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mightyflamethrower · 1 year ago

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In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.

His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.

And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.

They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.

Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.

Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.

Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.

Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.

“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”

Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.

When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.

Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.

Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.

Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.

When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.

Suddenly, there are three genders, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.

There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”

The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”

Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.

The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.

Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?

Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.

In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

A perfect metaphor for what the progressives have done to America.

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askgildaseniors · 8 days ago

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youtube

In this special Veterans Day 2024 episode of the FYI podcast, host Paul Tully sits down with a panel of U.S. veterans from National Core to discuss their military service experiences and the values they carry forward today. The panel features inspiring stories from Robert Diaz, a JAG Officer in the U.S. Army; Terry Kick, a U.S. Navy Flight Technician and Firefighter specializing in crash and salvage operations; Eric Grimes, a combat medic and Supply Specialist (92 Yankee); and Cory Demico, a former Army Ranger and infantryman with the Ranger Battalion (11 Bravo One Victor).

Together, they share what inspired them to serve, their leadership lessons from the military, and how their time in the U.S. military shaped their transition to civilian life. Each guest reflects on how these experiences now guide their work at National Core, an organization dedicated to building communities and transforming lives. Their stories highlight the parallels between their roles in the military and their dedication to community service today.

Listeners will connect with these heartfelt reflections on military service benefits, leadership, camaraderie, and resilience. This episode also delves into the difficult transition from military to civilian life, offering insights into how veterans, including those from the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, and beyond, continue to contribute meaningfully after their service. Themes of sacrifice, teamwork, and honoring the past are woven into this Veterans Day tribute, making it a must-watch for anyone seeking Veterans Day inspiration or a deeper understanding of what it means to serve.

As we honor the sacrifices of our U.S. veterans, this episode invites viewers to consider their own ability to serve, whether through leadership, teamwork, or community efforts. Don’t miss this powerful Veterans Day podcast that celebrates the courage, dedication, and enduring impact of those who served.

#veterans day inspiration #veterans day #veterans #veterans day tribute #veterans day 2024 #Youtube

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stardriveskickstart · 8 days ago

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Parahuman Space

While Stardrives is complete, I'm not done with TTRPG writing yet. I've been working on the @para-imperium setting for over a decade now and I'm almost ready to launch a complete RPG based on the Cepheus System derived from Mongoose's Traveller (but more open).

Parahuman Space is a furry setting, yes, of the genetically modified variety. It covers over 2,000 years, but the RPG will be focused on the period after the collapse of the big interstellar empire. When newly independent planets and systems are busy scavenging the wreckage.

Players will primarily be salvage crews venturing into hazardous ruined spaceships and stations. Braving haywire security systems, leaks of corrosive chemicals, and the dreaded Kessler Syndrome to retrieve valuable technology.

In other words, dungeon delving.

At present I am about halfway done drafting the rulebook, drawn heavily from the Cepheus System Reference Document that can be read online here. Once I'm finished and I have interior artists lined up I was hoping to bring it to Kickstarter.

Below is the setting's history, as written for the rulebook.

Timeline:

Most calendars in Parahuman Space are oriented around the launch of the first parahuman-built starship as the start of the exodus from the clade’s system of origin, Sol. On the Georgian calendar the year 0 Post Exodus (PX) would be in the early 22nd century AD. So the Federation would be founded in the 32nd century AD and collapse in the 45th century, or roughly the year 4600 AD.

-40 Before Exodus: Creation of parahumans. -24 BX: Parahumans emancipated and corporations that enslaved them dissolved. -17 BX: Events of The Pride of Parahumans. 0 Post Exodus: First Seedship, the Traveller, launched. 4 PX: Pallas launches second seedship. 10 PX: Earth destroyed by relativistic projectile, origin unknown. 14 PX: Second Pallene seedship is caught by berserker probes that destroyed Sol. Crew commit suicide first. 45 PX: Traveller lands on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, creatively named "Secland." 48 PX: Vestan ship lands on opposite hemisphere from the Traveller.

115 PX: Ship from Ceres arrives at Epsilon Eridani to find a lifeless system. Instead of terraforming the new corporate government opts to build artificial habitats in the asteroid belts and beneath the surfaces of planets.

124 PX: A second Vestan ship discovers a garden world orbiting Tau Ceti. The crew decide to eschew technology after printing enough colonists in fear of Sol’s Destroyers.

150 PX: Sleeper ship carrying 1500 humans from Sol arrives over Secland. After an abortive attempt at invasion the survivors gradually integrate into Pallene society. 500 PX: Cold war between nations on Secland ends with the completion of terraforming. Biological weapons leave New Pallas the sole nation standing. 950 PX: New Pallas contacts Tau Ceti thanks to the newly developed conversion drive. Triggering political restructuring among the natives resulting in the kingdom of Schwarswelt under King Hideo Fink.

1060 PX: Stable wormholes large enough to move a spaceship through are produced and launched from Proxima Centauri to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. 1100 PX: Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani form the Federation.

1150 PX: Centauri Grand Mayor Selkd de Argentum assassinated by Cetan partisans and succeeded by his more aggressive sister Lirdrill.

1200 PX: The Federation centralizes power in the office of the Praetor, first held by Lirdrill de Argentum.

1205 PX: The Outworld memetic quarantine and contingency program is established, forcibly relocating ideological dissidents to frontier worlds with limited technology.

1500 PX: After extensive lobbying by Centauran merchant houses and the Eridani Company, Federation Senate votes to allow limited trade with Outworlds, which now compose roughly half of all colonized planets.

1846 PX: Kershkans, the first extant xenosophont species, discovered. 1903 PX: Contact established with Kershkans. 2300 PX: Federal Guard destroys Sol with strangelet bomb, inducing a nova. Evacuation of Core Worlds begins. 2304 PX: Wormhole gates at Alpha Centauri collapsed ahead of the nova's radiation. The capital cut off, the Federation quickly begins to fragment. 2345 PX: The Emissary-Governor of the Tiere System, wracked by tensions between earlier colonists and new refugees, disables all nanotech in the system in an attempt to reassert control. He is lynched by an angry mob within weeks. 2590 PX: The self-proclaimed Imperator Ronkal launches Project Paladin, sending ships with new reactionless drives and augmentation suites to neighboring systems. 2600 PX: A Ronkalli ship reaches the Tiere System, only for interplanetary debris to kill the entire crew. The ship AI forcibly augments a crew of scavengers who come looking.

The Origin of Species:

The first parahumans were engineered from a blend of human and animal genes and bioprinted in corporate labs in high Terran orbit. They were designed to fill roles in asteroid mining that were too complex for robots but too dangerous to risk human life for. It took less than a decade for rebellions and strikes to start.

Fortunately, the parahumans found many allies on Terra and after the revolutionaries on Ceres worked out a treaty to maintain the flow of resources back to Terra they were essentially left to themselves. With their new freedom came disagreements over how to govern themselves. The guilds on Vesta formed a form of anarcho-capitalist feudalism regulated by the cloning guild that held the early parahumans’ sole means of reproduction. But then a Vestan scientist, a silver fox named Argentum, discovered a simple gene therapy to remove the genetic sterility imposed by their creators and their followers formed a breakaway colony on Pallas.

The Vestan guilds could not tolerate this loss of control and war almost broke out between the two asteroids. Luckily they found an alternative means of proving the superiority of their respective systems of governance. A space race. Exploration of other star systems had been proposed many times but there had been little interest with the abundance of resources right there in Sol system. But with the new nanofabricators it was possible for even a small asteroid outpost to construct an Orion-style starship with a small crew and the fabricators to print out an entire new colony, colonists included.

They couldn’t have timed the launch better. Just ten years after the first starship, the Traveller,was launched from Pallas towards Alpha Centauri, it received a frantic message from Sol:

“This is an automated beacon broadcasting what may well be the last message ever sent by the human race. Five years ago, our homeworld, Terra was struck by a 50-ton projectile traveling at 90% of the speed of light. The debris took out most of our habitats in Earth’s orbit, a few million of us survived elsewhere in the solar system. Then the rest of the invasion force arrived. Machines, vast machines kilometers in length that home in on any sources of radio transmissions, and annihilate them. We pray they are not intelligent and are simply weapons fired by a xenophobic alien race. But they’ve almost completed their work, we estimate that there’s only a couple hundred of us left in the system. We’re sending this message in hopes that there is someone out there who can hear it and beware. This universe is more hostile than we thought. They attack radio transmitters, dismantle whatever devices you are listening to this on before they find you.”

In total, five starships were far enough out to heed this warning. The Traveller, a Vestan ship also headed for Alpha Centauri, a second Vestan ship on course for Tau Ceti, a craft launched from Ceres to Epsilon Eridani, and the largest but slowest ship, a sleeper ark from Terra to Alpha Centauri.

Alpha Centauri: Sol’s Nearest Neighbors

Around Alpha Centauri A the Traveller found a Terra-sized rocky planet that had long been scoured of life by stellar storms from the trinary stars nearby. It was determined that this little rock could be reanimated with comparatively little effort and the crew made immediate plans to colonize and terraform the planet which they named “SecLand” (the landing on Pallas being the first land).

Just three years after the Traveller’s arrival, they were followed by their Vestan rival. Considering the horror they’d experienced since Sol’s last transmission they decided to set their differences aside and work together on terraforming SecLand, albeit from opposite hemispheres. This detente was strained at times, but the first real threat to world peace didn’t come until 150 years PX, when the ark carrying the last of unaltered humanity arrived.

By the time the sleeper ark arrived SecLand had a population of several thousand, the ark carried a mere 1500 passengers but over half were soldiers who’d entered stasis with orders to make sure that the first exosolar foothold of humanity was human, not parahuman. Or at least that was the plan, when word of what happened to their homeworld got out there was a mutiny and the victors immediately surrendered to the parahuman colonists, with most passengers integrating into the Republic of New Pallas. These newcomers brought a wide range of skills and knowledge, living knowledge, to a planet whose inhabitants up until then had primarily only known life inside their half-built habitat structures. The humans emigrated nearly equally to both colonies, over the centuries they interbred with the parahumans, with the net result being that many SecLanders have less fur or their facial features are closer to human than many further colonies. Today pure-bred humans, and parahumans (excepting uplifts), are miniscule minorities on SecLand with only a couple million individuals. The average SecLander resembles a blend of at least half a dozen species of Terragen origin.

For centuries the two colonies lived in relative peace, New Pallas breeding like rabbits while the Vestans cloned new citizens in bulk. But when the terraforming of SecLand had reached the point where colonists could breathe the atmosphere tensions re-established themselves between the two old enemies. With terraforming nearing completion some wondered what use New Pallas could have for the Vestans, on both continents. To that end the Vestans began to covertly build weapons in their Arcologies while New Pallas shifted their orbital satellites slightly. It all came to a head when the Vestans concealed a lethal virus in food shipments sent from their farms to the cities of New Pallas, thousands died in the months that followed. By the time the New Pallas government realized what had been done every Vestan arcology had unveiled surface-to-orbit mass drivers that could shoot down their enemy’s satellites. Even then, many arcologies were leveled by orbital strikes. Then the land battles began. The cybernetically augmented citizen-soldiers of New Pallas facing off against the bioprinted legions of the Vestans. The fighting raged on for months, then abruptly, it ceased less than a year after the war had begun. You see, the Vestans had underestimated New Pallas’s skill with biotechnology, crafting a virus that could be deadly to all the diverse inhabitants of the Republic had been difficult, but a dirty little secret of many 21st century regimes were the techniques to engineer a virus that had disastrous effects when it interacted with a specific gene or genes. And the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species had only used a couple genotypes for their army, and even fewer for their ruling priest-scientists. Once the virus had been grown any Vestan unit that came into contact with the enemy was dead within a week, in a month the ruling class had been reduced to a few paranoid individuals who had sealed themselves in hermetic bunkers. Specialized by repeated cloning into an effective caste system, and their soldier castes suddenly extinct, the surviving Vestan arcologies found themselves helpless against New Pallas occupation forces.

The medical advances achieved fighting the bioweapons led to the development of leukosynths, symbiotic microbots that could fight off nearly all microbes and repair the body at an accelerated rate. Even fighting off the advances of aging. When this “immortality” was proven to the public they clamored for the government to subsidize their deployment to the masses. Within the century 90% of New Pallas’ population enjoyed the benefits of leukosynths.

Among this chaos a new power emerged in the Pallene cities and settlements. Families all over the planet started giving birth to silver fox kits, reminiscent of their colony’s nearly-deified founder, Argentum. Some religious leaders saw this as a sign and exalted these silver foxes, propelling many into high positions in politics. The cynical suggested that the parents had modified their children’s genes in-utero, but after the plagues many people were desperate and willing to believe anything. Most of them were actually descendants of Argentum’s, but their progeny numbered in the hundreds of thousands by that point anyways.

An unintentional side effect of this bit of social engineering was a renewed interest in their origins out in the depths of space. And despite the terrors they knew awaited them they couldn’t help but wonder if any other colony ships had made it…

Epsilon Eridani

Ceres, the largest asteroid in Sol’s asteroid belt, was the main off-world base of operations for the corporation that created the first parahumans. During the revolution parahumans took over the local branch offices and largely continued to operate along the same lines. Their participation in the exosolar space race was almost an afterthought, an attempt at remaining relevant compared to the other two major asteroid civilizations in Sol system.

Upon arrival in the Epsilon Eridani system they found even fewer viable prospects for terraforming than those in Alpha Centauri. Instead, they opted to construct enclosed habitats in the system’s asteroid belts and under the surface of the larger rocky planets. Like on Ceres the colonists retained the corporate style of government that had served their forebears fairly well.

After about a century of this arrangement dissatisfaction among the lower ranking employees spread towards the shareholding class. A bloody revolution followed, after which the revolutionaries distributed the seized shares in the Eridani Company equally among the employees, granting everyone a vote in company elections and a share of the profits. Roughly a generation later a group of managers started buying up shares from others.

The third such regime made contact with a probe from New Pallas, trade began almost immediately.

Tau Ceti

The second Vestan colony ship took over a century to reach its destination, the star Tau Ceti. Along the way two generations of crew were decanted from the ship’s bioprinters to replace their predecessors. While the final crew were genetically identical to those who had set out from Vesta their commitment to the ideology of the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species had wavered, and with the news of Terra’s destruction some suggested that perhaps the best way to avoid sharing that world’s fate would be to lose their advanced technology.

That would require them to give up cloning as a means of reproduction, however they were unwilling to allow reckless crossing of genelines so they added genetic markers to prevent different phenotypes from interbreeding. Fortunately, unlike the other colony ships they discovered a lush world that wasn’t too hostile to Terran life which they named Schwarzwelt after the dark colors of the local chlorophyll analogue. They then settled each “species” into different “clans” in different regions of the planet. The clans grew in population rapidly, bumping up against the borders designated at founding in less than a century. War broke out.

Clans rallied behind charismatic warrior-nobles and weaker clans swore oaths of fealty to stronger ones to save their own skins. These wars continued until contact with the first probe from the Centauri system, realizing that there was another civilization out there and that they were capable of interstellar travel the clan heads held a council to decide what to do about it. The majority ruled that they needed a single man to represent their world when the outsiders came in person, they elected King Hideo Fink of the feline clan as the official ruler of Tau Ceti.

Birth of the Federation

While the first manned starships with conversion drives were still traveling to their neighbors, scientists at a research base orbiting Proxima Centauri, the small red dwarf star that barely qualified as the third star of the Alpha Centauri system, made a breakthrough. Using a newly discovered form of exotic matter a wormhole could be pulled from the quantum foam of the universe and held open indefinitely. Once they successfully sent a laser through a pinprick-sized wormhole from Proxima to Secland, the New Pallas senate approved funding for the production of wormholes large enough to send materials through.

A very expensive experiment proved that wormholes larger in diameter than a micrometer could be catastrophically destabilized by proximity to large gravity wells. It was decided that no traversable wormhole could be placed closer to a star than the Oort Cloud, but even then the potential for shortening an interstellar voyage from decades to months was too exciting. Proxima Centauri was enclosed in a small Dyson sphere dedicated solely to producing the exotic matter for wormholes and just over a century after contact the first interstellar traversable wormhole between Proxima Centauri and Tau Ceti was ready, Epsilon Eridani followed suit. Commerce and communication between the three systems exploded, and conflict with them.

While interstellar war didn’t break out, there were many in both Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani who suspected that New Pallas intended to invade them through their wormholes. Before long both planetary governments were dealing with armed insurrections. New Pallas was all too glad to provide advanced weaponry and vehicles, especially on Schwarzwelt where the military was decentralized and entire clans or houses were rebelling. Eventually Pallene troops and warships were stationed in the two systems to defend Pallene interests.

Seeing tensions rise Grand Mayor Selkd de Argentum came up with an ingenious solution, an interstellar government composed of representatives from all three star systems, as well as any new systems that would be colonized in the future. That way, everyone could theoretically have a say in interstellar politics. While visiting Schwarzwelt in 1150 to promote his vision, Selkd was assassinated by a sniper.

Selkd was succeeded by his sister, Lirdrill, who ordered the sniper’s family estates leveled by orbital bombardment as an example to the others. The ruling houses of other clans that had rebelled were rounded up and stripped of their noble ranks, then imprisoned in stasis banks. She continued her brother’s vision of a united parahuman government, but centralized around Alpha Centauri and the office of the Praetor, which would be held by her house.

Wormholes took a lot of time and resources to set up while probes were reporting back dozens of exoplanets that were inhabitable or easily terraformed, so the senate on New Pallas had been debating whether to launch colony fleets before or after traversable wormholes arrived at the potential colonies. As Lirdrill solidified the Federation, she made an executive decision. Wormholes would be spaced anywhere from 20 to 50 light-years apart, depending on resources and stellar density, and the stars between them would be reachable only by ships traveling at 80% of the speed of light or slower. Since leukosynths and cryo-stasis had become mature technologies by then the decades of travel were deemed acceptable.

Even then, there was some trouble finding enough volunteers to fill the colony ships that were being built. After a few suggestions of using rebels as indentured labor the Memetic Quarantine and Contingency program was established. The thousands of rebels held in stasis were to be shipped off to marginally inhabitable “Outworlds” light-decades from the nearest wormhole, and to make sure they didn’t draw too much attention, without any technology more advanced than the most basic steam engines. It was hoped that eventually they’d become “civilized” and submit to the Federation, or die off.

But, there was a secondary purpose to the program. The machines that had destroyed Terra were still out there, and if the Destroyers were to notice the Federation growing under their noses, perhaps they’d overlook those small Outworlds without radio.

The Traders

With the vast distances between most inhabited systems trade opportunities were limited. Most star systems had enough raw materials locally that shipping them from another star without a wormhole was simply not cost-effective. While nanofabrication meant that most manufactured goods could be produced in a small warehouse, if not a garage. For the first few centuries of expansion the only goods that were worth shipping interstellar were in the form of digital data, and most of that could be handled by laser transmissions, and the occasional courier.

Just over two centuries after the Federation was established, a courier ship operated by a branch of House Argentum decided to stop off at an Outworld. The captain decided to land a shuttle near one city-state established by the unwilling colonists to see what they were up to.

The locals were wowed by the great flying machine and the crew, having forgotten their origins already. They offered tribute to the visiting immortals, foodstuffs, sculptures, and textiles. The crew decided to take some of the tributes with them, leaving some inconsequential trinkets of Federation technology which were quickly replaced by their on-board fabricators.

When the courier next made port at a Federation starbase they showed off the unique goods they’d acquired, many of which were purchased at exorbitant prices by bored oligarchs. The Outworld’s inhabitants were rapidly diverging culturally from their forebears, far faster than the leukosynth-using worlds of the Federation. Those simple couriers had found something valuable to the nearly post-scarcity Federation, novelty.

Many houses and companies commissioned their own Outworld trade freighters while the senate debated whether it was even legal to trade with the “barbarians.” Eventually it was determined that trade would be allowed; but no weapons, vehicles, communications, or nanotechnology were to be given to Outworlders. Small starships with industrial nanofabricators would set up shop over Outworlds for years at a time, fabbing trinkets made from space-age alloys and exchanging them for cloth made with alien fibers. Many of these traders became fabulously wealthy during the next few centuries as the Federation expanded outwards and established more and more Outworlds.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Return of the Destroyers

The Destroyers responsible for Terra’s demise had made occasional appearances in the next two millennia. Zeroing in on sources of radio transmissions with relativistic projectiles followed by hunter-seeker probes that would scour the surrounding system of life. But it seemed they hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care about the Federation at large.

Then astronomers in the Federal core noticed something. Sol, Terra’s sun, was dimming. A few disposable probes sent back horrific images, a Dyson sphere, and it was almost complete. With the energy of Sol the Destroyers could incinerate the core worlds at the speed of light! A secret panel of the senate met with the Praetor to decide what to do about this unthinkable prospect.

The Federal Guard’s fleets were assembled at Proxima Centauri and dispatched for Sol. Never before had Federation technology been tested against the Destroyers, and no one wanted to underestimate them, so the fleet was loaded with the most advanced weaponry they could muster.

It wasn’t enough.

Quantum ansible transmissions reported massive ships that maneuvered without visible reactions and accelerated to impossible speeds in seconds. The Federal Guard was slaughtered in short order, but before they died one ship managed to launch an experimental superweapon at Sol itself.

A strangelet bomb, filled with the same strange matter that converted baryonic matter into antimatter in conversion drives, with catalysts for self-replication. They spread across the star in a matter of days, triggering a series of detonations that tore the star and the incomplete Dyson sphere apart.

When word came that they had a potential nova carrying strangelets in their neighborhood the Federation’s elites abandoned the core worlds en masse. Fleeing through the wormholes at top speed. As the secret mission to Sol and its destructive results leaked everyone who could afford a ship followed suit, departing for distant worlds that they hoped could bring salvation.

Then, just before the nova’s wavefront reached Proxima, the wormhole network was collapsed to prevent it from spreading to the far colonies.

The Collapse

Every star system that had a direct link to the wormhole network found itself swarmed by refugees from the Core. The remnants of the Federal Guard struggled to maintain order as refugees clashed with natives. Many refugee fleets were forced to leave for other systems that were less sparsely populated, a few even attempted to invade Outworlds. Other fleets became nomads, passing through inhabited systems without slowing down and trading for or extorting supplies as they passed.

As unrest reached critical levels many governors activated failsafe programs embedded in every Federation citizen’s leukosynth implants, rendering the star system’s entire population mortal. Most such governors were torn apart by angry mobs. On other worlds the population voluntarily gave up advanced technology in hopes of hiding from the Destroyers.

Three hundred years later the dust has mostly settled. Few star systems are politically united, with individual planets and megastructures using everything from wooden carts to gravity-manipulating starships. The Federation is ancient history, and its technology treasure waiting to be discovered.

#rpg #scifi #science fiction #parahuman space #furry #traveller #ttrpg

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redfish-blu · 2 years ago

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People asked to drop the Danger Days tl from my last post so I’ll do that.

*Disclaimer: Not canon at all this is just my personal idea and take on like. How all that happened. Based on what they said in the videos and comics sort of.

*Disclaimer 2: I have not read National Anthem and I don’t care if this doesn’t line up with that.

Zones Timeline

1947:

- Cold War begins.

1987: Dr. D is born (hey legend).

1991:

- Cold War does not end.

1996:

- 1st Helium War starts.

- NATO and the Warsaw countries exchange declarations of war.

- Most of Eastern Europe is destroyed first, followed by the Middle East. Russia remains intact, as do a few Western European countries. Not including Great Britain or Germany.

- Other countries fall into isolation in fear of being the next targets of war, and either disappear into themselves or join pacts with one another. Some disperse entirely.

1997:

- America dissolves into civil unrest after attacks on the mainland result in various important political figures’ deaths.

- A number of American states cede from the nation and become The Confederacy of California, as per their secession being definitely illegal, and they take the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Wyoming.

- Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas are disputed.

- The rest of the states are assimilated into The Federal Republic of The United States, however they are in constant political battles between themselves because now everyone either wants out of the nation or they want control of it.

1997-98:

- Technology stagnates, but still advances. Just nowhere near as fast as it did in our lives.

1998:

- 1st Helium War ends.

- Cherri Cola is born.

- Tensions between the COC and the FRUS are high strung but not hostile.

- This is generally considered peacetime, if peacetime can be defined as you and the person you just fist fought in the bathroom being forced to sit next to one another in the principal’s office. Alone.

- A company specializing in chemistry and weapons manufacturing under the name of “Better Tech” rises in the COC and the FRUS.

2000:

- 2nd Helium War starts.

- Jet Star is born.

- War is declared on the FRUS by the COC, and various military campaigns take place in the disputed states.

- Better Tech supplies resources to both sides in a kind of double entendre situation where neither side knows they’re actually being played.

2001:

- Party Poison is born.

2006:

- Kobra Kid is born.

- Fun Ghoul is born.

- Helium Wars end when a series of nuclear bombs are dropped around the Rocky Mountains.

- The FRUS is never heard from again, and radio/electronic communication is disrupted by damage to the earth’s electromagnetic field.

- Better Tech rebrands themselves to Better Living Industries and gain influence over the COC government with the aim of salvaging the country and fixing the physical damage done by the war as well as the mental trauma of the citizens.

2010:

- BLi attempt to take control of Latin America but are flushed out by rebellion, and Mexico’s border is closed.

- Canada follows suit soon after, and America is officially cut off. Trapping everyone who remains there within the country (legally).

2012:

- Pig Bombs drop, eliminating Texas and New Mexico, whose governments were still kind of functioning independently after Helium 2 and building resistance against the COC.

- Fires of 2012 destroy Phoenix but leave Las Vegas intact. All remaining military units are pulled to Los Angeles.

- This is where BLi’s intense propaganda machine starts working to cover up all the crap they do. Working in tandem with how technologically challenged most people are at that point.

- BLi take what’s left of the lower 48 and establish Battery City as the new capital of America. Their borders define the nation as California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.

- However, BLi becomes notoriously bad at maintaining and “cleansing” their proclaimed territories; and most of the area outside of Zone 3 sees little to no substantial BLi presence at all.

- Dr. Death Defying makes his first radio broadcast as a rebel.

2013:

- Analog Wars begin.

- Battle of Utah takes place wherein Salt Lake City is destroyed in a series of Killjoy v. BLi battles.

- Destroya was used for its first and only time during this battle, and was abandoned in Zone 3 during BLi’s retreat.

2015:

- Analog Wars pause after significant damages to both sides prompt an unofficial ceasefire, giving way to a long period of relative inactivity.

- BLi uses this time to build its presence in everyday life, establish the Zones, and advance it’s scientific research and development.

2028:

- The Girl is born.

- Girl’s mom is Drac’d

2029:

- The Girl is found by Killjoys.

- Analog Wars start up again when her existence is uncovered.

2029-35:

- These years see the most one on one fighting between kj factions and BLi since the Analog Wars first started.

- Generally remembered as a sort of Zones Renaissance due to the re-popularization of art, media, and philosophy within the killjoy community.

- Who had fractured off in the years after the armistice and became very detached from one another rather than a collective movement.

2035:

- The Killjoys die.

- Analog Wars officially end.

2036-47:

- The schools of thought built up during the renaissance period fade into the background once again as their figureheads either die off or become irrelevant.

- This is the era in which the Val Velocity era of killjoys grow up in. They were all born well after the Helium and Analog wars began and ended, so they have little to no connection to the values or customs of pre-war life.

- Its very Lost Generation-y in that everyone just kind of wants to party and forget about how their lives suck underneath all the glitter.

2047:

- California Comics events.

- Cherri Cola dies.

- Dr. D dies (rip legend).

- BLi is destroyed.

#danger days #ttlotfk #party poison #kobra kid #ttlofk #killjoys #the true lives of the fabulous killjoys #fun ghoul #mcr

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boinkingbattlemechs · 3 months ago

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Marauder II

First built in 3012, the Marauder II is a successful attempt to take the firepower of the Marauder and combine it with the reliability and ruggedness of an assault chassis.

In 3010 officers of the famous Wolf's Dragoons mercenary unit contracted with Blackwell Industries of New Valencia on the project of modifying the highly successful 75-ton Marauder into a 100-ton assault 'Mech. Working from existing plans the design phase proved to be very short, the process of reinforcing the Marauder chassis turned out to be easier than expected, enhanced by the removal of the finicky and temperamental General Motors Whirlwind Autocannon for a much simpler Large Laser. First appearing with the famous Zeta Battalion before spreading to Alpha Regiment, the Dragoons' enemies soon learned to fear the appearance of Marauder IIs as foreshadowing a major advance, as for the remainder of the Third Succession War it remained the exclusive property of the mysterious Dragoons.

This changed after the Fourth Succession War when Colonel Jaime Wolf authorized Blackwell to increase production and allow outside buyers access, on the provision that each sale had to be approved by the Dragoons.

Though customers like Barber's Marauder II would help drive the considerable interest and demand for the powerful assault 'Mech, they would also damage its seeming aura of invincibility following their ignoble destruction by Clan Jade Falcon on Koniz in June 3064. Seeking to rekindle interest in their flagship 'Mech following its disastrous showing on Koniz, GM/Blackwell noted the Vicore Industries triggered refresh of "classic" designs to develop a more powerful and visually refreshed model. The resulting MAD-4S variant was the first widely available Marauder II, Wolf's Dragoons' easing of sale restrictions partly motivated by profit but also as a means to punish the Lyran Alliance for the theft of the Blackwell developed light fusion engine, as of 3067 selling the 'Mech to all interested parties save those the Dragoons were fighting against in the Chaos March; the Word of Blake and the members of the Trinity Alliance.

The demand for the Marauder II would only increase in the Jihad following the Blakist destruction of GM and Blackwell's production facilities for the 'Mech as part of their vendetta against the Wolf's Dragoons, with many salvaged examples in use among the nations of the Inner Sphere in a large number of variations following the Blakists' fall, the most notable being the MAD-6D developed by the Federated Suns and shared with the Republic of the Sphere.

As the Dragoons' Marauder II factory on Outreach didn't survive the Jihad, Irian BattleMechs Unlimited purchased the design plans from the Dragoons and, after retooling their Awesome lines on Irian, began producing the newly acquired design. During the Dark Age Era, the Republic of the Sphere ordered Irian to shut down many of their 'Mech production lines, including the Marauder II - however, they never ceased producing them.

With the Marauder already a powerful and popular 'Mech, the Dragoons' goals with the Marauder II were to enhance its abilities by strengthening its chassis to carry a much heavier armor and weapons load. The 'Mech was then armored with nineteen tons of Valiant Lamellor armor, giving it protection that rivals that of the Atlas and fitted with thirteen additional heat sinks, a total of twenty-nine, to allow a more ferocious rate of fire. Retaining its progenitor's Vlar 300-rated engine, with the MAD-5A built around an extralight fusion engine to save more weight for weapons. To make up for the reduced mobility, the Marauder II was outfitted with three Chilton 600 jump jets that give it a jumping capability of up to ninety meters.

Retaining only the two Magna Mk II Medium Lasers, the 5A variant of the Marauder II carries as its primary weapons a pair of Magna Firestar ER PPCs in its arms which give it a powerful long range punch compared to the 4A. The ER PPCs are backed up by a right torso-mounted Mydron Excel LB 10-X Autocannon which gives the Marauder II the tactical flexibility of using both solid and cluster rounds. Curiously the 5A is built with CASE only in its right torso, yet its three ton LB-X Autocannon ammunition bay sits in the left torso, leading some observers to suggest another projectile weapon field kit variant was being contemplated.

#battletech #mechwarrior #battletech smash or pass #mecha #tumblr polls

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alexissara · 4 months ago

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My Fire Emblem: Three Houses/Hopes OCs.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is one of my biggest fandoms ever, generally speaking Fire Emblem is probably one of the only fandoms I'd consider myself to be in or have ever been in. Everything else, I feel like i'm more on the outside of things I like, not as into it as people who are "in fandom" are or have since grown uninterested in. Even for things I barely enjoy sometimes I like to make OCs for the universe just for fun cuz I enjoy it as a writing experience and an expression of creativity so of course I have made my fair share of OCs set in the Three Houses universe.

Xel is a young woman from Duscur who witnessed her fathers death at the hands of Dimitri when he participated in the genocide of her people. She is the last living member of her bloodline, even family friends were all killed who were of Duscur. She was forced to live on her own as a child, ending up fighting in the shadey underground arena of Fargus where the allegedly civilized nobles came to bet on what warrior would win or lose in bloody combat. She took some merc work from time to time the arena tiring on her soul but eventually it was at the Arena where she met the two women who would lead to her going to the officers Academy, Catherine and Cornella. At the arena she also got into sex work as she got older having people asking for a night with the buff warrior woman and accepting the money given her dire need for it.

Xel has a total contempt for Faerghus as a nation and wishes to see it burn to ashes regardless of who's hands it is at. However, her rage and cynical side stay mostly hidden as she attempts her best to present as feminine, delicate and soft. Xel is a trans woman who was accepted by her family and culture but lost her resources and acceptance with the death of her people. She was already not keen on fighting and wished to study magic but instead had to hone her arms for the arena becoming a world class brawler. Still she attempted to present feminine and did her best to salvage for what she could to continue a transition. She is my most dysphoric trans OC and often finds herself struggling between what she is good at and what she wants to be.

Xel is childhood friends with Byleth, both of whom were young and trans and met up together with their partners both seeking to support their child who knew their gender early. Xel's mother was a merc who had worked with Jearlt a few times so they had let the two have play dates and spend as much time as they could stationed there together. Xel learned Archery from her mother as well as the fundamentals of how she would later fight with her fists while she got her inspiration for magic from her studious father who worshiped the spirits and saw magic as a means to be closer to him.

She ended up working in the same company as Shez for some time before returning to the Arena making her connected to both mercs. Her connection to Cornelia started as a private engagement in sex work, a rare woman who wanted the lesbian and actually treated her as a woman. Cornelia assisted in funding her stay at the officers academy while Catherine was impressed with her skills in the arena and recommend her to the school getting her enrolled. Catherine see's Xel as a potential apprentice who can carry on her legacy whenever that time came although Xel disinterest in the faith troubles her.

I am still exploring Xel's arc and where it might go, she may get a buff to her faith magic spell list after some experiments from Cornelia who wants to take her as a long term lover once she can get her ascended to a higher status. Xel has her heart set on Byleth and Shez but Shez wants Byleth dead and it places her in a very complicated situation. Xel is a Black Eagle but the older women in her life both eventual enemies of Edelgard. Xel is in school with the boy who murdered her peace loving father and can barely contain her rage around him. A lot of fun hooks are set for her in the future.

From my sweet girl with a lot of potential paths, let's go to my most problematic gal of the batch Queen Arte of the Agarthians. Sister of Epimenides the twins were equal in skill and talent but differed in their abilities. Epimenides was a master of magic and power while Arte crafted the shapeshifting and stealth of her people which would become vital after Serios's bloody retaliation to her people's fight for freedom from the dragons. Arte is mostly hands off with Those Who Slither In The Dark allowing them their actions across Fodlan given they advance her eventual goal of reclaiming the surface. She however, does not trust Thales and excepts his eventual betrayal in a power play for her throne simply awaiting one wrong move to kill him and remove him all together from the chest board.

Arte is one of Shez's mothers and the reason for Arval's creation inside of her. Publicly she wished for her brothers return but truthfully Arval was created to be a thing capable of removing her brother from the table all together. Arte did not want her brother competing for her position in power nor to share it equally. However, the woman she paired with not knowing that she never intended to have their daughter consumed by her brother ran away with Shez hoping to let her grow up and be her own person. Arte would hunt down her former lover but wouldn't find Shez until she was a young adult.

Arte is a morally complex character who mostly cares for power but does wish for the best future for her people and does not want wanton human death either seeing any worshiper of the church as tainted and worthy of death but anyone who doesn't worship Serios as a lost sibling to her own people. The culture in Agartha is complicated, there is a mix of freedoms and oppression that suit Arte's grand design. Queerness is allowed, there is no poverty, there is public education but also the nation requires a lot of the people's bodies and lives in service to the continued existence of their people. She's intended to mirror Rhea in a lot of ways.

Taking a break from Slithering to talk about Zara my first major Three Houses OC that I used in a short lived Three Houses roleplay. Zara came after my first OC idea was rejected and I cooked up this terrible disaster instead. She has an OC crest, the crest of Herzefeld. Zara von Herzefeld is a mixed race Almyrian and Lester woman. She was raised in secret by her mother who hide her pregnancy from the noble man who had on some nights taken to her before she moved away near the border. In a little town Zara was raised, a happy girl but her crests healing abilities manifested, something that her mother would beg for her to suppress. Yet, one day a friend of Zara's was injured and she healed them, they told everyone about her powers and rumors came that someone else had the Crest of Herzefeld. So her father came to town. Her mother was killed for keeping her secret and Zara was taken in, given a cover story and raised by the man who killed her mother.

Zara at first tried to rebel, tried to fight back but she couldn't defeat the older war tested man even if he was mostly a healer. Then she tried to run away but his men would always catch her and he would get more agressive eventually having shackles placed on her. The reality was Zara was a valuable asset. He had failed to pass a crest onto any heir so he simply pretended he had non but he had, many, many children and non had gained the crest, so Zara had to be the answer. Eventually Zara learned to play him, to be the perfect daughter for her father with an intention, a goal, to kill him one day, not just kill him but to tear away his legacy, to ruin his family, to end nobility itself, she wanted to see it all in flames. In secret she studied fire magic but actively she practiced faith magic. Zara was set to be married off but convinced her father to wait until after she graduated the officers academy and that she would go hunting for a proper man of even higher status she might be able to seduce to bring their family higher wealth and power. He agreed but assured her he would keep his looking for suitors. Her father knows Zara's attraction solely lays with women but he cared not about that, never seeing her as more than an object to be used. Although in the time he started to truly see her as a daughter, as Zara stroked his ego and made him think they were ever more alike, he even began to search for whispers of young women in noble families perhaps looking for a mistress or ones his daughter might be able to take. Yet, it still was mostly to twist his own ego. Ultimately the goal remained the same and he'd do anything to get her to fill his goals even the worst things one could imagine.

Zara's personal skill allows her to gain extra damage when she does not heal an injured ally in rage and instead attacks with her fire magic. This represents her hatred of the noble class she is at school with at the Officers Academy and those of positions of power. She is in school the year before the Events of Three Houses, the same year Monica was enlisted and therefore lacks connection to most of the cast until the war begins regardless of Houses or Hopes timelines. Regardless of the timeline, the intended route for her as a character is to kill her father, join Edelgard but have some friction in her wanton desire for violence. Zara is unlikely to drop the guise though that she is a simple cleric stereotype, one who loves her friends and wants to heal everyone and that she is devote although in truth she hates the church nearly as much as the nobility. Can Zara be fixed, be open, will she end her path concluding that she too is a noble and must also face her own fires? I'm not sure I didn't get to explore everything but I really think she is a fun compelling character and I think about her often.

The final two face of my batch of Three Houses women. Heca is an Agrathian woman sent to live deep undercover by Queen Arte as a young Noble to be her spy on both Edelgard and Thales. To Thales she is a report on Edelgard but to Edelgard she is a noble she has no idea has any ties to Thales she's known since they were young. To Arte though she is here to ensure Thales stays in line although she is rarely ever to report to him only giving him updates every few moons. Heca is Kronya's girlfriend, they started dating young but were called apart when Heca was sent off due to her amazing aptitude for shapeshifting and roleplaying. She contained no other magical talent, unlike most Agarthians she had no magical aptitude at all except in her ability to shapeshift, even requiring a mystic stone crafted by Arte to do the Agthain's signature warp. Heca happily agreed to sign up having thought herself and the Agrathan's as future liberators of human kind of the churches oppression, it being pitched to her and many others of the nation as a means of giving liberation to the people to let them live as they were at the cost of the lives of those in power and those who would defend them. That they would end Sexism, Homophobia, and more that the Church created and placed in man.

Heca is a Wyvern Rider, something she hides from others in her role as a Student and noble, she saved a young Wyvern's life who was at the edge of the underground when her and Kronya were playing exploring the limits of where they were allowed to go and she nursed her back to health. Since then her and Medusa have forever been linked together. Medusa flies near where ever Heca works ready to be her escape at any time an the two meet in secret to play and enjoy each others company. She is a firm believer in Queen Arte and in the Agarthian cause but she feels bad for spying against Edelgard as a fellow queer woman, she has no love for Thales and hopes one day Arte will give her the order and let her kill him so Edelgard can be free of him but she is a good solider so she doesn't. When Shez appears at the monastery her goals are expanded to observing her and the Ashen Demon and to learn more about both their abilities by Arte.

Heca for her role was given to a noble man who's wife and daughter had died in a crest beast attack, "revived from the dead" before anyone even knew they were dead other than him. Arte gleefully positioned herself a necromancer when in truth they had simply extracted his dead daughters Crest of Earnest and placed it insider of Heca and Heca's exceptional abilities allowed her to copy the daughters memory and personality. Heca understands the weight of her deception but there a small loss of ethics in the grand scheme of the goals, in the end the man who believes her to be her daughter would likely need to be killed in order for Agatha to flourish above anyway. Although Heca advocated for the idea he may remain loyal given they had given back his daughter so long as she continued to live her life as his daughter until his natural death.

Heca begins to struggle with faith in her queen as she finds more of what Those Who Slither In The Dark had done through Kronya and as she finds more and more people who might need to be sacrificed she cares about. Her arc has her strugglingly between loyalties, realities, believes and dreams never totally sure that the path she choses is right and knowing every choice has the potential to hurt someone she loves.

That will do it for now, I considered talking about the Three Houses version of my OC Lena but I did talk about my longer term roleplay with here over here which was in my Thirsty Sword Lesbians campaign Four Houses, so not in Fodlan but a world with it's own lore and stuff but she was a very similar type of character as a Three Houses OC although not as important to the world as she is in Four Houses.

I hope you enjoyed this look at my OCs, if you like it you can always shoot me some cash over at patreon or ko-fi which helps me be alive so I can cook up new OCs and share them with the world, sometimes in the form of stories or as art in TTRPGs or as comic characters or whatever. I am deeply curious if if fandom inspired OCs are something that tickles people's fancies and if it is, what world should I cook up OCs for that you'd like to see me bake some lesbians in?

#Arte #Zara #Fodlan #Three Houses #Three Houses OC #Fodlan OC #Three Hopes OC #OC #Lesbian OC #Lesbian OCs #Fodlan OCs #Xel #Heca #5 years of Three Houses

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darkmaga-returns · 4 days ago

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"If these people had to be honest, it would all be over." -- Mike Benz

James Howard Kunstler

Nov 25, 2024

“Now that our cheques are bouncing and we are starting to default on our debts, our entire civilization appears to be manifesting suicidal behavior in an effort to control the firing squad.” — Luke Dodson

“Joe Biden” is feeling blue. Not a joke. In the lurid sunset of his dwindling term-in-office, the long shadow of his legacy points toward a gigantic glowing cinder where North America used to be. Such are the grievances of the outgoing president. I pass unto you and your legions of white supremacist slobs the ashtray that was once our mighty nation. Fix that! But, as Sir Mick Jagger observed some time ago: you can’t always get what you want. “Joe Biden,” in despair, sinks deeper into his McTeer power recliner and slips back into the bitter dream of his nemesis, a beast named Chrump. . . .

It’s such a chewy name: Chrump, a fricative fiesta! The tongue briefly presses against the alveolar ridge before releasing, then curls back, and the jaw opens slightly to form this vowel sound, the lips close to let the sound resonate nasally before releasing air. Chrump Chrump Chrump. Like, what your mouth would feel like working through a bowl of Froot Loops. So satisfying! The outgoing Party of Chaos can’t stop chanting it on the cable news networks, as if trying to invoke the ancient furies, ghastly, terrifying figures with snakes for hair, dogs' heads, blood-red eyes, and bat-wings, brandishing torches and scourges to mortify their enemy.

Otherwise, fantasy aside, they are in paralysis as this enemy, Mr. Trump, marshals his pieces on the gameboard: Musk, Vivek, Bobby Jr, Tulsi, Bondi, Hegseth . . . . Ay-yeeeeee! They are coming to get us. . . . Somebody. . . do something. . . !

Okay, then, who, exactly, in the shadows behind the half-conscious ghoul in the White House, thinks that now is a great time to commence an ATACMS (Attack’ems) missile barrage on Russia as the very thing to salvage our Ukraine project? You’d naturally turn first to Blinken and Jake Sullivan, those gold-dust twins of overseas jiggery-pokery. Or, is it the geniuses at Spook Central, worried about the fumigating operation incoming with Mr. Ratcliffe? Or perhaps it’s the men-in-skirts over in the Pentagon, seeking to punish humanity because of the clerical error inflicted on them by the desk up-yonder that handles sexual assignments at birth. Blow it all up!

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thenationaltreasuregazette · 11 months ago

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Hi, I was wondering how do you imagine the Team Treasure spending Christmas? Who cooks, who decorates the house, who dresses up as Santa?

Holiday Hijinks, Angst Edition

Hi @thesere1418!

Thanks so much for your question! Let’s have some holiday fun.

Right off the bat I’m going to divide this into ‘pre-treasure hunt’ and ‘post-treasure hunt’ Christmases, because they’ll look very different and I think the contrast will be useful and full of angst, muahaha.

What follows is 100% pure headcanon and conjecture. I have no source for any of this other than I feel like it : )

A Pre-Treasure Christmas

I think it’s important that we start here because before the events of National Treasure, our four heroes are all living isolated, solitary lives to varying degrees.

Angst & headcanons ↓

Ben

Ben spends his pre-treasure hunt Christmases, well, treasure hunting. I imagine that the holidays don’t factor much into the way he lives his life. He pours over books and old archive records for hours and days at a time. He eats frozen meals and fast food, takeout when he can afford it. He’s not one to decorate his apartment, because he’s not home that often. He can spend weeks at a time away on salvage dives, or off in New York or Boston or Paris searching for Charlotte’s whereabouts. If he is at home, he might have one or two sentimental decorations that belonged to his grandfather that he’ll put out. The remind Ben of early Christmases as John’s house.

At some point over the holidays Ben has to visit his mother. Emily seems like the kind of person who puts on a classy Christmas party, maybe not on the day itself, but sometimes around it. She has her professor friends over for wine and an a delightfully pretentious selection of cheeses. It’s a great time, if you like parties that come with their own subscription to The New Yorker. Ben is always invited and he has two options: attend and know that every other guest thinks he’s a crackpot, or disappoint his mother. Neither is great. Sometimes he’s conveniently out of the country. Sometimes he toughs it out. If he can, Ben visits her on the actual holiday instead. Then it’s just a quiet dinner with a few close friends and the guy she’s seeing, if there is one. If he’s out of the country he always calls.

On Christmas itself—or maybe Christmas Eve. Ben feels like a Christmas Eve person to me—he puts on an old record and splurges on some real takeout, Chinese or Thai. It’s that and a beer and another late, lonely night reading through ship manifests and learning about arctic weather patterns.

If you live in a world where Book of Secrets does not exists, then Ben’s mother probably hangs over the holiday like a fondly remembered ghost. He was quite young when she died, but the memories he has of her are dear to him, as are the traditions that come with them. If she made the best fruit cake in town, then Ben finds himself wandering into the bakery or that one and sampling the wares, never finding one that tastes quite the way he remembers it. If she had a favorite decoration, maybe a ceramic angel tree topper with delicate lace wings, Ben always finds a prominent place to display it, even if it’s the only thing he puts out.

What about being “cavalier in [his] personal life,” you say? Never a Christmas girlfriend? Sure, maybe once or twice. But Christmas with the family is a big step, one I think Ben would be reticent to take. Although he’s apparently going around telling at least two “someones” that he loves them, I think deep down Ben knows none of these relationships are as important as his one true love, Charlotte and the Templar treasure. He tries his best to get out of it. If he can’t, well, I imagine he’s his usual completely normal self and I’m sure that’s a big hit with some unsuspecting family.

Abigail

Abigail’s pre-treasure Christmas is the least isolated of any of them, but she might rather trade with Ben honestly. Her holidays start by suffering through the office Christmas party. Stan has too much eggnog and hits on her while her assistant does her best to run interference, and Abigail pretends to like coworkers she barely knows during an awkward secret santa. Then, after a brief stop at home to change and collect her already meticulously packed suitcase and meticulously wrapped gifts, its time to drive to wherever her family lives. I’m feeling Connecticut. So she drives to CT to her favorite Christmas jazz CD. She likes the quiet hours in the car.

Then the Christmas chaos sets it. I don’t imagine Abigail comes from an especially large family, it’s her mother and step-father, her brother, his wife, and her two grade-school-age nephews. I also headcanon that she has an older sister who moved back to Germany, but more on that some other time. Abigail arrives a day or two early to help with the preparations, and that’s one of her favorite parts. She and her mother make Lebkuchen (German spiced Christmas cookies) and other family recipes, as well as prepare a fish dinner for Christmas Eve and a roast duck or goose for Christmas Day.

The Chase family partakes in the German tradition of decorating the tree on Christmas Eve. This wasn't a huge part of their Christmas before they moved, but after they moved to the States it became an important way to stay connected to their roots.

Other favorite activities of hers include playing games with her nephews. She got them into go a few years ago, but Abigail is also surprisingly competent at Mario Cart.

But there’s also the comments about whether she’s seeing anyone, and the questions that make it clear that her family doesn’t understand what she does for work or why. She loves her brother and his kids and she’s always grateful to be home, but it’s also very clear to her, between the lines, that her family thinks her life is too small. When the noise and the people get to be too much, she escapes to the kitchen to work on the endless pile of dishes.

Riley

Riley, Riley, Riley. My problem child. Who are you??

Riley seems like he comes from a big-ish family, let’s say four kids, and he’s second youngest. Maybe it’s the way he seems to roll with the punches. We’re breaking into the National Archives? Sure, fine. I can’t stop you, so let me get my laser.

There’s also a good chance that he’s Jewish. Justin Bartha is Jewish, and Riley does say “Mazel Tov” to Ben when Ben says he looks alright for the gala. For the sake of this post let’s say that Riley is from a mixed family that celebrates both traditions. But if you have a take on how Judaism informs Riley’s character, I want to hear it!

Before meeting Ben, Riley worked at a dead-end office job (at IBM, according to the 2003 script). I imagine he was pretty low in the office hierarchy if a probably-fruitless, dangerous treasure hunt seemed like an appealing alternative. Otherwise he’d keep toiling away in a sea of gray cubicles, underpaid and under appreciated. The thing about offices is that when the holidays arrive, the people leave but the problems keep coming. And when you’re know as That-Guy-Who-Can-Solve-My-Problem, you get stuck with the problem. So as Riley’s coworkers and colleagues start to head out on vacation, more and more problems pile up on his desk. His nights get later, and on the last work day before the holiday, his is the last light on.

When all the workplace fires are finally put out, Riley stuffs the presents for his nieces and nephews into his clunker of a sedan and heads for the family home in…Florida? Michigan? My gut says it’s not one of the original 13 colonies, based on how geographic symbolism tends to work in the National Treasure-verse. (Riley listens to metal in the car. He gets sick of Christmas music by November.)

The celebration is at his aunt and uncle’s house, on his dad’s side. By the time he gets there, the house is capital C Chaotic. His cousins and most of his siblings have kids, so there’s a whole flock of nieces and nephews running amuck (and Riley is only too happy to join them). His dad and his sister are bickering over the best technique for cooking the roast. His sister and his brother-in-law are having a heated debate over who knows what. And his other sister—that’s right, I’ve decided he has all sisters—is trying mediate a spat between some of the kids.

Uncle Riley is a big hit with the kids. He’s cool. He’s techy. He always knows the latest video games and can troubleshoot any problem with their GameCube. With the adults…not so much. Riley was a bit of a late bloomer career-wise. He might have stayed in his parents’ basement for a year or two after college. He’s obviously incredibly smart, but he never applies himself to what he’s “supposed to.” Also please stop telling our kids that Bigfoot is real and the moon landing was fake, thank you.

Once he’s through with that and back in his broom closet of an apartment, Riley has a second holiday gathering, this time with his online squad. Riley has to be part of some online groups. Hackers. Conspiracy theorists. Random internet weirdos. Maybe they play D&D together, or swap code or challenge each other to hack into places they shouldn’t just to see if it can be done. In a lot of ways, Riley feels more at home with these usernames on a black background than he does with the family he grew up in.

Patrick

Any way you slice it, Patrick is having a pretty sad Christmas. He’s estranged from his only son. His wife either died thirty years ago or hasn’t spoken to him in thirty years. Either way, his belief that she was his “one and only” means he isn’t seeing anyone, and it appears he has no siblings, so he probably doesn’t have much in the way of family plans. Maybe he has a friend or two who invite him to their family gatherings. Patrick always says he’ll try to swing by, but he knows he won’t. He doesn’t want to intrude, and he has no interest in pity invites.

In the week leading up to Christmas, Patrick’s poker club meets for their holiday game. There’s eggnog and music in the background and enthusiastic discussions of everyone’s holiday plans. Maybe they even tried a secret santa once or twice. It’s a fun little time, but it’s not Christmas.

Christmas for Patrick Gates is a pre-ordered meal and a glass of whisky and an old record on the record player, alone in that big old house.

Conclusion

Okay! Have I broken your heart yet?

Sorry for the angst, but the contrast is going to be important!

This was actually a great opportunity to reflect on what Team Treasure’s lives were like before the events of the film. It highlighted for me just how lonely and isolated they each were, and how something was missing from their lives even if they didn’t know it at the time.

Of course, I’m making most of this up whole-cloth, so feel free to disagree with everything! What do you thing their families and family holidays were like?

This year, the holiday lead-up has been really hectic for me, but this question helped me get into the holiday spirit a bit and think more about my own Christmas traditions as well as the characters.’

Next time, I will answer you actual question about post-treasure Christmas!

I am trying so, so hard to have it ready by Christmas, fingers crossed.

#national treasure #the national treasure gazette #ben gates #abigail chase #riley poole #patrick gates

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beardedmrbean · 9 months ago

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Armed gangs have tried to seize control of Haiti’s main international airport, exchanging gunfire with police and soldiers in the latest attack on key government sites.

An explosion of violence has taken place in the country, including a mass escape from the country’s prisons.

The Toussaint Louverture International Airport was closed when the attack occurred, with no planes operating and no passengers on site.

It is the biggest attack on the airport in Haiti’s history.

Last week, the airport was struck briefly by bullets amid ongoing gang attacks, but gangs did not enter the airport nor seize control of it.

The attack occurred just hours after authorities in Haiti ordered a night-time curfew following violence in which armed gang members overran the two biggest prisons and freed thousands of inmates over the weekend.

A 72-hour state of emergency began on Sunday night. The government said it would try to track down the escaped inmates, including from a penitentiary were the vast majority were in pre-trial detention, with some accused of killings, kidnappings and other crimes.

“The police were ordered to use all legal means at their disposal to enforce the curfew and apprehend all offenders,” said a statement from finance minister Patrick Boivert, the acting prime minister.

Gangs already were estimated to control up to 80% of the capital Port-au-Prince. They are increasingly co-ordinating their actions and choosing once unthinkable targets such as the Central Bank.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry travelled abroad last week to try to salvage support for a United Nations-backed security force to help stabilise Haiti in its conflict with the increasingly powerful crime groups.

Haiti’s National Police has roughly 9,000 officers to provide security for more than 11 million people, according to the UN. They are routinely overwhelmed and outgunned.

The deadly weekend marked a new low in Haiti’s downwards spiral of violence. At least nine people had been killed since Thursday - four of them police officers - as gangs stepped up co-ordinated attacks on state institutions in Port-au-Prince, including the national football stadium.

But the attack on the National Penitentiary late Saturday shocked Haitians who are accustomed to living under the constant threat of violence.

Almost all of the estimated 4,000 inmates escaped. Three bodies with gunshot wounds lay at the prison entrance on Sunday.

Among the few dozen people who chose to stay in prison are 18 former Colombian soldiers accused of working as mercenaries in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise.

“Please, please help us,” one of the men, Francisco Uribe, said in a message widely shared on social media. “They are massacring people indiscriminately inside the cells.”

Colombia’s foreign ministry has called on Haiti to provide “special protection” for the men.

A second Port-au-Prince prison containing around 1,400 inmates was also overrun.

Gunfire was reported in several neighbourhoods in the capital. Internet service for many residents was down as Haiti��s top mobile network said a cable connection was slashed during the rampage.

After gangs opened fire at Haiti’s international airport last week, the US embassy said it was halting all official travel to the country. On Sunday night, it urged all American citizens to depart as soon as possible.

The Biden administration, which has refused to commit troops to any multinational force for Haiti while offering money and logistical support, said it was monitoring the rapidly deteriorating security situation with grave concern.

The surge in attacks follows violent protests that turned deadlier in recent days as the prime minister went to Kenya seeking to move ahead on the proposed UN-backed security mission to be led by that East African country.

Jimmy Cherizier, a former elite police officer known as Barbecue who now runs a gang federation, has claimed responsibility for the surge in attacks. He said the goal is to capture Haiti’s police chief and government ministers and prevent Mr Henry’s return.

The prime minister, a neurosurgeon, has shrugged off calls for him to resign and did not comment when asked if he felt it was safe to come home.

Why is there violence in Haiti?

Some of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders say their goal is bringing down Henry.

The country has failed to hold parliamentary and general elections in recent years and there are no elected officials. Henry was sworn in as prime minister with the backing of the international community after the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The latest round of attacks began in February after Henry pledged to hold long-awaited general elections by mid-2025.

A map of Port-au-Prince in Haiti

Henry’s whereabouts were not public Monday. When asked in Kenya if it was safe for him to return to Haiti, Henry shrugged.

Who is responsible for the violence?

Jimmy Chirizier, a former elite police officer known as “Barbecue” who is considered one of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders, announced as gunmen began to attack infrastructure that he would try and capture the country’s police chief and government ministers.

Four police officers were killed when their stations came under siege.

Cherizier said last summer that he would fight any international armed force if they committed abuses, and he urged Haitians to mobilize against the government.

Other gang leaders also appear to be involved in recent attacks.

Johnson Andrï best known as “Izo” and leader of the 5 Seconds gang, appears in a video posted on TikTok wielding a heavy mallet in his right hand as he pretends to punch his face with his left hand.

Izo’s gang is considered an ally of G-Pep, archenemy of Barbecue’s gang federation, but alliances have been shifting in recent days.

A report released last month by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that “for the gangs, the development of alliances is a fluid phenomenon.”

It also noted how “only the most powerful gangs — such as Izo’s or Chïrizier’s — are usually able to operate or profiteer outside their fiefdoms.”

Barbecue is leader of a gang federation known as G9 Family and Allies, and he has previously launched powerful attacks that have crippled the country. In late 2022, he seized control of an area surrounding a key fuel terminal in the capital of Port-au-Prince for almost two months.

Why have the gangs become so powerful?

An estimated 200 gangs exist in Haiti, with 23 main ones believed to be operating in the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince.

Up until recent years, they controlled some 60% of the capital, a number that has since grown to 80%, according to U.N. officials.

Smuggled firearms and ransom payments to kidnappers have allowed gangs to become more financially independent. That has increased their power as the state has weakened, and an underfunded and under-resourced police department has been unable to contain them.

“Present-day gangs enjoy a much higher degree of military capacity than those a decade ago,” according to the Global Initiative report. “This has largely been driven by the gangs’ ability to acquire high-caliber weapons.”

A 2023 U.N. report stated that recovered weapons destined for Haitian ports include “.50 caliber sniper rifles, .308 rifles, and even belt-fed machine guns.”

The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.

#nunyas news

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 2 years ago

Photo

“Scrappers Give Shell Cases for Scrap,” Windsor Star. November 14, 1942. Page 3. --- TWO young Canadian scrappers are shown above, Wireless Telegrapher Gerard Desramaux, and his brother AC. Roger Desramaux, as they turned in souvenirs from the last war in today's salvage drive. Their father, Mr. Fernand H. Desramaux, 824 Pillette road, found the two shell cases in his backyard, at Ypres, in Belgium, after the British pushed the Germans back in that sector in the last war. The British then fired the shells into the German lines and Gerard and Roger made sure, today, that the shell casings, prized as souvenirs since the last war, will head for some axis target, too.

#windsor #scrap metal #shell casings #salvage campaign #salvage conscious #national salvage office #world war 1 #ypres #belgian immigration to canada #canadian soldiers #canada during world war 2 #world war ii

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rauthschild · 3 months ago

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We have described for you the deplorable criminality which has gained access to our world through the British Government(s) and their collusion with the Holy Roman Empire -- the impersonation of people as different kinds of corporations, the illegal and unlawful direct taxation of civilians by private banks, the use of commercial corporations to usurp national governments, and we have touched upon the corruption of the courts, especially Admiralty Courts and the so-called King's Bench (Maritime Commerce) courts.

We have plainly stated that the courts are bonding court cases and presenting them as investment opportunities. The bond numbers are case numbers, and the odds of conviction and "commission returns" on these bonds run at 96% on average, so the Hired Jurists running these courts are highly motivated to secure convictions by any means possible ---- the courts and the court's officers share in the booty they collect.

Government "Investors" are also highly motivated to keep this gravy train running. Where else can you guarantee yourself a 96% rate of return on a short term bond investment?

When first confronted about this "Court Registry Investment System" court officials stonewalled and denied the existence of any such bond investment (and ultimately, payola) system by which they receive commissions, aka, "pension" payments from all the loot rolling in from the illegal confiscation of privately-held American assets and equally illegal betting on the rigged outcome of court cases controlled by Hired Jurists in the King's Service.

The Guilty Parties observe that there is no law against murdering corporations, stealing from corporations, impounding corporations, etc., but then, in the same token, corporations should have no ability to make unlimited political campaign contributions, should they?

Those responsible for the unconscionable contracts allowing them to create all these Puerto Rican shelf corporations, and the Roman Inferior Cestui Que Vie Trusts that result when the shelf corporations are bankrupted, should be paying all the charges and expenses of maintaining these corporations and should also be paying all taxes owed by these imaginary corporate franchises, too.

The living victims of this personage scheme should be held absolutely harmless from all charges and harm, but as everyone can see and attest, the Parent Corporations and Administrators have been evading their Usufructuary Duty and foisting their responsibility off onto the victims of their inland piracy.

The Admiralty Courts have been busy collecting booty belonging purportedly to "rebels" engaged in illegal commercial mercenary "wars", and salvage fees owed by foreign sovereigns, and managing the Estates of imaginary British Merchant Mariners, who all just happen to be "Taxpayers" --- Warrant Officers who are responsible for collecting tariffs for the King, who are all based out of Puerto Rico and all declared "missing, lost at sea".

The Maritime Commercial Courts operated by the British Crown have been fraudulently confusing themselves -- the so-called United States District Courts -- with district courts of the United States authorized under Article V of the Federal Constitutions. Under this guise of borrowed rectitude, they have been operated as "concessions" to take advantage of the Cestui Que Vie ESTATES purportedly belonging to Municipal "citizens of the United States".

Are we all beginning to get the drift of just how crooked all these operations are and the nature of the "courts" that have been foisted off on the people of this country, who have all suffered crimes of impersonation and identity theft and human trafficking, at the hands of men employed by them to protect their "persons" and who are obligated by contract and treaty to do so?

As mentioned in our International Public Notice: Impersonation, the British Territorial Rump Congress created by Abraham Lincoln changed the meaning of the word "person" to mean "corporation".

See 37th Congress, Second Session, Chapter 49, Section 68.

This was followed up on February 2nd 1871, when the 41st British Territorial U.S. Congress declared itself to be the Successor of all United States Corporations.

The "United States" being referenced is the American Federal Republic and its corporations.

This takeover was done with no Notice to the Public, no listing in the Congressional Record, and, most importantly, no Notice to the Federation of States. It failed all requirements of Due Process.

How is that even possible?

By February 2nd 1871, all the State Governments had been confused with State of State Governments, and the Brits had illegally included State assets as if they were American State of State assets, and rolled everything into "State" Trusts.

They had also demanded that the people of each State write new Constitutions allowing their own British Territorial State-of-State operations to take over.

The American States of States, such as The State of New York, were replaced by British Territorial counterparts calling themselves, for example, "the State of New York". The name change was so slight, a change from "The" to "the", that nobody but British Collaborators knew there had been any change at all.

The new "State" Constitutions enacted between 1863 and 1871 were equally vague and deceitful, appearing very similar to prior service contracts and calculated to hide what was actually going on from the American Public.

By February 2nd 1871, the assets of the actual Autochthonous Nation States had been illegally and illogically misidentified as assets of the Federal Republic and had been cashiered in covert State Trusts, like the Michigan State (Trust).

This is what gives rise to the grammatical nightmare of "the Michigan State Capitol" and "California State University".

As an analogy, if the company hired to mow your lawn went bankrupt, or for any reason failed to perform, would this justify an assumption that your property was part of their bankruptcy or incompetence? Would this scenario justify an assumption that your home was an asset of their bankrupt business? Or an unclaimed chattel of theirs?

Certainly not, yet this is precisely the "reasoning" employed to secretly latch upon the assets of the American States and cashier them in State Trusts controlled by the Perpetrators of this gigantic fraud scheme.

With the State assets illegally cashiered in trusts controlled by the Perpetrators under False Pretenses, the original American State of State organizations inoperable, and British Territorial States of States operating as franchises of the British Territorial corporation calling itself "the United States of America" --- Incorporated, there was nothing to stop the Perpetrators from bypassing Due Process owed to the actual States and People.

According to them and what they told the rest of the world, we had ceased to exist. Our lawful American Government was reportedly "in interregnum" and in the meantime, our British Territorial and Holy Roman Empire Federal Subcontractors were "assuming" a "custodial interest" in our assets.

In this way, the British Territorial Government under contract to our States, contrived to unlawfully convert our State assets into Public Trust assets controlled by their Agents, and to mothball and substitute their own "services" for both our Autochthonous American States-of-State organizations and our lawful State Governments.

This is all premeditated, malicious, self-interested legal chicanery and constructive fraud, by which our foreign employees have attempted to erase our national sovereignty, use our assets as collateral backing their debts, and ultimately, bring False Claims on Abandonment against our assets for their benefit.

We never abandoned anything, just like we never volunteered to act as "Taxpayers" and never knowingly adopted U.S. Citizenship, and were told nothing about the Roman Inferior Trust ESTATES established for us under the resoundingly False Presumption that we were ever "citizens of the United States", either.

These False Friends and False Representatives impersonated the American States and seized upon their assets, and have controlled our State assets by dint of secrecy, False Legal Presumptions, and False Claims dependent on similar names deceits.

Our original state-of-state entities doing business as, for example, The State of New York, were members of the failed Confederation.

Likewise, the stricken State Republics and Republics of State, such as the Texas Republic and Republic of Texas, were members of the failed Federal Republic.

Their assets might, arguably, be salvaged and secured by the British Territorial Federal Subcontractors doing business as the United States of America, Incorporated ---- but not the assets of our Autochthonous Nation-States.

Our Autochthonous unincorporated States of the Union are members of the unincorporated Federation of States.

There are no "United States Corporations" present for British Interests to seize upon or assume any custodial interest in.

In the same way, there is no excuse for them impersonating our States as State Trusts, substituting their state-of-state organizations for ours, nor any of the criminal impersonations and undisclosed registrations of individual Americans that have taken place.

There is no plausible excuse for them bringing their Admiralty and Maritime courts ashore and misaddressing American civilians as corporate franchises and foreign persons in their own country.

All of this is in direct violation of both The Constitution of the United States of America and The Constitution of the United States, Article IV, in its entirety.

These men and women are present in our country to provide us with essential government services in "good faith", not to practice crimes of personage against us and pretend that they are our "representatives", custodians, guardians, and trustees.

For those who cannot believe that the Admiralty and Maritime courts presently operating in this country have been used to promote illegal and immoral confiscation of Autochthonous American assets, to commit personage against average Americans, to create a rigged bond market and to provide commissions masked as "pension payments" to the men and women engaged in this criminal activity, we are attaching a 66 page pdf file that adequately explains the Court Registry Investment System (CRIS) and documents its receipts.

#blacklivesmatter #blackvotersmatters #donald trump #joe biden #naacp #blackmediamatters #blackvotersmatter #news #ados #youtube

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wealmostaneckbeard · 2 years ago

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Signalis: Obsolescence

At the heart of the Eusan Nation is the oceanic world of Vineta. On this planet there is the coastal city of Gasthofsmund. Outside the city limits is the National Museum. Something, as horrible as it is inexplicable, has happened to Gasthofsmund. You, the player, are going to try and figure out what that was. First you must choose a Replika to play as:

Obsolete Replika lines: Individuals Nickname: Original Purpose: Special Equipment/Abilities: Reasons for Production Cessation:

Taub (TB): Dove: Counter-Intelligence/Therapy: prototype bioresonance modules that allowed the user to remotely Interrogate, Punish, or Regenerate a targeted individuals neurological system: could not get along with others of it's own line. It would prioritize patient welfare over the concerns of the Nation. It was replaced by the Kolibri line.

Geier (GR): Morticia: Salvaging/Biohazard Clean-up: anti-toxin modules that enable the user to become immune to lethal substances through direct exposure although the process is painful: Replaced by new models of remote controlled salvaging vehicles. Although social towards some, it would also fill it's living quarters with biohazards to keep out unwanted visitors.

Flamingo (FMGO): Lanky: Entertainment/Athletics: Extremely long limbed and graceful, able to move through confined spaces and leap across large gaps: It had a narcissistic personality. It would take excessive risks during performances. It also required a lot of maintenance.

Metzgervogel (MZGL): Improv: Orbital infrastructure maintenance/Anti-Partisan: Easy-to-repair body armor and trained in combat/engineering: Originally developed to fulfill the same functions as the lost Elster line. The recovery of the dead LSTR unit and the restart of it's production caused the MZGL to become redundant.

The Museum

The tutorial segment and hub area is the Gasthofsmund National Museum. Which is fitting since it contains a classroom used for teaching Gestalt children. It is also filled with surprisingly useful items and material. Unfortunately, most of it is locked up and can only be accessed with employee ID cards. And the employees, mostly Gestalts with a few modern Replikas, haven't shown up to work for a few days now. As an obsolete Replika on display, you've regularly communicated with staff and know they were excited by a relic dredged up from the toxic ocean depths. Fortunately, the few areas that are accessible to you contain clues to the employee's locations as well as information about the world. The Replikas you did not pick at the start become NPCs whom you can help and may help you (or potentially betray you). Outside of the museum is a station for a self-driving bus which you can use to access other stations within the city. There's also a scenic hiking trail.

The City and it's Inhabitants

Gasthofsmund is a proper city with a trio of residential blocs (for upper, middle, and lower class citizens), a government office, engineering facility, and a well used harbor. The city rests on a sunken labyrinth, allegedly a ruined stronghold during wartime. There have always been rumors that the city is infested with an anti-nationalist cult founded on the prophecies written in the journals of dead soldiers. But several thorough investigations (by a Kolibri and a few others) have only revealed low-complexity insurgent activity.

Currently, the harbor and upper class residential bloc are thoroughly infested. Biomass oozes from structure exteriors and are fed upon by sea birds which causes them to act unpredictably. Corrupted Replikas try to conceal the growths from sunlight with tarps tied to scrap metal scaffolds. Automated security systems protect the upper class residential bloc while ignoring the masses of pulsating flesh that used to be the owners. The Harbor was home to a colony of obnoxious sea lions, that same colony has undergone a series of mutations that made them more effective hunters.

The engineering facility and the other two residential blocs are contested territory. The corrupted Replikas here move in packs while hunting for survivors and material. Any Gestalts you encounter are immobilized for one reason or another, some of them you can rescue. There are abandoned supplies, blast marks, and other signs of violence scattered though the zones, reflecting the desperate conflict between the survivors and corrupted replikas.

The government office was designed to protect the mayor, bureaucrats, and select civilians from riots and other disasters. The last mayor was a gestalt woman named Greta Han and she became a rotting meat-tree in her home. The survivors within the office are safe thanks to trip wire traps, barricades and improvised weapons which keep out the corrupted. The leaders of the group is a Gestalt safety inspector named Martin Zhow and an ADLER Replika (serial number 2342). The others are an exhausted STAR, a frustrated scientist, a pair of EULAs who are trying their best to keep an orphaned gestalt child happy, and a scared engineer (who mentions they were raised by a pack of ARARs). There's also a mixed-breed dog on a little bed that you can pet, to restore some mental health. All of them are starting to run out of certain supplies which they are willing to trade for. The Gestalts will accept ration packs as currency while Replikas will barter for equal value items. Although historically important, authorities with the Eusan Nation never considered sending a Falke unit to supervise Gasthofsmund.

The Madness

While accomplishing different objectives is relatively simple, there are a pair of complicating factors: The Interface and Persona Degradation.

The scientist survivor explains that the relic dredged up from the polluted ocean is an interface through which an extra-dimensional intelligence can manipulate reality within a certain proximity. Obviously this has resulted in the reconfiguration of the local organics into new forms and the corruption of the Replikas. But It is doing other things as well.

At best, those things are inconvenient. Examples being the self-driving bus will go to the wrong destination or the formation of unnatural weather patterns (fog, heavy rain). But the intelligence can also cause time dilations. Thus you may encounter terrified trigger-happy soldiers from ancient wars, impenetrable domes of slowed time containing people frozen in place, and unhelpful observers from the future.

What the intelligence on the other side of The Interface is trying to accomplish is unknown. Some characters will speculate on it's goals but each theory will have some flaws.

The Replika that you are playing as is experiencing persona degradation due to stress and contamination. As a result your Replika will experience lapses in memory. Objects will randomly appear or disappear from your inventory and have to be re-located. NPC's you talk to will mention conversations that your Replika will not remember. If Dove is an NPC, you can convince her to regenerate your mind, which prevents the memory lapses, at the cost of her own sanity. However, the more your replika's persona degrades, the more you get to experience it's gestalt memories.

The Endings: The Interface or The Escape

You can escape Gasthofsmund by road or by boat.

There is a town to the north named Mahkra which has a military training camp and an airport. Survivors speculate it might be unaffected by the current crisis, someplace they could escape to.

If you attempt to walk along the road to Mahkra, you will be attacked by flocks of crazed sea birds, blinded, and then bleed to death, falling to the ground alongside other eyeless corpses. To avoid this ending you need to travel in a vehicle.

Normally you would be able to ride the bus to the town but Mayor Han shut the route down for security reasons. You can reprogram the buses, but first you'll have to extract the RFID chip from the Mayor's mutated remains in her upper class residence and plug it into a computer terminal at the government office. Some of the survivors, led by Adler, will turn on you for bringing the contaminated chip into their sanctuary, you'll have to deal with them. Afterwards you and whichever survivors are still alive can ride the bus safely through the murder-bird flocks. The bus will reach a barricade and then get hit by a rocket fired by the military, killing everyone inside. To avoid this ending, you have to search the hiking trail around the National Museum and recover a military radio from a dying scout which you can use to call off the rocket strike. Afterwards your replika and everyone with them will be taken into custody and kept under close observation for the remainder of their lives.

There is a boat in the harbor that you could use to escape the city by water. It's called the Misericordia and it needs work before it can become seaworthy. First you have to incinerate the flesh growths keeping it anchored. Then you have to find replacement parts at the engineering facility. And then you have to refuel it, this last step is noisy and will attract the corrupted replikas, the mutated sea lions, and the insane birds. If you manage to survive all that and weigh anchor then you + any surviving NPCs have the freedom to set sail in any direction, a freedom your Replika has never known. This might be the best ending.

Now about the Interface. It is located within a secret room in a chapel in the upper class residential bloc.

It looks like a small obsidian slab with crimson pulsating mold growing out of the edges. Touching it will cause you to be consumed by rot slowly and join the intelligence(s) on the other side. This is one of the simpler possible endings for your replika.

After it's immediate discovery, a group of scientists was called to Gasthofsmund to study The Interface. It was still dormant, just like it had been on the bottom of the ocean. The people researching it drafted up a simple two step plan: First, build a containment device based on known principles of bioresonance. Second, activate the Interface while it's in containment and try to establish a line of communication with whoever is on the other side. Unfortunately some other residents of the city had other ideas and caused the second stage to happen before the first was ready.

The half-finished containment device can be found in the engineering facility. By scavenging for parts across the city and in the museum, you can complete the device. You then have to haul it on your back through an unnaturally occurring typhoon to get to the chapel. You will receive assistance from a survivor NPC (that you befriended earlier) while being attacked by a few random enemies. Inside the chapel are 3 mysterious cultists, two of them are armed with guns, while the third uses their bioresonant abilities against you. They will try to kill you and your ally. If you manage to kill them and find The Interface, you can place it in containment. This will disconnect it from the biomass neural network and waves of enemies will attack you every few minutes in retaliation. Your ally then proposes taking the loaded device on to a raft with an outboard motor, going as far out to sea as possible, and then dumping it over the side. You then fight your way to the docks where a raft is tied up to a pier. The two of you board the raft and ride out into a storm tossed sea, never to be seen again. That is the last of the possible endings.

Depending on other unmentioned factors, there might be an epilogue where your replika wakes up in a bright clean factory. They are informed by an AEON executive that due to the heroic actions of the replika you played as during the Gasthofsmund Incident, their line has been reconsidered, their obsolete status rescinded, and production restarted.

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shisui-week · 1 year ago

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Prompt Discussion pt.3

Coup D'etat

Does Shisui have a role to play in the Coup? Or is he blind to the rebellion? Explore how the Coup might play out, planning, organizing or the event itself. Who's in charge, what are they after? Is the Coup successful? What happens next!

'Changes' by Hayd 'Blood // Water' by Grandson 𓅂𓅂

Mission Gone Wrong

Oh no! The mission's been derailed; Is it a salvageable mistake, or fatal for the Village and the team? Does the mission put Shisui and co. in a series of wacky weird scenarios, or is it something more sinister? Has a comrade betrayed them, or do they run into rogue nin?

'Who I Am Hates Who I've Been' by Relient K 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' by Anthony and the Johnsons

𓅂𓅂 First Time...

First kiss, first crush, first kill, first date, first time, first mission-- Anything that encapsulates a new experience, or dealing with the repercussions of exploring something new; good or exciting or terrifying! Did Shisui make a mistake on a mission, does he have nightmares about his first kill, or daydreams about his first love.

'Adrenalize' by In This Moment' 'Groan' by Dazey and the Scouts

𓅂𓅂 Free Space

Anything you can think of! Explore Shisui however you wish, in an AU, with a new character he's never met before, having a nice relaxing morning, maybe he just got a pet cat, or has an exciting mission to another nation.

'Conversations In The Dark' by John Legend

𓅂𓅂

Police Force

Explore Shisui's relationship with the Uchiha Police Force. Does he become a high ranking officer, does he have bad blood with the force. Is he a spy, a double agent, how does it affect his relationship and feeling with the clan? Does he go against the Village and become a lone detective? Does he dig into the founding of the Uchiha Police?

'Karma Police' by Radio Head 'DNA' by Kendrick Lamar

Part.1𓅂Part.2𓅂Part.4𓅂Part.5𓅂 𓅂Prompts𓅂Playlist𓅂

#prompt discussion #prompt #shisui #Shisui uchiha #uchiha #naruto #naruto shippuden #naruto events #narutoevents2023

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foreverlogical · 2 years ago

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SALEM, N.H.—Well, that was something.

By the time former President Donald Trump left a high school auditorium Saturday afternoon—his return to the campaign trail after an unusually sleepy start to his 2024 campaign—he had ricocheted off many of his standbys: indulging conspiracy theories, nursing conservatives’ fears about race and gender, and offering an alternative reality to his successor’s record. The hour-long diatribe suggested Joe Biden would have been shrewd to throw his son, Hunter, under the bus, that the Taliban were incapable of fighting at night because they lacked “binoculars,” and that wind turbines routinely knock planes out of the sky. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

It was, in essence, a standard Trump speech, but with a more uneven pacing, and a little weirder and meandering.

For a fragile frontrunner facing criticism for the shaky start to his third bid for the White House, Trump’s initial showing did little to calm the skittishness that the candidate himself acknowledged.

“They said, ‘He’s not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost a step,’” Trump said, mocking his critics. “I am more angry now and I am more committed now than ever.”

Maybe, but words—even hyper-exaggerated and errant ones—aren’t deeds. Trump on Saturday dropped into New Hampshire to speak to the state party’s annual meeting, where he picked up the backing of the party chair who ended his term on Saturday. He then jetted to South Carolina, where he unfurled a pack of high-wattage supporters at the state capitol. As political events go, they were fairly routine and expected steps for presidential hopefuls.

“Together we will complete the unfinished business of making America great again,” Trump said in Columbia, S.C.

Yet Trump isn’t starting as a blank-slate national candidate. The image of Trump is pretty well baked at this point. A meager 5% of Americans said they don’t have an opinion about the only President who was impeached twice and whose actions in the wake of the 2020 election led to a deadly attack on the Capitol, according to the latest CNN poll. Trump may want to campaign as a traditional candidate with the universal support befitting a former President, but that isn’t his core competency, and he seems to lack the requisite skills to keep his ship afloat as some two dozen would-be pirates are on the docks and considering their own next steps.

For potential Trump challengers, Saturday’s showing should not have spooked anyone from the race. Sure, Trump can still butcher political red meat with the best of them; he can slag his foes without a flinch, call the modern Democratic Party a tribe of socialists, Marxists, and communists, and disparage Black Lives Matter demonstrators as criminals. But mentions of Hunter Biden’s errant laptop seemed to land with a thud, and members of the audience seemed to go numb when “Crooked Hillary” Clinton came up in remarks that seemed like a time capsule from six years ago. His boasts about being called “your excellency” now just seem sad.

Trump has a rich reservoir of material to mine, to be sure. If you strip away his crude mannerism and crash rhetoric, his agenda as President actually gave conservatives a whole lot of the wishlist that’s been incomplete since the Reagan era. Trump smartly picked up on the public’s latent—and then not-so-latent—discontent with the border criss, the economic disparities incumbent with globalization, the rampant drug addiction crisis in this country. In turn, he reshaped the modern GOP to fit his needs.

On this new jaunt to New Hampshire, he used a more aggressive pivot to parents’ rights and education—including, unfortunately, a lot of talk about school sports and trans kids—but it was lost amid so much noise.

Ex-Presidents leave office with some truly unique stories, and Trump is no exception. On Saturday, amid a salvage yard of anti-trans exclusionary ideas and the direct election of school principals by anti-woke parents, Trump told the tale of landing in another country and being shocked that Air Force One had to dim its lights and draw the shades for security precautions. He talked about his negotiating sessions with the Taliban and the five telephone operators who stood by to help him place calls. Corporate clients might pay top dollar to hear such anecdotes on the lecture circuit. The members of The Presidents Club command six-figures for an afternoon in a convention center, and Trump’s time in D.C. is certainly ripe for storytime.

Which, if you listen carefully to the activists in the audience at Republican events in recent years—and especially after Jan. 6, 2021—is where many in the party would prefer Trump spend his days. To a tee, they all praise what Trump was able to accomplish but aren’t exactly eager to rush back into the late-night tweets, the performative trolling of anyone not wrapped in a Trump fleece, or the erratic policymaking by hunch. They’re objectively good anecdotes, even if it’s unclear how any of them help convince voters Trump should again be given the nuclear codes.

“I liked President Trump’s policies,” Michael Loftus tells me as we were waiting in the school hallway for Trump to start his speech. “But he’s so divisive,” the 67-year-old retiree from Newport continues. “Going forward, we need someone who is not so controversial.”

That, no matter how much sandpaper Trump brings to his new workshop, will never be the case. Which is why Sen. Lindsey Graham, appearing with Trump in South Carolina, took direct aim at that criticism: “How many times have you heard, ‘We like Trump policies but we want somebody new’? There are no Trump policies without Donald Trump.”

There may be no Republican Party, either.

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