#Wendell Moore

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[jimintomystery]

In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it. The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000°. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds. [...] Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle. [...] As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade.

--Cory Doctorow, "You were promised a jetpack by liars"

[basketballjersey]

[smashpages]

Out this week: Born Driven (Oni Press, $15.99): 

Saxton Moore Jr. and Nolwe Azul Tamis tell a story about the first African-American NASCAR driver and team owner, Wendell Scott, set during his childhood as he competes in his town’s soapbox derby

See what other comics and graphic novels will make their way into comic shops this week.

[lserver362reviews]

While Elvis doesn't seem fully comfortable in this movie, the wardrobe (esp complete denim & cowboy looks), the songs (I loved Teddy Bear as a child), and the character fit really nicely. It is very meta and I find it so interesting with where he was at with his life, and this being his second film. Graceland purchased months before this movie was released for him and his family, pre-service, his own mother still alive, revolutionized music & performance, and he's got his Blue Moon Boys in this. What a young beautiful baby! Note the same weird 50/50 deal with his manager is in this as in Jailhouse Rock, also released in the same year as this film. King Creole (also starring the lovely Dolores Hart) which would come out one year later as his 4th film, is still the best I've ever seen Elvis, but this works as a stepping stone. Lovely to see! This movie did make me a little sad thinking about his exploitation and talent. ily, Elvis.

[vino---delectable]

Y/n: My boyfriend is too tall for me to kiss him on the lips. What should I do?

Fisher: Punch him in the stomach and when he doubles over in pain, kiss him.

Wendell: Tackle him.

Daisy: Dump him.

Arastoo: Kick him in the shin.

Vincent: NO TO ALL OF THOSE! JUST ASK ME TO LEAN DOWN!

[fcmalby]

Book Pile

This morning, I’m dipping into some poetry and short stories from a few of my favourite authors. The advice I was given when I began writing was, read as much has you write. Over the years I’ve come to see the importance of this and the need for balance. Ian McEwan, in an interview, said that he reads for several hours a day and it’s good to read a range of fiction, especially outside your…

[graphicpolicy]

Oni Press to Publish Born Driven, an Uplifting Tale Based on the True Story of Wendell Scott - the First African American NASCAR Champion

Oni Press to Publish Born Driven, an Uplifting Tale Based on the True Story of Wendell Scott - the First African American NASCAR Champion #books #kidslit

Oni Press is publishing Born Driven, an uplifting children’s book by Saxton Moore Jr. and Nolwe Azul Tamis, based on the true story of the first African American NASCAR champion Wendell Scott. Born Driven will be published in collaboration with the Wendell Scott Foundation and available in stores on November 28. Bold pioneer. Fearless driver. Skilled mechanic. Devoted family man. World War II…

[t4t4t]

Your fake ass aesthetic of being a good person because you’re a liberal lesbian or whatever is pretty lame too

I'm a communist, not a liberal.

Do you mean my ethics ?

My aesthetics are things like, 4lung and Diabarha, guro robot puppy girls, uh. Irish reels, Impressionist painting, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Jorges Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Tarkovsky.

I can appreciate nature but I don't like the framing or frame of this appreciation being "pastoral/rural/agricultural community life" rather than say, botany, or paleontology, or anthropology.

Anyway I see the poverty of Western philosophy every goddamn year in front of my eyes and I know that there are many people being allowed to do very lazy and evil things to the land.

Go read Masanobu Fukuoka and Toby Hemenway

Or check out a YouTube channel by the name of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. Dozens if not hundreds of hours of footage of him rambling around talking about botany and usually making some commentary on the political character of what he sees before him. He had much to say about the border wall killing Saguaros and peyotes, and he even personally saved a few of those peyotes with his own hands and truck, and the footage of that is on his channel.

The peoples who knew and know those Saguaros as relatives still exist on other side of this fake and disgusting border and don't deserve this colonial label of immigrant for going back and forth across the border on their own ancestral lands. (Whether anyone else deserves that label is a different question.... "No borders no nations no mass incarceration" is a fun protest chant I've heard many times...)

[mitchipedia]

The rise and fall of the personal jetpack

Jetpacks were ubiquitous in midcentury pop culture, including James Bond, the Jetsons and Gilligan’s Island. “… it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work.” But we never got personal jetpacks. This delightful episode of the 99% Invisible podcast looks at the history of the jetpack—how it came to be developed after World War II, how it became a pop culture phenom, and why it flopped. As always, the website has great images to accompany the podcast. 99percentinvisible.org

Also: Cory Doctorow—You were promised a jetpack by liars. pluralistic.net

The jetpack—technically a rocket belt—was developed by Wendell Moore at Bell Aircraft Corp. in the 1960s.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone’s back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery’s stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor’s interview … for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like “a surprise is a fart with a lump in it.”

But what’s most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt’s limitations, and by callously risking Suitor’s life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What’s more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the “promise” of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that “full self-driving is one to two years away” every year for a decade:

Cory also sees similar scams in hype about robots and AI.

I’m far less skeptical about AI than Cory is. Generative AI in particular. I use GenAI several times a week, and find it helpful. Still, I wave off claims that GenAI is on the verge of superhuman intelligence. Lesser claims, that GenAI will be as transformative as the smartphone or Internet, are more credible. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

I asked ChatGPT to summarize the 99% Invisible podcast episode about jetpacks, and it summarized the wrong episode. When I pointed it to the right episode, the summary it delivered was bland and useless. ChatGPT gets it spectacularly wrong like that nearly as often as it gets it right.

[kwebtv]

Burke’s Law -  List of Guest Stars

The Special Guest Stars of “Burke’s Law” read like a Who’s Who list of Hollywood of the era.  Many of the appearances, however, were no more than one scene cameos.  This is as complete a list ever compiled of all those who even made the briefest of appearances on the series.  

Beverly Adams, Nick Adams, Stanley Adams, Eddie Albert, Mabel Albertson, Lola Albright, Elizabeth Allen, June Allyson, Don Ameche, Michael Ansara, Army Archerd, Phil Arnold, Mary Astor, Frankie Avalon, Hy Averback, Jim Backus, Betty Barry, Susan Bay, Ed Begley, William Bendix, Joan Bennett, Edgar Bergen, Shelley Berman, Herschel Bernardi, Ken Berry, Lyle Bettger, Robert Bice, Theodore Bikel, Janet Blair, Madge Blake, Joan Blondell, Ann Blyth, Carl Boehm, Peter Bourne, Rosemarie Bowe, Eddie Bracken, Steve Brodie, Jan Brooks, Dorian Brown, Bobby Buntrock, Edd Byrnes, Corinne Calvet, Rory Calhoun, Pepe Callahan, Rod Cameron, Macdonald Carey, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Carlson, Jack Carter, Steve Carruthers, Marianna Case, Seymour Cassel, John Cassavetes, Tom Cassidy, Joan Caulfield, Barrie Chase, Eduardo Ciannelli, Dane Clark, Dick Clark, Steve Cochran, Hans Conried, Jackie Coogan, Gladys Cooper, Henry Corden, Wendell Corey, Hazel Court, Wally Cox, Jeanne Crain, Susanne Cramer, Les Crane, Broderick Crawford, Suzanne Cupito, Arlene Dahl, Vic Dana, Jane Darwell, Sammy Davis Jr., Linda Darnell, Dennis Day, Laraine Day, Yvonne DeCarlo, Gloria De Haven, William Demarest, Andy Devine, Richard Devon, Billy De Wolfe, Don Diamond, Diana Dors, Joanne Dru, Paul Dubov, Howard Duff, Dan Duryea, Robert Easton, Barbara Eden, John Ericson, Leif Erickson, Tom Ewell, Nanette Fabray, Felicia Farr, Sharon Farrell, Herbie Faye, Fritz Feld, Susan Flannery, James Flavin, Rhonda Fleming, Nina Foch, Steve Forrest, Linda Foster, Byron Foulger, Eddie Foy Jr., Anne Francis, David Fresco, Annette Funicello, Eva Gabor, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Reginald Gardiner, Nancy Gates, Lisa Gaye, Sandra Giles, Mark Goddard, Thomas Gomez, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, Sandra Gould, Wilton Graff, Gloria Grahame, Shelby Grant, Jane Greer, Virginia Grey, Tammy Grimes, Richard Hale, Jack Haley, George Hamilton, Ann Harding, Joy Harmon, Phil Harris, Stacy Harris, Dee Hartford, June Havoc, Jill Haworth, Richard Haydn, Louis Hayward, Hugh Hefner, Anne Helm, Percy Helton, Irene Hervey, Joe Higgins, Marianna Hill, Bern Hoffman, Jonathan Hole, Celeste Holm, Charlene Holt, Oscar Homolka, Barbara Horne, Edward Everett Horton, Breena Howard, Rodolfo Hoyos Jr., Arthur Hunnicutt, Tab Hunter, Joan Huntington, Josephine Hutchinson, Betty Hutton, Gunilla Hutton, Martha Hyer, Diana Hyland, Marty Ingels, John Ireland, Mako Iwamatsu, Joyce Jameson, Glynis Johns, I. Stanford Jolley, Carolyn Jones, Dean Jones, Spike Jones, Victor Jory, Jackie Joseph, Stubby Kaye, Monica Keating, Buster Keaton, Cecil Kellaway, Claire Kelly, Patsy Kelly, Kathy Kersh, Eartha Kitt, Nancy Kovack, Fred Krone, Lou Krugman, Frankie Laine, Fernando Lamas, Dorothy Lamour, Elsa Lanchester, Abbe Lane, Charles Lane, Lauren Lane, Harry Lauter, Norman Leavitt, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ruta Lee, Teri Lee, Peter Leeds, Margaret Leighton, Sheldon Leonard, Art Lewis, Buddy Lewis, Dave Loring, Joanne Ludden,  Ida Lupino, Tina Louise, Paul Lynde, Diana Lynn, James MacArthur, Gisele MacKenzie, Diane McBain, Kevin McCarthy, Bill McClean, Stephen McNally, Elizabeth MacRae, Jayne Mansfield, Hal March, Shary Marshall, Dewey Martin, Marlyn Mason, Hedley Mattingly, Marilyn Maxwell, Virginia Mayo, Patricia Medina, Troy Melton, Burgess Meredith, Una Merkel, Dina Merrill, Torben Meyer, Barbara Michaels, Robert Middleton, Vera Miles, Sal Mineo, Mary Ann Mobley, Alan Mowbray, Ricardo Montalbán, Elizabeth Montgomery, Ralph Moody, Alvy Moore, Terry Moore, Agnes Moorehead, Anne Morell, Rita Moreno, Byron Morrow, Jan Murray, Ken Murray, George Nader, J. Carrol Naish, Bek Nelson, Gene Nelson, David Niven, Chris Noel, Kathleen Nolan, Sheree North, Louis Nye, Arthur O'Connell, Quinn O'Hara, Susan Oliver, Debra Paget, Janis Paige, Nestor Paiva, Luciana Paluzzi, Julie Parrish, Fess Parker, Suzy Parker, Bert Parks, Harvey Parry, Hank Patterson, Joan Patrick, Nehemiah Persoff, Walter Pidgeon, Zasu Pitts, Edward Platt, Juliet Prowse, Eddie Quillan, Louis Quinn, Basil Rathbone, Aldo Ray, Martha Raye, Gene Raymond, Peggy Rea, Philip Reed, Carl Reiner, Stafford Repp, Paul Rhone, Paul Richards, Don Rickles, Will Rogers Jr., Ruth Roman, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Gena Rowlands, Charlie Ruggles, Janice Rule, Soupy Sales, Hugh Sanders, Tura Satana, Telly Savalas, John Saxon, Lizabeth Scott, Lisa Seagram, Pilar Seurat, William Shatner, Karen Sharpe, James Shigeta, Nina Shipman, Susan Silo, Johnny Silver, Nancy Sinatra, The Smothers Brothers, Joanie Sommers, Joan Staley, Jan Sterling, Elaine Stewart, Jill St. John, Dean Stockwell, Gale Storm, Susan Strasberg, Inger Stratton, Amzie Strickland, Gil Stuart, Grady Sutton, Kay Sutton, Gloria Swanson, Russ Tamblyn. Don Taylor, Dub Taylor, Vaughn Taylor, Irene Tedrow, Terry-Thomas, Ginny Tiu, Dan Tobin, Forrest Tucker, Tom Tully, Jim Turley, Lurene Tuttle, Ann Tyrrell, Miyoshi Umeki, Mamie van Doren, Deborah Walley, Sandra Warner, David Wayne, Ray Weaver, Lennie Weinrib, Dawn Wells, Delores Wells, Rebecca Welles, Jack Weston, David White, James Whitmore, Michael Wilding, Annazette Williams, Dave Willock, Chill Wills, Marie Wilson, Nancy Wilson, Sandra Wirth, Ed Wynn, Keenan Wynn, Dana Wynter, Celeste Yarnall, Francine York.

[lorenfinch]

Find-It Game

I was tagged by @liv-is; thank you so much for the tag!

Tagging: @writernopal @writinglittlebeasts @author-a-holmes @ardenfiction @serenanymph @kaiusvnoir if you would like! Also tagging anyone else who wants to

Your words are: gloom, sky, wonder, beyond, grace

My words: heart, dusk, touch, bite, strike

Heart:

The cacophony grew until the caravan of hunters reached a towering, formidable-looking stone castle, where a crowd had gathered near the front gate. Affixed to the castle wall was the same symbol as the brooch I had seen Ainsley and the rest of the hunters bearing on their chests—a winged shield. I knew right then that this was the base of the Monster Hunter’s Guild. My heart, dead though it may be, hammered in my chest as one hunter dismounted her horse to unlock the cage and swing open the door. Ainsley gave me an encouraging grin as he took me by the arm and guided me out of the cart.

Dusk:

It was approaching dusk when we finally reached Lightpoint, the sun low on the horizon behind us. The small town sat right on the edge of the Everdark, nestled in the moors of eastern Cedra. On the outskirts, small farmsteads peppered the sides of the road, and of the small amount of people I saw tending to them, most waved at or otherwise greeted the approaching gaggle of monster hunters.

Touch:

“I’m sorry, darling,” he murmured, reaching over and caressing my cheek. Sir Wendell’s words forgotten, I leaned into his hand, a tiny whimper slipping past my lips at the rare gift of such a soft and tender touch. If I weren’t tied to my horse, I might’ve leapt into his arms right then and there. “You don’t look like a tempter, do you? You poor thing. You’re much too lovely to be kept in such a state.”

Bite:

It wasn’t just a simple bite. Despite my foggy memory, I could recall what did the trick. A bite was only the first step. Then, my savior had offered me their own bleeding wrist and implored me to drink. It didn’t take much at all, only a few drops before I fully blacked out.

Strike:

“So this is the Freshblood of Blackstead?” The old man shook his head as his gaze returned to his desk, and at that point I spotted the quill in his hand and the parchment it glided across. Clearly he was writing something, perhaps transcribing our conversation. “Further proof of the treachery of vampires. First they strike our base, then slaughter our town’s livestock, and now they have cursed a child.” “I’m not a child,” I hissed. The old man narrowed his good eye at me.

[basketballjersey]

[lentheric]

Poems that have connected with me in some way or another

About love and relationships

Having a coke with you- Frank O’Hara

Want- Joan Larkin

Chen Chen Summer was forever

I want to eat bugs with you underground- Julie Dano

Mountain Dew commercial disguised as love poem- Matthew Olzman

I carry your heart with me- E.E. Cummings

Warming her Pearls- Carol Ann Duffy

We have not long to love- Tennessee Williams

Come, and be my baby- Maya Angelou

Summer- Chen Chen

You up?- Rachel Taormino

History student falls in love with astrophysics student- Keaton St. James

Strawberry Moon- Matthew Dickman

A Complaint- William Wordsworth

About grief and loss

Five stages of grief- Linda Pastan

In the end you get everything back (Liza Minnelli)- Jacob Schneiderman

A Meeting- Wendell Berry

Half-light- Frank Bidart

Life to the last drop- Mahmoud Darwish

John Wick is so tired Kyra Wilder

My dead friends- Marie Howe

Grief- Barbara Crooker

Time does not bring relief- Edna St. Vincent Millay

A possible exit- Jarrett Moseley

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone- W H Auden

About life and perspective

Meeting Point- Louis Macneice

The years- Alex Demitriov

Planet of Love- Richard Silken

July- Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Wear sunscreen- Mary Scmich

December- Michael Miller

Alone- Edgar Allen Poe

Other

Girls- Emily Moore

How to be a dog- Andrew Kane

Dead Rat- Mervyn Peake

On this the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the titanic- Laura Lamb Brown-Lavolie

[flydeltajets]

ok last post b4 i go do smth else

hi! ok so i just wanted to jot down some of the ocs i most frequently talk about

airline ocs nicholas collett sykes - delta airlines aldrich lloyd cyrus smith - american airlines louis (no full name yet) - united airlines diedrich (no full name yet either) - boeing vincent willem plesman - KLM shin sook-ja - korean air yu “freida” jinghua - cathay pacific dietmar pitcairn - eastern air lines henrietta clemence wendell - trans world airways alexandra quesada - federal aviation administration diana tripp - pan american world airways ashlyn (no full name yet) - virgin atlantic philippe (no full name yet) - air france

cruise ocs stefan wilhelmsen - royal caribbean international nomiki chandris - celebrity cruises astraea chandris - azamara club cruises casimir lichtenberg - serenade of the seas cordelia lichtenberg - jewel of the seas raelyn lichtenberg - radiance of the seas chen zhihao - quantum of the seas chen guiqing - ovation of the seas chen ming-hui - spectrum of the seas harmony bellamy - harmony of the seas fredrick (no full name yet) - oasis of the seas harald (no last name yet) - majesty of the seas (now majesty of the oceans) sarah (no last name yet) - empress of the seas (now empress) ingunn prima skaugen/strand - song of norway (rip) håkon wilhelmsen/strand - nordic prince (rip x2) kjerstin raphael vasa - logos hope (really neat ship u should check it out)

unrelated/human ocs willow “blue” mccarran - MH-60R and F/A-18E pilot for the US navy alexis sylvia stanton - blue’s cousin who’s in the army wilson moore - everyone calls him ceiling fan, don’t ask why andrew “andy” sullivan - commanding officer of the USCGC steadfast takahashi machiko - commanding officer of the USCGC polar sea annalise “anna” sullivan - andy’s twin sister and CO of the USCGC healy isaac “kabob” alonso - E-2D pilot and head of carrier air wing 11 (CVW-11) leslie hannaford - gunner’s mate on the USCGC steadfast caroline (no full name yet) - shooter onboard the USS theodore roosevelt holly janssen - head medic person on the USS theodore roosevelt viktorija “fountain” petrauskas - blue’s co-pilot and bff 4 lyfe cameron “cam” moore - wilson’s older sibling and USCG recruiter ioanna culianu - MH-65 dolphin pilot for the US coast guard liang “jackson” guiying - iykyk sanicas - mystical bird like creature that travels between worlds bhinnehawk - sanicas’s brother (literally that “i hope i dont have to fight my evil self” meme LMAO) emberly - dimension hopper (+ former pokemon trainer?? idk man) sadira - emberly’s sister chad - just chad. malcolm/mikhail/augustus - exists almost exclusively within my genshin au lore yes, i have quite a few military ocs. yes, i am very critical of the us military and i hate it as much as the next person with a lick of common sense. we exist.

[ballplayersxo]

I love Lexi Gordon and Wendell Moore from the Timberwolf’s but I can understand why people get sick of it. She does post a lot about him and not cheating like I’m glad she has that idea. Also the timeline of the relationship is iffy when they met at duke in which is why she leaves out details sometimes. Technically Wendell was still with his hs gf when they met and they both caught feelings.

lmfao these relationships never end well