: 176cm

Hair Color: Dirt brown

Habits: Patty is a kindhearted person, though he usually does things that infuriate the rest of crew members, driving them to almost toss him overboard. He speaks in the third person, and most of his sentences are broken, jumbled, and indecipherable to those now accustomed to him.

Special Features: Patty adores pretty things, so he’s always covered head to toe in dramatic and sparkling jewels that he either steals or is given. This always leads to conflict as well, with poor men and thieves. 

Hobbies: Scribbling on tables, talking to a ghost, stealing princesses and potatoes. 

Aspiration: To have a good time for as long a time as possible.

[gladevalley]

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by Alec Parker

Special graduate freelance writer

As the sun goes down the lights come out, and yet again Walkersville proves their dominance by winning their 23rd game in a row against a mighty tough Oakdale team that was 8-0 coming into the night. The final score was a nail biter as Walkersville won 19-13.

It was not only a big night for the whole team of Walkersville, but it was a special night as it was senior night. There are 27 seniors on this very experienced Lion team, and each one of them got their deserving round of applause, and the respect they earned through tough, and long days at practice, and their constant participation, and leadership during games.

As the game started the temperature dropped to the low 50’s into the high 40’s. Walkersville started off strong with a great return by senior number 22 Jacob Wetzel. However Walkersville would have to eventually punted away. Oakdale was a prominent pass first offense with weapons all over the field. The Bears did push the ball down the field, but only came up with a field goal, making the score Oakdale 3, Walkersville 0. This would be the first time Walkersville has trailed at home all year. Walkersville did eventually strike back as they marched all the way down field, and when in doubt hand it off to Wetzel as he scampered in for a four yard touchdown.

Walkersville’s defense in the first half was stellar as they forced Oakdale to turnover the ball twice. On one turnover Walkersville’s number 33 senior Christian Policelli recovered a fumble , and returned all the way which put Walkersville up 13-3. Towards the end of the half Walkersville did add a field goal by number 11 senior Noah Sadler. At halftime Walkersville was up 16-3. According to Steve Hawkins Walkersville had 245 total yards in the first half to Oakdale’s 127. Also Wetzel had 12 carries for 71 yards, and one touchdown.

In the second half it was a totally different game. Oakdale started to connect on a lot more passes, really starting to push the ball down field, and eventually scoring to make it 16-10. Later in the third quarter both teams started to struggle to put points on the board. Which is usually a rarity when it comes to these two powerhouse offenses. Walkersville eventually did get another field goal by Sadler putting the Lions up 19-10. Late in the fourth quarter the Bears were trying to push the ball down the field however a few penalties cost them some big plays, and eventually had to settle for a field goal, and were forced to onside kick, and the Bears were too aggressive, and touched the ball too soon. So the Lions were given the ball at the Oakdale 40, and got one first down. Then the Lions respected kneeled the ball, and won the game.

Some seniors were really touched by all the support they got especially from family members, and when the whole community comes together, this is an unstoppable force. Some players had a lot to say about the whole season, and what they felt about the team, and the brotherhood they have, plus the leadership they use to help the younger players.

“We have been watching a lot of film and been coming to practice with a lot more focus. I’ve been able to make decisions a lot faster whether it be an audible or who I should throw to. We try to focus on taking things one game at a time and having as much fun in the process,” said senior number 15 Billy Gant.

“In football you have to a short memory. What we try to do is have a next play mentality because once you make a mistake there is nothing you can do but make the next play. All players make mistakes, and although it can be challenging we can’t allow past mistakes to affect our confidence. I would say just making sure we are always focused and playing with energy. Tuscarora was definitely a humbling experience but we came out playing “Walkersville football” against Wootton,” said senior number two Josh Polce.

“I’ve always had high expectations for myself when it comes to pretty much anything whether it’s in school or in athletics to be the best at what I’m doing so I always try to max out my effort because I know that if I put in the work and the drive is there, then I’m going to accomplish my goals so I’d say having high expectations in myself is what pushes me to be the best of my ability,” said senior number 33 Policelli.

(As a captain) “I expect to keep everyone’s head straight and make sure we stay together as a team. I also expect to give my best effort every play. It’s pretty weird too be honest. I can still remember my first home game as a freshman, which was also against Oakdale. So it’s cool that we open and close our high school regular seasons with Oakdale,” said senior number 65 Ethan Parish

“We are very senior loaded this year and have a lot of guys with experience. A lot of guys take on a leadership role when needed. We had a few minor injuries, younger guys had to step up and play larger roles for the team. You have to stay positive when things aren’t going your way. Momentum swings all the time in football, you have to stay focused and positive when momentum isn’t in your favor,” said senior number five Zack Mathis

This was a huge win for Walkersville especially against another top team like Oakdale. Next week Walkersville will be heading to Middletown to once again renewing one of the great rivals in Frederick county sports. Last year Walkersville defeated Middletown twice once in the regular season ,and once in the playoffs. This should be a great game, with a lot of action, and emotion.

In Battle of Unbeatens, Lions Roar to 9 and 0 by Alec Parker Special graduate freelance writer As the sun goes down the lights come out, and yet again Walkersville proves their dominance by winning their 23rd game in a row against a mighty tough Oakdale team that was 8-0 coming into the night.