#how old in the uk do you have to be to join the army

[sharpestsatire]

starting writing a new fanfic like

[welldonekhushi]

Call of Duty OC: Samantha "Scarlet" Wright 🦋

Finally, after ages, I came up with Scarlet's biography sheet! So in case you guys are curious about her, you can go through this post, hope it helps! (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠✧⁠*⁠。

If you want to see any artwork or fics on her, go to the #samantha scarlet wright tag for her content!

GENERAL

Name: Samantha

Full name: Samantha Wright

Codename: "Scarlet", Hotel Two-Six

Age: 29 years old

Gender: Female

Nationality: British (UK)

Languages spoken: English (native), Arabic (conventionally), Russian (for intelligence purposes)

Date of Birth: June 9, 1984

Place of Birth: Cambridge, England

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Martial Status: Single (married in 2017 to John "Soap" MacTavish, her childhood friend — diverging canon AU)

Occupation: British SAS (Special Air Services), member of the Task Force 141

Status: Active

Rank: Sergeant

Universe: Original timeline (2011-2017), reboot (alternative AU)

Faceclaim: Jenna Coleman

Song: Tangled Up by Caro Emerald (Lokee Remix)

Biography: Samantha Wright, under the codename "Scarlet" followed her dream in joining the most elite forces of the British Army, after hearing about her father's experiences in the military. As her hard work pays off, she finally gets selected for the SAS, and then for the Task Force 141, for her skills and strength. There, she meets a very old friend, that she missed and deeply cared for..

AFFILIATIONS:

Task Force 141

Captain John Price

John "Soap" MacTavish

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick

Simon "Ghost" Riley

Hannah "Sparrow" Clayton (@revnah1406)

Sergeant Annabelle "Kit" Pham (@applbottmjeens)

2nd Commando Regiment (@kaitaiga)

Charlotte "Jade" La Jardin (@sleepyconfusedpotato)

Sergeant Damien Whitlock

Captain Lachlan Jones

Los Vaqueros

Colonel Alejandro Vargas

Rodolfo "Rudy" Parra

Alyssa "Aly" Martinez (@alypink)

SKILLS AND ABILITIES

Weapon induced: M4A1 Carbine, M4A1 Grenadier w/ Red Dot Sight, M14 EBR Scoped

Fighting style: Hand-to-hand-combat, martial arts, a bit of jiu-jitsu

Special skills: Has good agility, wits and strength from intensive physical and mental training.

Talents: Is able to strategise a plan for greater impact.

Shortcomings: Is a bit sensitive and confused when it comes to choosing a decision which leads to life or death.

PERSONALITY

Myers-Briggs Type: ISFP (The Adventurer)

Is a positive presence among everybody: Yes, a soldier sure is a tough-hard individual who is determined to follow their duty, but Scarlet is the opposite. She maintains her duties and also motivates and cheers others up to keep moving and never surrender, as taught by her father. The reason why others notice when Scarlet is present with them, they feel calm and encouraged.

Emotional, but also dangerous: Sure Scarlet looks like she's a sweet presence among everyone, but at the same time, we shall not forget she's SAS-trained. When things get serious, she gets serious. During some missions (1 and 2), she has shown remarkable strength and courage by eliminating enemy soldiers in combat, as if she's a different person. The cheerful presence Scarlet holds among others has another dark side inside that she never reveals, but towards her enemies.

Can indulge with anyone, and is respectful: She'd love to make friends or teammates! It doesn't mean she doesn't give importance to anyone, but she especially bonds a lot with Soap. They two have been childhood friends since the start and everyone notices how close they both are and thinks if they two are a couple. Even if Soap is her best friend and he has a superior rank, she'd still respect him as her Captain. But sure, personally, they two engage like they used to.

Very empathetic: Whether it's a random person or not who is dying in her arms, it breaks her. It happened once when she tried to save a person who was losing their life and in the end they couldn't make it. It makes her want to blame herself a bit, thinking she didn't do her duty right, even if everything wasn't in her power. Also, if she sees anyone in distress, she's able to console and help them in time of need, the reason why Scarlet is able to sympathise and understand others well.

BACKGROUND STORY

Born as Samantha Wright, she lives in a small town in England with her father, Albert Wright, who is a former SAS-soldier under the codename "Bolt", and mother Elizabeth. When Scarlet was a toddler, she used to hear stories from her father about him working in Special Air Services, an elite special forces unit, and retired the day when his one leg was brutally injured that made him unable to walk or run.

Those stories gave Scarlet an idea to also join the SAS like him, but her father chuckled and said that right now she was too young to do so. Sometime later, she met John MacTavish, who recently moved into her neighbourhood from Scotland, but wasn't happy that he shifted away from his homeland. She wanted John to be her friend, and make him familiar with the surroundings so he'll get used to everything and love staying at his new home. And soon, they two grew closer, and became best friends.

They two had a similar goal — to join the defense. And one day, that day had to come between the two, when John had to leave for military school. Bidding her best friend a bittersweet farewell, unsure what future has for them in between, John encouraged her to follow her dreams. Taking that as a motivation, Scarlet kept John close to heart, while continuing her aspiration to join the SAS.

Her father got to know about her plan, saying that it won't be easy, since the SAS had the toughest selection processes. That sure unsettled her for a while, but didn't make her back off from her decision respectively. Instead, she learnt a couple of exercises, tips and tricks on self-defense from him that mentally and physically prepared her fully at the same time.

When she recruited herself in the selection process, it was an absolutely different experience for her. The way her mind drastically changed during the training quite traumatized and scared her, knowing what it feels to be in the SAS. But, keeping her father's words by her side, she didn't let the weakness and fear sink her in and moved on further. At times, she was ridiculed by others that she'd never be able to complete the process, but chuckled it all out instead.

The day came, when her hard work paid off, and she finally became eligible for the special forces. It was a blessed feeling for her, as if luck always stood by her side. And this is where, her journey begins..

[alienelvisobsession]

The Led Zeppelin Connection

When Robert Plant was about 10 years old, in 1958, he used to do an Elvis impersonation behind the curtains in his living room, arguably looking for a certain ambience that Elvis’ early records had. He used to have a quiff and spent hours in front of the mirror trying to emulate Elvis’ moves. Both him and Jimmy Page used to listen to Radio Luxembourg, a foreign radio station that at the time was the only way to listen to rock ‘n’ roll music in the UK. It couldn’t always be tuned in and it was staticky, but in their homes with ears to the speakers they would pick up fragments of Fats Domino, Buddy Holly or Elvis Presley. Robert’s parents were worried about the influence rock ‘n’ roll had on their son and one day, while he was listening to his favorite music, even pulled the plug off the radio. He didn’t desist of course and it was through Elvis that he learned about the Delta Blues. Rock ‘n’ roll and R&B records were only found in second-hand shops in the UK back then, left behind by Americans or discarded from jukeboxes, so that’s what Page and Plant focused on separately while Elvis was drafted into the army.

What sparked Jimmy Page musically, however, even before discovering Chuck Berry in 1956, was Elvis’ rockabilly classic “Baby, Let’s Play House”, which he heard first on that staticky radio. Even though the allusion in the lyrics about living in sin didn’t hit him until years later, that song, he confessed in an interview, turned him on and sent shivers up his spine, so much so that he decided to take up a guitar left behind at his house and learn to play it. Soon enough, he formed a skiffle band and started to emulate solos from guitarists he liked, especially James Burton (who played guitar in Ricky Nelson’s hits and would later play his famous pink Telecaster in Elvis’ TCB band). Like Elvis, Jimmy would bring his guitar to school and sometimes it got confiscated for the day. He bought a record player in 1960 and got the early Elvis records he liked, such as “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and “Tryin’ to Get to You”. “That music was refreshing”, observed Page many years later, “when all you heard before was Rosemary Clooney”.

It was only in 1968 however that Page and Plant joined forces and with John Bonham and John Paul Jones formed Led Zeppelin. Rock music had evolved a lot from ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll to 70s hard rock, but Elvis’ influence can be heard everywhere in Robert Plant’s delivery, in some of his stage moves and in the lyrics too (“It's been a long time, been a long time / Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time” - “Rock and Roll” from Led Zeppelin IV). Having watched Elvis for years, Led Zeppelin also learned how to use their bodies on stage to emphasize the feel of the music – striking poses, shaking their hips, thrusting their pelvis and so on. In order to pay homage to how it all started for them, they semi-regularly included Elvis songs in their sets, especially in the long “Whole Lotta Love” medley. It included “That’s Alright, Mama”, “Heartbreak Hotel”, “A Mess of Blues” and others.

The members of Led Zeppelin went to see Elvis live several times over the years, including in 1972 at Madison Square Garden, but it was only in May 1974 that Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Bonham were invited to meet him after a concert. Elvis was not a fan of hard rock, but he knew about Led Zeppelin, as they were topping the charts at the time. He would say to his own entourage, “Well, I may not be Led Zeppelin but I can still pack 'em in”. He was actually amused that his step-brother Ricky was really excited that they were in the audience. During the concert that night in Los Angeles he acknowledged them before launching into “Funny How Time Slips Away” with his signature self-deprecating humor, stopping his TCB band and saying that they should all play as if they knew what they were doing because Led Zeppelin was in the audience.

After the concert they were invited to see Elvis and led into a room full of girls – all copies of Ann Margret, as Robert Plant humorously recalls. They were told by Elvis’ entourage not to discuss music with him, so initially they were starstruck and tongue tied. Elvis, who apparently only knew one of their songs, Stairway to Heaven, didn’t talk to them for a little while, until his interest was sparked by Bonzo mentioning his classic car collection. Elvis knew the band members were famous for the groupies and their libertine behavior on tour, so he asked about that and they hilariously denied everything. Jimmy joked that they rarely did sound checks, but if they did all Robert wanted to sing was Elvis’ songs. Elvis was amused by that and asked him which songs he liked and Robert said that he liked the ones with all the moods, like “Love Me”: “Treat me like a fool / Treat me mean and cruel / But love me”. When they were about to leave, Elvis swung around the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song to them: “Treat me like a fool…” and Robert promptly replied “Treat me mean and cruel…But love me”. They actually talked and had fun for about 90 minutes together. Members of his Memphis Mafia even checked with him several times because Elvis usually saw people for only 10 minutes.

Another memorable meeting took place in his Monovale house, also in LA, this time involving John Paul Jones, the bassist of the band, and Richard Cole, the band’s tour manager, who was a friend of Jerry Schilling. When the two arrived with a bottle of Dom Pérignon, they were surprised to find Elvis in his pajamas and slippers watching TV with the MM. Cole, apparently a bit drunk, started to swear in front of everyone and Elvis didn’t approve, especially since his girlfriend Sheila Ryan was present. Accounts differ but one story says that Elvis jumped up in a karate stance and knocked off his watch and another that Elvis simply asked to see Cole’s expensive watch. What happened for sure is that they all started to swap watches, John getting a jewel-encrusted watch from Elvis in exchange for his Mickey Mouse wristwatch. The evening went on pleasantly, with Elvis quoting several Monty Python routines to his new English friends. Towards the end of the evening, Elvis suggested another exchange. He eyed John, who had been the quiet one all night, lowered his pajama pants beneath his robe and in perfect Monty Python fashion said “Let’s swap pants!”. According to Jerry, the more eccentric Cole was shocked into silence, while John and Sheila bursted into laughter.

The last time Elvis Presley and Led Zep crossed paths is bittersweet, as it happened shortly before Elvis’ death in 1977 when their jets met on the runway at the airport. His other step brother, David Stanley, asked Elvis if he could go with the band that night for their concert. Elvis just looked at him and said, “No.” When he asked Elvis why, he said, “Look at the bottom of your paycheck.” As he entered the limo with Elvis David said they sure have a nice jet. Elvis leaned over and reminded him, “They lease their jet from Caesar’s Palace, I own mine.”

Robert Plant kept singing Elvis’ songs on stage throughout his career. Here he’s singing “Little Sister” in 1979 with Rockpile.

Here he’s sitting on the floor with some records. Note Elvis’ first album is there (thanks Lucy for this).

You can find my other posts on Elvis connections with artists who followed him at this link. So far I’ve written about Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan/Andy Warhol, the Clash, Jim Morrison and Quentin Tarantino.

[whitewolf2759]

First Meeting-Chris alonso

Hey guys I hope you enjoy this one-shot, I have just started publishing my writing so there may be some mistakes and if you want to view more of my content I will place a link to my youtube below.

You had first been introduced to Chris by Street the both you were raised at the same orphanage until you had been adopted by a nice old couple, however you made sure to stay in contact as he was like a brother in everything but blood.

After being adopted you had moved to the UK which was actually were you were born and raised until the age of six where you had been adopted by couple that were bad parent and chose to leave you when on holiday in America.

You were conflicted about as the UK was where you born but it would make staying in contact with Street harder. After reaching 18 you had followed in your adopter fathers footstep’s and joined the army as a medic.

After just over 19 week of army training as well as 22 weeks of medic training I then served for 4 years doing 2 tours after which I decided to join the military police.

At the age of 29 I had been a member of the military police for 6 years however during this I continued staying in contact with Street. We told each other everything as we comforted each other at every low and celebrated every high, however what we spoke most about was his team and every little shenanigan they got up.

These conversation gelped me decide to take an offer to move to America and work as a liaison between the military police and swat as well as an onsite medic.

///

Hey Chris!" Street waved to me "Come meet someone!"

I put my weights down and jogged over.

"Chris, this is y/n who’s basically my sister. She's going to be working here at SWAT."

"I'm mostly going to be assisting Commander Hicks and helping teams with military based cases as well an injuries if needed. It's not as difficult as what you lot do" You said with shy smile and slight blush at seeing the state Chris is in.

Chris almost didn't even process what you said because she got lost in  your bright eyes and shy smile. Get a hold of yourself Chris.

"Nonsense, you'll be plenty of importance. Welcome to 20-David" Chris say’s with a welcoming smile and dusting of pink of her cheeks at getting distracted shaking your hand.

While the two of you were focused on each othet neither noticed Street watching you both with a raised eyebrow, knowing look in his eyes and smirk slowly rising on his face before hiding it before either of you noticed.

///

You have now be working a swat for a couple of days and Street had introduced you to the rest of the team, while working if you had time you would spend in getting to each other and you made sure to give any teasing material they had on Street to annoy him when he gets in your nerves.

Most of the time you would obviously hang out with Street however you and Chris had also spent a lot of time together. With the amount of time spent with each other you had learned a lot about the other, for example you had learned that Chris loved trying a lot of different activities and she had learned of you love of reading. During all of this your attraction to Chris continued growing, however it only took one event for you to ask her out.

///

 Chris and the team had just returned after taking down a gang’s drug operation and the all got a bit banged a few scratches and bruises, Chris had the biggest wound which was a shallow cut from a knife on her right side.

“Chris you should really had gone to the hospital in case you need stitches” Hondo said in serious but tired voice knowing it was useless trying to get Chris to go the hospital.

“It’s fine it barely grazed me, nothing that wont heal in few days” Chris said in a tired voice just wanting to clean up and get out of her gear.

Both Hondo and Street shared knowing it was useless trying to convince however as they walk into HQ Street spot’s you talking to Hick’s knowing how much you worry about the team he now knows how to get her wound looked at.

“Hey Y/N we’re back” Street say’s catching you attention you glance at them before finishing you conversation with Hick’s.

As you make you way towards them Chris focuses on you seeing your hug your form showing your perfect hourglass figure causing her to get into a trance.

While this is happening the rest of the team leave to take their gear off besides Hondo and Street who share a look and Street indicates to Hondo what his plan is.

“Hey guys heard about the operation hope you all didn’t hurt badly” You said in caring voice your still showing you British accent.

“We’re fine just a few bruises but Chris has a cut she should get checked at” Hondo says in a hopeful tone hoping Streets plan works.

“What, no Im-.”Chris says in a annoyed tone with a slight blush realising she got distracted and they were still going on about her wound, however before she could finish her sentence Street interupted.

“Chris didn’t want to go to hospital so we were hoping you would take a look” Street said giving Chris a knowing look as she shot him an annoyed one in return.

“Sure, Chris meet me in office aftet getting changed” You said leaving no room to argue as head to your office to get your med kit ready.

As you leave Chris watches you getting slightly hypnotised by the jeans hugging against your figure. After shacking her head she look towards Hondo and Street about to argue about what they just did but stopped as they look at her with knowing look’s having caught her so she heads to changing room with a light blush leaving behind the two smiling at her action.

///

30 minutes later Chris enters your office with tank top and jogger's hugging her form causing a slight blush to form on your cheek's before you tell her to sit on your desk as you get stuff to clean her wound.

Chris heads to sit on your desk with a slight smile on her face having caught your blush, a happy feeling filling her at the fact you find her attractive.

You sit on your chair in front of Chris and raise her top just below her breasts, blush returning when seeing her toned form. You start cleaning her wound apologising when she winces at the sting, while this happening you stay quite focusing on her wound while she tells you about the mission

However both of you fail to notice that Chris stops mid way through her story. When you finish you realise she’s stopped you look up and immediately blush.

When she see’s your blush she realises she got so entranced on you while you focused on her cut that she stopped talking.

Not giving her time to talk you get up to get a bandage for her cut and as you come back you see a shy look on Chris face. Smiling to yourself you place the bandage on her and lower her top, as she gets up and begins to leave you stop her.

“What are you doing Sunday?” You ask with a small smile and hopeful look in your eyes.

“Nothing why?” Chris replies while turning back to face you.

“I wondering if you would like go on a date” You said the smile on your face widening as a shocked but happy look crosses Chris’s face.

“I would love to” Chris says a happy but shy smile on her face at the fluttery feeling you caused at the question

You just continue to smile as you walk towards her placing a kiss on her cheek before heading back intent on clearing up so you can finish early and start planning your date.

As you turn Chris watches you with surprise in her eyes before a sweet smile appears on her face as she leaves.

[czigonas]

Saw this image of Soap and Ghost enjoying the spoils of a carnival/fair and my brain immediately went instead to Actually They Are Both Carnies AU.

(I am going to preface this by saying I am much more familiar with American traveling carnie lifestyles rather than the UK [do they... even do those over there?] or anywhere else, so that's what I'm basing this on. This is set vaguely late 80s-early 90s in my mind.)

Ghost has been working as a carnie for a very long time. He basically grew up on the fair circuit, helping his dad as soon as he was old enough to carry things and count out change (and do a little pick-pocketing on the side).

Old Man Riley runs a ring toss booth, though not well. He's constantly on the bad side of the man that owns the ring toss trailer but they keep him on the job because, when he's sober, he's charming enough to pull people in and keep them playing. Problem is, he's increasingly not sober. Simon's tall for his age though, so, as soon as they can pass him off as 14 (he's about 9 or 10), the lead has a few of the other barkers teach him how to draw people in. Look charming, smile wide, get them to see you as a friend, play the part and get paid. Simon hates it, but he does what he's told because it keeps his mom and Tommy housed and fed.

(Lead's wife is pretty good about keeping odd jobs set aside for Simon's mom at any time of day she needs to escape. Lead's wife can't interfere every time, but she and a couple of the other carnies do try to minimize the abuse by offering legitimate ways to get away for a short time.)

As Simon and Tommy grow, Old Man Riley steps back more and more. He's almost never sober anymore and rarely seen anywhere near the booth-fronts. He's a terror in the back lots, and burns through a lot of the goodwill the rest of the family manages to generate among their fellows. Tommy starts being trained up taking tickets at a fun house, and he's good at it. He's not as conventionally pretty as Simon, but he's flirtier, more attuned to crowd moods, and much more willing to bark, so he does well pulling.

As soon as Simon's 18, he joins the Army. He's always liked the travel aspect of carnie life, but he hates that it's seasonal work and the months and months of downtime. He never grew to enjoy having to put on the charming mask to draw in customers. Instead, he leaves with the lead's grudging blessing and a promise to his mom and Tommy to catch them up at whatever stop they're at whenever he has leave.

The Army is... nice. It's not necessarily a life he wants to live forever, but for now it's different and yet still enough like what he left behind to satisfy. He ends up having to take an extended leave right after basic to sort Tommy out, though. Drugs have always been passed around pretty openly around the booths and caravans, the the Riley boys had never partaken. His mum had sent a letter that Tommy had been getting into them and not handling it well. She doesn't say it outright, but Simon blames the old man.

He finds an unexpected ally in Beth, the daughter of the man widely acknowledged to be taking over as lead when the current one finally retires. It's not exactly an advantageous match for Beth's family, but she's stubborn and has made up her mind. She wants Tommy and she's going to have him so long as he wants her back. Together they get him clean and Simon gives the pair of them his blessing and a good chunk of the money he's saved over the years.

(Tommy uses it to buy his own caravan so he and Beth aren't imposing on their parents. They both agree Mrs Riley can stay whenever she needs. The old man has been getting worse the more he sinks into the drugs and drink. He'll need to be left behind soon, but no one can agree on where. There are a lot of jokes about ditches and empty fields. [A good number of them aren't jokes.])

Simon heads back to the Army with a lighter heart, ready to do his duty knowing his family is once again as safe and happy as he can make them. They exchange postcards and letters when they can, e-mails when they manage to find somewhere to send one from. Simon doesn't make it home in time for Joseph's birth, but he sees him as often as the leave schedule allows. Everything is good for a few years.

Then. Roba.

Ghost crawls out of his desert grave and, while the Army welcomes him back, they simply do not have a place in their ranks for a dead man. They want to forget the betrayal by one of their own and the loss of a whole unit of promising soldiers; sweep it under a rug and never speak of the shame again. Ghost gets an honorable discharge and several discreet leads to a few PMCs and even the CIA if he wants to stay fighting near the front lines. He doesn't.

Instead, he goes home. He takes what's left of his belongings, the rest of his pay, the survivor benefits in the name of Simon Riley's next of kin, and the hush money check thinly disguised as a pension and goes to find his family. He finds them happy, safe, and sound. Joseph is thriving under the attentions of both Mama Riley and Beth's parents. Tommy's in charge of a handful of booths now, and Beth is running their section of the back lots as well as any sergeant Ghost's ever known.

He gets himself a little trailer to sleep in so he's not imposing and slides back into the crew so easily it's almost as though he never left. Except now he has a mask he won't remove for anyone. The lead sets him up doing mostly setup/tear down, but supplements his time with stalking the fun houses and dark rides to make sure no one's slipped off into a corner trying to get frisky or burn the place down.

Sparks and Washington, when they show up, don't make it far into their convoluted revenge/enticement plot against Ghost. Tommy ends up losing an eye and an unlucky witness gets Sparks' knife to the ribs, but at least they'll both live. The same can't be said for the two ex-Army men.

The carnies close ranks when the authorities show up. They blame the injuries on an after hours party trick that got a little out of hand and accept medical treatment, but offer no information that would lead to any charges being filed against anyone. When they move on to the next show, they leave behind two unmarked graves that will lay undiscovered on those grounds for decades to come.

(The road out of town ends up with one of its own, and Old Man Riley is guaranteed not to bother anyone any further. The crew doesn't take lightly to rats.)

Life slowly crumbles its way back to a semblance of normal. A few stops later, they pick up a few new additions. One of them happens to be a brash Scottish man who comes highly recommended by the head of another crew named Price. Johnny "call me Soap" MacTavish immediately gets on Beth's good side (and Ghost's annoyed one, much to his chagrin).

Still, this Soap guy is kinda growing on him. Just a little.

[aquadestinyswriting]

Hello there, and Happy Worldbuilding Wednesday!

During my due diligence for this, I came upon some of your Prose mentioning Detectives and Constables and such. So, I'd love to hear more about it!

How did the society in question develop its 'law enforcement' institutions over time, what kinds of people fill its ranks, and how is it viewed by the rest of society?

Hi there. Happy Worldbuilding Wednesday and thank you so much for the question. The answer is going to be under a cut as it's going to be quite long

I see you stumbled onto my Modern AU stuff, which I am more than happy to do more worldbuilding for. I'll answer a bit more specifically for the Fangthane Stronghold Guardian Corps for this, since the Detective stuff is more about Toreguarde and I'm still working out some of the specifics about how their police departments are organised.

The SGC is loosely based on a mixture of the real world Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) (due to the inspiration for this whole thing being Due South) and the UK Royal Military Police (RMP) (as I live in the UK and am a bit more familiar with the terms used here).

As to how this was developed, I decided that Fangthane would remain a kingdom for this modernised story, and is technically a Constitutional Monarchy like the UK. It's an old kingdom, with many outposts scattered across the continent of Allansia, all of which require some kind of police and/or military presence to prevent crime and to keep the citizenry of Fangthane safe from hostile outside forces.

Part of the history includes Fangthane once having the kingdom spread across almost the entirety of Allansia, but due to various wars and other skirmishes, the territory has since shrunk back to mostly the area immediately surrounding the capital city of the same name, which is situated at the bottom of Ben Oir, the tallest peak in the highlands just south of the much larger Freezeblood mountain range. The Stronghold Guardian Corps was originally created to act as a localised military police force for the various outposts that once belonged to the kingdom, but has since become the main military police force for what is left of the kingdom, with their main headquarters stationed within Fangthane city.

Part of the SGC's remit is providing security for the various Consulates Fangthane has created within friendly city-states and nations, as well as investigating potential civilian threats to Fagnthane's national security. They may, at times, work alongside the police forces of other nations and city-states to deal with problems created by Fangthane citizens living in these locations. Those SGC officers working in areas outside of the capital city also have an important ceremonial role when the King visits other nations and have a separate uniform to be worn on these occasions.

Within Fangthane, the Stronghold Guardian Corps is viewed relatively neutrally by most of the population. Since they rarely interact with the general population - who are subject to the various departments of the local civil police forces instead - their presence is usually the topic of a lot of gossip whenever they do show up outside of the pageantry associated with Official Royal Events.

Within the more general military structure of Fangthane however, they are seen as quite a lot lesser. The army, which is one of the few organisations under the direct purview of the SGC in the capital city, understands their necessity, but are generally a bit more hostile than other the other arms of Fangthane's military. The King's Guard, that part of the military directly responsible for the safety and security of the Royal Family, looks down their nose at them, despite both organisations reputedly being part of the same overall division.

The Airforce and Navy don't really have any strong opinions about the SGC, since they don't interact with them on a regular basis. What interactions they do have are generally neutral to pleasant.

As to the types of people that join the SGC, most are people who have family connections to one arm of the Fangthane military or other. Most cadets are those young people who have a strong sense of justice and a want to do right by others. They also tend to be fairly academically-minded and/or have displayed good puzzle-solving skills. Those that make it past the gruelling training regimen tend to be extremely disciplined, observant, assertive and have a strong sense of self. Many of those who manage to start climbing the ranks towards commission also have a tendency towards lateral thinking and have a more nuanced view of what is right and wrong. While the SGC is a military police force, and most officers are conditioned to follow direct orders and Standard Operating Procedure as given, those who know when to question their orders and use alternative methods when the situation calls for it are often lauded for it. After all, what is the point of following orders or Standard Operating Procedure when there are situations where they can be detrimental to a mission or investigation? At least, that's the view of the current Field Marshal, Kargun Vanskleig.

[dragon-kazansky]

The Chaos Family

Iceman x Dragon

[Masterlist]

[Next Chapter]

From how these two fools met and fell in love. To how they built a family surrounded by those that mean the most to them. There's a lot to tell in a story like this, but if you're willing to hear it out, well, who am I to deprive you of the Kazansky's and their crazy friends?

Word count: 1.6k

Chapter One - Hunter & Bradshaw

♡♡♡

Nick Bradshaw has been friends with Rachael Hunter since high school. It's a wonderful moment when you come cross someone you get on so well with. Someone who feels like they were just meant to be in your life. Someone you know you'll be friends with for years to come, and someone who would influence you so greatly. Rachael was just that.

It was because of Rachael that Nicholas Bradshaw joined the Navy. That young girl in his class aspired to be a Navy aviator when she grew up, and follow those dreams she did. Nick had encouraged her to follow her heart, and so she did.

Rachael was originally from the UK. When her father got deployed permanently over in the States, her family moved out there. It was strange new place she had never been to before. She had no one. Nick saw her sitting alone at school and decided he would be someone. He would be her friend.

They were as thick as thieves after that. Always together. Always laughing, chatting, hanging out. As they got to the end of their high school years, people assumed they would get together. They never did. They were friends. Good and dear friends. It was a friendship that would never end.

When Rachael turned around and told Nick she was going to apply for flight school, he was over the moon for her. Rachael's dad is an army man. He had been a solider since he was old enough to join. He thought his daughter might follows in his footsteps, but it wasn't the army she wanted to join. When she told her parents she wanted to be a Navy aviator, they were both shocked. She had fallen in love with planes from a young age, so it really shouldn't have come a shock to know she wanted to be a pilot. But a Navy pilot... that was a whole other area.

"Are you sure?" They asked her.

"Yes," she replied confidently.

Nick was there the day she left for flight school. He wrote to her often while she was away. They called each other when possible. He was a constant in her life.

Flight school was tough. Rachael was the only woman in her class, but she showed them what she was made of. She would tell Nick everything she could about being there. He always knew Rachael would put all her effort into everything she did, but when it came to achieving her dream, she had to push that little bit harder. He would send her words of encouragement every time.

Knowing Nick Bradshaw had her back kept her going. Without a friend like Nick, she was sure this would have been impossible.

Rachael graduated the academy as one of the top students in her class. She proved what was possible and she had never felt prouder.

When it came to graduation, she of course invited her parents, and her dear friend Nick. He was so happy to see her again after months of being apart. He was smiling proudly as she took her stand with her fellow classmates. When the graduation was over she went over to greet her parents and she gave Nick a huge hug. Rachael, being only 5'2, was easily picked up by Nick and swung around. She laughed.

"I've missed you!" She cheered.

"Missed you too, Dragon," he winks at her. Rachael pushes him gently, but it really doesn't do much.

"Oh hush you! I think it sounds cool!"

"It is cool. You're cool!" He laughs.

"Thanks, Nick."

Rachael turns to her parents with a smile. "I did it. I survived the academy."

They smiles at her proudly. Her father was proudest the most. He hugged his girl and cried. He cried. Happy tears for his daughter.

"I am so very proud of you."

Rachael looks at her teary eyed father and smiles.

"I'll show them what's what!"

"I know you will."

Rachael spends a bit of time with her parents and then heads to the bar with Nick in tow. Her fellow pilots are celebrating, and Rachael wants to go with them. Nick is happy to tag along to spend more time with her.

The pair lean up against the bar and order a drink each. There's music playing, people are dancing, chatter coming from every direction. Nick is grinning as he follows two ladies who walk past them. Rachael laughs and nudges his side.

"Go shoot your shot, Nick!"

He shakes his head and turns to her.

"Is now a good time to tell you something huge? I don't want to take the spotlight away from your own achievements, but I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this a secret," he says.

Rachael gives him her full attention. "Tell me."

Nick takes a deep breath and looks at her head on. He looks nervous though, she can tell. Rachael offers him a soft smile and waits patiently. This is obviously something huge.

"Seeing you up there today, achieving your dreams, it inspired me to follow mine. You really went out there and showed them you have what it takes to be in the Navy, and I think that's amazing, Rachael. That's why I want you to be the first person I tell this to. I've decided that I'm going to apply for flight school too. I want to be up in the sky with you. You have inspired me to take the leap and join the Navy too.

"I know this might be surprising to hear, after all, flying was always your dream, but the way you always spoke about wanting to be in the clouds, taking down the bad guys and protecting our country.... well, that stuck with me. I want to be someone worthy of flying with Dragon."

Rachael finds herself overcome with emotion. In one quick movement she has her arms wrapped around Nick's neck. He wraps his arms around her and they hug.

"And that's what you want? To be an aviator like me?"

"More than anything."

Rachael smiles. She inspired her friend to follow in her footsteps. She feels so happy. So proud. So exhilarated.

"Oh, Nick! I'm honoured!"

They pull apart and they laugh.

"You were there every step of the way for me, and I'm going to be there every step of the way for you. I want to see you enter your badass era, Nick."

They both laugh again.

"It is pretty badass, isn't it?" He chuckles.

"Yeah. It is."

They order another drink and celebrate together. It was a night for cheering and laughing. A night of celebrating until the sun came up.

Rachael 'Dragon' Hunter was about to start her Navy career, and Nick Bradshaw was about to follow her.

When the time had come for Nick Bradshaw to graduate his class, Rachael was on the first plane over. She was so excited to see him take the next step in his career. Shortly before, Dragon had been deployed on a mission, her first big mission, and hadn't been able to talk to Nick as constantly as before, but he waited and he understood. This is what it meant to serve the Navy.

She watches him graduate with a huge smile on her face and instantly runs up to him when he's free.

He catches her effortlessly and picks her up, spinning her around like he does.

♡♡♡

"Go on, tell me!"

"Are you ready?" He asks.

"Yes! Come on, tell me!"

Nick chuckled. Rachael waited on the other end of the phone eagerly. Nick Bradshaw had been given is official call sign.

"Nick! Come on!"

"Goose."

"Goose?"

"Goose!"

There was a pause on the other end. Then he heard laughter. He smiled down the phone. He knew that would tickle her.

"Oh, Goose! I like it!"

"I knew you would."

♡♡♡

"Goose!"

He laughs and sets her down. He steps back to smile at her. It was so good to see his friend again.

"Dragon!" He cheers back.

They both laugh this time.

"Look at you! On your way to be a Navy dog like me," she grins.

"Hey, I wouldn't have it any other way. You're the reason in here. One day I'm going to pay you back for this," he says to her.

"There really isn't a need to. I'm so proud of you, Nick."

He smiles warmly at her and then pulls her into another big hug. Rachael hugs him back just as eagerly. Eventually they had to pull away, but they continued to smile at each other like children.

"So, are we going to celebrate?" Rachael asks, looking up at Nick with nothing but joy painted onto her face.

"Obviously!"

Nick briefly looks over his shoulder and waves over at someone across the way before taking Rachael's arm and guiding her away from the graduation ceremony. She didn't even get to meet any of his classmates. Yet.

As they made their way to the bar, Nick shared stories of his academy days.

Goose hadn't become a pilot. He had become a RIO. Radar Intercept Officer. He would have a pilot when he reached his base in a few days.

"You won't be too far way then," Rachael chuckled.

"Of course not! I have a lot of making up to do to you. You'll fly back with me right?" He asked.

Rachael laughed. "Of course, silly Goose!"

He rolled his eyes with a little grin.

Rachael was looking forward to their days in the Navy together. Nick would get his pilot and together the would take on the world. In a sense.

As she walked into the bar with Nick, Rachael had no idea the impact this night would have on her life. Goose was about to set her on the adventure of a lifetime.

It started here.

♡♡♡

@bayisdying - @mrsjaderogers - @gracespicybradshaw - @cycbaby - @callsignscupcake - @askmarinaandothers - @breadsquash - @luckyladycreator2 - @callmemana - @starlit-epiphany

[reginaxxmarie]

Intro to 1st Sgt. Naomi “Velvet” Quinn

(these came from pinterest bc i can’t draw for shit but i tried to find art that best captured how i envision her)

Velvet is 26 years old, she joined the army at 17 after graduating high school at 16. she is mixed race, her mother is white and her father is black.

5’1, she is petite but not thin. i picture her to be more toned but curvy. she was athletic as a teenager because she rode horses but definitely had to be in better shape when joining the military. she has stretch marks but she’s not self-conscious about them, she views them as a testament to her commitment, as she does with her scars.

grew up rural Louisiana in a very small town, has a pronounced but smooth southern accent as most people in the central area do.

her position in the military is sergeant 1st class and weapons specialist in the special forces detachment A. it took her 7 years to earn the 1st sergeant title as it is a time served position. she joined the 75th ranger regiment special forces and trained additionally for the occupation of weapons specialist. this means she knows how to maintain as well as operate all different kinds of weaponry, even foreign ones. this job also required her to be a skilled diver, parachutist, and endurance runner. (home girl got stamina FOR DAYS) this made her very desirable for the 141.

as far as combat, she’s skilled in mma but specializes in brazilian jiu-jitsu. she prefers long-distance weapons but because of her skill set, she’s good with any weapon you put in her hands. has a fixation with knives, she carries two pearl handled throwing knives that she affectionately named thelma and louise and they are her children. touch her knives and expect to not have hands.

owns a doberman named Loki that her sweet older neighbor looks after while she’s away. after a particularly awful mission, feeling safe in her own home proved difficult so she adopted Loki to keep her company and he does just that. after being recruited by Price for the 141, she relocated to the uk so Loki would be closer to her.

she has no piercings but has a large dragon on her sternum, a sleeve on her right arm, and “Sua Sponte” (of their own accord), the ranger motto, between her shoulder blades.

looks like a cinnamon roll but will kill you with her bare hands. she is an omnivert by nature. once she’s comfortable with you and sure she can trust you, she’s quite open. but if she senses something is off, she shuts down.

i ship her with ghost. she is the sun that he orbits around. upon arrival, she had a flirtationship with gaz but it ended as quickly as it started when they realized they were better off as friends.

soap is most def her bestie in the group. those two gossip like old women. together, it’s always crackhead energy and shenanigans. once they tried to sneak into ghost’s room to steal his mask and paint it but just as she grabbed it, ghost shot up out of bed, knife swinging. in a panic, she pushed soap towards him and sprinted to the door. unfortunately she never made it to said door because ghost picked up his heavy ass boot and yeeted it at her head.

she fits in well with the 141. the boys are extremely protective of their little velvet, despite her being perfectly capable of defending herself. they love to play with her hair because how is it so SOFT?! and they are positively enamored by her hair care routine when she explains to everyone but gaz that because she has mixed hair, it takes quite a bit of maintenance.

as she is in the gen z realm, she has a tendency to say some pretty outta pocket shit that has pepaw price REELING. some days he’s not sure if she needs a grippy sock vacation or a smack to the forehead. basically she’s a feral gremlin most of the time.

on the battlefield she’s much like könig in the sense she’s absolutely A MENACE. once the adrenaline gets flowing, she’s unhinged but never in a way that puts her team in harm’s way. she becomes a machine, built for the mission. if you asked price, he’d describe her as a thoroughbred in the starting gate, vibrating with energy. she’s deadly and she knows it. her first mission with the 141, she took down a man twice her size and crushed his windpipe with her boot. ghost would never admit it but watching her completely annihilate a man who was every bit as big as him, had him feeling like a horny teenager. mans was ready to risk it all.

very much into hard rock. she’s quite y’allternative but she appreciates all types of music. she likes everything except for what she doesn’t like.

i do so hope you enjoyed this snippet of Velvet and i fully intend to write a fic with her and post more facts if that interests any of you. 💕🤘🏼

[the-heaminator]

OKAY SO; Heinrich's mom died when he was young like 8-9, and his dad being a veteran of ww2 with ptsd & some pretty heavy survivors guilt & now a wife who just didn't wake up one morning turned to drinking. So Heinrich has this whole "after my mom died my dad was never sober, not as far as i remember, and yeah he went through a lot but I still resent him for not being there for me".

Heinrich's dad dies when Heinrich is just shy of 18. He has a little melt down, goes "i don't want to be here anymore". And with literally zero plan and two bags of his stuff just leaves. Ends up in the UK, with no job, barely anything to his name, and not sure if he's even going to stay there. (part of him thinks it's not far enough from Germany)

Romulus was a hippy through and through, he was all 'peace and free love ✌️' probably lived in a commune of sorts (just too many people in one house but hey it was home). He had run away from home when he was about 16 because his parents were ✨shitty✨, and was living his own found family trope.

Heinrich finds out finding a job when technically you're not there at all, and also homeless is harder than he thought. So he's on the streets for a solid two weeks until Romulus is walking home from a party and finds him. He tells Heinrich he can come stay with him and his 'family' and Heinrich has a moment of "i could get murdered if I go with him, i could also get murdered sleeping on a park bench" he goes with Romulus. They share a room (did I mention too many people in one house) and it's fine bc they're strictly homies, plus it's just for a few nights until Heinrich finds a job.

a few nights turns into a few months, about a month and a half in Romulus tells Heinrich "Listen, I don't mind you staying, but you should come with us to this march! It'll be fun, and it's for a good cause and I don't think it's much to ask on our part :\" While there some idiot says something, Romulus looks at Heinrich "Can kiss you?" "what?!" "Can I kiss you?" "...sure?" and Romulus kisses Heinrich right on the mouth for the cause of pissing off a homophobe.

a few nights later before bed "you know how you kissed me a few a days ago?" "Yeah, why? Did u like it :p?" "...yeah" "do you want me to kiss you again?" "...yes please" they never officially label their relationship but they sure are kissing a lot.

anyway six to eight months go by, Heinrich still hasn't found a job. And while he's grateful for a roof over his head, and he doesn't mind pitching in with housework, and Romulus sure isn't bad either, he gets tired of waiting around, and he gets real sick of the rest of the housemates.

One night he tells Heinrich they have to have a talk, he enlisted in the military. He was going to be an army mechanic, they get in a whole argument "I want a family Romulus!" "we are your family!" "no! I want a spouse! someone who's just mine, I want kids, I want my own house, I don't want to have to rely on kindness for food that night or money for rent," Romulus gets really quiet, "We're anti military, if you joined the military you can't live here anymore. Leave" Heinrich didn't say he expected anything else. He leaves.

He's going to get his wife, and his kids, and the house and a steady job. Romulus will too eventually, it would take him awhile longer though.

Then fifty years later they're both going to show up for some seniors game night and go "...oh fuck"

but anyway yeah thoughts?

thoughts. THOUGHTS?????

MY BROTHER IN CHRIST I HAVE NO THOUGHTS THIS IS WONDERFUL AND ACTUALLY SO WELL THOUGHT OUT WTFFFFFFFFF.

Imagine seeing the guy you lived with and kissed a couple times in a free love commune in the 80s 50 years later and you once again have the violent urge to kiss him after 50 fucking years even if the last time you saw him you had a massive argument.

And they're both widows, Heinrich at this point has a 7 year old Gilbert and a 3 year old Ludwig and needs help and Romulus is more than happy to provide it but over time they get really close again and Ludwig basically grow up with Romulus as Grandpa number 2 and so much of Gilbert's formative experiences with affection between adults comes from Heinrich and Romulus being fucking Weirdly Cuddly. Which is why later on he can't tell the difference between having a crush on Alfred and just being good friends.

But also imagine present day Gilbert going, hey, how did you two even meet?

Heinecih evades the question and Romulus flatly goes hippy free love commune. And blows Gilbert's mind.

"Opa, you weRE A HIPPY?

"NO, NO, I just needed a place to stay."

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day. Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday.

The most misspelled word in English is separate.

The average speed of ejaculation is 28 miles per hour.

The favourite food of Adélie penguins is Jellyfish genitals.

The United States is the world's largest exporter of sperm.

Around 20% of AirPod owners wear them while having sex.

Tom Cruise divorced all 3 of his wives when they were aged 33.

Mariah Carey employs a man to walk backwards in front of her.

Men are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.

In the UK you can join the army at 16 but have to be 18 to play Call Of Duty.

Human pollution has caused the average length of polar bear penises to shrink.

One in five doner kebabs in the UK poses a “significant” threat to public health.

You aren’t allowed to warm your balls during a round of golf but you can before you start.

The average four-year-old laughs 300 times a day. The average 40-year-old laughs four times a day.

In the late 1980s, officials in India released 25,000 turtles into the Ganges to eat dead bodies.

There are as many Russian agents in London today as there were at the height of the cold war.

Research by MIT suggests that humans can only cope with a maximum of five close friends.

The city of Regina in Canada was forced to apologise after adopting the slogan, “Show us your Regina”.

Collectively, humans have watched Adam Sandler movies on Netflix for longer than civilisation has existed.

Swearing on the Bible is theologically problematic as the New Testament forbids the taking of oaths.

In 2017, six Chinese officials were punished for falling asleep in a meeting about how to motivate lazy bureaucrats.

According to the Vatican, you can reduce the time you spend in purgatory by following the Pope on Twitter.

The average office employee who works an eight-hour day is productive for just two hours and 23 minutes, according to a UK study.

Studies have found patients spend fewer days recovering in hospital if they have a window looking out into natural scenes.

Private jets fly higher than commercial ones, partly so they can avoid bad weather and give their passengers a smoother ride.

King Zhou of Shang (1075-1046 BC) built a wine lake in China and made naked men and women chase each other round in it.

45% of Americans admit to having worn the same pair of underwear for two or more days in a row, with men more likely to do so.

Karl Marx is a very famous historical figure, however hardly ever mentioned is his wife, Onya, who invented the starting pistol.

In a UK poll of things that people most associate with Easter, Jesus came in fourth place after chocolate eggs, bank holidays and hot cross buns.

Last year in Ireland, a woman was hospitalised with ‘extreme stomach pain’ caused by years of holding in farts around her boyfriend.

Key In Lock Syndrome is the name for the phenomenon when you start needing a pee as soon as you get home and put your key in the front door.

Until 1961, the New York Times had a full stop in its logo. It was dropped partly because they realised that removing it would save $600 a year in ink.

The founder of IKEA reused teabags and was known to steal salt and pepper packets from restaurants. He was worth approx. £50 billion at the time of death in 2018.

Researchers from Essex and Berlin’s Humboldt Universities have discovered that drugs and alcohol do not make you more creative, they just make you think you are.

Gibraltar was besieged 14 times between 1309 and 1779. As a result, “toasting the siege of Gibraltar” is an old naval expression for having a drink without reason, as there’s a decent chance it’s an anniversary.

To reduce cleaning costs, Amsterdam Airport printed pictures of flies inside urinals, thinking men would aim at the flies while using the bathroom, reducing the amount of urine landing outside the urinals. Their plan worked.

The British Airforce invented the myth that eating carrots can help you see in the dark during WWII. They were trying to explain how British air raids were so successful without telling the Germans about the existence of radar.

DMX avoided a maximum jail sentence for tax fraud when his lawyer played his song ‘Slippin'’ for the judge to demonstrate X's struggles and how bad his upbringing was. The judge considered it and gave a one-year sentence instead of max five years.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has, since 2019, earned nearly $60M under her deal with Amazon Studios, despite not producing any content for the platform. The plan was for Phoebe Waller-Bridge to collaborate with Donald Glover on a ‘Mr And Mrs Smith’ series, based on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's 2005 film but, within a few months, she departed. Amazon recently renewed her three-year deal, at $20 million a year.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.

[houseofbrat]

In response to fed in Washington. IMO, the U.K. has no choice but to sidle up to the U.S. in light of Russian and Chinese aggression. NO ONE has the military might of the U.S. One sixth of our total federal budget is devoted to the military. We are the only power currently (for good or bad) that can even contemplate a war with either Russia or China. Of the major powers, only Russia outspends us.

[related post]

The UK is part of NATO, so I would describe the scenario a little differently. A little more like this...

Ukraine has no real strategic interest to the USA, and the USA would have preferred it if Russia never invaded Ukraine in 2022. The pre-2022 status quo was just fine for everyone in the USA.

However, Russia believes--based on a few hundred years of existence--that they need to lock down and control territory that they used to control in order to feel safe. Obviously it involves Ukraine. But also Poland and Romania. And probably the Baltic states too.

The small problem is that all of those countries except for Ukraine are a part of NATO. Once Russia attacks a NATO country, it then becomes Russia versus NATO. If anything about the Ukraine war has been made abundantly clear, it's that the Russian army of today does not know logistics and cannot pull off an invasion. If they could, then they would have steam rolled Ukraine in less than a year. Except they couldn't because their military is weaker than we all assumed.

NATO doesn't really fear a NATO-versus-Russia military fight because NATO would obviously win that fight with something like 1,000 Russian casualties to 1 NATO casualty. Or worse. It would be that overwhelming. Russia is making the Iraqi army of 2003 look supremely competent with their moves in Ukraine.

However, American military leaders are freaked out seeing how badly number two Russia is doing on the battlefields of Ukraine. They know that if a Russia-versus-NATO war happens, Russia will nuke everyone. Because in the minds of Russian leaders, this fight is for their survival. Even though, in the minds of everyone else, we would all just prefer if none of this ever happened, and we could all go back to 2019 when we could buy finely made crafts from Ukraine on Etsy.

But everyone else has gotten the memo that the peeps in Moscow have gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, which is why formerly neutral countries like Finland and Sweden are joining NATO three decades after the Cold War ended. Because they don't want to get invaded by the crazies in Moscow. And no one wants a nuclear war.

For that, it's just better for everyone right now if the Russian military temporarily dies in Ukraine. Because no one wants to get nuked when the Russians act like sore losers. Also, a revolution in Moscow over the failures in Ukraine within the next two years is basically even money at this point.

I wouldn't even conflate Russia's aggression with China right now. Russia may be using China these days. Russia has the natural resources while China has the people and the money. However, China & Russia are natural enemies. I'm still wondering if China will invade eastern Russia some day just to take over Lake Baikal for its water.

So, yes, the USA has the best military in the world. We've used it a lot. Even when we shouldn't have. But we really don't want to go to war with Russia. Neither does the UK. Or anyone else in Europe.

Because we don't want to get nuked BY LOSERS lashing out at the rest of us.

Do you want to get nuked? I don't want to get nuked. I bet Rishi Sunak and the entire Foreign Office of the UK government doesn't want to get nuked. It doesn't really have anything to do with the UK-US special "relationship" because neither wants to get nuked. Neither does France, and I am old enough to remember Jacques Chirac calling bullshit on George W. Bush and the Iraq War when Tony Blair wouldn't.

Not getting nuked? Win-win!

[the-daily-telegraph]

Murphy bought a cup of Yappucino.

In a rousing speech and letters by the one and only Benjamin Murphy to the RUC army, he commented on the UK government's incompetence. Breaking the SDF's rules and regulations he stated "1. To my fellow men in RUC, you have been loyal to me, and we have been loyal to the British Government all this while, and I will never abandon you, my fellow men. But now, with all the attacks on our Irish people, and the abandonment of our RUC, those scandalous people in the UK parliament do not care about us at all, they only care about their power, their stupid old prime minister and the people, Now its time, we run our own force, for Ireland, for the people, for the future, for peace we have all longed for. We shall create our own police force, comprised of all Irishmen, called Police for Ireland, or PFI. Rise my men, and join me, we shall be the true safekeepers of Ireland with our own power, not that of the PM. Regards, Benjamin Murphy""

The men of the RUC were inspired by this speech and stood up, excited to fight. However, following this, Benjamin Murphy went dead silent and he shared a palpable silence with his soldiers. They promptly sat down, muttering about how Murphy was all bark and no bite.

[nevermindirah]

Do you have any thoughts on the use of AAVE for Nile (or lack thereof) in TOG fanfiction? I've been reading some Book of Nile fic and some writers seem to write her as a Millennial™ (using words like "fave" and "woke") but never acknowledge her Blackness in her patterns of speech. I know we don't see her use as much AAVE in the films, but I would argue she's in situations where code-switching would be valued (first in a "professional" environment in the army, then around a group of non-Black strangers).

Hi anon! I have many thoughts on this and I'm honored you asked me! But I should start by saying I'm white and any thoughts Black fans and especially Black American fans have on this that they want to share would be beyond lovely. (I'm not gonna tag anybody bc that feels rude but please add onto this post if any of y'all see this and want to!)

The main reason I personally avoid AAVE for Nile in my own fics is because I'm not Black. But Nile-centric fics by Black writers tend to avoid using much of it too, at least from what I've noticed/understood, and my guess is it's largely for the reason you mention, that she's in situations that encourage code-switching.

In movie canon Nile is highly competent at tailoring her language to each situation she finds herself in. This fantastic linguistics analysis meta shows how skillfully Nile chooses her vocabulary and grammar to meet her goals with different conversation partners in different contexts. In comics canon Nile had a bunch of different civilian jobs before joining the Marines, so she would've had experience code-switching in the ways that made sense for all those different contexts as well as the Marines and her family and high school and wherever else she spent her time before we met her. And now she's spending her time with a handful of immortals none of whom are native English speakers and a fellow Black American but one with a Queen's English UK accent whose professional experience is in the CIA where high-status code-switching is often an absolute must for success or even survival.

Fics featuring Nile are charged with extrapolating from that to how it might show up in her use of language that she's coping with a traumatic separation from her family and her career and pretty much everything she's ever known and now she needs to be able to make herself understood to people who seem to care about her and each other but are super duper in crisis, three (soon to be four) of whom predate Modern English entirely and the only one who's anywhere near her contemporary she's not supposed to talk to for a century. All of these people are telling her that pretty much any contact with any mortals poses an existential threat to her and the rest of the group. How the FUCK is she supposed to cope with that, like, generally? And would it be a more effective way for her to cope if she talked to Andy Joe and Nicky using the speech patterns that she used to use with her mom and brother, to at least retain that part of her identity even if it means having to do a lot of explaining, or would it meet her needs better to prioritize Andy Joe and Nicky understanding what she means with her words over using the particular words and grammar forms she used with her family?

I've seen several fics, both Nile-centric / BoN and otherwise, explore this a little bit in how/whether Nile uses Millennial™ speak. It's often a theme in Nile texting Booker despite the exile because of the popular headcanon that he as The Tech Guy is the only other immortal who understands memes. But Nile's much-younger-than-Booker mom probably uses Boomer and/or Gen X memes and Andy has been adapting to new communication styles for forever as evidenced by her canon high level of fluency with standard-American-accented English.

Which brings us back to people avoiding AAVE because they're not Black and they don't want to make mistakes (or they're not Black and they don't want to get yelled at for making mistakes, though I think many people overestimate how much they'll get yelled at while underestimating how much these mistakes can hurt). I can imagine some Black fans hold back from using much AAVE in fic because they don't want to share in-group stuff with white people who are likely to then adopt and ruin it, as white people so often do with Black cultural stuff. Some links about this including a great Khadija Mbowe video. I'm saying this gently, anon, because you might not know: woke, an example you cited as Millennial™ speak, is AAVE, and that's gotten erased by so many white people appropriating it and using it incorrectly online.

And also there's the part where fandom is a hobby and you never know when you're reading a fic that's the very first thing someone's ever written outside of a school assignment. This cultural considerations of language shit takes a level of effort and skill that not everybody puts into every fic, or even could if they wanted to because they haven't had time to build their skills yet. It's definitely easier for non-Black fans to project our millennial feels onto Nile than to do the layers of research and self-reflection it requires to depict what Blackness might mean to Nile, and it's not surprising that often people sharing their hobby creations on the internet have gone the easier route. There's not even necessarily shame in doing what's easier. It's just frustrating and often hurtful when structural white supremacy means that 3-dimensional Black characters are rare in media and thoughtful explorations of them in fandom are seen by the majority of fans as not-easy to make and therefore Nile Freeman, the main character in The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood, has the least fic and meta and art made about her of our 5 main immortals.

I've been active in different fandoms off and on for twenty years and I barely managed to write 5,000 words about Sam Wilson across multiple different fics in the 7 years since I fell in love with him. There's an alchemy to which characters we connect with, and on top of that which characters we connect with in a way that causes us to create stuff about them. Something about Nile Freeman finally tipped me over the edge from a voracious reader to a voracious writer. It's not for me to judge which characters speak to other individuals to the level of creating content about them, but I do think it's important for us to notice, and then work to fight, the pattern where across this fandom as a whole Nile gets way less content, and way less depth in so much of the content that's in theory about her, than any of these other characters.

Anyway, back to language. My two long fics feature Nile with several Black friends — Copley and OCs and cameos from other media — but all of those characters except Alec Hardison from Leverage aren't American. It's very possible I'm guilty of stereotyping Black British speech patterns in I See Your Eyes Seek a Distant Shore. I watched hours and hours of Black haircare YouTube videos in the research for that fic and I modeled my OCs' speech patterns on what I heard from some of those YouTubers as well as what I've heard people like John Boyega and Idris Elba saying in interviews, but the thing about doing your best is you still might fuck up.

I'm slowly making progress on my WIP where Nile and Sam Wilson are cousins, and what ways of talking with a family member might be authentic for Nile is a major question I need to figure out. For that, I'm largely modeling my writing choices on how I hear my Black friends and colleagues talking to each other. I haven't overheard colleagues talking in an office in a long-ass time, but back when that was a thing, I remember seeing a ton of nuance in the different ways many of my Black colleagues would talk to each other. Different people have different personalities! And backgrounds! And priorities! A few jobs ago my department was about 1/3 Black and we worked closely with Obama administration staff many of whom were Black and there was SO MUCH VARIETY in how Black people talked to each other, about work and workplace-appropriate personal stuff, where I and other white coworkers could hear. There are a few work friends in particular who I have in my head when I'm trying to imagine how Sam and Nile might talk to each other. From the outside looking in, God DAMN is shit complicated, intellectually and interpersonally and spiritually, for Black people who are devoting their professional lives to public service in the United States.

One more aspect of this that I have big thoughts on but I need to take extra care in talking about is the idea of acknowledging Nile's Blackness in her patterns of speech. There's no one right way to be Black, and Nile's a fictional character created by a white dude but there are plenty of real-life Black Americans who don't use much or even any AAVE, for reasons that are complicated because of white supremacy. (Highly highly recommend this video by Shanspeare on the harms of the Oreo stereotype.)

Something that's not the same but has enough similarity that I think it's worth talking about is my personal experience with authenticity and American Jewish speech patterns. My Jewish family members don't talk like they're in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and I've known lots of people who do talk that way (or the millennial version of it), some of whom have questioned my Jewishness because I don't talk that way. That hurts me. Sometimes when another Jew tells me some shit like "I've never heard a Jew say y'all'd've," I can respond with "well now you have asshole, bless your Yankee-ass heart," because the myth of Dixie is a racist lie but I will totally call white Northerners Yankees when they're being shitty to me for being Southern, and this particular Jew fucking revels in using "bless your heart" with maximum polite aggression, especially with said Yankees. But sometimes I don't have it in me to say anything and it just quietly hurts having an important part of me disbelieved by someone who shares that important part of me. The sting isn't quite the same when non-Jews disbelieve or discount my Jewishness, but that hurts too.

Who counts as authentically Jewish is a messy in-group conversation and it doesn't really make sense to explain it all here. Who counts as authentically Jewish is a matter of legal status for immigration, citizenship, and civil rights in Israel, and it's my number 2 reason after horrific treatment of Palestinians that I'm antizionist. But outside that extremely high-stakes legal situation, it can just feel really shitty to not be recognized as One Of Us, especially by your own people.

It can also feel really shitty to be The Only One of Your Kind in a group, even if that group is an immortal chosen family who all loves each other dearly. Sometimes especially in a situation like that where you know those people love you but there are certain things they don't get about you and will never quite be able to. I'm definitely projecting at least a little bit of my "lonely Jew who will be alone again for yet another Jewish holiday" stuff onto Nile when at the end of I See Your Eyes Seek a Distant Shore she's thinking about being the only Black immortal and moving away from the community she'd built with a mostly-Black group of mortals in that fic. Maybe that tracks, or maybe that's fucked up of me.

Basically, this got very long but it's complicated, writing about experiences that aren't your own takes skill which in turn takes time and practice to build, writing about experiences not your own that our society maligns can cause a lot of harm if done badly, it can also cause a lot of harm when a large enough portion of a fandom just decides to nope out of something that's difficult and risky because then there's just not much content about a character who deserves just a shit ton of loving and nuanced content, people are individuals and two people who come from the exact same cultural context might show that influence in all kinds of different ways, identity is complicated, language is complicated, writing is hard, and empathy and humility and doing our best aren't a guarantee of avoiding harm but they do go a long way in helping people create thoughtful content about a character as awesome and powerful and kind and messy and scared and curious and WORTHY as Nile Freeman.

[simonxriley]

I know we will never know how old Ghost really is, but if you really look at his bio you’ll be able to figure it out. Somewhat. 

We know he was an apprentice butcher at a local grocery store before joining the military. There are no formal educational requirements to become and apprentice, you just need to be at least 18 years old. Though some do have a diploma or equivalent when becoming one. We don’t know why he took an apprenticeship, maybe he just wanted to be a butcher which makes the most sense. Let’s say he become one between 18-20 years of age. It takes 18-24 months (i’m going by 24 months to make it easier) to complete the standard Level 2 training, that would make him between the ages of 20-22. If he was training to be a butcher than he would go for his Level 3 training, which is another 24 months, making him between the ages of 22-24. 

He joined the British Army sometime after September 11th, 2001, making him between the ages of 22-24. He goes through the 28 week basic training becomes a private? in the British Army. It takes two years to become a Lieutenant, making him between the ages of 24-26. He later comes home in January of 2003, only being gone for a year and 4 months making him between the ages of 25-26. He stays until his family is doing better and heads back to the military sometime in 2006, making him between the ages of 28-30.

7 years later is operation Kingfish, taking place on October 8th, 2013, making him between the ages of 35-37. Jump ahead three years to the events of MW2, set in 2016. That would make him between the ages of 38-41. This means he was born between the years 1975-1978.

Edit: I know you can leave school at a certain age over in the UK (16 is it?) and you can join the military at that age. But I headcanon Ghost as someone who didn’t join the Army until he was an adult. As for the apprenticeship there was a lot of information about different ages, I just went with 18.  

[girlactionfigure]

The British Schindler

He saved 669 children.

Nicholas Winton was a young British stockbroker who rescued 669 Czech Jewish children from being sent to Nazi death camps. He never told anybody of his heroism, and the story only came out 50 years later after his wife found an old briefcase in the attic containing lists of children he’d saved.

Nicholas was a 29 year old clerk at the London stock exchange getting ready for a ski trip to Switzerland when he received an urgent call from his friend Martin Blake. Known to be passionately opposed to Nazism, Martin urged Nicholas to cancel his vacation and come to Prague immediately. He told Nicolas, “I have a most interesting assignment and I need your help. Don’t bother bringing your skis.”

It is a testament to Nicolas’ sterling character and strong moral compass that he didn’t waver for a moment. It was an easy decision to sacrifice his fun and relaxing ski trip and instead travel to a dangerous place on a mysterious mission.

Two months earlier, in October 1938, Nazi Germany had annexed the Sudetenland It was clear that the Nazis would soon occupy all of Czechoslovakia. When he reached Prague, Nicholas was shocked by the huge influx of refugees fleeing from the Nazis. In early November, the Kristallnacht pogrom occurred in Germany and Austria. Jews were killed in the street and hundreds of synagogues burned down, as well as Jewish-owned businesses. This horrifying event shocked the Jewish community in eastern Europe, and thousands were now desperate to flee.

Born to Jewish parents, Nicholas was actually Jewish himself. However, his parents changed their name from Wertheim and converted to Christianity before he was born. Nicholas was baptized and raised as a Christian, and he didn’t consider himself Jewish (although was doubtless aware that Hitler would.)

In Prague, organizations were springing up to help sick and elderly refugees, but Nicholas noticed that nobody was trying to help the children. In his words, “I found out that the children of refugees and other groups of people who were enemies of Hitler weren’t being looked after. I decided to try to get permits to Britain for them. I found out that the conditions which were laid down for bringing in a child were chiefly that you had a family that was willing and able to look after the child, and fifty pounds, which was quite a large sum of money in those days, that was to be deposited at the Home Office. The situation was heartbreaking. Many of the refugees hadn’t the price of a meal. Some of the mothers tried desperately to get money to buy food for themselves and their children. The parents desperately wanted at least to get their children to safety when they couldn’t manage to get visas for the whole family. I began to realize what suffering there is when armies start to march.”

Nicholas knew something had to be done, and he decided to be the one to do it. He later remembered, “Everybody in Prague said, ‘Look, there is no organization in Prague to deal with refugee children, nobody will let the children go on their own, but if you want to have a go, have a go.’ And I think there is nothing that can’t be done if it is fundamentally reasonable.”

Nicholas decided to find homes for the children in the UK, where they would be safe. He set up a command center in his hotel room in Wenceslas Square and his first step was to contact the refugee offices of different national governments and see how many children they could accept. Only two countries agreed to take any Jewish children: Sweden and Great Britain, which pledged to accept all children under age 18 as long as they had homes and fifty pounds to pay for their trip home.

With this green light from Great Britain, Nicholas did everything possible to find homes for the children. He returned to London and did much of the planning from there, which enabled him to continue working at the Stock Exchange and soliciting funds from other bankers to pay for his work with the refugees. Winton needed a large amount of money to pay for transportation costs, foster homes, and many other necessities such as food and medicine.

Nicholas placed ads in newspapers large and small all over Great Britain, as well as in hundreds of church and synagogue newsletters. Knowing he had to play on people’s emotions to convince them to open their home to young strangers who didn’t even speak English, Nicholas printed flyers with pictures of children seeking refuge. He was tireless in his efforts and persuaded an incredible number of heroic Brits to welcome the traumatized young refugees into their homes and hearts.

The office in Wenceslas Square was manned by fellow Brit Trevor Chadwick. Every day terrified parents came in and begged him to find temporary homes for their children. Despite Nicholas’ success in finding places for the kids to stay, British and German government bureaucrats made things difficult, demanding multiple forms and documents. Nicholas said, “Officials at the Home Office worked very slowly with the entry visas. We went to them urgently asking for permits, only to be told languidly, ‘Why rush, old boy? Nothing will happen in Europe.’ This was a few months before the war broke out. So we forged the Home Office entry permits.”

The first transport of children boarded airplanes in Prague which took them to Britain. Nicholas organized an amazing seven more transports, all of them by train, and then boat across the English Channel. The children met their foster families at the train station and Winton took great care in making the matches between children and foster parents.

The children’s transport organized by Nicholas Winton was similar to the later, larger Kindertransport operation, but specifically for Czech Jewish children. Nicholas saved an astounding 669 children on eight transports. Tragically, the largest transport of all was scheduled for September 1, 1939 – but on that day, Hitler invaded Poland and all borders were closed by Germany. Winton was haunted for decades by the remembrance of the 250 children he last saw boarding the train. “Within hours of the announcement, the train disappeared. None of the 250 children aboard was seen again. We had 250 families waiting at Liverpool Street that day in vain. If the train had been a day earlier, it would have come through. Not a single one of those children was heard of again, which is an awful feeling.”

Nicholas joined the British military and spent the rest of the war serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, attaining the rank of Flight Lieutenant. After the war, Nicholas worked for the International Refugee Organization in Paris, where he met and married Grete Gjelstrup, a Danish secretary. They moved to Maidenhead, in Great Britain, and had three children. Their youngest child, Robin, had Down Syndrome, and at that time children with the condition were usually sent to institutions. However Nicholas and Grete wouldn’t consider it and instead kept their son at home with the family. Tragically, Robin died of meningitis the day before his sixth birthday. Nicholas was devastated by the loss, and became an active volunteer with Mencap, a charity to help people with Down Syndrome and other developmental delays. He remained involved in Mencap for over fifty years.

Humble – and perhaps traumatized by the children on the train he wasn’t able to save – Nicholas rarely talked about his wartime heroism and his own family didn’t know the details. It was only in 1988 that Nicholas Winton became widely known. His wife found an old notebook of his containing lists of the children he saved. Working with a Holocaust researcher, she tracked down some of the children and located eighty of them still living in Britain. These grown children, some with grandchildren, found out for the first time who had saved them.

The BBC television show called That’s Life! invited Nicholas to the filming an episode that became one of the most emotional clips in TV history. With Nicholas in the audience, the host told his story, including photos and details about some of the children he’d saved. Then the told Nicholas that one of those children was the woman in the seat next to him! They embraced, teary eyed, and the host announced there were more grown children in the audience as well. She asked everybody who owed their life to Nicholas Winton to stand up. The entire audience stood up, as Nicholas sat stunned, wiping away the tears.

After that, Nicholas was showered with honors, including a knighthood for services to humanity. Known as the British Schindler, he met the Queen multiple times and received the Pride of Britain Award for Lifetime Achievement, both for saving refugee children and working with Mencap to improve the lives of people with cognitive differences. There are multiple statues of him in Prague and the UK, and his story was the subject of three films.

Nicholas Winton died in Britain in July 2015, at age 106. Today there are tens of thousands of people who owe their lives to Nicholas Winton.

For saving hundreds of Jewish children, we honor Nicholas Winton as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Accidental Talmudist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived

When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like Amy Klobuchar's CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust law.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to aerospace.

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech – it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

But though industries all attained their monopolies through similar tactics – predatory acquisitions and mergers, vertical integration – they also each have their own technical characteristics that must inform our demonopolization tactics.

Take emergency care: monopolists love ERs because we don't choose which ER to use, nor when. You can't shop for an ER from the back of an ambulance. You don't know going in whether you're going to spend $1m or $1k. And you'll buy whatever services the ER tells you to buy.

Or power-grids: demand for electricity is both inelastic (you need power when you need power) and price-insensitive, and that inelasticity increases with demand: that is, when it's freezing or boiling out, everyone wants electricity.

Tech, of course, has its own technical characteristics. Chief among these is its flexibility. At a deep, theoretical level our digital tools and networks are capable of interoperating with one another in ways that no physical technologies can match.

Think of the Australian rail-system. In the mid-19th century, would-be rail-barons laid differing gauges in hopes of conquering the nation's logistics and transport. For 150+ years, engineers have tried to solve the "multi-gauge muddle" by designing multi-system railcars.

Hundreds of designs for cars that retract and extrude different wheelbases have been tried, and none ever caught on. Instead, Australia is tearing up and re-laying thousands of kilometers' worth of track. With physical tech, "compatibility" often means starting from scratch.

Not so with digital tech. If you are an OS company whose rival has locked up all office docs in a proprietary format, you don't have to convince all its customers to abandon their documents and start over. You just make a compatible program:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

With digital and physical tech, network effects drive high switching costs, but when it comes to digital, network effects are a double-edged sword.

With interoperability, a walled garden can easily become a feed-lot, where customers for a new service are neatly arrayed for competitors to come and harvest.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interoperability-some-thoughts-peanut-gallery

Good tech policy emphasizes interoperability when it comes to demonopolizing the digital world. Long before the US ACCESS Act and the EU Digital Markets Act, Mike Masnick published his seminal "Protocols, Not Platforms" paper.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interoperability-some-thoughts-peanut-gallery

And Daphne Keller's work on "Magic APIs" presaged the ACCESS Act's idea of forcing tech companies to expose the APIs they use internally so that competitors can plug into their services:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200901/13524045226/if-lawmakers-dont-like-platforms-speech-rules-heres-what-they-can-do-about-it-spoiler-options-arent-great.shtml

(that paper is outstanding, BTW, with clear-eyed assessments of alternatives, like a digital fairness doctrine, "common carriage" rules, an "indecency" standard for content moderation – basically a checklist for "So you've got a plan to fix tech – did you think of ____?")

Masnick's "protocols" are a vision for a decentralized, better internet. Keller's Magic APIs describe a legal path to getting there. My own work on Competitive Compatibility (nee Adversarial Interoperability) describes how we'll STAY there.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Because monopolies are good at subverting regulation, so any Magic API rule would be brittle – dependent on the tech companies not sabotaging those APIs by moving the important data-flows away from the mandatory APIs.

That's why we have to strip monopolists of the power to ask a court to block interoperators: take away the wildly distorted copyright, patent, terms of service and other legal doctrines that Big Tech ignored during its ascent, but now enforces against would-be competitors.

With both interop mandates and a legal right for new entrants to force interoperability through technical means, tech giants will face consequences if they subvert antimonopoly rules.

The choice becomes: either respect the intent of a mandate and preserve interop; or be plunged into a chaotic arms-race with competitors who switch to scraping, bots, and reverse-engineering.

All of this is incredibly wonkish, a highly specialized debate that involves highly technical propositions about how digital technology works today, how it used to work and how it might work – layered atop a similar, highly technical understanding of antitrust law.

The Venn overlap of "deep understanding of digital tech" and "deep understanding of antitrust debates" isn't so much a slice as it is a sphincter, and the debate has been equally narrow, but when it's railbaron time, you get trustbusters.

The tech monopoly/interop debate is going mainstream. Francis Fukuyama and his colleagues at the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale have proposed an intervention similar to the ACCESS Act, where trusted third parties mediate between monopolists, new entrants and users.

The Stanford proposal calls them "middleware companies," but they're conceptually interchangeable with the idea of a "data fiduciary": companies that act as referees when a new co-op, startup or nonprofit wants to plug into a monopolist's service.

https://pairagraph.com/dialogue/4124f75013da40038c4cbff5ebdaaa51/3

This is clearly an idea whose time has come – it's present in the EU's DMA and the US Access Act, and latent in the UK CMA report:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study#final-report

Importantly, it's an approach that recognizes the distinctive character of tech – taking account of the power of interop to break open walled gardens and unravel network effects.

What's especially interesting about this work is that it appears to have been developed in parallel to pre-existing work from Masnick and Keller (and me) – it's a case of convergence between the tech-policy world and the broader world of policy.

After all, while Masnick and Keller's work is well known inside of tech policy, that's just our obscure, nerdy corner of the policy world – now they're escaping that corner, becoming self-evident to people from traditional policy backgrounds.

https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2020/article/capitalisn-t-francis-fukuyama-s-proposal-rein-big-tech

My hope is that the trend continues – that we see ideas about Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interop join the idea of API mandates, so that we produce durable anti-monopoly systems, not just anti-monopoly rules.

Most important, though, is restoring an appreciation for the importance of interoperability in preventing monopolies and promoting technological self-determination for communities and individuals.

Because such a sensibility can escape the legislative world and be enacted via fast-moving, easier-to-use policy  tools. For example, we could (should!) make interop a feature of all government procurement rules.

No school district should buy devices for students without securing the right to sideload the apps they need on them – imagine buying 50,000 Ipads at public expense and then having Apple boot the app you rely on out of the App Store!

Likewise, no district should buy Google Classroom without securing a legally binding guarantee not to block interoperators who want to integrate other ed-tech services into the curriculum, with or without Google's cooperation.

Procurement and interop are as old as the Civil War, when the Union Army demanded firearms and ammo that had multiple manufacturers. As the state-level Net Neutrality rules (which bar governments from using non-neutral ISPs) showed us, procurement can shape markets.

Procurement is just for starters. Right now, tech companies caught breaking the law are handed down fines that are less than the profits their lawbreaking generated – instead, we could demand interop as part of any settlement.

One major barrier to interop is contract law: terms of service, EULAs, noncompetes, arbitration, etc. States wield enormous power over contracting terms: states can declare certain contractual language against public policy and thus unenforceable.

If, say, California were to pass a rule nullifying the mountain of abusive garbage that has become standard in digital "contracts," it would be in a position to export fair usage terms to the country in just the same way it exports robust emissions standards.

Antittrust is primarily a federal manner (that's why 40 years of federal antitrust malpractice has been such a disaster). But every level of government, down to your local school board, can make a meaningful difference in tech antitrust.

Digital technology's inescapable, marvellous, terrifying flexibility can be translated into so many unique, powerful weapons for transforming the industry and empowering communities to control their digital lives and seize the means of computation.