#freedom edge

[head-post]

US, South Korea, Japan hold 1st trilateral Freedom Edge exercise

The US, Japan and South Korea began the first trilateral military exercise on the Korean Peninsula on Thursday, South Korean media reported.

The three-day exercise, dubbed “Freedom Edge,” began in international waters south of South Korea’s resort island of Jeju, after the three countries’ defence chiefs agreed to start the drills earlier this month in line with an agreement reached last year.

The JCS said, using the official name of South Korea as RoK:

“Freedom Edge expresses the will of the RoK (Republic of Korea), US and Japan to promote trilateral interoperability and protect freedom for peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, including the Korean Peninsula.”

The exercise will involve various warships and aircraft from the three sides, including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, the ROKS Seoae Ryu Seong-ryong, a southern ROKS destroyer, and the Japanese helicopter destroyer JS Ise.

The drill will focus on missile defence, air defence, anti-submarine warfare, search and rescue, maritime interdiction and defensive cyber training, the JCS said, adding that the three sides will continue to expand Freedom Edge in the future.

The Freedom Edge exercise also comes amid growing concerns about deepening military ties between North Korea and Russia.

Read more HERE

[nedeii]

wip X2

[kimquatz]

I've been really getting into the indie game scene over the past handful of years, and i think the coolest thing abt indie games is that you realize everything is so much more "within your reach" than you would have originally thought.

I feel like when ppl imagine making a game, you compare yourselves to triple A studios, and it feels like such an impossible standard to reach and that THIS is the bar you have to be at in order to Make Things. But when you realize it CAN also literally just be a small, scrappy thing between you and your buddies (or even making it solo) and whichever niche audience is willing to enjoy it--anyone can make anything! Even if it's just a "sketch" of a game, you still *made* something.

[unwillingtoreachout]

So this is a very vibe motivated au that I came up with (as in there are too many aspects of the canon plot that would have to be re-examined but that's not a job for me) and it was mostly a hypothetical for "what if the twinyards were fraternal twins of opposite genders and had a way worse relationship than they do in canon?"

And the answer is a ballroom + fem Aaron au apparently. So basically all I have is the following:

Aaron (Aria in this au) breaks the deal with Andrew in highschool which prompts them to go their separate ways in college

Neil (trans) stays at millport for longer (he still plays exy but he's also introduced to ballroom) and he's again recruited by wymack

Not sure whether to have Aria study in PSU with a dance scholarship or not, but anyway the point is that she befriends Neil and convinces him to dance with her

I guess it would make the most sense for them to dance American rhythm but in my head they also dance international latin

Kateaaron endgame (they're roomates)

I would imagine that thanksgiving is the first time Andrew and Aria have been within close proximity to each other in a while (which makes what happens probably a lot more complicated bc yes, Aria does kill drake)

One of the main conflicts I originally thought of was based on Neil's love for exy vs his love for ballroom, and I think it would be interesting if he's forced to keep playing exy bc of his deal with ichirou but he didn't actually want to

[geospiral]

One more chance.

[kingofattolia]

"Do you miss it? The Order?" "I miss... the idea of it. But not the truth, the weakness. There was no future there." OKAY, THIS MAN MISSES THE ORDER SOOOOOOOOOOO BAD IT MAKES HIM LOOK STUPID

I'm serious. He's carrying the husk of his long-ossified grief so obviously. It is evident in everything he does and says that he was a young knight absolutely ripped to shreds by Order 66 and its lonely, dark aftermath. He allowed despair to be his comfort, convincing himself there's nothing to mourn because it's easier than dealing with the loss.

[avatar-news]

Nathaniel Kong has been cast as Longshot in Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series!

He is a newcomer.

Check out the latest update on Jet’s Freedom Fighters revealed so far! Again, they already filmed their scenes for Season 1 last year, their castings are just being revealed now.

Check out a video of Wes Valarao (Smellerbee) and Nathaniel here!

Source for Longshot’s casting: Knight Edge Media

[tonightillbeonthathill]

Bruce Springsteen: I understood that underneath this illusion of freedom was an oppressiveness that would kill me

My Hometown (Bruce Springsteen Live at LA Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA - September 1985)

Bruce Springsteen: “At some point I said to myself—and I know this is one of the things that caused me a lot of distress—I said, Well, okay, what if I am the guy in ‘Born to Run,’ with the bike and the girl, shooting down the road. But when you get out there a little ways, there’s not that much traffic. And you can’t see the people in the cars next to you; all the windows are tinted. And all of a sudden you’re out there, but where is everybody? So I guess I kinda thought, Well, all right, you know; so maybe I get to do these things, but what about everybody else?

And that didn’t come from a real selfless motivation or some idea to do good. Because I understood that it was a self-preservation question. I realized that you will die out there, simple as that. I understood that underneath this illusion of freedom was an oppressiveness that would kill me. And that where maybe I was different was that I knew it.

So when I got in that situation, I felt tremendously threatened, and I did not know why. It was totally instinctive. Matter of fact, I don’t think I really knew why until not that long ago. But initially, when I was twenty-five, it was just instinctive—I felt threatened, I felt in danger. And it was funny because those were the exact opposite responses that people generally have. But I didn’t know why I was havin’ ’em; I was just havin’ ’em.

So initially, I wanted to just reject the whole thing—‘This is bad; all this is bad’—as people have done before. I think you look at some of the older rock and rollers, they’ve chosen to reject it and their opposite choice was to move to religious fundamentalism. But I got so alienated from religion when I was younger that there was no way that that was ever gonna be an alternative, in that sense, for me. I just could never see it.

I think when I got in that spot, I really did feel—and not in a paranoid fashion— attacked on the essence of who I felt that I was. So at that point I realized that, unattached from community, it was impossible to find any meaning. And if you can’t find any meaning, you will go insane and you will either kill yourself or somebody will do the job for you, either by doping you or one thing or another.

I began to question from that moment on the values and the ideas that I set out and believed in on that Born to Run record: friendship, hope, belief in a better day. I questioned all of these things. And so Darkness on the Edge of Town was basically saying, You get out there and you turn around and you come back because that’s just the beginning. That’s the real beginning.

I got out there—hey, the wind’s whipping through your hair, you feel real good, you’re the guy with the gold guitar or whatever, and all of a sudden you feel that sense of dread that is overwhelming everything you do. It’s like that great scene in The Last Picture Show where the guy hits the brakes and turns around. The Darkness record was a confrontation record: ‘Badlands,’ ‘Adam Raised a Cain,’ ‘Racing in the Street’all those people, all those faces, you gotta look at ’em all. Right through to ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’—that was a whole other beginning.

Now, you strip a whole bunch of things away from the thing, and you lose a lot of your illusions and a lot of, I suppose, your romantic dreams. And you decide…you make a particular decision. And that is a decision, I believe, that saves your life—your real life, your internal life, your emotional life, your essential life. Because you can live on, and a lotta people do; there’s all sorts of people livin’ on out there, you know. But I knew—and this ties right in with the discussion I had with Jon about Born in the U.S.A.—that the reason I began to do what I did was for connection. I desperately needed connection. I couldn’t get it; I wanted it.

And that’s why the guitar was my lifeline. That was my connection with other people, more than anything else. Because other things will not sustain you. Maybe for a while you’ll be distracted and have some fun, but in the end, your real life, you’ll die, you will really die. And then once that happens, I believe there’s only a certain amount of time before the physical thing catches up to you.

So you’ve got that situation, where I turn around—on the live record, that’s where ‘Badlands’ fits.”

[golvio]

Sometimes I wonder if I write Ghirahim too butch or if the fandom is just completely wrong about him.

[eternalwritingstudent]

Did some art of my character Freedom from On Shadow's Edge. Thought I'd share it. It's done in Daz3d Studio.

Here's a quote that got cut from the book. “I’ve been broken so many times I wonder if I can ever be put back together at times. You stay with me and you’ll break too. The things that haunt me, they don’t care about collateral damage. In fact, let me be honest, they love it.” She wiped the blood from her blade, putting it away. “If you stay, don’t expect me to put you back together. I can’t do it for myself and its not fair to expect me to do it for you.”  ~ Freedom - On Shadow's Edge

[boanerges20]

Isle Of Man T.T.

[ralexsol]

wonder if tealor briefly had a sense of deja vu when looking at the prophet for the first time. like they were strangely familiar. through the fog of his memories, he sees a flash of 3 years before, when he was approached by a shadow figure who emanated the same otherworldly aura. the prophet is naive and untrained. but the shadow god, despite still being early on in their quest, was already ready and waiting to take on fate

[deadpresidents]

What have you been reading since the last time you posted your latest reads?

It's been a few months since I updated my latest reads, so I'm probably going to forget a few titles, but here's what I've been reading since then:

•The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Pancho Villa: A Revolutionary Life by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and translated by Todd Chretien (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite by Dean King (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day by Garrett M. Graff (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk by William Stadiem (BOOK)

•The House Divided: Sunni, Shia, and the Making of the Middle East by Barnaby Rogerson (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Founders' Curse: James Monroe's Struggle Against Political Parties by Brook Poston (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 by Robert W. Merry (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom Remade the World by Don H. Doyle (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty by Alexander Larman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis by George Stephanopoulos with Lisa Dickey (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War by James B. Conroy (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Ballyhoo!: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling by Jon Langmead (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California by Arthur Quinn (BOOK)

•The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael Cook (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, Third Edition by Aidan Nichols (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309-1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society by Joëlle Rollo-Koster (BOOK | KINDLE)

[petr1kov]

i won't generalize because every case is different and etc but the berserk fans who claim that the movies are the best adaptation of the manga tend to be the fans who least get what makes the story work, imo. it's like they prefer the movies because they are more straight up 'faithful' to the source material compared to the '97 anime in terms of plot points and levels of graphic violence and act as if that is the most important measure of a successful adaptation, while ignoring how much of the relationship dynamics and characterization of each main character were cut in order to make room for such scenes or rushed due time constraints and how it overall ends up feeling way more mechanical and soulless than the anime because of it.

[salvatoreren]

you know, it doesn't help the fact that in the final op they show baby eren reaching to his father then to ymir or the fact that deep inside the attack titan there was ymir who always sought freedom signifying that eren was always meant to be the one who would free ymir ultimately, that eren was that somebody that ymir was waiting for only to then subvert it then make mikasa as the one who freed ymir like...

i don't think that to be the chosen one, you have to exactly parallel and ymir and eren do parallel in a way in which they were controlled and only used to do this and that, most of the time being disregarded for who they truly are, a human and most of the time being put in a pedestal, a god and humanity's hope. Eren is the total opposite of Ymir while she is passive and submissive, Eren is not, he's full of rage and hate and he does not back down without a fight regardless if the fight would come out fruitless, only the fact that he got to fight.

And in Ymir's belief, which I think is one of her main drives in serving Fritz is that she needs to EARN her freedom whereas Eren believes freedom is a RIGHT, it is something that is already granted to you the moment you were born to this world.

Eren is exactly what Ymir needed in that moment. I believe Ymir did wanted to rage at the world for everything.

Like, the rumbling isn't just an alternative for Paradis to be liberated and be safe, it is a personification of rage, human rage, it is misdirected, yes, there is no arguing that but it is rage.

And most would argue, it would deconstruct eren being not special and how that's okay that he isn't well, important and all that but it really isn't because this isn't a jon snow story book wise, in which it would be okay that jon isn't azor ahai nor is he the prince that was promised nor that he had targ blood in him because everything he got was done straight from the ground, no shortcuts.

but the thing is there was plenty of buildup for Eren and the way the narrative always veered away from him, always showed him losing in some way and how him being the ONE, how the final arc was now focused on eren and eren alone. It reminds people who is the main protagonist, reminds people why Attack On Titan is named from his titan.

And there was a price to pay indeed if he ever was the one, what bastard, what non special people, what second choice in aot ever won without paying a price? He killed thousands of innocent people and is deemed a monster, he would not attain his freedom in the end because if Ymir was freed, the power of the titans would cease to exist and the founding titan is what kept Eren alive the whole time.

[bitchesgate3]

After they sanitized most of the gith, when I encountered this awful being - I was utterly delighted. This comment is utterly unhinged.

Wish I took a screenshot of him saying after, "Hand it over. Please." in such a Githyanki way.