#that are about to get destroyed in spring 2024

[luc3ks]

hey girl I mean he I mean she I mean they

[riamaple]

Life on Your Line (Ch. 19)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x f!Reader

Summary: Cursed to sacrifice your life to save another, you were never able to connect with others, always meant to drift before you could belong. Death was all you knew. Then, one day in Brooklyn, you saved a young man, and for some reason, you kept seeing him again. And again. And again. No matter where you went, across decades, you always found your way back to him.

He was forced to live to destroy, you were forced to die to save—bound together in ways neither of you could understand.

Warnings: Angst (with an eventual happy ending). Death and Dying. Self-Sacrifice (Immortality / Resurrection). Canon-Typical Violence / Description of Wounds. Suicidal Thoughts. Implications and References to Child Death, Suicide, Self-Destructive Behavior / Self-Harm.

< PREVIOUS CHAPTER

Word Count: 4.7k

CHAPTER 19: September 20, 2024

I escaped HYDRA 3 months ago today.

It took a while but I found a quiet place in Bucharest. It’s a small apartment. The heater barely works and the walls are thin so I have to be quiet. It’s not a problem for me. There was a broken cabinet and a loose tile in the kitchen, but I already fixed them. I remember that I used to fix things. Tables, chairs, and couch legs. I don’t know if that was me doing it for missions, or the man I was before HYDRA. Either way, I think I can make this place work. It doesn’t feel like home, but it doesn’t feel like a mission either. That’s new.

I think my father taught me to fix things. I can’t remember his face, but I can now feel his hand patting my shoulder. Things are coming back to me, so I think I can remember his and my mother’s face one day. I know I had sisters. I read that I had siblings but I don’t remember ever having a brother. I think I found myself a brother in Steve.

Being part of the world is strange. I still watch people and look for exits like it’s normal, but the actual normal things confuse me. Ordering food, catching a cab, asking for what I want. I’m not used to it. I always did everything with a target in mind. Undercover. Now I’m just me. Whoever that is.

Too many choices, but I think this is what living is.

I’m trying to live. I’m trying for her.

I don’t know where she is, but I hope she’s safe. She gave me my life back, even if I don’t know what it means to have one.

I miss her. 

Asking for what I want is still strange, but I know I want to know who she is. She died too many times for me. I want to see her without having to worry about losing her. I want to know what she dreams about or is afraid of. I want to protect her when she can’t defend herself.

I want her.

I just want her.

James stopped writing, the pencil in his hand unmoving as he stared at the page. His handwriting wasn’t the neatest—he had to get used to writing again—but it was still his words on paper.

Would you be proud of him? Journaling and writing down his life, no matter how dull it was, because it meant he was living it. Building something out of a broken place—trying to make it his home. Learning how to feel again—not just survive or follow orders, but live.

Or would you see right through him—how he flinched at loud noises and slept with his back to the wall? He didn’t know how you’d feel, but he hoped you’d at least see he was trying.

Being a person was hard.

With a sigh, James closed his journal and set it beside the mattress on the floor. The springs beneath him creaked as he stood, rolling his shoulders to ease the tension that had settled in his back. The sky outside was still dark, but the first hints of sunrise were beginning to seep through the windows.

He stepped to his kitchen counter and grabbed the folded newspaper and the old roll of tape he picked up from a corner shop. The glass panes were too bare, open, and vulnerable, and he couldn’t have that yet.

James began to press the newspapers against the window, sealing the edges with strips of worn, crinkling tape. Nothing was perfectly aligned or smooth, but it did the job. One page after another, until the light couldn’t spill in completely, and no one could see the life inside.

This life was his, and only his.

<><><>

The bookstore was quiet.

It was Friday morning, meaning that Cherry Nook wouldn’t get busy at least until mid-afternoon when school would end and people get off work. The store felt still, untouched by the usual hum of customers, while the sunlight filtered through the front windows. The scent of paper lingered in the air as always, and only the sound of Mandy’s fingers tapping across the keyboard broke the silence. She was sitting at the front desk, replying to emails she’d procrastinated on, and new ones that were meant for you specifically.

Hi Mrs. Morcos, Thank you for reaching out to Cherry Nook! We’d be happy to host your 3rd graders in November. Avery and I love to work with young readers and

She paused, realizing the mistake she had made. With a sigh, she moved her cursor to change the error and silently chastised herself for forgetting something so simple.

Hi Mrs. Morcos, Thank you for reaching out to Cherry Nook! We’d be happy to host your 3rd graders in November. Nicole and I love to work with young readers and always enjoy creating a fun, welcoming space for them to explore stories. Let us know what date you’re thinking of and any specific activities you’d like us to include. We can tailor the visit to fit your class’s needs, and we also offer story time and scavenger hunts. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Warmly, Mandy Lee, Cherry Nook Bookstore

There were too many names to remember.

Avery was what Mandy called you, as it was the name you carried when she found you five years ago, when you tried to pretend you didn’t save her life. It took her weeks to find out that you had changed your name between your lives to avoid suspicion. Out of curiosity, she asked you what you went by when you saved her.

Olivia. It was such a pretty name, but also one you had to erase the moment you moved to Brooklyn. You became Avery and managed to hold onto that name much longer than you expected.

But then, over a year ago, you were shot in the chest saving a college student. It happened near midnight, in front of a fraternity house, and a small party of college students witnessed your death, shocking them into sobriety before calling for the authorities. But, at one point, they all had looked away at the same time, and turned to see that your body was gone.

No blood splatters were spotted. The bullet lodged in your chest was gone. The suspect had already run away. 

The police came and didn’t believe any of the students, blaming their drunkenness on creating ridiculous stories, and warned them of their actions.

But still, you woke up a month later, unable to breathe properly for hours before deciding you had to change your name again.

On paper, you were Nicole, but if anyone asked why Mandy called you Avery, you’d claim it was your middle name. It wasn’t an unusual thing—many people preferred to go by their middle name, rather than their first. 

James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes was a prime example of that.

Thankfully, no student ever came into your store and found you…or maybe, they had come in and still never noticed you. Your curse did work in mysterious ways, and made it so that Bucky and Mandy were still the only ones who recognized you.

But still, there were too many names to remember, and now, Mandy had to add Rose to the list.

She blinked and sat up, realizing that she had been staring at the back of the store, half-expecting to see you walking out of the back room with a smile. 

Even after five years, it wasn’t easy to see you missing, and act like everything was fine.

Sighing, Mandy turned around and sent the message, then clicked through the page to make sure all emails had been addressed. As she went to lean back in her chair, the front door opened. She looked up, and her furrowed eyebrows softened at Bucky walking in with a small paper bag. He looked exhausted—weary around the eyes as he made his way to the front desk.

She sat back up, exiting out of her tab before turning in her seat to face him. “Hi, Bucky. How are you?”

“I’m alright,” he said while putting the bag on the desk, then glanced around. “How about you? Everything okay here?”

Her eyes slightly widened as a smile crept onto her face, entirely caught off guard by his question. It just hit her that for the first time, Mandy had someone else who knew about your curse—who knew you had just endured a terrible death and vanished from the world. So, while the question was simple, it landed deeper than expected, making her feel seen in a way she never realized she needed.

“Everything’s good,” she replied gently. “I’ve always been able to handle the store when Avery goes away. Nothing’s different this time.” Then she glanced at the paper bag. “What’s this?”

“There’s this donut shop I usually stop by, and the owner gave me free donut holes today. Figured you’d want some.”

“Shit, man, I can’t say no to that.”

Bucky lightly chuckled as he nudged the bag towards her, watching her happily plop a donut hole into her mouth. Then he looked around again, but more attentively this time, and something in him shifted. It was as if he was checking to see if anyone was around, and once confirming that there was no one, his posture stiffened.

Mandy tilted her head to the side, swallowing the treat before asking, “You alright?”

“Yeah. I just had something to ask you today,” he said softly, almost like he was sharing a secret. “Do you have any information on Rose’s curse?”

She blinked at him. “...What?”

“Information. Research. Anything about her curse?”

She continued to stare, feeling her guts slowly twist. “Why?”

He hesitated, but met her gaze firmly. “I’m trying to figure out how to end it.”

Somehow, the quiet store became quieter. It was as if time went still within the room—every shelf and paperback frozen from hearing Bucky’s words. The paper bag crinkled when Mandy set it down, her wide eyes locked onto him as her chest began to feel heavy.

“You… What?” she breathed.

Bucky took a slow breath. “The curse. I’m trying to figure out how to stop it.”

But before he could say more, Mandy cut him off—not harshly, but with a tired, defeated shake of her head.

“Don’t bother,” she said quietly.

Surprise flickered across his face. He blinked, genuinely taken aback. “What? Why?”

“Because there’s no way to break it,” she replied, her voice steady—but not cold. 

“Well, I’m sure there’s—”

“No.” Her voice sharpened just slightly. “There isn’t a way.”

He frowned, crossing his arms. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because Avery already tried. She tried to search for a solution herself, but she never found anything.”

“But that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist,” he said quickly, stubborn, almost pleading. “Maybe she just hadn’t found it yet. Maybe we haven’t looked in the right place.”

“Well, she did look, Bucky. In every possible place, she looked. Every myth, story, fairytale—she looked.”

“But she—”

“Do you think you’re the first person who’s tried to save her?” she asked suddenly, not out of condescension, but something closer to tired honesty. “She wanted to save herself, so she researched the hell out of her curse. And…she didn’t find anything.”

Bucky’s chest tightened. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look. We could try for her, you know?”

And in Mandy’s eyes, he noticed something shift before she looked down, her lips parting like she wanted to say something. But she instead closed her mouth and stared at her hands.

Then, she exhaled, long and deep as she looked up at him again. “I did.”

He paused, uncrossing his arms and leaning against the front desk, his expression softening at her reply. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was like you—tired of seeing her hurt because of this stupid curse. So I did the same thing. Dug into any strange events and stories of people who claimed to have experienced something weird with death. Read a lot of folklore, especially now that the gods we read about exist. It just seemed more possible that there would be an answer now. But…” Mandy glanced away. “Avery found out what I was doing and told me to stop.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, she already tried, and…she got tired of believing that a solution even exists now.” 

Mandy then leaned back in her seat, her gaze drifting towards the windows as if she could see her memories playing in front of her. “She told me that it was better to let it go. I wanted to keep looking into it, but she said it wouldn’t change anything. I think she’s been disappointed too many times by herself, the world, the curse… It’s like…every time she thinks there’s a little bit of hope, it slips right through her fingers. So, she’s tired of even trying to hold onto something now.”

She looked away from the glass, meeting Bucky’s eyes instead to see a quiet sense of understanding. “That’s why she stopped looking for an answer. The constant chase for it was breaking her. So…she told me to stop looking, and I know she’ll tell you not to start looking.”

Bucky slightly grimaced before shaking his head. “But I can’t not do anything.”

“She’s gonna ask you not to.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Bucky—”

“I’ve watched her die too many times.”

Mandy stopped speaking, lips going ajar as he continued with a quiet voice. “I know you had to watch her die too, and that it was terrible. But, Mandy…I’ve watched it more than anyone. Watched her take on kinds of pain that a regular person couldn’t even imagine. I can’t accept that this is how it has to be—that she has to keep dying because there’s no escape. There has to be something. A weakness, a flaw, a mistake—anything in her curse that could let us end it.”

Bucky stood up straight, his eyes burning with determination and fists tightening by his sides. “Finding a way to end it… I owe her that much.”

Words got caught in Mandy’s throat as her body shrank into itself with uncertainty. She wanted to believe in the fire in his frost-blue eyes, but the memories of your exhaustion and sadness ran through her head, reminding her of the storm that raged around you for too long before you decided to let it consume you. It was painful to see that you had given up, but it was what you wanted, and she wanted to respect that.

So she sat up and let out a breath, mentally preparing herself to argue with Bucky once more on why it was better to leave it alone than to look for a cure. But then the front door opened, and both of them looked to see who walked in.

Mandy’s eyes shot open while Bucky’s lips curled into a faint smile.

“Took you long enough,” he quickly teased.

Sam lightly laughed as he approached the front desk. “Hey, cool it. I had family business to take care of when you called. We were gone on a mission, so I wanted to catch up with my nephews.”

“Holy fuck.”

The men turned to Mandy, who suddenly blushed at realizing what she had just whispered. 

Sam grinned and extended his hand. “Hi. You’re Mandy, right?”

She quickly stood up and shook his hand. “Yes, and you’re…Captain America. Holy shit, you’re in our store.”

He laughed again. “I am, but Sam’s also fine.”

She pulled away, though clearly still in awe, and cleared her throat. “Uh, right. I’m sorry. So…” she then glanced at Bucky with slight suspicion, “care to explain what Sam is doing here?”

The men glanced at each other before Bucky let out a small breath. “I told Sam about Rose, and he said he’s gonna help with finding an answer.”

“You…” Her breath hitched before she shook her head. “You told him?”

“I just thought—”

“Avery kept her identity a secret for a reason, and you just went and told Captain America?”

Clearing his throat, Sam raised his hand a bit awkwardly. “Uh, again, Sam’s fine.”

“Right. Sorry. But—” She crossed her arms with a frown, not necessarily out of anger, but rather disappointment. “Bucky, Avery fought to keep her life a secret. It’s— It’s the one thing she’s been able to protect this whole time, and you told Sam?”

“I wanted help with finding a way to break Rose’s curse,” Bucky explained. “I know she didn’t go around telling everybody who she is, but you two can trust Sam.”

“And…to be fair,” Sam cut in with a small grin—one that felt warm enough to ease the tension within the room, “I already knew about Rose—Avery—before Bucky called me for help.”

Mandy blinked. “You did?”

“Oh yeah. I saw that locket of his a few weeks ago and had to ask. All Bucky told me at the time was that it was a girl he lost. But honestly? I never expected that he would tell me more about her, it’d turn out that she’s some kind of semi-immortal, rad-as-hell superhero.”

There was something about Sam’s description of you—a superhero of all things—that made Mandy’s chest tight, but not in a bad way. Seeing someone else who viewed you as a hero rather than a sacrifice—not someone meant to be thrown away—sent a gentle wave through her body. Her mouth opened briefly, wanting to reply but unable to. As his words settled in her, her gaze flickered down to the floor, remembering the way you carried yourself every day.

You were strong, but also noticeably exhausted from how the world shoved you around like nothing. You always acted like you were okay—that you were used to the treatment now, but it was clearly a lie that you tried to believe in.

Mandy didn’t want to see you suffer anymore. So even though you told her to stop looking for an answer…

She sighed, dropping her arms to her sides as she spoke more softly, “Avery kept her life a secret for decades. Even when the strangest things became part of our lives, like gods and aliens being real, she still kept quiet for so many reasons. She told me before that one of her biggest worries is that some terrible asshole would find out about her curse. Experiment on her and try to use her, you know?”

Bucky grimaced. “I understand that.”

Mandy bit her lips and gripped the bottom edge of her shirt. “But also…she kept her life a secret because…no matter how many people she’s saved, she can’t feel proud of her curse. So, I guess, there’s a part of me that knew that keeping her a secret would keep her safe and well. But…there’s another part that knows it’s not enough to make her happy.” 

Then, she tilted her head up, facing the two with a long breath. “I want her to be happy. I really do…”

“Me too,” Bucky replied with softened eyes. “I know Rose has been careful with her curse, and she’s been strong for that. But…she doesn’t have to be strong by herself anymore. Her curse forces her to save someone. Maybe we can choose to save her instead.”

“But I tried, Bucky,” she whispered, a small hiccup almost escaping her throat. “I really did. I’ve read books, articles, folklores, forums—fucking Reddit too, especially since it wasn’t around when Avery looked. I spent months hoping something out there would make sense of this, and I didn’t find anything.”

“But we could,” Sam said, stepping forward. “It sounds like you’ve done a lot to figure it out. We can help now too. And it’s different with us—we have connections with scientists, sorcerers, people from outer space. If not us, then someone we know gotta know something.”

Bucky nodded as his voice softened. “Did you ever take notes?”

A small, damp laugh left her lips. “Of course I did. I love note-taking.”

Sam chuckled. “Can’t relate.”

At that, Mandy lightly laughed, wiping at her eyes before the single drop of tear fell. “I took notes on everything I looked into. Tried to treat it like how I would with worldbuilding for my stories—find any weird errors and figure out how the world navigated it.”

“Can you share with us what you found?” Sam gently asked.

Quickly, her smile faded as her body stiffened. With a sharp breath, she shook her head. “No.”

Bucky’s breath hitched. “Mandy—”

“I said no,” she repeated, louder but not harshly. “At least, not without telling her.”

Both men stared at her while she sighed, gripping the edge of the desk nervously. “I’ll only share with you what I found if you have Avery’s permission. When she comes back, you can ask her. This is something you can’t do behind her back.”

Sam shifted on his feet, crossing his arms. “We get that, but what if she says no?”

“Then it’s a no.”

Bucky’s jaw tensed. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“But…” Sam frowned, thinking carefully. “What if she says no because she’s afraid? People say no all the time when they’ve been hurt too long. It doesn’t always mean they want to.”

Mandy winced, knowing the truth behind his words, but stood up tall. “It’s still a no. Look, I want her curse to end too. I want it more than anything. I want her to live. To stop hurting all the time. But, whether she’s afraid, or tired, or just over it, if she says no, it’s a no. After everything she’s been through, we have to respect her decision. I…I want to help. I want you both to help, but doing it without her knowing… That’ll break her trust. And I— No.”

The room shifted when she turned to fully face Bucky with a pleading look. “You, of all people, can’t break her trust. Everything you two went through—all of that will go out the window if you try to control her life. You can try to convince her—get her to change her mind. But if you really care about her, then you don’t do anything if she still says no. Let her choose. That’s the one thing the curse never took from her.”

Stunned, Bucky opened his mouth only to close it again, feeling something deep in his chest split.

Not from anger, but rather from grief.

The trust between you and him had been feeling fragile lately, and he was horrified by how easily it could all fall apart. After everything you’d survived together, tampering with your curse was what might undo it. One wrong word—one step too far—and the thing you’d both held onto for so long could shatter in his hands.

And he couldn’t let that happen.

As his shoulders slumped, Bucky slowly exhaled and nodded. “Okay.”

The silence that followed was still, but it wasn’t empty. Mandy glanced between the two of them, watching Sam’s expression soften at Bucky’s behavior—the way he agreed not out of defeat, but out of pure love for you. His eyes slightly darkened with something fierce and tender altogether, amazed to see Bucky willing to step back to let you choose, despite carrying so much desire to save your life. Mandy noticed it too, and her lower lip slightly trembled, feeling so overwhelmed to see the man who you swore to protect wanting to do the same for you so desperately.

You were so loved by him.

Maybe he would be enough to change your mind.

Mandy let out a breath and gave him a nod back.

<><><>

James hadn’t realized for months that he was even allowed to have favorites, but the first time he was enveloped by the smell of fresh bread, he knew it was possible. He had stumbled into a bakery in the morning, and the warm scent filled his lungs like it was giving him a hug from the inside. And just like that, he knew he liked it— No. He loved it, and for the first time in too long, he felt that it was okay that he had something ordinary to love. 

He intended to buy a loaf of bread and enjoy it for lunch, but couldn’t help but notice how the owner, an older woman with flour on her apron, was fidgeting with a broken cabinet before she made her way to a new customer. Rather than asking for bread, James instinctively asked if she wanted her furniture fixed, as if the man he was before the war was speaking for him.

She said yes in a heartbeat, telling him to come back later in the day, and offered to exchange bread for his service.

Seemed like a lovely deal to him.

The streetlamps shone onto the cobblestone streets, and James, who walked quietly with his gloved hands in his coat pockets and two loaves of fresh baguette under an arm. He had expected a small loaf, but after he managed to mend the splintering frames and squeaky hinges of the cabinet, the owner was so excited that she wouldn’t let him leave unless he took two giant loaves, and then forced him to promise to return so that she could give him more free bread.

It felt good to help someone. It was simple, kind, and…human.

When the owner had handed him the food, James realized that he had done something good. There were no weapons, gore, or orders involved whatsoever. It was just him and his gloved hands, tapping into a part of himself he didn’t know he’d ever get back—the one who used to run around with his father, eager to help him fix up anything his neighbors needed.

His feet shuffled against the cobblestones as he let himself drift through the town’s streets, passing by restaurants and stores that were closing or had already closed. A few people moved around him—a man getting onto his bicycle, a mother picking up her child who was getting sleepy, a shopkeeper locking his store.

Then, James heard it.

His feet came to a stop around a corner, and he spotted a street musician playing a slow, beautiful melody on his violin. The song was gentle, sweetening the town as the sun disappeared for the night.

James was about to turn away to make it home when a couple, who had been closer to the violinist and admiring the performance, suddenly laughed at each other before embracing one another. They then moved in a quiet circle, swaying slowly as they stared into the eyes of their partner. They didn’t speak, nor did they perform. They just held each other, like they had all the time in the world.

Something ached in James’s chest. The feeling was unsteady, but also incredibly warm. He just couldn’t take his eyes off them.

And…slowly…his mind tapped into his imagination.

And he saw you in his arms. Your fingers curled against his back while one hand was in his, and you let him guide your steps. And he could just look at you in the softest of lights, taking it all in while music played in the background.

You both wouldn’t have to run. You both wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

You both could just dance, letting it end a night on a good note before you both went to bed together.

For the first time in months, James smiled. It wasn’t small or fake—it was a real, gentle smile born from yearning. From a hope that maybe, someday, life with you could be more than just a dream. It could happen, and fill his mind with wonderful memories. 

Without realizing it, James was touching his chest, feeling your locket through his shirt, before he let out a quiet breath and walked away. He was going back home—to his small apartment with newspaper windows and crumbly drywall—but he still carried that image of you with him.

Dancing together, realizing just how much you both loved each other.

NEXT CHAPTER >

Taglist! @a-century-of-sass @clemicious @fallenxjas @paryl @frog-fans-unite @sebastians-love @buckvoidsyy @nj01 @avengersgirllorianna @western-nightss @chonkybonky @weasleyswheezeys @balatroaddict @herejustforbuckybarnes @redtaytan @lilfuturescars @glossy01 @starstruckfirecat @moon-shampoo @buckysdoll1940 @rainbowpr1sm @phoenix666stuff @hangingmooncloud @ajanauia @maribirdsteele @intothesoul

Thanks for reading :)

[reiniesainyo]

IN BETWEEN. charlie bushnell x reader – 02

02 | WELCOME TO NY previous | next | masterfile

SYNPOSIS. when a girl's co-star is good to her and now she wants it more than everything in between. (smau)

A/N. wow actual content who knew! i give some tidbits about rina and lukes dynamic as well for funsies (takes place at the start of the season premiere to probably episode 4-5 ish)

liked by iamcharliebushnell, walker.scobell, and 322,778 others thelnarchive best people to star in my first show with actually

walker.scobell pov: you at the end of this sentence 🤓👆 ↳ thelnarchive that** ↳ leahsavajeffries destroyed him with one word that's insane

user1 she's so gorgeous it's killing me

user2 her photo dumps are so cute it's so RAHHHHH ↳ user3 thank you yn for keeping us fed

iamcharliebushnell no photo creds? thats crazy...... ↳ thelnarchive 📸: charlie bushnell  ↳ iamcharliebushnell thank you 😁

user4 she's so pretty, i would go to hell and back for her. she could be sent to the underworld and i would go and traverse the entire underworld for her and bring her back, have hades let me walk out with her only if i don't turn my back and bet you baby i'm no orpheus because you're coming home ↳ user5 this is so real but also what the fuck

dior.n.goodjohn PRETTIEST IN CAMP HALFBLOOD ↳ thelnarchive NO YOU!

iamcharliebushnell for everyone's information, she yapped for like the 2 hour makeup and hair session ↳ thelnarchive you weren't interested in the cultural impact of feminist retellings of mythology? 😔 ↳ iamcharliebushnell i didn't say i didn't listen to every bit

user6 yn ln being a yapper and charlie being a listener was not in my 2024 bingo card but it is pleasantly accepted ↳ user7 the chemistry is kind of crazy

bellie 💋 @G1LLMOREGRLS theres like less than 3 minutes of luke and rina screen time but the way they look at each other is insane. ik luke visiting rina before leaving was implied and like them him contacting her even after the attempt too i still want to see some because the potential angst is so insane 🗨 19 comments 🔁 129 retweets ❤️ 707 likes

user1 "i lost luke three times in my life." if they remove this it better be for something even more heartbreaking

user2 honestly truth i'm manifesting so hard to see some of their iris messages like i can just imagine it ↳ G1LLMOREGRLS oh my fucking god that's so true, i want to see luke begging her to come with him and then her begging him to change his mind

user3 i want the new seasons to come sooner because i trust in rick's capability to give us what we want 💳💳💳 ↳ user4 i trust in the editor's to make what rick gives us even better brah ↳ user5 what if i said lascotellan to a hozier song

user6 the show ate with levitating as the replacement for poker face in e6 so i'm expecting a tragic song for their scenes too ↳ G1LLMOREGRLS dare i say we get a scene of luke regretting his actions juxtaposed with a scene of him and rina arguing with her telling him to silver springs by fleetwood mac ↳ user6 LUKE AND RINA ARGUING OVER HIS ACTIONS TO SILVER SPRINGS. YOU'RE A FUCKING GENIUS OOMF ↳ G1LLMOREGRLS luke thinking about her constantly when he thinks abt why he shouldn't have done it is so "you'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you"????

user7 YOU'RE SO CORRECT FOR THIS ‼️‼️ i'm so insane over them, tragic greek couple of the century

user8 i fear no one will ever beat rina saying she wanted to go to the underworld to get him back but deciding not to and letting him repent in elysium or try for reincarnation

liked by thelnarchives, dior.n.goodjohn, and 350,232 others iamcharliebushnell hanging out with the muse

thelnarchives you call me "the muse" so often i'm starting to think you don't know my first name anymore.... 🤨🤨🤨 ↳ iamcharliebushnell 😔 i would never do that to you muse ↳ thelnarchives i'm gonna start calling you traitor. ↳ user1 wat why would she call him traitor ↳ user2 oh you sweet summer child

user3 picture 3 is so cute i love her so much !!! and charlie's there too i guess

dior.n.goodjohn why are you hanging out with MY girlfriend ↳ iamcharliebushnell you snooze you lose :/

walker.scobell you owe me like 2 meals from our past bets and you keep saying your busy but obviously you're not??? ↳ iamcharliebushnell hanging out with the muse is a trip priority, man 🤷

user4 i'm obsessed with how charlie calls her muse they're so i want to Bite them. ↳ user5 he ate with the pet name

user6 that's actually me in the second photo guys

user7 WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT HER HAND PLACEMENT IN THE THIRD PHOTO??? ↳ user8 girlie's just scratching her own cat

[celticcrossanon]

BRF Reading - 21st of December, 2024

This is speculation only

Cards drawn on the 21st of December, 2024

Question: Is Queen Camilla envious and/or jealous of Princess Catherine?

Interpretation: Yes. Kind of. Queen Camilla resents anyone who gets attention and praise from the public that she (Queen Camilla) sees as attention and praise that should be going to herself.

I'm going to start this reading with the underlying energy, because everything in the reading springs from that.

Underlying Energy: The Empress in reverse

The Empress is the card for Queen Camilla in her role as queen. It is also a card that represents beauty, abundance, fertility, charm, creativity, the mother, the divine feminine etc. In represents the planet Venus, the planet of love, female beauty, charm, attractiveness, generosity etc.

Here, the Empress is in reverse. This tells me that Queen Camilla is feeling overshadowed and /or she is acting out of her shadow side. No one is praising her looks, her charm, her generosity, her way with children etc (apart from obvious PR pieces) and she is upset about it. The energy from this card is one of 'I am The Queen, I expect to be praised to the skies' and of someone being very, very upset that this is not happening and that being The Queen has not magically erased her past from people's memories or changed how they see her. Along with this feeling of outrage at not getting the praise and attention that she thinks she deserves, there is a nasty, sulky, spiteful energy that is hidden behind a layer of 'being nice', and that energy is directed at people that Queen Camilla thinks are getting the praise and attention that she herself deserves.

On top of this energy and powered by this energy is the reading itself, as follows:

Card One: The Ten of Swords

This is a card of despair, betrayal, hitting rock bottom, and the energy from this card is a very strong energy of betrayal. Queen Camilla is feeling betrayed. She expected something different from when she was queen, and whatever it was that she expected, she is not getting it. She is disappointed and upset and feels betrayed - the energy is of someone who felt they were promised a lot of things that have not been delivered (It's almost as though she thought she could walk straight into the place that Her Late Majesty left vacant when she died, and just give it a few little tweaks so it fit her perfectly).

Fair enough, a lot of us have had the experience of wanting something and working for it and then when we get it, finding out that it is not what we imagined and in fact it was not worth the effort we put into gaining it.

However, there is a nasty, 'scorched earth' energy to this card as well as the betrayal energy. It feels like that Queen Camilla is reacting to her sense of betrayal by lashing out and cutting down anyone that she sees has having more than her, i.e. as 'taking' what is 'rightfully' hers as Queen (i.e. all the attention, all the praise, all the flattery and grovelling etc). There are many other ways to deal with a sense of betrayal, but it appears that this is the way that Queen Camilla has chosen to deal with it - basically to throw a tantrum and hit out at everyone around her because what she has is not what she thought it would be like.

Card Two: The King of Swords in Reverse

This is a continuation of the nasty energy I felt in the Ten of Swords

The King of Swords in reverse represents being a dictator, being irrational, being cold and inhumane, someone who is controlling, oppressive, ruthless and dishonest.

This card tells me that Queen Camilla is out to destroy people that she thinks are taking what belongs to her. Queen Camilla is being manipulative, controlling, cold, and ruthless in her attempts to regain what she thinks should go to her because she is Queen. She is being dishonest in what she is saying and doing. The aim seems to be to tear the other person down so then she can shine brighter and have all the attention and admiration that is going to that other person (or so Queen Camilla thinks). It won't work - the card in reverse tells me that this is not going to work - but Queen Camilla can not see that. She thinks that if she gets rid of the other person by ruining their reputation etc, then all the attention that the other person gets will automatically go to her.

This is giving me Princess Diana marriage flashbacks. I think that Camilla behaved in a similar way then, and what that behaviour got her was the place of the most hated woman in the UK, but for some reason she thinks that it will work this time around. There is very much an energy of repeating the past here, of doing things that didn't work in the past but somehow expecting them to work now).

Card Three: The Three of Cups in reverse

This is what Queen Camilla wants and is not getting.

The Three of Cups is a card of friendship, gatherings, community, celebrations, being a part of the festivities, having people glad that you showed up, having a warm welcome at events, being an integral part of the community, etc. It's about celebrating the good times together in an atmosphere of joy, getting a success of some sorts (graduation, work promotion, finishing a project etc) and throwing a party to share your joy with others. In this deck it is also my card for weddings, as the picture shown on it is a wedding.

This is what Camilla wanted - a big wedding, a big celebration, all the attention focused on her, for everyone to look at her when she goes into a room, to be the centre of events, the centre of attention, everyone overjoyed to have her at an event, etc.

It is not what she got.

The card is in the reverse. Instead of the big wedding, warm welcome, people delighted to see her where ever she went, being the centre of attention at events, what Queen Camilla got was more along the lines of what the Three of Cups in reverse represents: isolation, failure (nothing to celebrate), gossip, scandal, not being welcome, not being part of the community, getting little to no attention, and/or not having the time to have a social life because of your work commitments, and/or doing things to excess because you feel isolated and alone.

Queen Camilla expected that people would be far happier to see her than what they are, she expected all the scandal of her past to somehow vanish once she was queen, she wanted a big wedding (and turned the coronation into her second wedding imo), she expected every event to pivot around her and to be the centre of attention where ever she went, and she did not expect to have to work as much as she does or to have so little time for her private pursuits. What she got was something very different - more work, more expectations and making nice to people in social situations, continued gossip about her past, less time for her own pursuits, and less attention and praise than she wanted.

Conclusion

Queen Camilla expected to have a very different life as Queen - more time for her own pursuits, more praise and admiration, the scandals of her past to vanish, people to make her the centre of attention etc (I'm getting the impression that she expected the public to give her both what they gave to Her Late Majesty and what they gave to Princess Diana). When this did not happen, she felt betrayed. Instead of e.g. accepting what she had, or doing what she could to change the situation, she decided to lash out and destroy any other person that she saw as having the admiration, attention etc that 'rightfully' belonged to her.

So far, The Princess of Wales has been retired from the public eye this year and Queen Camilla has had the stage all to herself. In that time we have seen articles come out that actively put down The Princess of Wales to elevate Queen Camilla, indicating that Queen Camilla sees Princess Catherine as someone who has the attention, admiration etc that Queen Camilla thinks belongs to her. Once the Princess of Wales is back in her public life, if Queen Camilla continues this behaviour, then I would expect to see both covert and overt undermining of The Princess of Wales as well as using her to boost Queen Camilla's popularity and to present a public image of 'close friends'.

This may not happen. Queen Camilla may change her behaviour. However, if Queen Camilla continues along this path, especially with the King of Swords in reverse as as indicator of her behaviour, then I would expect to see malicious, underhanded, deceptive, back biting behaviour towards Princess Catherine as Queen Camilla tries to 'reclaim' what she sees as 'rightfully hers' in terms of the public reaction to the two women. This would include things like deliberately setting up the Princess of Wales to look bad, lying about incidents to make herself look better when talking to the press, giving the Princess of Wales the wrong information about things and then denying that she had done so, etc. It's going to be Camilla versus Diana all over again.

I hope this does not come to pass, but that depends on how Queen Camilla choses to act in the future - whether she decides to indulge her nasty streak or to rise above it and be a better person.

Edit: This is not a personal vendetta against Princess Catherine. It's how Queen Camilla seems to be reacting to anyone who gets attention or praise that Queen Camilla sees as belonging to her. If Princess Beatrice got the attention and praise, the spite and malice I feel would be directed as Princess Beatrice. If Princess Anne got the attention and praise, the spite and malice would be directed at her. It's not any attention and praise, either - the spite and malice is directed towards people who Queen Camilla sees as getting attention and praise that belong to her as the Queen (i.e. what she expects to be given to her because she is the Queen). She doesn't care about people getting other kids of praise and attention. She only cares about the praise and attention that she thinks belongs to her because she is the Queen. I hope that makes sense.

[dangermousie]

Sorry, still thinking about The White Olive Tree which is living in my head - I fully accept that the ending could be nothing but what it was but in my head I want to either write a 40k slow healing fic or, since I know I don’t write, rewatch Hidden Love to see Chen Zheyuan as a good guy who gets fluff and happiness.

But aside from that, I am thinking I haven’t seen a drama outside (pun) the old Taiwanese drama The Outsiders (sheltered rich girl rebellious poor boy fall in love, her fam disowns her he becomes a killer for the Triads as the only way to eat, they end up utterly destroyed by the darkness) which went so hard on the “their love was pure and true and it would have been better for both of them if they never met.” Maybe A Love to Kill kdrama?

All I know they don’t really make them much like this any more - fluff yes and overcoming adversity yes and yes gritty “we are cool and world sucks” stuff commissioned by Netflix and co. But not something that is delicate and tender and following two gentle people and yet such an utter slow thorough breakdown.

It’s old school in the best way which might explain why I love it. I am thinking of Taiwanese Silence and Japanese Taiyou No Uta and Korean Snow Queen - being good not really resulting in a happy ending. (The ending of Silence with Vic Chou’s character speaking into the camera about how terrified he is still stays with me - ooof.) I genuinely think this is one of the reasons this wasn’t a big hit - this sort of vibe is not one current audience see much of and not sure want much of. (Compare it to CZY’s own mega hit Hidden Love which I adore but which is very much on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of just world paradigm. His character has some tragedies in his background but they never take over the narrative and he ends up loved and happy. It is a much more comforting narrative.)

I think the sort of narrative Olive gives us - trauma stays and heroism sometimes is not enough - isn’t even that common in costume dramas any more (Eternal Brotherhood and Heroes 2024 gave it to us and both were small dramas for a reason - I cannot think of a big budget costume production with that theme in the last five years. LYF got close but ultimately chickened out.) And it is hugely uncommon in moderns. I don’t have any issue with that because everyone has different tastes and I am not one to mandate to others - but for someone who loves the Olive type narrative, it was like water in the desert. (And of course even old dramas or shows from most anywhere rarely dwell on trauma the way Olive did - not inspirational, not dark/cynical. And to give it to one’s male lead, and one in such a macho profession and one who is a bona fide hero, is freaking wild in how unusual it is.)

I mean, Olive stands out in its themes even from my other favorite modern cdramas. If we take a look at Lighter and Princess (another modern love story with a driven damaged ML and a ride or die FL who has been hurt herself but takes on his demons repeatedly) or Will Love In Spring (two differently damaged people discovering love with each other) or Go Ahead (damaged quasi adopted boys healing with help of found fam) - they all have happy endings with the mains so much better off than they started. Because the degree of damage is different and less, because the world is kinder and the environment less extreme. The FL of L&P would follow ML into hell if she had to but she didn’t have to, maybe just a little bit of the purgatory. He’s quite damaged (especially after jail) but it’s the kind of damage that can be slowly healed with love and support, it doesn’t need diagnosis and meds. Olive could have perhaps gone that way before Zan went back for the last time but as is…

Anyway, I am not sure I even have a point other than I love this drama so so so so much. I never thought anything would displace the perfection that is Lighter and Princess from my first place as a modern cdrama but here we are…

PS still shocked how hard Olive went. I was so sure they’d never go as hard as the novel. And then they chopped off his fingers.

[mariacallous]

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched—fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. “The government said to me, ‘We need you to make drones,’ ” Yakovenko told me. “So I said to my guys, ‘You have four hours to make up your minds. Leave or stay—and, if you stay, promise me that you’ll do your best to help our military.’ ”

Yakovenko’s task was to set up factories to mass-produce unmanned vehicles, designed to overwhelm whatever Russia sent across the border. When I visited his fab, as the plants are called, more than a hundred employees, many of them women, were working intently in a setting that seemed more college campus than munitions factory. With techno music humming in the background, they tended to 3-D printers, assembled carbon-fibre components, carried out flight simulations, adjusted video cameras and radio transmitters. “It’s quite meditative,” one of the women told me.

The TAF fabs are part of a constellation of similar facilities, hidden in basements, warehouses, and old factories, which have helped the Ukrainians battle the Russian Army to a stalemate. The one that I visited makes about a thousand drones a day. They are sophisticated and lethal and, above all, cheap, produced for about five hundred dollars apiece. Some are used for surveillance and some to ferry supplies, but most of them, laden with explosives and directed by an operator through a video screen, are crashed directly into their targets. One of Yakovenko’s managers showed me a fuzzy black-and-white video, taken in April, of a night operation behind enemy lines. Onscreen, a drone equipped with a thermal camera dived toward a TOS-1 rocket launcher, and then the screen exploded in a white flash. Russia builds TOS-1 units for about five million dollars apiece. “One of our drones costs a tiny fraction of what it destroys,” the manager told me. “That’s our advantage.”

When the Russian Army rolled into Ukraine, it was equipped for a conflict from an earlier era: an old-fashioned land war prosecuted by tanks and heavy artillery. In response, Ukraine devised a futuristic take on hit-and-run guerrilla operations. Now when a Russian column tries to advance it is met by a swarm of buzzing bombs. Russia has suffered about a million casualties in its attempt to invade. Since early 2024, according to an estimate by Mykhailo Samus, a researcher in Kyiv, about eighty per cent of its losses in men and matériel have been inflicted by drones.

The most dramatic application of this asymmetric approach came in June, when a fleet of more than a hundred Ukrainian drones struck targets as far away as Siberia, destroying or damaging some twenty Russian warplanes. It was the most militarily significant attack on Russia since the Second World War. The Ukrainians released a taunting video, in which first-person views of the drones careering into the planes were set to a pulsing techno soundtrack. The videos were stamped “Failsafe,” a military term that suggests immunity to harm.

While the future of warfare is being invented in places like Ukraine, U.S. officials are looking on with a growing sense of urgency.

For decades, the American armed forces have relied on highly sophisticated, super-expensive weapons, like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, which take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce. (The country’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were not for a lack of technical prowess.) Since the end of the Cold War, these munitions have given the U.S. near-total dominance on land, sea, and air. But now the technological shifts that have stymied the Russian invasion of Ukraine are threatening to undermine America’s global military preëminence. David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official and a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, told me that the American way of war is no longer viable. “We are not moving fast enough,” he said.

Throughout history, technological advantages have altered the course of wars, sometimes suddenly. In the late nineteenth century, railways displaced horses as a way of moving and supplying armies, and the Prussians exploited them to overwhelm their French opponents. In the first Gulf War, the U.S. used precision-guided cruise missiles that could be steered into an office window from a thousand miles away. The Ukrainians argue that they represent a similar technological vanguard. “We are inventing a new way of war,” Valeriy Borovyk, the founder of First Contact, whose drones carried out the strike on the Russian warplanes, told me. “Any country can do what we are doing to a bigger country. Any country!”

America’s best approximation of Oleksandr Yakovenko is Palmer Luckey, who helped found the defense startup Anduril in 2017. Not long ago, he met me at the company’s headquarters, in Costa Mesa, California, amid an array of high-tech weapons: drones, missiles, pilotless planes. Anduril is housed in a cavernous building that once contained the Orange County offices of the Los Angeles Times, whose faded logo is still visible on the exterior walls. At thirty-two, Luckey embodies the stereotype of a cocky, gnomic tech mogul: shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops, a mullet and a soul patch. As we talked, he snacked from a bag of chocolate-chip cookies.

He wanted to show off his creations, autonomous weapons that he believes will upend many of the American military’s most cherished notions of strategy and defense. He walked over to a model of the Dive-XL, an unmanned submarine that can go a thousand miles without surfacing and is designed to be produced as quickly as an IKEA couch. “I can make one of these in a matter of days,” he said.

The U.S. military is accustomed to doing business with huge, entrenched players: companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman that employ tens of thousands of engineers and military veterans in a culture not unlike the one inside the Pentagon. Luckey, by contrast, built an early career in video games and virtual reality. At nineteen, working from his parents’ home, in Long Beach, he created a V.R. headset called Oculus, a technology that he promised would “transport us into worlds we cannot hope to experience in real life.” He sold the company for two billion dollars to Facebook, whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, brought him on to oversee the Oculus team. Their collaboration was brief. In 2016, following a controversy over a contribution that Luckey made to a pro-Trump group, Zuckerberg fired him. “I had a real chip on my shoulder,” Luckey said. “I wanted to prove that Oculus wasn’t a fluke.”

A few months later, Luckey met with Trae Stephens, a principal at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm led by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and libertarian political activist. Thiel had helped found Palantir, which was transforming the American defense establishment by integrating computer operations and simplifying tasks like tracking and destroying enemy targets. At Founders Fund, he and Stephens were searching for fledgling companies that could bring the breakthroughs of the tech world to the military.

Luckey told me that his central insight with Oculus was to distinguish himself from competitors by focussing less on the headset’s mechanism and more on its software. Unlike hardware, software could be easily replicated and regularly updated, improving it quickly and at little extra cost. For generations, the U.S. military had fielded fantastically complex systems that ran on software Silicon Valley regarded as substandard and overpriced. Luckey envisioned cheap, mass-produced weapons whose main value lay in their operating system—in their brains, not their brawn. He began working at the juncture of weaponry and artificial intelligence, to devise systems that could accumulate data and then act on it. With machines to do the fighting, humans could be kept far away from the battlefield. The goal, as he has said, was to “turn warfighters into technomancers.”

Trae Stephens joined Luckey and two additional partners to form Anduril, with seed money from Founders Fund and other investors, including one of J. D. Vance’s financial ventures. The company’s name was taken from “The Lord of the Rings,” in which Andúril, a reforged sword, stands for the renewal of the civilized world in the fight against darkness. Luckey saw his work as part of a civilizational conflict. “I wanted to take people out of the tech industry and put them to work in national security, which actually matters,” he said.

In the showroom, Luckey stopped before the Fury, a pilotless jet designed to operate at g-forces that could flatten a human pilot against her seat. To prepare the Fury for dogfights against piloted planes, Anduril’s engineers were feeding it maneuvers from the Air Force’s Top Gun school. “We’re teaching this plane all the ways to get in a position to kill the other guy and come home alive,” Luckey said. “But the cool thing is, it’s not human—right?”

Anduril has secured billions of dollars in defense contracts, as the Pentagon has been swept up in a wave of enthusiasm for unmanned systems. But many questions remain, including the fundamental one of whether such weapons work as well as Luckey says they do. Even with the Pentagon pouring cash into experiments, the vast majority of the budget still goes to the same kinds of programs that it has been pursuing for decades. A growing consensus of defense experts holds that the United States is dangerously unprepared for the conflicts it might face. In the past, the country’s opponents were likely to be terrorist groups or states with armies far smaller than ours. Now planners must contend with considerably different threats. On the one hand, there is the prospect of insurgents who can field swarms of armed drones. One the other, there is the rise of China—a “peer competitor,” which by some measures has surpassed the U.S. as a military force. There is no guarantee that we have the right matériel to prevail against either. “Shit,” Luckey said. “We’re like a gun store with no stock.”

During the Second World War and the decades after, the American armed forces devised technologies far more advanced than anything made in the private sector. “The military produced an astonishing amount of innovation,” Bill Greenwalt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me.

Facing an existential threat, the Pentagon adopted a free-form procurement process, with senior leaders often assigning several contractors to make prototypes for a single weapon and then giving a contract to the most successful contestant. “The generals threw money at good people, broke furniture, and picked winners,” Greenwalt said. This unconstrained methodology helped lead to the first reconnaissance satellites, the first integrated circuits, the first atomic weapon. “The important thing to remember about the Manhattan Project is that there were multiple pathways to success,” Greenwalt pointed out. “It was incredibly competitive.” In 1949, Admiral Hyman Rickover was assigned to oversee an effort to use the newly harnessed atomic energy to power a submarine—an idea that many observers considered fanciful. Five years later, the first nuclear submarine entered service.

Over time, though, the process became more regular and rules-bound. In 1960, President John F. Kennedy appointed a new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who had built his reputation by bringing organizational discipline to the Ford Motor Company. Under the system he helped implement, weapons were conceived not by industry but by the Pentagon, where planners were typically following five-year prospectuses drawn up by other Pentagon planners. It usually took years to design a new weapon—and only once the specifications were agreed upon did the Pentagon solicit input from defense companies and finally select a contractor to produce it. The new system was more orderly, but it was also less competitive and far less dynamic. “We stopped innovating,” Greenwalt said.

We also, to a significant extent, stopped producing. During the Second World War, the U.S. armed not only its own military but its allies’, too. American shipyards built some six thousand ships, including more than a hundred and fifty aircraft carriers. Automobile factories were converted to war production; General Motors built Sherman tanks, and Ford built B-24 Liberator bombers. In the closing stages of the war, Ford plants could turn out a B-24 every hour.

When the Cold War ended, America’s defense-industrial base shrivelled. Without persistent demand from the Pentagon, some factories closed, and others produced barely enough weapons to stay open. Skilled workers migrated to other jobs; those defense industries which still existed, like shipbuilding, were short tens of thousands of employees. As a result, American shipyards are now capable of completing only one new submarine per year.

In July, 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and his deputy, William Perry, gathered the C.E.O.s of major defense contractors for dinner at the Pentagon. Aspin and Perry told the executives that in a few years most of their companies would not exist. The end of the conflict with the Soviet Union meant that the defense budget would be cut, and only a handful of contractors would survive; the rest would either be forced to merge or be driven into bankruptcy. The meeting has become known in the defense business as “the last supper,” and its essential message proved prophetic: within a few years, the number of “prime” defense contractors shrank from more than fifty to five. The industry wasn’t happy, but the Pentagon was the only buyer, so there wasn’t much that anyone could do about it. “The last socialist systems in the world are in Cuba and the Pentagon,” a former Senate staff member who dealt with the armed forces told me.

The current procurement system favors highly sophisticated weapons, usually made in small numbers. The F-22, widely considered the world’s best stealth fighter, costs three hundred and fifty million dollars per plane. The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier costs thirteen billion and takes as long as a decade to build. A single Tomahawk cruise missile, used to attack ships or radar installations, costs about two million. (Last month, a U.S. submarine launched two dozen Tomahawks at Iran in a single night.) Earlier this year, when two F-18 fighter jets slid off the deck of the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea, some hundred and twenty million dollars’ worth of machinery sank to the ocean floor.

On top of that, many components of American weapons are outsourced to adversaries. In 2024, Govini, a software company hired by the Pentagon, traced supply chains for U.S. weapons and found that nearly forty-five thousand suppliers were based in China. Many produced essential parts, including semiconductors for the B-2 bomber, the Patriot air-defense missile, and the Ohio-class submarine, which carries nuclear missiles. “Of course, in the event of a conflict, the Chinese could cut us off,” Jeb Nadaner, a senior vice-president at Govini, told me.

The United States has even found it difficult to supply allies that are at war. When Russia launched its invasion, the Ukrainian military began requesting about five hundred Javelin antitank missiles a day. In the course of three months, the U.S. shipped over some seven thousand Javelins, about a third of its stockpile; at current production, it will take more than three years to replenish them. Likewise, the U.S. sent Ukraine a quarter of its Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The missiles had been out of production, and to build new ones the manufacturer had to call back retired engineers, some of them in their seventies. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national-security adviser, told me that the attenuated state of America’s defense-industrial base was one of the most intractable problems he faced. Fixing it would take years, he said: “It’s a generational project.”

The combination of limited production capacity and expensive weapons sometimes constrained the government’s options. In March, President Trump vowed that the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia that was menacing global shipping in the Red Sea, would be “completely annihilated.” The Navy and the Air Force launched more than eleven hundred strikes, at a cost of at least a billion dollars in the first month. The Houthis, who sometimes operated out of speedboats and skiffs, kept on harassing ships. They shot down several American MQ-9 Reaper drones—which cost thirty million dollars apiece—and fired on two U.S. carriers. After seven weeks of fighting, they agreed to stop attacking American vessels, and Trump called off the campaign. But the Houthi force remains largely intact, and has attacked ships from other countries. Even this brief engagement left senior Pentagon officers worried that they had dangerously depleted the country’s stores of weapons.

Earlier this year, a group of Ukrainian officers stood in the lobby of a civilian building in Kyiv. Among them was Kyrylo Budanov, the country’s head of military intelligence—a hulking, baby-faced figure, instantly recognizable even though he was partly masked. He and his colleagues had gathered to boast. About a week before, a pair of Magura V7 pilotless attack boats had ventured into the Black Sea and shot down two Russian Su-30 fighter jets. It was the first time in history that combat aircraft had been shot down by maritime drones, the Ukrainians said. One of Budanov’s officers, a masked man who went by Thirteen, stepped forward and spoke through an electronic device that scrambled his voice. He pointed to a Magura V7 that had been wheeled in for the occasion: a sleek, low-slung craft made of fibreglass and polyethylene. It looked like a miniature speedboat with missiles attached. “The Ukrainian intelligence service has made a revolution in war in the sea,” he said.

As the conflict began, Russian warships roamed the Black Sea from their base in Sevastopol, a Ukrainian port captured in 2014. Ukraine hardly had a navy. When Russia blockaded the port of Odesa, a crucial outlet for grain and other agricultural commodities, it threatened to devastate an already battered economy. “We were desperate,” Thirteen told me.

Ukraine began attacking Russian naval vessels with missiles and aerial drones, and struck the Sevastopol base. Around the same time, it implemented two parallel programs to launch a fleet of naval drones. Group Thirteen, a newly created military-intelligence unit, oversaw the making of the Magura, a fast, maneuverable craft that would go after ships at sea. The country’s counter-intelligence agency put forth the Sea Baby, designed to carry heavier payloads and strike such targets as bridges and ships in harbor. With ranges of more than five hundred miles, the two could threaten adversaries almost anywhere in the Black Sea.

Ukraine released them into service, and, in the course of a few weeks in early 2024, swarms of Magura drones sank three Russian warships—the Ivanovets, the Tsezar Kunikov, and the Sergey Kotov. The rest of Russia’s Black Sea fleet soon retreated from Sevastopol and began dispersing from Novorossiysk, on the eastern shore. This March, the Russians agreed to a ceasefire in the Black Sea. “They didn’t have a choice,” Thirteen said.

At the beginning of the war, Ukraine used drones mostly for reconnaissance. But, as they showed their worth as weapons, their use expanded. Last year, by some estimates, Ukraine’s factories turned out more than three million drones. The key to successful operations, TAF workers told me, was that the manufacturers of the drones and the soldiers using them were in the same place, allowing the software and components to be continually tweaked. The drones that I examined were remarkably simple: a lightweight square frame, four propellers, a video camera, a battery-powered motor, and room for a bomb. The attack drones, known as F.P.V.s, for “first-person view,” are guided by an operator watching a video screen that shows what the drone is seeing; other members of the unit monitor feeds from reconnaissance drones. Yakovenko described a recent attack in which a Ukrainian pilot crashed his drone into a Russian tank, forcing the crew inside to flee. Other F.P.V. drones chased down the Russian soldiers. “We killed all of them,” he said.

The Russians are terrorizing the Ukrainians with drone attacks of their own. Towns and hamlets have been largely pulverized along the front lines and for miles beyond; even American air defenses are mostly useless, because setting them up invites an immediate Russian attack. Iranian-made Shahed drones, capable of carrying large warheads long distances, have pummelled Kyiv and other cities with hundreds of strikes. Under the constant threat of attack, the Ukrainians have found it difficult to supply their front lines, and evacuation is sometimes impossible.

The prevalence of drones appears to have given the advantage to the defense. Along the seven-hundred-mile front, soldiers on both sides are huddled in fortified trenches, separated by a no man’s land known as the “gray zone.” With drones circling day and night, surprise attack is impossible, movement suicidal. If soldiers venture out, they are attacked immediately by drones or artillery.

Prevented from breaking through the lines, the Russians have lately employed a desperate maneuver. Soldiers race motorcycles across the no man’s land and then jump off and try to hold whatever territory they can—a tactic that summons Putin’s dictum “Wherever a Russian soldier steps foot, that’s ours.” Casualty rates are extremely high. Samus, the researcher, marvelled at the disregard Russian commanders had for their men’s lives. “The Russian mentality—there is nothing like it in the West,” he said. “It is something different.”

The challenge Yakovenko faces is evading Russia’s efforts to jam radio frequencies used to control his drones. “The Russians are the champions of jamming,” he said. The latest TAF drones are able to hop to a new frequency if the one in use is jammed. But the Russians can change channels, too. “It’s a game of frequencies,” Yakovenko said. He told me that only about thirty per cent of his drones make it through Russia’s defenses, but the low hit rate doesn’t bother him: he figures that they have destroyed thousands of targets. “Many kills,” he said.

Russian electronic warfare tends to be most effective against Ukrainian drones that are within a mile of their targets. So Yakovenko has lately begun to equip drones with thermal sensors, which take command of the weapon as it nears its mark. His sensors aren’t yet accurate enough—“You have to hit the tank in a special place, like the gas tank,” he said—but they are improving.

Last fall, Russia launched its own anti-jamming technique, deploying drones controlled by long fibre-optic cables that ran all the way back to their bases—essentially, deadly kites. The cables are cumbersome. They get tangled up in trees and power lines; one image from the front shows a street crisscrossed by what looks like a giant spiderweb. But they’ve been effective, and Ukraine has struggled to defend against them.

The Ukrainian government has created a contest in which fighters upload videos of their drone strikes in exchange for points: six for a Russian soldier, forty for a tank, up to fifty for a battery of rockets. Successful units can use points to buy more drones in an online market; the government gets a vast library of videos with which it can refine its strategy.

As each side races to out-innovate the other, Yakovenko says he is not especially concerned that the Russians will come up with some transformative advance overnight. “It is a war of small steps,” he told me. “We find some solution, our enemy finds some solution.” His greater worry is that he won’t be able to procure necessary parts, like thermal cameras. Most of them are made in China, which is helping to arm Russia against Ukraine, and has begun clamping down on such exports. Corruption and betrayal abound along the way. “A lot of people try to cheat you, because you’re under pressure,” he said.

The recent Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian warplanes marked a striking advance in the arms race: a combination of human subterfuge and precise tech work. More than a hundred drones were smuggled into Russia in pieces and assembled there. A phony businessman arranged for them to be loaded onto cargo trucks, without the drivers’ knowledge. Deep inside Russian territory—as far as twenty-five hundred miles from the border—the drones flew out and struck.

The effects were devastating, crippling about a dozen long-range bombers that were equipped to carry nuclear weapons. Borovyk, whose company made the drones, told me that the key was the element of surprise. Russia hadn’t anticipated drone strikes so far from the border, and had no time to put jamming systems into place. “They were not prepared for that type of attack,” Borovyk said.

Ukraine’s fighters have not yet been able to regularly deploy autonomous drones—the kind that can find targets without human help—but they are getting closer. Some of Borovyk’s drones were steered manually, but others were equipped with A.I. technology that could help them find their marks. According to reports in the Ukrainian press, the A.I. had been trained to recognize targets using images of old Soviet warplanes on display in an aviation museum east of Kyiv.

When Palmer Luckey began tinkering in a camper in his parents’ driveway, the kind of rapid innovation that is flourishing in Ukraine was almost unthinkable in the American defense establishment. Silicon Valley was producing a string of technological breakthroughs, but its leaders shied away from working on defense projects. The reasons were partly ideological—the tech business retained some of its roots in the seventies counterculture, which was revolted by the Vietnam War. But mostly the hesitation was pragmatic: the Pentagon’s development process was so slow that it typically took contractors years to receive any money. Many big Silicon Valley companies weren’t willing to wait, and smaller ones couldn’t afford to. Meanwhile, the technology that the Pentagon developed on its own often became obsolete before a weapon was even deployed. “By the time the F-35 came out, some of the microprocessors it used were slower than an iPhone,” a former Pentagon official who worked on tech issues told me.

In 2015, Ash Carter, President Obama’s Secretary of Defense, set out to bring the two communities together. Carter, who had a doctorate in theoretical physics, dispatched a team of officers to the Bay Area to set up an outpost—officially called the Defense Innovation Unit, but known at the Pentagon as Unit X. Its job was to find fledgling technology companies with interesting ideas and give them contracts. One of Unit X’s first initiatives was to do an end run around the Pentagon’s procurement process. By invoking an obscure paragraph buried in a budget-authorization bill, it was able to award contracts to companies as soon as they completed a successful pilot program. “Our goal was to shrink the Pentagon’s contracting process from ten years to six weeks,” Chris Kirchhoff, a founder of the unit, said. “We were able to do that.”

The Pentagon was also under pressure from Silicon Valley, which increasingly regarded itself as a rival power center to the government. In 2014 and 2016, the tech companies SpaceX and Palantir sued the government, claiming that it prevented private firms from competing for contracts; the companies argued that they could offer products at much lower costs. Both prevailed, and went on to receive billions of dollars’ worth of federal contracts, clearing the way for others.

As the Pentagon was opening up, Palmer Luckey got fired from Facebook and started Anduril. Among the first ideas that he brainstormed with his co-founders was an A.I. system that, by synthesizing enormous amounts of data, could learn to identify objects and track them in real time. Once it locked on, it could guide a mass-produced, disposable weapon to strike the target nearly anywhere on earth. They named the system Lattice, and a few months later they won their first government work: a contract, for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to use Lattice in towers that tracked people moving across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The system worked, and Border Protection soon bought more. But Luckey believed that the ideal client for Lattice was the Pentagon. He explained to me that if the military needed to track a Chinese destroyer across the Pacific, Lattice could provide a real-time picture of the ship, using data from more than a hundred sources—a mix of classified and public channels that included geospatial satellites, ship beacons, radar, signal intercepts, and thermal sensors. With precise targeting, the military could sink the destroyer with a much smaller, cheaper missile than the ones it was using. “I can tell you, not only is that a Chinese destroyer, I can tell you which one it is—it’s a Luyang destroyer!” Luckey said. “I can tell you that because of the particular equipment it is configured with. And I know that, to achieve my objective—mission kill—I need to target either the bridge or its radar. I can put a missile right there.”

Rather than wait for military leaders to announce the kinds of weapons they needed, Anduril’s engineers would build sophisticated devices and offer them to the Pentagon. If the generals wanted something slightly different, Luckey’s team could simply rewrite the code. The weapons themselves would be little more than shells for software, making them much easier to build. “Our cruise missile has fifty per cent fewer parts than what the military uses now, and it can be put together with ten simple hand tools that I can put in a small bag,” Luckey said.

In 2018, with most of their ideas still inchoate, Luckey and Stephens walked into the office of Christian Brose, the defense adviser to Senator John McCain, who was then the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the time, Anduril was a startup with twenty-five employees, hoping to break into the defense business. Brose, like his boss, had grown deeply frustrated with the Pentagon. He quickly realized that he and Luckey had aligning objectives. Later that year, after McCain died of cancer, he joined Anduril as the head of defense strategy.

The way Brose saw it, the Pentagon had to be transformed. Not only did it need a new strategy; it also needed to supplant many of its most coveted weapons. “The U.S. used to have a system that worked, but it’s broken,” he told me. “We spend a ton on defense, but if we don’t change we’re going to lose the wars of the future.” The war that worried him and his peers most was with China.

Earlier this year, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, a dozen or so experts gathered to conduct a simulated war between the United States and China over the island of Taiwan. Though most discussion about such a conflict centers on an all-out Chinese invasion, the C.S.I.S. war game was built around what many observers regard as a more likely scenario: a blockade, designed to box out the American Navy and squeeze Taiwan into submission.

The experts split into teams representing the U.S. and China, and each side was armed with the weapons that its country is thought to possess. As the game began, a crisis was already under way; China had encircled the island, and its sailors had sunk ships that attempted to run the blockade. U.S. forces announced that they would protect Taiwanese vessels, and American and Chinese ships began exchanging fire.

The scenario felt alarmingly plausible. In 2021, President Biden broke with decades of “strategic ambiguity” by publicly committing the United States to Taiwan’s defense. Biden called America’s support for Taiwan “sacred”—but the island also produces the world’s most sophisticated microchips, which are considered essential to the global economy. Although President Trump has been less declarative, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently warned China that any attempt to conquer Taiwan would have “devastating consequences.”

From the game’s opening moves, the conflict escalated rapidly. The Taiwanese Air Force began attacking Chinese ships and mining the Taiwan Strait, and Chinese warplanes struck ports on the island and shot down two American planes. The U.S. retaliated by sinking a squadron of Chinese warships in harbor. After China fired ballistic missiles at American bases in Japan, the fighting exploded, with the U.S. launching massive strikes against the mainland and Japanese jets attacking Chinese ships. China’s missiles sank three aircraft carriers—drowning as many as fifteen thousand sailors—and destroyed a quarter of the American Air Force.

By the time the game was stopped, each side had lost tens of thousands of people. Seth Jones, a C.S.I.S. president who took part in the game, seemed taken aback by the ferocity of the fighting. “I’m surprised how rapidly things got out of control,” he said. Still, it could have been worse. The Chinese didn’t strike the U.S. mainland, as they do in other war games. In some simulations, the two countries have traded nuclear assaults, with hundreds of thousands of casualties.

American officials say that they are racing to keep this kind of scenario from becoming real. According to U.S. intelligence, Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has told his military to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. The People’s Liberation Army has been testing the hardware it would need to undertake an invasion, including landing barges that appear designed for beaches that, like Taiwan’s, have shallow approaches. The Chinese Navy and Air Force have been sending planes and vessels on sorties around the island. These “aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises, as they call them,” Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of U.S. forces in the region, said this February. “They are rehearsals.”

Some observers argue that each side is responding to the other’s rhetoric, and the escalation represents a game of mutual deterrence. But credible deterrence requires a force that can hypothetically defeat your opponent’s. In the past decade, the People’s Liberation Army has grown rapidly in capability and sophistication, in a way that seems designed to thwart the United States. As America’s Navy has steadily shrunk, China’s has grown to surpass it in size, though not yet in tonnage. (China’s shipbuilding capacity is more than two hundred times that of the U.S.) Where the U.S. has formed its naval strategy around nuclear-powered carriers, China has built hundreds of anti-ship missiles, known colloquially as “carrier killers.” Some can reach speeds of more than seven thousand miles an hour, and are capable of evasive maneuvers that make them nearly impossible to intercept. What’s more, China is deploying surface-to-surface missiles of sufficient range and number to destroy American bases in Guam, the Philippines, and Japan. “The scale of the Chinese buildup is amazing,” Tom Shugart, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former submarine commander, told me. “There hasn’t been anything like it in peacetime since the Cold War.”

In August, 2023, American defense officials launched the Replicator initiative, a crash project to mass-produce air and sea drones that could deter Chinese military action in Asia. At the same time, commanders across the armed forces are racing to update their arsenals. The Air Force is advancing a program to have as many as five unmanned craft accompany each manned fighter plane; Army leaders have mandated that each division have a thousand drones.

“We are sending thousands of drones to Taiwan and the Pacific,” a former senior defense official told me. As Pentagon leaders see it, the key is to get unmanned systems ready to go immediately. “I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape,” Admiral Paparo said last year, “so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.” The Pentagon intends to have a substantial deployment complete by 2027. But Paparo and other commanders worry that the Chinese will seize Taiwan before then, presenting the United States, some seven thousand miles away, with a fait accompli. “If the Chinese decide to invade, things would get ugly quickly for both sides,” David Ochmanek, of the Rand Corporation, told me.

In crucial respects, the vision sketched out by American officials resembles Ukraine’s effort against Russia: flooding the skies and seas with inexpensive drones in order to thwart a larger adversary fighting near its homeland. In other ways, it is vastly different. Ukraine’s front extends for seven hundred miles; the western Pacific is millions of square miles, and any conflict around Taiwan would be fought not just on land and in the air but also on and under the sea.

Christian Brose, of Anduril, told me that the fleet of unmanned systems would be guided by what he calls “the kill chain.” If a Chinese invading force embarked on the Taiwan Strait, U.S. satellites would detect ships and relay their locations to targeting systems, which would guide the drones. “This needs to be happening very fast, again and again and again,” Brose said.

Brian Schimpf, Anduril’s C.E.O., told me that the Chinese would try to sever communications with his missiles, just as the Russians are doing with drones in Ukraine, by jamming radio signals trying to guide them. The Americans, of course, would be doing the same to the Chinese. “Everyone is doing it,” he said. “We are. The Chinese are. ‘How do I create confusion for the other side? And how do I mitigate the confusion they are going to create for me?’ ”

Every Anduril weapon is built to be capable of operating independently of humans. “We’re assuming all the weapons are going to be cut off from us,” Luckey said. But how autonomous would the American weapons be? Would they fire on command? Or fire on their own? Michael Horowitz, a former senior official who helped oversee artificial-intelligence policy for the Department of Defense, said, “Ukraine has shown us that in future wars we have to expect that data links with all sorts of platforms and systems will be severed. Autonomy lets you solve that issue.”

Schimpf sketched a scenario: American satellites detect Chinese warships and notify U.S. forces, which fire a volley of, say, forty cruise missiles. Once the missiles were launched, the Chinese would almost certainly jam the radio navigation system. But A.I. would take over: each missile would select one of the Chinese ships to strike and inform the other missiles of its intention. “I can say to the missiles, ‘Go look for ships,’ ” Schimpf said. “And they’ll find the ships.”

That’s the idea, at least. Schimpf expects the Chinese to use an array of tactics to throw the missiles off course, including deploying thousands of decoy targets in the water and in the air. Even navigating the vast stretches of the Pacific, where the missiles won’t have any landmarks to guide them, presents a challenge. “Over the water, it’s much harder,” he said.

Defense experts I spoke to were enthusiastic about Anduril’s ideas. But several current and former officials said that, even if the U.S. military had the weapons in the Replicator initiative, it is woefully incapable of using them. The kill chain that Anduril imagines requires rapid, intricate orchestration of satellites and sensors for reconnaissance, data collection, and targeting. But those satellites are controlled by myriad federal agencies, which, according to knowledgeable insiders, are too fiercely independent to coöperate smoothly. A former Senate staff member who worked extensively on these issues expressed deep frustration. “The Air Force won’t work with the Navy,” he said. “The Army won’t work with the Air Force. The N.S.A. won’t work with anybody. The National Reconnaissance Office won’t work with anybody. The National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are both supposed to work with the N.S.A.—and they won’t talk to each other.”

The branches of the military, which maintain their own communication networks, have their own obstacles. Navy ships typically cannot communicate directly with Air Force jets, even when they are operating in the same theatre. Even within the Air Force, many planes cannot talk to one another; the pilot of an F-22 fighter jet can’t communicate directly with the pilot of an F-18. “If you flew the two aircraft next to each other, the only way the pilots could communicate would be to wave to each other,” the retired Air Force general Scott Stapp, who spent several years working on such concerns as a senior Pentagon official, said.

Experts see the issue of “joint command and control” as one of the military’s biggest, most underpublicized problems. The former Senate staffer imagined what might happen during a crisis in the Western Pacific. A satellite could detect a radio signal sent by what the N.S.A. believes is a Chinese warship. To make a precise identification, the N.S.A. would need the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which oversees imaging satellites, to take a photo. “You have to make the request through a tasking mechanism,” the former staffer said. “And then it gets shipped over to the N.G.A., to take a picture of this ship. That can take several minutes. There’s a war going on, and you’re asking yourself, ‘Do I have to shoot this thing?’ But by then the ship has moved.” He continued, “It has to be boom, boom, boom, boom. And people have to be making split-second decisions, and you have to get the latencies down, because it’s not just one fucking ship but hundreds of targets, all at the same time.”

For two decades, senior legislators and military leaders have been working, mostly without success, to overcome these problems. In Pentagon jargon, the goal is known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a term that has become so familiar that it has acquired a shorthand—JADC2. “It’s not a technology issue,” Stapp, the former Air Force general, said. “It’s a cultural issue. The commercial world solved these kinds of problems years ago, and we have made the choice to run on separate networks with separate capabilities.”

The prospect of armed drones limited only by the capacities of artificial intelligence raises a disturbing question: Could they escape our control? Ever since humans began to dream of intelligent machines, they have feared that their creations would turn on them. In “R.U.R.,” Karel Čapek’s play from 1920, androids created to do humankind’s drudge work rise up and wipe out their makers. In “The Terminator,” from 1984, an A.I. defense system called Skynet becomes self-aware and triggers a nuclear war. This year’s “Mission: Impossible” sequel has basically the same theme: a rogue A.I. known as the Entity seizes control of nuclear weapons and comes within a tenth of a second of obliterating life on earth.

Similar warnings have come from more sober sources. Demis Hassabis, a prominent A.I. innovator at Google, has warned, “A bad actor could repurpose those same technologies for a harmful end.” Yet the Pentagon seems more concerned with making A.I. systems work effectively. Under a 2012 Defense Department order updated by Biden and left intact by Trump, the military may employ autonomous systems as long as they succeed in tests and their use is consistent with international humanitarian law.

The most prominent real-time laboratory for using A.I. in warfare is in Israel. When Hamas-led fighters crossed the border on October 7th, 2023, and launched a bloody assault, hundreds of thousands of Israelis were called to military duty. Among them was a technology entrepreneur from Tel Aviv, who asked me to refer to him as Michael. For four months, Michael told me recently, he commanded a group of sixteen targeters for the Israel Defense Forces, taking advantage of powerful computer programs that helped select targets. “We called ourselves warriors of the keyboard,” he said.

For years, I.D.F. officers had used periods of relative peace to assemble lists of suspected militants and structures to be targeted if a war broke out. The lists often took months or even years of painstaking work to compile; by late 2023, there were some two thousand Hamas targets and some ten thousand Hezbollah targets. But Israeli military officials told me that, after October 7th, the I.D.F. quickly burned through its lists. The opening phase of the campaign was extraordinarily fierce, with the military hitting several hundred targets a day. Even the American bombardments of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq were never that intense. “The volume and velocity of bombing appear to be unprecedented in modern warfare,” a former senior American defense official told me.

In previous conflicts, Israel might have relented after a week or two. This time, the I.D.F. kept up the campaign, backed by political leaders. The former senior American defense official told me, “Israel set out to kill every fighter in Hamas. They had never done that before.”

To generate new targets, the I.D.F. tried an experiment. Working with the country’s bustling tech industry, intelligence officers had developed programs to help identify suspected Hamas and Hezbollah members and find where they were hiding. They included Lavender, which identified potential militants, and Gospel, which vetted both people and structures.

The I.D.F. employed these programs to sift huge amounts of data compiled on Gaza, everything from social-media posts to government records. They searched text messages and drone surveillance videos for patterns of suspicious activity. They examined people’s friends, relatives, and associates for links to Hamas. A former senior I.D.F. officer told me that Israel’s security agencies could record the millions of telephone conversations happening in Gaza each month, but didn’t have the manpower to listen to them all. So they tasked an A.I. with scanning the conversations and flagging any voice that matched a recording of a suspected militant from Israel’s files. The A.I. searched for keywords and pinpointed the locations of suspects’ phones. “Now, instead of thirty million conversations, we have one million conversations, and we can have our linguistic analysts listen to those,” he said.

A former senior Israeli military official said that the programs were constantly refining their own methods. “It’s not just finding the targets that’s important but how to locate the people more quickly as they move around,” he told me. “We are learning all the time. The A.I. is learning.” At one point, he said, intelligence officers determined that they could find places Hamas had buried rockets by identifying where the soil had shifted after heavy rains. So they used a program to scan hundreds of hours of drone footage and find disturbed soil, “even if it had moved only two centimetres. And then, like that, we created another two hundred targets.”

Much of the targeting work was done by Unit 8200, a wing of the I.D.F. whose function was to gather signal intelligence. For most of the war, it was run by General Yossi Sariel, who oversaw a team of twelve thousand, including targeters and linguists who worked from a desert airbase in Nevatim. The former senior I.D.F. officer told me that the targeters were meant to see artificial intelligence as a tool, not as a moral arbiter. “The purpose of the machine was to support the soldier, not replace him,” he said. “Our A.I. programs never took the decision to attack anyone. Only humans made those decisions.”

Michael, the targeter, described the process: The A.I., sifting the data, would suggest a target and list the factors, such as telephone contacts and video evidence, that supported a link to Hamas. Based on those, it would give an estimated likelihood that the person or building should be struck. “What we have is a priority queue,” Michael said. “The A.I. will say, ‘You should watch this guy.’ ”

Michael told me that his team was required to attempt to verify each target: examining video footage from drones, listening to telephone conversations. “My job in the targeting room was to put together all the indications and decide, What am I looking at?” he said. He added that he was also required to estimate how many civilians would be killed or wounded in an attack. If a suspected militant was in an apartment building, he would examine property records and drone footage to determine how many people lived there. “The A.I. thing says, ‘You should pay attention to this,’ and then I gotta do this whole checklist,” Michael said. “Who else is in the building? When did they leave?” In the course of a typical workday, the programs that Michael used would give his team about a hundred suggestions. He would select about five of them and send the recommendations to superior officers. “Usually two will be accepted,” he said.

As the battle raged, though, there were times when he felt pressure to decide on targets too quickly. “Sometimes I couldn’t do all the preparation and all of the checks that I should have,” he said. “Obviously, there were mistakes.” He added that he was comfortable with the final outcome of his work. But Adam Raz, an Israeli writer and activist, said other I.D.F. targeters had told him that in the most intense periods of the war their efforts were merely pro forma. “Most times, it took thirty seconds to a minute to get the target from Lavender or Gospel, verify it, and then give it to the Air Force to strike,” he said.

An estimated sixty thousand Palestinians have died in the conflict, prompting widespread accusations that Israel has committed war crimes. Yet Israeli authorities show little concern about the targeting systems. “We ended up, I believe, with about twenty-five thousand Hamas killed and twenty-five thousand civilians,” a former political leader told me earlier this year. “This is a better proportion than was ever achieved by a modern military.” When I ran that argument by John Spencer, a professor at West Point, he concurred that similar attempts to expunge enemies from densely populated areas had often resulted in higher proportions of civilian deaths. In 2016, the U.S. military initiated a campaign to root out ISIS from Mosul, Iraq, which killed about five thousand militants and twice as many civilians; the fighting ended up razing a city of two million people. In the Second World War, when the U.S. retook Manila from the Japanese, about seventeen thousand soldiers and a hundred thousand civilians were killed.

In Gaza, though, no one knows precisely how many people have died, or what proportion were innocents; the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, maintains that more than half were women and children. American officials suggested that the essential issue was one of human judgment. “The civilian casualties in Gaza were not an A.I. issue—they appear to be a rules-of-engagement issue,” Michael Horowitz, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Biden Administration, said. Michael, the targeter, told me that in the early stages of the conflict he was permitted to recommend a strike that could result in as many as twenty civilian deaths for one suspected militant. The strictures tightened and loosened over time, but they were typically relaxed for high-ranking figures. “When we killed Nasrallah, there were a lot of people in that building, you know?” he said.

The former senior U.S. defense official told me Israel permitted civilian casualties in numbers that, by American standards, were greatly disproportionate to the value of the militants being attacked. “During the invasion of Iraq, if we were contemplating hitting a target that might result in twenty-five civilians being killed, that’s a decision that would have gone all the way to the President or the Secretary of Defense,” he said. “In Gaza, that was happening every day.”

Sebastian Ben Daniel, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and a critic of the I.D.F., told me that the claims of precise targeting can’t be verified, because the way the A.I. systems function is largely a mystery. “How do we know that this person was a legitimate target?” he said. “We don’t know, because nobody can check. The algorithm is a black box. The military says it looks at millions of parameters. But what parameters? We don’t know.” A.I. systems like the ones that the I.D.F. used often fail to understand context; if someone says “watermelon” on the phone, the A.I. can’t tell if he’s making an oblique reference to a bomb or just talking about fruit. “You think this person was Hamas, because he met somebody in Hamas, or he called somebody in Hamas—so you kill him,” he said.

Ultimately, Ben Daniel argued, the purpose of the A.I. systems was to lend a veneer of legitimacy to a preconceived policy. “The goal was not to kill this guy or that guy, for which A.I. was sometimes useful,” he said. “The goal was the destruction of Gaza. A.I. gives you that effect without the public outcry.”

Even within the I.D.F., there is some concern that A.I. will displace human intelligence. The former senior I.D.F. officer told me that Israel had used a combination of technical and human means to track Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, some of them for years. “We knew where Nasrallah was almost every single day,” he said. “We could have killed him whenever we were asked.” Right until the end, he said, Nasrallah was convinced that Israel would never strike him. He was only forty feet underground when the bomb hit.

The former senior Israeli official spoke proudly of a case in which targeters believed that a Hezbollah leader was hiding in a Beirut apartment, and wanted to gather details of its layout and surroundings. “We can send someone to the street to take photos,” he said. “We have people on the ground—but not inside.” To acquire more precise information, the I.D.F. developed a telephone that appeared to be registered in Lebanon. Then an agent posing as a wealthy expatriate called a real-estate broker in Beirut and said that she was interested in several properties on the same street. The former officer described the scheme: “Some nice woman will start with you on the phone. She’s very rich. Her father was from Lebanon. And she wants to buy the entire block.” The woman asked to hear details about the street, the apartment, the specific room where the target was thought to be; the broker provided all the information the I.D.F. needed. “Do you know how many people work for us without knowing that they work for us?” the former officer said.

Still, for Israeli security officials, small victories do not assuage the sense that they missed intelligence that might have forestalled a war altogether. The failure to prevent the October 7th attacks still weighs heavily. One cause, some officers told me, was an overreliance on intelligence gathered by technological means. Cameras set up along the border were easily disabled, and warnings from intelligence officers were ignored. The former Israeli military official told me that, during the attack, some militants switched off their cellphones to make themselves harder to track. Others simply left their phones home.

Indeed, the former official said, Israel had largely given up trying to cultivate human sources inside Hamas and Hezbollah. He said that the I.D.F., himself included, had fallen in love with technological methods because they seemed so easy to use, compared with the tedious and dangerous process of cultivating spies. “How many human souls did we have to describe the reality for us in Gaza and Lebanon on the night of October 7th?” he said. “Zero.”

The former official continued, “This is the main reason that created this great failure and caused us not to see what Hamas was planning to do. The feeling was ‘I don’t need to know you. I don’t need to know where you are going to pray, or what is your ideological way of thinking—I don’t need them because I have your phone.’ The trouble is, on the night they attacked, their devices were turned off.”

So far, Anduril has secured several billion dollars’ worth of military contracts, including one for sending drones to Taiwan. Early this year, the company announced that it was taking over a twenty-two-billion-dollar project, formerly run by Microsoft, to develop “augmented reality” headsets for the Army to use in combat. To produce its weapons, Anduril is planning to open a sprawling factory near Columbus, Ohio. Luckey told me that, in order to build a secure supply chain, none of the components would come from China.

Financial analysts have been speculating that Anduril will soon open investment to the public. Still, the essential question remains: In the uncertainties of combat, will Luckey’s unmanned systems work? Even admirers of the company evince some skepticism about weapons built around A.I. “I would take any claims of success with a grain of salt,” a former senior Pentagon official told me. “The Pentagon needs to do its own testing.”

On a lonely stretch of chaparral near Fort Stockton, Texas, I watched two Anduril engineers make their last adjustments before test-firing a Roadrunner—a five-foot-tall interceptor similar to the company’s attack drones, except that it is designed to crash into such airborne targets as jets, missiles, and drones. At about a hundred thousand dollars each, the Roadrunner isn’t Ukrainian-style cheap, but in the Pentagon’s arms bazaar it qualifies as a bargain. If it misses its target, it returns to base, to be fired again. “It lands just like a spaceship,” an engineer named Jackson Wiggs told me.

The Roadrunner is built to be launched out of its own packing crate; before the test flight, the engineers placed one of those crates in the scrub, as tumbleweeds skittered by. A low buzz from an intruding drone echoed from the other side of a nearby ridge. As the sound drew closer, Wiggs and his colleague pressed a button on a console. The sides fell from the packing crate, and the Roadrunner, a squat device that looked a little like a penguin, was propelled upward by two turbojets. It climbed to about three hundred feet before it turned and flattened until its fuselage was parallel to the earth. Then, like its namesake, the Roadrunner took off, sailing over the ridgeline. Seconds later, it shot past the intruding drone, missing it by a precisely calibrated distance. It circled back, righted itself, and landed neatly next to its packing crate. “Perfect,” Wiggs said.

Even as the Anduril engineers congratulated themselves on a successful test, people elsewhere were scrambling to create new advantages, under the messy conditions of war. Ukraine launched autonomous craft from catapults and snared Russian drones in fishing nets. Israel, in its recent conflict with Iran, deployed lasers to blast drones from the sky by burning up their guidance systems. An American company called BlueHalo is testing a similar device. It’s carried on a truck, and, after an investment of nearly a hundred million dollars, can fire individual shots for three dollars each. One day, it, too, will be eclipsed.

[roxasbooth]

What IS this "infected time" au?

Hiya there! :DDD💫

Hope you're doing great! :3

Am I glad you asked xD

I'll start from the very beginning if that's alright with you :P

So it all started in the spring of 2024. I had seen @/krossan's danny phantom art before, and I was in love with it, however, I didn't know a thing about danny phantom xD

So comes spring 2024, and I watch danny phantom. Lo and behold, I get obsessed! A kids show from early 2000's? SIGN ME UP!! >:P

Comes the end of spring break, I'm back at uni. My best friend spams me (/pos) with mlp Infection AUs that are all over tumblr and tiktok. They're cool! They're inspiring! They tingle a very specific part of my brain in the best way possible!

Long story short, I get obsessed×2!

And what does my brain do? Smashes this current fixation of mine in with the infection AUs!

The idea of danny phantom infection AU is born! YIPPEE!!!

I decided to pick up the story from where a glitch in time left it.

No one remembers Danny's identity again, vlad and dan are getting a second chance, all that!

But I added a twist based on the canon.

In 'the ultimate enemy', the observants weren't exactly happy about the second chance that clockwork decided to give danny. They believed he shouldn't exist altogether. Clockwork was the one to change Danny's fate and help trap dan in a thermos. But what do we have now?? The timelines are all messed up, dan is roaming free in a timeline that he doesn't belong to, and everything's supposed to go fine, right?

Nope. Why would the observants be happy after all of this? Why would they agree with clockwork?

See where I'm going with this?

In AGIT, clockwork said that his powers are weaker for whatever reason.

How weak exactly? It was never specified.

How powerful are the observants? IT WAS NEVER SPECIFIED EITHER!

So I went crazy with it.

The observants aren't satisfied. They want clockwork to do what they ask him to. Clockwork refuses.

So the observants take the matter into their own hands.

They infect the timeline.

They decided to destroy it all together.

What will everyone else do about it?

That's for you to find out ;)

Thanks for reading!!!✨✨ x3

(Edit: I have a ten pages long PDF. Written by me. And um. Yeah it's basically the whole story. I sat down one day and realized that I couldn't get anything done because this AU was jumping around and screaming in my head like a rooster. So I sat down and wrote that. It took. 10 hours. YEAH LOLZ-)

[diaryofageekgirl]

Cross-posting more of my meta/ranting from the Helluva Boss subreddit. Originally posted June 25, 2024 (here):

He might get something, I just don't think it will be enough to balance things out, the show has invested a lot of time in 'Blitzo sucks' and 'Stolas is sad'....a lot of time.

That's exactly what I've been feeling. Like, we got three back-to-back Sad Stolas Songs™ (Just Look My Way, his part of When I See Him, and All 2 You), all about how much he loves Blitzø and feeling sorry for himself and all that. With how biased a big part of the fandom already is towards Stolas, it really feels like they're laying it on too thick. Like, when I was watching Apology Tour for the first time, it took everything in me not to roll my eyes when Stolas started singing. Which sucks! I love him, I love Bryce's singing, I love this story, but another Stolas song? Already? The same thing happened at the beginning of the show - people were put off by how weird and creepy Stolas was in the pilot and Ep1, but it took one nice lullaby to his daughter in Ep2 to make people love him.

The closest we've gotten to any of that for Blitzø is stuff like the hallucinations in his own mind tormenting him in Truth Seekers, or him self-destructing at Bee's party.

Pivoting from that point, I've seen a lot of people's reactions to Apology Tour include stuff like "Blitzø needed this wake-up call", or "He needs to know that his actions hurt people other than himself", or similar sentiments, and I COMPLETELY disagree. He hates himself. He hates himself. He already blames himself for people leaving him, and thinks they're better off without him. He already scribbles his face out of every photo. He's already convinced he's going to die alone. You think putting him in a room full of people that throw an annual party about how much they hate him, filled with pinatas and knife-throwing games and bonfires destroying representations of him is somehow going to HELP?!

And sure, Stolas can claim that "There is a crowd full of people here, who cared so much", but that's categorically false. Dennis is there, who Blitzø made out with at a party one time. Wally Wackford is there, and their only on-screen interactions are just a running joke of Wally's business ventures getting fucked up by Blitzø/I.M.P. All of Verosika's succubus crew is there, and there was zero indication in Spring Broken that they knew Blitzø or vice-versa.

I genuinely believe that there was a grand total of maybe 5 or 6 actual exes at that party (including both Verosika and Stolas) - everyone else was either a) a friend of one of the exes who showed up as solidarity; b) someone who had been "hurt" in some capacity by Blitzø in the past but had no romantic or sexual connection with him (like Wally Wackford, for example); or c) just demons excited to go to a party thrown by Verosika Mayday (who I believe to be the vast majority of people there).

I mean, we saw Blitzø's hallucinations in Truth Seekers. We saw his camera roll at the end of Ozzie's. We know who the people that matter to him are: Fizz, Verosika, Stolas, Millie & Moxxie, Loona, Barbie. Everyone at that party were nameless, faceless background characters, and I cannot imagine a single one of them actually having a meaningful relationship with Blitzø, because if they did, wouldn't he have also cared about them in return, at least a little bit? Wouldn't we have gotten some kind of foreshadowing that a new character from his past would be showing up? Wouldn't there have been some meaningful interactions between Blitzø and someone other than the already-established ex-girlfriend and the current bungled situationship?

I also can't imagine that someone who hates themselves as much as Blitzø does, who openly states that they don't do romantic relationships (which we know he's lying to himself about, but consider: self-hatred and self-worth issues), would then go on to have that many long-term relationships. That just doesn't add up in my mind.

(Sorry for the super long and only tangentially-related reply... I am incapable of being succinct, lol 😅.)

[siena-sevenwits]

January 2025 Reads

The list will be modest, as I am coming out of a slump, but I used to have fun doing this, so I'll put my pride aside and enjoy it.

Complete: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911, children's classic) As I have already remarked, I think I loved it more in adulthood than I ever did in childhood. I noticed so much more this time through. One thing that stood out to me was how Mary and Colin both were changed by meeting a hope-filled person who told them of joys they had never experienced. Even more Mary discovers the Garden, hearing stories of the family life of the Sowerbys changes her. Hearing of Dickon out on the moors with his animals changes her. And of course the simple idea of a mysterious locked Garden changes her. It's the same for Colin - he falls in love with all these things before he can ever experience them. There's something about the generosity of sharing that kind of joy even just by the spoken word - something very good news-y about it. I remember as a child I didn't much care about Mrs. Sowerby sending them food, and advising Mr. Craven, and eventually coming into the Garden and being part of the secret - but not I see why it feels like a necessary culmination. It's all very, very Spring, and that was good for me this time of year (Spring does not usually come till May here, and it's hard sometimes.) I might have to revisit my childhood adaptation, the 1980's Hallmark one, if only to laugh at how Gothic they try to make it. (That scary thunderstorm scene with the creepy statues while Colin wails! Oh, and random Colin Firth before he was famous at the end, for some reason.)

Complete: The Shadow of the Bear by Regina Doman (1997, Catholic YA Fairy Tale Retelling) Technically I was reading my first printing copy, the one where the publishers got mixed up and gave it the wrong title of Snow White and Rose Red: A Modern Fairy Tale, which was just meant as a note at the beginning of the manuscript. This was another revisit of a favourite - as a twelve-year-old, I read this so many times, before Black as Night was published. I can see the writing flaws much more clearly now, but also all the ways she succeeds at the story she'd trying to tell. The story meant a lot to me, and I think it had a big effect on me going into my teen years. Revisiting was good fun.

Complete: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (1601, classic theatrical comedy) This feels like a cheat to include, but. What can I say? My favourite of Shakespeare's comedies.

In progress: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (2024, epic fantasy) Getting close to halfway through. I'm here for my beloved characters and getting an ending to the five books. It's great to be spending time with Kaladin and Shallan and Adolin and Dalinar again, and seeing payoffs for this set up earlier in the series. It has some passages I'm not a fan of, (and some scenes I thought were just plain silly. Kaladin's kata/dance scene could maybe have been fine, but once he started saying affirmations? *Eyeroll*) but I've found a way to navigate the content considerations so far, and eh, I can put up with a little cringe. And who would have thought I'd be so happy every time the scene switches to Azimir? :-) I enjoy doing all the voices and sharing the experience with Juan Diego. I'm hoping for a satisfying avalanche, and for Brandon Sanderson to keep his promises well.

In progress: How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason (2019, YA space opera fairy-tale inspired) Also close to halfway through. I enjoy the blend of some fairy-tale conventions with the interplanetary setting. There's a fun sense of humour and sharp imagination at work here. I love the dynamic of Rory's tiny household, which consists of just her, her vizier/tutor, and her tiny band of female guards. But I'm slightly annoyed at the arranged marriage aspect of the book, because the direction I thought the author was taking it excites me more than the direction it's probably going. That's not the book's fault, though. I should probably just outline an arranged marriage story that I'll never get round to writing and get it out of my system so I can enjoy this one wholeheartedly.

In progress: The Dawn of the Messiah by Edward Sri (2005, Scriptural theology) Not that far in yet. First fifty pages are good.

In progress: The Red Palace by June Hur (2022, YA historical mystery/romance) Whoops, forgot I was reading this and enjoy it! It's because I took my night reading lamp to another part of the house and forgot to bring it back for my bedtime book...

In progress: The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff (1973, travel memoir.) I am delayed because my dad took it to read it after he finished 84 Charing Cross Road.

[wtfuckevenknows]

Well, I guess let's review this past year a little different and highlight the not so great parts.

This 👇🏻 is how I ended 2023.

I knew it would get better eventually, I knew I had to hold on and just keep pushing through. But it didn't get better immediately after that, it got worse actually. At that point I had only one surgery done. And then I had two more in the span of a week, right before Christmas. Three surgeries in eight weeks take a toll, not just physically but also mentally.

This 👆🏻 is what life looked like in January. (Do we think Tumblr will let me keep it up or make this post rated mature?) It was absolute shit. I was at my limit. I'm usually very in tune with my body but at that point I wasn't at all. I was sick of not being able to do shit, I was sick of sitting on my sofa and staring at the same four walls day in day out.

That is fortunately not how I'm ending 2024. It got better eventually, as I knew it would but it was a lot of fucking hard work. Like A LOT. A million doctors appointments, two radioactive pills, copious amounts of physical therapy, oncological therapy, rehab and rehab mandated sports class, yoga, so many tears (there was a lot of crying involved, so much fucking crying) and god knows what else later, I FUCKING MADE IT.

By May life looked like this 👆🏻 again. Seasonal depression (on top of everything else going on, what a joy) was gone come spring, and mentally I was doing heaps better.

But it still wasn't all sunshine and roses, especially physically. Had a set back in March when I was technically allowed to do Zumba again but my first class back destroyed me. Finally ended physical therapy at the end of AUGUST!!!! But the shoulder still wasn't pain free. That actually took until the end of November. After a second attempt at Zumba, this one successful, I sat in my car and wept, so fucking happy.

Today, as the year comes to an end, I can finally say I am 99.9% healthy again. The cancer is gone, the shoulder is able to do everything again and doesn't really hurt anymore. It's still not a hundred percent but that's probably because they had to reattach a ligament and I can somewhat feel the "string" they used to sew it back to my shoulder with. It's a weird feeling but it doesn't hurt really, and I guess over time I'll get used to it.

I wanna say a big THANK YOU.

Thank you to everyone who helped me get better, in small or in big ways. Thank you for this hellsite for bringing me some form of entertainment. Thank you to the fic writers for giving me lots to read in the 10 months I spent not working, 4 of those being an absolute horror movie.

Thank YOU GUYS for worrying about me, for cheering me on, for your kind words. Thanks for entertaining me with posts, fics, and conversations when I was bored out of my mind. Thank you for letting me rant and vent. Thank you for something as simple as our conversations, even just those kept me going. Thank you for sending Christmas cards or care packages, thank you for letting me come visit you as soon I was able to so I could escape for a little while. Thank you for keeping me company, putting my hair together when I couldn't, preparing food for me and god knows what else. I wouldn't have made it without you guys.

@paperstorm @loveconquersall @thebumblecee @beautifulhigh @heartstringsduet @celeritas2997 @goodways @carlos-tk and everybody else ❤️ I love you guys!

[srbachchan]

DAY 5803

Jalsa, Mumbai Jan 6/7, 2024 Sat/Sun 3:05 AM

��� ,

January 7 .. birthday greetings to Ef Deepa .. and .. Ef Sakshi Tara .. love and 🙏🏻🚩 ..

And .. to the dearest Ef family in Russia, Ukraine, and across the globe, our heartfelt greetings as you celebrate Christmas on January 7 according to the Orthodox Christians .. may your celebrations be drenched in joy and divine blessings .. much love from all the Ef Family .. 💖

Apprehensions reveal a most undesired reveal at times .. the worst turns out good and the vice versa .. what really gets destroyed is the element that conducts the disquiet, the unease, the anxiety .. they are all latent yet contained symbols of the world divided into belief and reality ..

The reality of the presence of the Force .. or its nemesis ..

Both survive, both dissipate ..

It is indeed a most peculiar world of the exist ..

And many psychological and mature renderings of the existence mattered from the DAY of the yesterDAY .. existence and its various tributaries ..

Jean Paul Sartre and the existentialism of his writings , in particular 'Crime Passionnel ' .. a crime of passion .. which I do believe is not a crime in certain parts of the World .. this play being renowned for its selective explanation of the World where the human existence is desired rather than the efforts being made in the existence of the World and indeed the Earth ..

it is profound .. difficult to understand and generally ignored ..

For the desire to spend time on detailing and perspective readings has long passed the time table of time ..

what exists exists .. why the effort and the waste of time in delving into the realities of a philosophy that has been emanating for years and years and years .. spend it on the more lucrative obsessions than a waste of time on this .. or so it is believed .. ..

I must be off .. to retire , to covered warmth of the quilted embrace and to the apprehensive dreams that spring about within the cataracted eye .. in the dark expectations of the light of dawn .. in some ..

Amitabh Bachchan

AND .. the joy of stepping out to cheer and support the TEAM ..

JAIPUR PINK PANTHERS ..

... and a grand VICTORY ..

ever the JPP discarded, talked down, not given due reference or mention in the positive .. but hard work and success takes care of all ..

AB

[shantismurf]

Author Q&A with Wolfsbane_and_Nettles, 3/29/2025

To wrap up our month of member author appreciation, @wolfsbane-and-nettles offered A Necklace of Teeth for our discussion. Here are their q&a responses:

What name would you like us to use and what are your pronouns? Nettles (they/he)

2. How long have you been in the Book Club, and how long have you been writing fanfiction? What fandoms have you written for? I joined in 2024, I think? — I have been writing fanfiction since 2003? It was first grade and wrote an LOTR friend-fiction called “4 kids in Middle Earth” about me and my friends. I found a copy of it recently and I about died of laughter. — I’ve written for (in chronological order) Lord of the Rings, Hetalia, and the Hobbit, in terms of published works online. I’ve written a few Demon Slayer and My Hero Academia fanfics that will not see the light of day. — And the Witcher! How did I forget I wrote Witcher fanfics before the hobbit? It’s what got me back into writing fanfiction!

3. What do you think of as your writing style - are you a plotter or pantster? — a little bit of both! I typically start as a pantster…I’ve got a vague idea I want to do something with, and then I might write a few paragraphs before I succumb to my plotting need, and begin the meticulous plotting. Only for me to get a couple thousand words in, realize I need to adjust the plots and begin more research and planning. Repeat the process until it’s done. — My fic “finding my way back to you” was my one rare occasion I had done absolutely no plotting. It just kinda happened. “Chosen Horizons” was plotted meticulously since day one of its conception.

4. What’s your favorite genre/trope to write? it wasn’t until recently I realized it, but definitely angst and whump. I gotta put my blorbos through hell, apparently. Bilbo can’t catch a break.

5. Is there a genre/trope you haven't written as much of yet that you're excited about for future writing? — I’m excited about an ABO fic I’ve got in the back of my mind. Not just Mpreg, but like, detailed dynamics and world building. — also a fluff/comedy fic I’ve got simmering. I don’t know if I’m more excited or nervous to write it, as I’m not used to writing soft and sweet things (unless prefaced and followed by angst. )

6. Why did you select this work for us to read? this fic is probably one of my favorite things I’ve written. It gave me hell, as I’m terrible at deadlines, and I did it for Thorin’s Spring Forge in 2024. I had had this idea for this fic for long time, as it was one of the million of ideas that spun off from the original plot for “Chosen Horizons”, and TSF gave me an excuse to finally write it. It is because I’m so proud of it (and myself) that I selected this work, and to share it with others makes me so excited! ((That, and I really just want to talk to people about parentshield, cabbage patch hobbits, and dragon sickness.))

8. Did you do any special research for the work? I did a good amount of research into the history of Rohan and (Tolkien’s) dragons—how long it takes for something very large to decompose underwater?

9. Did the story change from how you originally envisioned it? Were there scenes or plot elements you had to cut out, or unexpected additions? oh it changed SO MUCH. The very original idea didn’t even have Frodo in it. — there was going to be a lot more Shire and Bilbo scenes that I had to restrain myself from writing, because I truly wanted this to focus more on Thorin, as it was for TSF. I had started writing the scenes where Bilbo took his own quest to Mordor to destroy the ring, and scenes for after they were reunited in Erebor…

there was also an entire several thousand words I cut of the orc attack on Edoras where Thorin saves the prince and princess…I ended up cutting all of it and just having that scene start after it had already happened.

10. Do you have a favorite line or moment from the work? — the whole tirade Bilbo gives Lobelia when she insults Frodo! That was so much fun to write. I love writing Bilbo going ape shit (in his charming, witty way) at people.

“And as for your little lesson on manners, when you wish to start a conversation with someone above your status, it is polite to curtesy, call me Mister at the very least, and ask if it is alright to make a remark about the beautiful color of my son’s eyes. Because, unlike some people, my son’s eyes aren’t the same color as their shit.” He finished, leaning in to whisper the last words in her ear, but loud enough for a few others to hear. - Bilbo Baggins, chapter 10 of A Necklace of Teeth.

Join the Bagginshield Book Club Discord Server

[satoshi-mochida]

Mythical Concept: STARNAUT launches April 28 - Gematsu

Roguelike action game STARNAUT will leave Early Access and launch for PC via Steam on April 28 under the new title Mythical Concept: STARNAUT, developer crim announced.

STARNAUT first launched in Early Access on February 14, 2024.

The version 1.0 release will feature a massive update that introduces new systems, story content, weapons, and stages, including a tale that connects to El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.

Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:

About

STARNAUT is an easy to control roguelike action game.

Choose Your Weapon – Feel the excitement of destroying the infinite amount of enemies!

Challenge to the Extreme – You will have maximum of 30 minutes to sweep them!

Be Careful – This game is way too addictive! You may forget the time!

Attention! Humanity Went Extinct! Earth is Doomed!

During such time, you became Starnaut, an astronaut who goes to solo space expedition. Before the doomsday, people launched the Omega Rockets with their precious memories and history but they ended up landing in multiverse! Starnaut runs today to find out if all of the rockets were launched back, so the Earth will be resurrected… or not!?

Mission #1: Land on the Area Within Multiverse

Some part of multiverse became the level by the power of Starnaut! Five different levels are confirmed, but it seems like there can be more!? Clear all the levels!

Mission #2: Eliminate those Endless Incoming Enemies

Beat up those enemies endlessly infiltrating from multiverse! Enemies can be anything! Can be something cool or cute, but don’t get tricked by its look! Not confident with the 3D combat?? Do not worry! Your weapons will automatically attack them!

Mission #3: Use Your Coins and Upgrade

Beating enemies will drop the coins! The coins you get can be used to purchase weapons or upgrade your spacesuit from SHOPNAUT!!

Mission #4: Escape With the Omega Rockets

The condition to win is to launch 10 Omega Rockets! Not to mention, those Omega Rockets have oxygen tanks! Replenish your oxygen to keep going!

Mission #5: Collect the Data from Earth

There are foes running around the level with the “Lost Data” from past Earth. Punch them to bring back the data!

Mission #Whatever: Just Beam ‘Em as Many as You Can!

Those enemies are not only hungry for you but YOUR KNUCKLE SANDWICH!!! There are things like a gacha capsule, jump pad or even a hot spring! Also, you can buy a new helmet and upgrade your spacesuit to enhance your basic abilities before you start the level. Everything for you! Just use them well!! Starnaut, fight solo! Annihilate ’em!

Hint for the Beginners!

Let’s start with beating a few enemies then reach to the shop! Upgrade your weapons and spacesuit to prepare for the incoming enemies! Antennas are a great choice until you get used to the game! Once you pick the weapon, it will never run out of bullets and will never be destroyed! You can unlock additional elements in the game with the prize you can get by clearing the levels! Also, don’t forget to check out the support dialog from WONDERFUL who is on top of the head of Starnaut!

Watch a new trailer below.

Release Date Trailer

[nutella-icecream]

Fandom homework

Assigned by myself, inspired by @the-overanalyzer , for what fanworks I'd like to see or make

Torturing my self-insert by forcing them to live in the body of Damien from The Bright Sessions: This one kind of explains itself. I just think it would be neat to explore how one person could change the events of that universe, and also torment them relentlessly. I've started drafting it but won't feel comfortable publishing until I've figured out what happens in July (I'm currently in February)

2024 American men's gymnastics team group sex: it's a travesty that no one has written this yet. I may end up needing to write it myself, despite feeling entirely unqualified

Throwing FeMC into Gotham: I enjoy many stories about people with powers being forced to live in Gotham, and I think Minako being freed from the seal after many centuries but forced to live in another universe is a perfect candidate. I started drafting this one as well, but haven't figured out how I'd get Steph, Cass, and Minako to date yet

Goro Akechi in Kirkwall: there's something about the idea of chaotic evil, uses-something-like-blood-magic-for-the-pain, demon summoning, literally uses magic to drive people insane Goro Akechi that would be really funny in Dragon Age 2. He's powerful enough that he could probably survive long enough to find support, but he's feral enough that idk if anyone would want him. Maybe Merrill? Tbd

Nara Shikako in The Bright Sessions: while there is no version of Nara Shikako I think would voluntarily choose to go to therapy, the possibility of her getting imprisoned in Tier 5 and struggling to decide if escaping and/or destroying The AM is worth the potential costs to herself and the world fascinates me. And she has technically used her abilities to kill people (as a child soldier), which is more than what got Oliver sent to Tier 5.

Spring Awakening, but with badly understood Omegaverse: listen. I read a fic where no one knew that male omegas could exist in the 1980s, and it was fascinating. So like...how much worse would it be in 1890s Germany, with a complete lack of sex ed? The vague idea I wrote down was about Ernst and Hanschel having sex while they're both deeply confused about what's happening but I could easily see this becoming angsty. Oh my god what if Wendla got Melchior pregnant and they BOTH died. No hear me out—

Tormenting Mark Bryant by putting him in the X Mansion: I didn't develop this idea much, but Mark literally copies the abilities of every person inside a ~30 foot radius. He would go through So Much if he was dropped into a meeting of the X-Men. And if Rogue was there I think chaos would inevitably ensue. Plus, the X-Men are fictional in The Bright Sessions, so he gets to try tiptoeing around giving them a metafictional existential crisis the entire time

Tagging @talysalankil but you don't have to answer if you don't want to

[cailjudy]

My Top Reads of 2024

Hey gang. We are freshly into 2025 and you might be thinking of ways to spend your time a little differently this year, perhaps venture down a path you haven't gone before. Maybe take a good book to join you. Any of these would be a ready companion.

10. A Swiftly Tilting Planet 

This is the third book in the Time Quintet by Madeleine L'Engle. Charles Wallace is 15 now, and he teams up with the unicorn Gaudior to undertake a journey through time to stop an atomic bomb from destroying the world.

This series is wonderfully strange and bizarre, and this book has a lot of historical fiction woven in. Very much worth reading, but only if you've taken down the first two. It rewards being read in big chunks so you can keep the difference voices straight. A lot of time jumping.

The Time Quintet has had a big influence on the novel I'm working on! The mix of religion, sci-fi and fantasy is special.

9. Crypt of the Moon Spider 

Nathan Ballingrud is one of our leading lights in strange fiction. His stories stand-out in any anthology they're placed in. Wounds in particular was a very impactful read when I read it back in 2019, and I've been a huge fan since I first picked up North American Lake Monsters and started to tweet at him about the body horror in “You Go Where It Takes You” and he sent me a thoughtful reply. Ballingrud just keeps moving the bar up with every book he writes.

This story is a tasty novella that slaps you across the face halfway through. Unexpected, truly gothic with all the weird moon-worship you could want. Recommended!

8. The Life and Death of Conan, Book One + Two

This was straight-up fun. Jason Aaron gets Conan in a big way, and he created a narrative structure that allows him to jump into different periods of Conan's life. We get King Conan, then see him on the high seas, later fighting the Picts and massive snakes, reaving his way through the desert and so much more. It's kind of an incredible run, and he leaves it all on the table. If you're looking for a well-written, engaging entry point for the world of Conan, look no further than Jason Aaron's run. I wasn't familiar with Aaron's work before this and I was very impressed.

7. The Bell Jar

How have I not read this until now? One of the best books we read in my book club this year by far. The first half feels a lot like Salinger and the voice continues into the dark abyss, but really Plath wields a sword that is entirely her own.

6. The Bright Sword

This put me into an Arthurian tailspin I'm not sure when I'll get out of. I loved reading The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White a few years back, and I'd been meaning to read more King Arthur. I mean, he's the KING, right? Well this book came out, heard Grossman interviewed on the NYT Books podcast, and goddman it blew me away. The prose is strong, crisp, clear, moves live a train and his command of story and language is incredible. I WILL be reading the Magician trilogy after this. This guy is incredible. A lot of "fucks" and and a helluva good time.

5. The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

Long, winding poems that twisted around my brain like a brook. I only read three books of poetry this year, and I enjoyed dipping into this first thing in the morning at my desk to get my head into writing mode. Stunner of a book.

4. Don't Skip Out On Me // Lean On Pete

Both of these books consumed me. I read Lean on Pete in a couple nights, one of those books you nurse a beer and read into the wee hours for. I loved the cover for Don't Skip Out On Me and it was the first book of Willy's I was aware of. Both devastating, life-affirming, staggeringly well-written. Like a glass of clear water, I adore Willy Vlautin's writing.

3. Provinces of Night

This book....you gotta read it if you have any predilection for Southern gothic writing. It's like Gay is putting a spell on you. It's hard to put down, takes hold of you like a fever. Every couple pages Gay cracks you with a thunderbolt of a line like this:

“Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty.”

I'd read two short stories, which are what he's more known for, but by God he can write the hell out of a novel. I loved everything about this book. William Gay was one of the greats.

2. Lonesome Dove

When I finished this enormous book, I was at a coffee shop near my house. I turned the last page, over a thousand pages into this novel, and by God I could've read a thousand more pages.

This is a book that lives up to all the hype. It takes it's time to get going, provides an unbelievable amount of characters to get to know, and it takes hold of you (a term I keep coming back to in these reviews). If you're looking to get into a western, this is the greatest of all time, and well deserved. I read the sequel as well, Streets of Laredo, which was also great, but very dark, and it didn't quite have the magic. Still a great book, and it was a pleasure to spend time with those characters again. McMurty was a real one.

1. Watership Down

Watership Down has been on my bookshelf my entire life, waiting for me. Literally THIS copy. When I finally started it at the end of 2023, it was like reading C.S. Lewis for the first time. The rabbits and their society is so well-articulated and believable. I was in this world from the start and it was a pure joy. I loved it so much I designed a long-sleeve for my buddy Tim’s bookshop!

[chaztalk]

If you want to learn more about the new anime (of lesser known series:

Blue Archive the Animation

Studio: Yostar Pictures (Arknights)

Summary: The city's academies are divided into their own districts and are considered mostly independent. The General Student Council acts as governing board to manage the academies as a whole. However, the group's ability to govern has come to halt since the mysterious disappearance of the General Student Council president. Countless issues have begun to surface throughout Kivotos in the absence of the president's leadership. To avoid disaster, the General Student Council requests assistance from the Federal Investigation Club, otherwise known as Schale. In fact, Schale is the city's newest club and the last to be approved before the president's disappearance. To accomplish its task, Schale relies on the guidance of a Sensei who can help them resolve the incidents around Kivotos. Based on mobile role-playing game.

Bartender Glass of God

Studio: Liber (Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague

Summary: Remake of the 2006 Bartender. The story of the Sasakura Ryu and Eden Hall, a small cocktail bar in the Chiba area of Tokyo, where troubled customers come for the "glass of the gods," which with Ryu's assistance helps them to resolve their often highly emotional problems.

Kaiju No.8

Studio: Production I.G. (Haikyuu!!, Kimi Ni Todoke)

Summary: With the highest kaiju-emergence rates in the world, Japan is no stranger to attack by deadly monsters. Enter the Japan Defense Force, a military organization tasked with the neutralization of kaiju. Kafka Hibino, a kaiju-corpse cleanup man, has always dreamed of joining the force. But when he gets another shot at achieving his childhood dream, he undergoes an unexpected transformation. How can he fight kaiju now that he’s become one himself?!

Mahjong Soul Kan!!

Studio: Alke

Summary: Sequel to Mahjong Soul Pon. Following up the prior animated series, this time you will see quirky Jyanshis trying out live streaming, two guys traveling together, unfortunate(?) fights against gangs, and more situations where the charm of the Jyanshis comes to shine.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger!

Studio: Yostar Pictures

Summary: Thirteen years ago, an evil army of mysterious alien monsters invaded the Earth, but the great protectors of mankind--the Divine Dragon Rangers--rose up to stop them! To this day, the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance as the fierce struggle continues to unfold! ...Or does it? In truth, the evil aliens were subjugated within the first year, and they've now become nothing more than clowns forced to act out their continuous defeat every week for the entertainment of the masses. They're not real villains, being forced to crank out a monster a week for the Rangers to crush. But one of the aliens has had enough. Something has to change! He'll rebel against the strongest might of the Dragon Rangers and destroy them all from the inside!

Re:Monster

Studio: Studio DEEN (Rurouni Kenshin)

Summary: Tomokui Kanata has suffered an early death, but his adventures are far from over. He is reborn into a fantastical world of swords and magic-- as a lowly goblin! Not content to let this stop him, the now renamed “Rou” uses his new physical abilities and his old memories to plow ahead in a world where consuming other creatures allows him to acquire their strengths and powers.