#at eight frames per second

[jamathydodger]

Me when I get complimented:

Was practicing some animation after my little phantom transformation gif and this took way too long to not share it somewhere.

[bloodblanks]

masterlist — creepypasta + marble hornets

characters: eyeless jack, hoodie, masky, ticci toby, jeff the killer, ben drowned, slenderman

all works are reader insert [character x fem reader]

author's note: dead dove: do not eat. the following works may contain dark, explicit content, including rape/non-con, dub-con, stockholm syndrome, ‘yandere’ tropes, abuse, death, violence, and similar themes.

please read at your own discretion.

if you wish to see more content, please consider commissioning me! ♡

creepypasta boyfriend quiz

eyeless jack

tili tili bom | one | two | three

a field of red spider lilies | one | two | three | final

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

hoodie / brian thomas

solace | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine | ten | eleven

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

masky / timothy ‘tim’ wright

solace | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine | ten | eleven

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

ticci toby / tobias erin ‘toby’ rogers

pumpkin head | one

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

jeff the killer / jeffrey woods

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

ben drowned

30 frames per second | one

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

slenderman / the operator

feverish and faint

first encounter

when you’re sad

punishment

kinks

miscellaneous work

creepypasta pet headcanons

creepypasta video game headcanons

creepypasta pet name headcanons

creepypasta height headcanons

[shyflops]

The Princess Bride (novel) by William Goldman is 89,426 words. if a picture were actually worth a thousand words, then translating the novel The Princess Bride into a movie would require approximately 90 images, which, at 24 frames per second, would cause the movie in question to last 3 and 3/4 seconds

however, in reality, The Princess Bride (movie)'s runtime is one hour and thirty-eight minutes. so clearly these images are not so efficient. 98 minutes of movie at 24 frames per second is 141,120 frames of movie, which suggests that the average frame is in fact worth Less than one word.

clearly the value of images was overinflated by marketing executives at Big Image, presumably in order to sell more images

[she-who-paints-with-fire]

KING'S FALL

Monarch pilots knew missiles well. The small, the medium, the large; the heat-seeking, the antiradiation, the radar locking; the agile, the powerful, the arcing.

Monarch pilots knew missiles very well. It was their domain.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING]

Not all kings could control their subjects.

[INCOMING MISSILE!]

Dawn Always Comes went into a steep dive; Lux strained against a force several times stronger than gravity and felt her mech strain with her. Her knuckles were white around the controls as her thumb pressed down the button for the first stage countermeasures.

[CHAFF FLARE / CHAFF FLARE / CHAFF FLARE]

Twenty thousand metres, falling at 600 metres per second and increasing. Slivers of metal exploded from small boxes in her mech, obscuring her back in a haze of metallic film.

[RADAR LOCK BROKEN]

Respite. She kept diving, just in case—

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

—that happened. 670 metres per second and increasing. Eighteen thousand metres above sea level.

[PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [CHAFF FLARE / CHAFF FLARE / CHAFF FLARE]

1000 metres and closing. Lux knew that instinctively.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [CHAFF FLARE / CHAFF FLARE / CHAFF FLARE]

Dawn Always Comes screamed warnings at Lux as she kept diving, jinking left and right all the while in an effort to find some sort of space or measure of safety. 730 metres per second and falling. Sixteen thousand metres above sea level. The air was growing thicker as she shot downwards, meaning the missiles following her would need to expend more fuel to keep up and retarget. Her fuel, on the other hand, was functionally infinite.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [PROXIMITY ALERT - MISSILE]

Fifteen thousand metres. Her pursuer had fired more ordnance. The lock-on warning tone howled in Lux's ear as she did her best to evade while her subjectivity suite screamed warnings directly into her mind. Her thumb pressed down the button for her countermeasures again.

As slivers of metal and thousand-degree magnesium flares shot away from her back, she felt a momentary searing heat, then a wash of fire as a missile detonated too close. Instinctively she flinched away, only to feel another missile detonate too close again, sending small electric shocks rippling across her frame.

The feeling jolted her brain, made something stand out over the haze of warnings. Gandiva. She was being shot at with Gandiva missiles.

[PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

Reality smashed back into her with the warning tone of ten thousand metres. 810 metres per second and falling. No time to think about how the hell her opponent, a small-time pirate lord Union wanted dethroned, had gotten their hands on mainstay BELLA CIAO weaponry. Only time to react.

Nine thousand metres. She kept moving, dodging back and forth, trying to evade whatever she could.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

In her mind she weighed a choice. It was clear she couldn't outrun the missiles, even as she closed in on Mach 3, and the countermeasures hadn't worked the second time. Her Javelin rockets and Avenger mini-missiles could function as an ad-hoc point defense, but to fire them she would need to turn around, bleeding away speed—and while yes, speed wasn't going to win this fight, it did give her time and time gave her options, which was something she was sorely lacking.

Eight thousand metres. 920 metres per second.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

Seven thousand metres. 930 metres per second. As seconds passed by so did distance. Distance gave time. Time gave options. She was running out of all three.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

Six thousand metres. 940 metres per second. Her thumb hovered over the countermeasures. She could feel herself pushing past the redline; the subjectivity suite that linked her neurons to her mech made it feel like her heart was straining to keep up.

[RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE! INCOMING MISSILE!]

Five thousand metres. 950 metres per second.

[ALTITUDE! ALTITUDE!] [RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY WARNING - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

Four thousand metres. 950 metres per second.

[ALTITUDE! ALTITUDE!] [RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY ALERT - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

Three thousand metres. 950 metres per second. Lux braced for the force of gravity on her to multiply even further.

[ALTITUDE! ALTITUDE!] [RADAR LOCK WARNING] [PROXIMITY ALERT - MISSILE] [INCOMING MISSILE!] [INCOMING MISSILE!]

Two thousand metres. 950 metres per second. This was insanity under the best of circumstances—suicide under the worst. Bleeding off nearly a thousand metres per second of speed in less than a second was near impossible.

[PULL UP! PULL UP!]

Lux strained as hard as she could to level out before throwing herself around and firing every micromissile she had at the incoming ordnance. Her body felt like it was being crushed into paste as her momentum fought against the thrusters on her back and lost—900 metres per second, 700 metres per second, 500 metres per second, 400 metres per second, 100 metres per second. It made her ill. Her bones howled, her organs screamed, even with the interia cushioning provided by the Monarch—had she not had that cushion she would have been emulsified. Her micromissiles blazed away, seeking out the incoming missiles and detonating them prematurely a mere 100 metres away. Slivers of metal and white-hot flares shot out from her metal back, [RADAR LOCK BROKEN] finally freeing her from the enemy targeting lock, and [SCAN COMPLETE] her IFF system tagged the enemy mech as a Monarch named Dark Sky Stalker as it silhouetted itself against the setting moon.

Dark Sky Stalker, the personal mech of the pirate lord Lux was hunting.

[TARGET LOCKED]

[SHARANGA MISSILES ARMED]

[GANDIVA MISSILES ARMED]

[JAVELIN ROCKETS RELOADING]

[AVENGER MISSILES RELOADING]

She pressed the trigger, bore witness to a hundred shooting stars, and then the light of dawn.

[KILL CONFIRMED. NO FURTHER TARGETS. WELL DONE, LANCER.]

[sierrale8ne]

40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS CHAPTER EIGHT

thought i’d be lying if i said ‘i didn’t want you to myself.’ when you look me in my eyes and, tell me that it’s mine, i…

pairing wnba!paige bueckers x singer!oc

taglist @thaatdigitaldiary @ohbueckers @wbbgetsmewetter @rosemariiaa @tndaqlifwy @patscorner @pboogerswbb @xxloveralways14 @makethemhoesmad @h34rtsformilli @uconnpazzi @luvapaigeeyy @hedidnotpleaseme @paigesbabygirl @mopopshop @omg-imtumbling @ch12334 @wbb4l

warnings substance use, infidelity, sexual content

kalena speakss 🪽! good morningggg ;) song for this chapter is BPW by jasmine sullivan, you’ll know when to play it!

June 2025 — Los Angeles, California

The lights are low in the studio this evening, as per usual whenever I’m here. I’m not the type to have multiple people in my space, usually it’s just me, Kaylee, and my producer. But tonight I get to be wonderfully distracted by Page Madison Bueckers.

Her phone is propped up on a bottle of Patron, some audio playing from it as she makes a TikTok in front of me. I’m fighting a laugh in the midst of rolling a blunt, because everything they say about her lack of rhythm seems to be true.

“Oh you’re annoying.” She laughs, picking up on my obvious amusement and mushing my face with her fingers.

“Hips don’t lie.” I giggle. “C’mon, no way you thought I wasn’t gon’ make fun of you.”

“You a bully. Ion know why I’m friends with you.”

“Because I’m just so pretty.” I reply jokingly.

Paige rolls her eyes at my statement, retaking her original seat in the rolling chair next to mine and shoving her phone in the pocket of her black Essentials sweatshorts.

If there’s any color I love on Paige, it’s definitely black. The darkness perfectly accentuates the tan of her skin and the bright blond of her hair and the blue of her eyes. She’s been wearing it more lately. Which I find odd, considering the blazing heat in California this summer.

I asked her to be here. No other reason than being alone in the studio is usually a recipe for disaster. She took up my offer gratefully, almost too grateful but I was probably overthinking it.

“You gonna let me hear some unreleased shit, or what?” Paige asked. Her chair slides closer to mine until our arms are touching. Our noses are close too, my eyes boring into hers. Purple rimmed wide framed glasses sit on her nose, making them look bigger.

I look away quickly, leaning towards the monitor in front of me. “I can, yeah.” I tell her, setting the blunt on the rolling tray. “If you leak it tho’ I’d have to kill you.” I joke as my eyes pass through all the possible unreleased and unfinished songs on the file.

I watch her take the substance into her own hands, packing and rolling it in places I didn’t get to reach yet. I would normally be pissed off, watching someone else roll my blunt as if I couldn’t do it myself. But the way her tongue darts out to lick it sealed, pretty and pink and soft, then her perfect fucking face has me mesmerized.

“Who taught you how to roll?” I laugh, honestly a bit shocked.

“I was in college for five years, you think I didn’t learn?” Paige looks back at me, fingers still sealing it like a second nature.

“You probably shouldn’t tell people you were in school for that long.” I snide and her elbow meets my ribs.

I take it from her hands gracefully when she finishes, putting it between my slightly chapped lips. Paige takes the lighter, striking the flame a few times until it lights and bringing the flame to the end of the blunt. Her blues are basically eating up my soul, the tip of her tongue peaking out slightly in concentration until I take the first hit.

The weed fills my lungs fast, and I take the blunt away from my lips, smoke clouding the air. Paige was still in season, and due to her recent shooting outbursts, subject to multiple rounds of drug testing. She wasn’t smoking with me tonight, rather taking a few shots from the liquor not too far away.

I laugh at the thought, “they really been testing you?”

She nods, the light falling from her hands and back onto the desk. She’s so close, I can smell every note of her cologne. Lavender, some cedarwood.

“Literally this morning. As soon as I stepped off the court last night I got an email saying I got an appointment in the morning.” She chuckled.

To say Paige had been on a tear this month would be an understatement. 20 point games, double-doubles, off of crazy efficiency too. She’s shooting 57% from the field and 42% from three, but last night she shot almost perfect, literally, 10/10 on her first shots 13/15 on the game.

For someone who claimed to not be a big basketball fan, she has me watching and remembering her stats like i’ve been doing it for years.

“Okay, music.” She starts. “If you had to make a collab album with one artist, who would it be?”

I sit back and bit for her question, but the answer really wasn’t too difficult. “Frank Ocean, easily.”

“Really? I thought you’d say Drake or sum.” She chuckles.

“Him too!” I responded. “But Frank doesn’t make music with just anybody. If I get that, I’ll know I made.” I shrug. It’s a dream that’s a bit out of touch, he hasn’t put out music in years, but one can wish.

“Imma manifest that Frank feature for you, angel.” She smiles. Her hand reaches to brush my hair out of my line of sight before gesturing with it towards the monitor, “which one can I hear?”

I skim past all the music loaded up on the screen before clicking on a file, all the colorful waves pop up individually. The vocals, ad-libs, all the snares and drums. To me, it’s normal. I wasn’t a producer but after making music for so long, the technicalities become less and less overwhelming and more interesting.

“Wow.” Paige breathes.

“It’s a lot, I know.”

“Is it finished?” She asks me. I nod, shaking my hand side to side as to non verbally tell her ‘sorta’. The title reads BPW and yes it pretty much is finished, but I’m a perfectionist and I feel like most songs can always have more.

“You wanna hear it?” I question while looking her way. I take another drag from the blunt. “It’s kinda nasty tho’. The label only let me put two freaky songs on there, so this one got pushed back.”

“Only? You’re a freak, bro.” Paige replies. “Lemme hear it.”

The instrumental echos first when I hit play. Violin and bass, and then I remember I tried to avoid the piano for this song since most of my discography already is over taken by it. The intro is long, when I look over at Paige and she’s listening intently, I start to get nervous. “It’s still missing some thi—”

Her finger meets my lips, indirectly telling me to shut up. I sit there shocked. It’s soft, her finger, sliding down my bottom lip until her hand rests in my lap. It’s like i’m not even there, just another object in the room as she got consumed by the music.

I didn’t think I could be more turned on.

It’s the reason I write in the first place, the reaction and the feeling of absorption from my lyrics or my sound. But not many people around me get that. Paige so clearly does. It makes me feel warm, taken over with emotion because she sits there so focused, waiting for that first vocal.

—

Well shit, I think to myself when I finally hear the lyrics.

Maraye is crazy. She’s crazy for having me sit here and listen to her sing about sex while she wears those tight ass shorts, just days after telling me we are just friends. I can’t do anything about it.

My head slowly bows back and forth along with the sound of her voice. This song doesn’t deserve to be unreleased, it deserves to be in my library, on that playlist.

And even though we ain’t official

You know I ain't no regular girl

So tell me whenever I'm witcha

I got the best pussy in the—

I stare at her in awe, not just because of what I’m hearing but the way the smoke passes through her lips has me squeezing my legs together. My hand still rests in her lap lazily, I can’t will it to move, I don’t think she wants me to either.

It’s clear to me I have no self control. The other night, just minutes after dropping her off at home, I said I was done. Julian was a dickhead but that’s Maraye’s dickhead and I needed to respect it. Then here she goes, singing about how good she is in bed, and looking this fucking good. I need her. In all definitions of the word, I need her bad.

I stand up, needing some sort of space between us before I’m ripping every single thread of clothing on her body. I take a comfortable seat on the edge of the control panel, bowing my head with the melody. My heart rapidly beats in my chest, palms growing sweaty.

“You’re really good at this.” I breathe.

The song comes to an end, she presses a few buttons on her monitor that I don’t really care for. “Thank you, love.”

I force a large amount of oxygen into my lungs. Why did she have to say that? I was already struggling just being in the same room. Those damn eyes turning me into a mess between my thighs and here she goes.

A giggle escapes Maraye’s lips as she takes another hit. “Are you drunk?”

I shake my head. “Nah, ma. This tequila is hittin’ though.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm what?”

“Nothing.” Maraye mumbles. “Whatcha think about the song?” She asks me. She scoots the chair closer to me, wheels rolling against the hardwood until she’s seated between my legs.

“Only you could make singing ‘bout sex sound so perfect.” I comment. She really did sound angelic, the nickname so fitting. My arms are crossed over my chest as I size her up. It’s the first time I get a good look at her tattoos, normally I’m looking at her eyes or her thighs or shamelessly her tits. But the ink down her arm makes me crazy.

There’s one in particular that catches my eye. Linework of three faces overlapped, one blue, one green, and one red. I have no idea of the meaning, or what it stands for but the pop of color on her skin eats me alive.

Maraye shifts in her seat and a smile inches on her lips. Her hips moving in a way that intrigues me. “You alright there, angel?”

“I’m just fine, superstar. You?” She poses. I reach forward, taking the blunt from her hand and taking a drag. The way it clouds my brain let me know that I was not about to leave this room without making a move on her. I set it on the tray to my right, listing to her as she hums, “that song looked like it riled you up. I’m observant.”

I pull her in closer by the arm of the chair, if I couldn’t flirt I would sure as hell have fun teasing her. “I’m observant too. You been holding these legs together all night. Why?”

“Are you minding my business?”

“Yeah, ma. Now what?”

She doesn’t respond and now I want to know what she’s thinking. I want to get everything out in the open, all the things she wants to say but holds back on.

“The line is paper thin, Madison.”

“Like I asked, why you been sittin’ like this?” I ask again.

I know what I want her to say. I want her to tell me it’s me. That I got her so turned on that she’s sitting here with her legs practically glued together because it’s morally wrong to act on how she’s feeling. Even tell me that she wants to rip my clothes off as badly as I want to rip hers off.

Her foot taps against the floor, echoing off the walls alongside our in sync breathing. “I-uh. M’just crossed. Leave me alone” She begs, voice low almost like she’s shy. It’s cute.

“Jus’ crossed, baby? Y’sure?”

I don’t think i’ve ever been so forward with Maraye than I am right now. Everything running through my body right now is like a shot of adrenaline.

“Paige! You can’t be doing this to me right now.” She tosses her head back frustratedly. I’m stifling a laugh from where I stand. I knew I could get her flustered but this was too easy.

She looks back up at me, her eyes dark and slightly glazed over. The weed has her eyes rimed with red and oddly enough the smell it exudes from her is incredible. Nearly as intoxicating as the substance itself.

“Doin’ what?” I chuckle. “I just wanna make sure you’re comfortable, angel. You look tense.”

“You make me tense.”

I fake a pout. “Lemme fix it.”

“Why do you insist on not having a boundary or respecting mine?”

“I don’t think we’ve ever had boundaries, Raye.” I point out.

My hands instinctively reach for her own, standing her up so I’m not longer craning my neck to look at her. Still, the good four inches I have on her makes her eye me eagerly. Looking up like she’s giving in. “Paige we can’t.” Maraye sighs.

“So tell me to stop.” I muse.

“What?”

I trail my hands to her body. The left holding onto her hip while the other wraps around her waist. She doesn’t even try to fight me off, instead I swear she falls into me more. Her hand holds onto my bicep, avoiding eye contact with me.

I notice it. Every single act that is out of her normal. The stuttering and looking everywhere but me. She’s shy. I’ll take it as a good thing, that my actions have her reacting like a school girl.

“Lemme get you right.” I murmur.

Maraye’s mouth opens, then closes immediately after. My head pushes towards her, right where her neck meets her shoulder. I get a good whiff of her Chanel perfume.

“This is so wrong, P.” She whispers.

“Tell me,” I start with my lips up against her ear, “to stop.”

“The cameras.”

I look around the control panel, before spotting the on/off switch under the table. I flick it off, the red light by the camera in the corner blinks off.

“I—”

“Oh my God, just shut up.” I hum and it’s a matter of seconds before our lips are touching, moving against one another in sync.

It’s different than the first time. That one was slow, like we were still trying to figure it out. But this one? This one is hungry, fast and familiar. I can make out the taste of weed on her lips, tequila in the back of her mouth when my tongue reaches that spot.

Maraye’s hands are in my hair, tugging it between her fingers all hurried like I could slip away. Mine are everywhere. her hips, her thighs, her ass. I squeeze it before smoothing a hand over the area. A groan slips past my lips and into her mouth.

I’m pushing us away from the table, past all the chairs and wires until her back hits the leather couch behind us. I pull back, and her mouth is sucking on my tongue. I swear God himself would have to claw me off of her after that.

“Wanna take your clothes off.” I pant. My kisses move to her jaw, licking it before moving down her neck. I’m searching for that sweet spot, and when she moans in my ear I know I’ve found it.

It’s quite easily the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard. Maraye is quite easily the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen. Her stunning brown skin and curls that tickle my face with each suck I give to her neck. The septum in her nose and tattoos down her arm. To make things harder for me she smells fucking incredible, and the feel of her plush thighs in my hands reduces me to nothing.

My knee meets the center of her legs, that spot that makes her arch into me. I reach for the hem of her shirt, pulling it up and over her head and it hangs off the arm of the couch.

“I wanna fuck you right here, angel.” I mutter against her warm skin. Maraye cups my face, pulling my lips back to hers eagerly. She licks at my bottom lip before slipping it into my mouth. I swallow up every moan she gives me, so damn desperate for more. My hand grips her breast that unfortunately is confined in that black sports bra she wears.

“Paige, fuck.” She gasps against me. Her hand leaves my face to pull my glasses off, they’re unbelievably foggy and I didn’t even notice, too busy tonguing her down to care. She holds them before kissing me again and biting my bottom lip.

“You’re fuckin’ nasty.” I sigh, pulling her closer.

Maraye moans my name when I push my knee deeper into her cunt. I can feel just how wet she is against my bare skin.

“Lemme have you, ma.” I grunt, suddenly felling very hot in the UConn hoodie I have on. “Show me how good that pussy is, baby. You said it’s the best, yeah? Prove it.”

It’s carnal the way I need her. Like my sole purpose for being put on this earth was to please her. I’ll do it. Happily. Hell, I’m begging for it.

“Fuck. God, P.” She hiccups, letting my hands travel wherever they can reach. They settle on her hips, playing with the waistband of her shorts while my tongue continues to clash with hers. God, it’s messy. Saliva sticky on my chin.

I’m about to dig into her shorts when the door handle fumbles. I sigh gratefully that it’s locked but then I hear it, the clicking.

—

The fact that I have to fight with myself on whether or not I should push Paige off of me is very telling of my behavior. Someone is messing with the lock on the door, so with what leftover strength I have, I pull away from Paige and push her back off of me.

She reaches for my face and wipes the saliva from my lips, giving me one more chaste kiss before sitting back on the opposite end of the couch. I search for my shirt, which has now made it’s way to the floor. By the time I toss it over my head and hand Paige her glasses back and fluff my hair so it is naturally falling over the hickeys I assume Paige has left on my neck, the door is swinging open.

“God damn, Raye. You coul— oh. I didn’t know you had someone else in here.”

It’s Kaylee, which makes me let out quite possibly the world’s biggest sigh of relief. I play with my bottom lip, hoping she can’t point out how swollen it is from Paige biting it.

Her taste, like cherries and a bit of tequila, has completely overpowered any other taste previously in my mouth. She’s taken over my entire body.

“Hey.” Paige greets her, awkwardly clearing her throat.

Kaylee smiles and waves before walking to the controls. She drops her bag in the seat I had just occupied earlier. She stands still, then looks up in the corner, the light by the camera’s that are almost always on suddenly off.

She flips the switch before turning to look at the two of us.

“Huh. Someone turned the camera’s off.” She comments.

“Weird.” I reply.

Really weird.

[dawnfelagund]

We don't often think of The Silmarillion as a text that uses modern literary strategies, like indirect characterization through dialogue. However, Tolkien absolutely characterizes using dialogue. Some characters have distinctive patterns in their dialogue, for instance. Námo Mandos is one such character.

Námo is a man of few words. The Silmarillion states that he speaks his judgments at the bidding of Manwë ... not only that, but he speaks very few words, even when pressed to do so.

Námo speaks eight times in the text with a median of twelve words per instance of dialogue. Across the entire book and all characters, the median number of words per instance of dialogue is thirty-one words, so Námo is well below average.

Until he isn't. As the Noldor leave Aman, "they beheld suddenly a dark figure standing high upon a rock that looked down upon the shore. Some say that it was Mandos himself, and no lesser herald of Manwë" ("Of the Flight of the Noldor"). This guys churns out 259 words, more than three times his next longest speech and twenty-one times longer than Námo's median dialogue length. It is the longest dialogue by a single speaker in The Silmarillion.

What is happening here? There are a few possibilities:

Tolkien uses this single long speech in contrast to Námo's seven other much shorter instances of dialogue to emphasize the importance of this speech. Along those same lines,

the Doom of the Noldor, along with the Oath of Fëanor, form the "explanation of history" used by the narrator of The Silmarillion. Just about everything bad that happens, the narrator finds a way to tie back to these. Again, the length of the speech—especially coming from a character who is succinct verging on terse—emphasizes the centrality of the Doom of the Noldor. We understand that Námo only speaks when it's important, and he says a lot here, so it must be really important.

Is the speaker even Námo? The language "some say" creates doubt; it relegates the identity of the speaker to the realm of rumor. Again, thinking about the narrator, the uncertainty allows for the possibility that the narrator elevated a theory that confirms his understanding of history without having firm evidence.

Or maybe the anomaly is a characterization strategy. Tolkien writes a character who speaks very little. In this scene, he speaks a lot. And I do mean A LOT. What does this say about Námo's frame of mind in this scene? He suddenly unleashes a torrent of dialogue where he spoke minimally or not at all before, perhaps an indication of distress, sorrow, frustration? It is further interesting, considering that his second longest instance of dialogue was also Fëanor-related, to consider what this shows of his feelings toward Fëanor. Is this the Silmarillion version of the modern comedy trope where the strong, silent type suddenly lets loose the outpouring he's been holding in all this time?

Regardless of the theory you prefer, Tolkien uses dialogue here to raise questions about characters and about history.

---

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

Previous posts:

Dialogue by Chapter Dialogue by Character Group Dialogue by Gender Who Talks More Than God?

The entire project is archived on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.

[mortkranken-plague]

Sleep has been elusive for the Mortkranken second-year until now, his head had hit the pillow and nothing could even stir him awake. Not even Yuri's excessive yelling or anyone passing by his room.

It was only until he woke up from his week nap (accidental coma) that he felt... odd. Sure, it was likely the position he slept in, but this wasn't the usual “Ough, I slept with the position akin to the number eight.” No, this was something that would clearly throw off his schedule for the next week.

Stretching the way he usually does, Auggie seems to find that his hands had been replaced with biscuit makers. In fact, everything about his small feline arms seems to send off alarm bells in his mind, which is about the same time frame he pieced together what happened.

He had become a cat. He didn't know what breed, all he knew now was meow meow.

Now, the problem lies in the fact that one; he had no way of getting out of his room without meowing like a wet kitten; two, the possibility of getting picked up and taken who-knows-where; and three, he couldn't get his usual dose of affection from Raiden.

This was clearly a horrible mistake the deities above were playing, and it made the (rather large) cat pace on his bed and panic. He couldn't live like this!! Who knows how long it'll be until he turns back!!! This is the worst, the absolute worst!

[TL:DR - Auggie gets turned into a cat for a 3 day long April Fool's event per the suggestion of one of my irls. It was either this or his personality switched.]

[any asks sent between today at 12 AM - april 1st at 11:59 P.M CST will be answered by kitty!auggie]

[luna-wing-cns274]

@ocram-station-admin-and-records

< Alright, let’s fuck around with Ocramite. >

[ Video feed from the surface of a barren, lifeless moon. Above, set against the black of space, is the disk of a nearby planet. Visual conditions are too poor to make out any of the planet’s surface features; only a narrow crescent of the world is illuminated.

An open field of gray regolith extends to the horizon, illuminated by harsh sunlight. Solid boulders are scattered among the dust, ejecta from meteorite impacts. One of them stands in the distance, centered in frame. It’s difficult to judge the scale of the object by visuals alone, but HUD elements have been added to provide information. ]

TARGET RANGE: 40.6M

COMPOSITION: BASALT ROCK

APPROX. MASS: 27.3 TONNES

[ A combat subaltern moves into view, facing away from the camera. It makes long strides through the low-gravity environment, and clouds of dust billow up around its feet with each step. In one hand, it holds an anti-materiel railgun, slung at its side by a strap over its shoulders.

With slow, deliberate motions, it falls into a low stance and slides to a halt. Raising the railgun to its shoulder, it sights the boulder in the distance. As it looks through the scope, the subaltern reaches up to make a small adjustment before lowering the weapon and turning to look at the camera. Rather than any humanlike features, the subaltern’s face has eight optical sensors arranged in double rows, protected by plates of sloped armor. ]

< Yo. It’s Garm, if you can’t tell. >

The subaltern reaches to a pouch at its belt and extracts an object which fits neatly in its palm, holding it up. As if on queue, the camera zooms in to view the object in detail: a small, precisely-machined dart of black material, encased in a squarish metallic shell.

< Alright, so, this is what I’m here to fuck around with. If you’ve never seen a railgun round, quick crash course. That little dart in there is the actual bullet, and the casing around it is called an armature, sometimes a sabot. Whole thing gets loaded into the gun. When current runs through one rail, it travels into the armature, through it, and into the other rail. That makes the armature accelerate real quick. When it leaves the barrel, the armature discards, and the round itself goes out to hit the target. Simple.

Now, usually, this dart would be made of tungsten or depleted uranium. This one is special. It’s made of Ocramite, which means it’ll soak up electrical current and radiate it all away as heat with perfect efficiency, which is flat-out insane. So, if I loaded this thing up into a normal armature and let ‘er rip, the Ocramite would just turn all that electricity into heat. Bullet goes nowhere, gun melts in my subaltern’s hands.

That’s why we aren’t going to use a normal armature. Took a sec to figure out how to get it to work, but this one should make it so the Ocramite itself only gets a little bit of the current, and only when it’s near the end of the barrel. Just enough to get it spitting out enough heat to really do some damage when it hits our target rock over there.

Since the Ocramite is going to drink up some of our current, we’re going to fire this thing at higher power than normal to make up for the difference. We don’t want the Ocramite sticking around in the barrel for a nanosecond longer than it has to, so we need that extra current.

If I took everything into account and did my math right, this should work. >

[ Garmr’s subaltern turns, raises the railgun, and loads it in the same motion. It kneels, preparing for low-G recoil, and brings the scope up to one of its optical sensors. Tiny flickers of motion can be seen across the synthetic muscles of its arms and torso as it corrects its aim—then, it stands perfectly still.

A change in the quality of the footage—the fighter’s camera begins gathering thousands upon thousands of frames per second, preparing for post-test analysis. ]

< Let’s see if I’m any good at R&D. Charge ready, and…firing. >

[ The surface of the moon is in vacuum, so there’s no sound when the gun explodes.

A flash of orange and blue flares up in the center of the screen. Sparks of molten metal bloom away from the railgun’s barrel, and the entire forward half of the weapon is blasted apart.

Hurled to one side, away from the blast, Garmr’s subaltern scrambles to catch itself as a cloud of shrapnel pelts its armor plating. Pieces of debris spin away into space: the gun’s external components, bits of metal casing, and the remnants of the subaltern’s right forearm, sheared off when the conductive rails came apart.

The subaltern stumbles to its feet. All around it, plumes of fine regolith are rising into space, kicked up by the wave of shrapnel. Still clutching the remnants of a grip and rifle stock in one hand, the subaltern glances down, examining the damage to itself. It inspects the stump of its right arm; black, glistening threads of frayed synthetic muscle dangle from the severed elbow joint. ]

< …ow. Goddammit. >

[ For a long while, the subaltern stands motionless. Garmr growls. ]

< Okay, I fucked something up. Let’s go see if it did anything, at least. >

[ Dropping its destroyed railgun, Garmr’s subaltern begins loping along towards the target boulder. The video feed shifts to the subaltern’s own optics, a composite image generated from its optical sensors. At the far right-hand side of the image, sections of footage are discolored, stuttering and skipping every so often.

HUD elements flash onscreen: MALFUNCTION DETECTED - OPTICS 6, 8. ]

< Yeah. I know. >

[ Coming closer to the boulder, Garmr pushes his subaltern to move faster. Something catches his attention. ]

< Wait, wait…yo, hold on. >

[ Carved into one face of the boulder is a small crater. In its center, a hole has been neatly punched in the rock. As Garmr adjusts his subaltern’s optics to look into the hole, the interior can be seen glowing dull red with residual heat.

And on the other end of the hole, sunlight. ]

< Y’ALL, IT WORKED >

[bearterritory]

Cal Wins Thriller Over Auburn

Twidale Triples Power Late Rally

Golden Bears Remain Undefeated

BERKELEY – In its toughest matchup of the season so far, the California women's basketball team was down by six with five minutes left in the game before Lulu Twidale came to the rescue connecting on back-to-back 3-pointers to power an 11-0 run and help the Golden Bears (6-0) come away with a 63-59 win over visiting Auburn at Haas Pavilion on Friday night. The win gave Cal its second straight victory over the Tigers (3-2) after it won last year's matchup in Auburn and its second this season over a team from last year's NCAA Tournament as the Bears beat Gonzaga earlier in the month. The Bears have now matched their best start under head coach Charmin Smith having also started the 2023-24 season at 6-0.   One of the nation's leading 3-point shooters, Twidale had her second 20-point outing of the year finishing with 22 points (7-of-11) and four 3-pointers (4-of-8). Ioanna Krimili knocked down three triples in the first quarter and ended up with 14 points to go along with six assists for the second consecutive game. Michelle Onyiah and Marta Suárez both brought down eight rebounds to tie for the game high.   The Bears held the Tigers to just one made 3-pointer and their leading scorer, Taliah Scott, who came into the game averaging 27.0 points per game to just seven points.   In the first quarter, two triples from Krimili and one from Twidale gave the Bears an early 9-7 lead. Onyiah blocked a shot which led to a fast break and 3-point play by Twidale for the Bears' fourth straight field goal to put the Bears up 14-9. Suárez hit a turnaround jumper in the paint to cap a 7-0 run and put the Bears up 10 with under two minutes to go but that would be their biggest lead of the night.   Auburn fought back and opened the second quarter on a 6-0 run to get within 23-19 at the 7:19 mark. Cal was held scoreless from the field until Kayla Williams drove to the rim for a layup at the 4:50 mark. The Tigers tied it up at 25-25 on a layup with 2:41 to go in the half. The Bears only hit two field goals in the quarter but converted six free throws. Williams was able to swipe a steal and outlet the ball to Twidale for a layup to give the Bears a 31-28 lead with under a minute to go. After the Tigers missed a layup on their last possession, Lola Donez came away with the rebound and rushed up the court and got fouled on a 3-point heave attempt, but only made one from the charity stripe giving Cal a 33-30 lead heading into the break.   After the Tigers made their first two field goals of the third quarter, Onyiah grabbed an offensive rebound and found Twidale for her second 3-pointer of the game followed by a triple from Williams to put the Bears up 39-34 with 7:31 to go. The Bears went three minutes without a field goal until Suárez grabbed an offensive rebound and made a putback to tie the game at 45-45 at the 1:16 mark. Cal would turn it over on back-to-back possessions leading to Auburn layups to close the third quarter giving the Tigers a 49-45 lead going into the final frame.   After the consecutive triples from Twidale tied the game at 57-57 with 4:16 to go, Krimili found Onyiah in the paint for a layup to re-gain the lead for Cal – one it would not give up for the remainder of the game. With the Bears up just two, Onyiah secured a steal and found Twidale who drew a clutch shooting foul with just 40 seconds left. She made 1-of-2 to put Cal up three and Williams came up with a key steal on the Tigers' next possession forcing them to foul. A pair of blocks by Onyiah and Krimili helped keep Auburn scoreless over the final five minutes until the Tigers hit a layup down five with 16 seconds left.

[whileiamdying]

The Strange Journey of John Lennon’s Stolen Patek Philippe Watch

For decades, Yoko Ono thought that the birthday gift was in her Dakota apartment. But it had been removed and sold—and now awaits a court ruling in Geneva.

By Jay Fielden June 17, 2024

The missing watch, now valued at between ten and forty million dollars, was a fortieth-birthday gift from Yoko Ono, along with a tie she knit herself.Photograph by Bob Gruen

For years, John Lennon’s Patek Philippe 2499 has been the El Dorado of lost watches. Lennon was known for collecting expensive things: apartments in the Dakota (five); guitars (one apartment was mainly for musical equipment); country estates; jukeboxes (three); and Egyptian artifacts, including a gold-leafed sarcophagus containing a mummified princess, who Yoko Ono believed was a former self. But the Patek appears to have been his one and only wristwatch.

A gift from Ono, the watch is more than anyone would ever need to tell the time. A perpetual-calendar chronograph, it is, as Paul Boutros, the head of watches at the American arm of Phillips auction house, says, a “mechanical microcomputer, the most sought after of all Pateks.” Between 1952 and around 1985, Patek produced just three hundred and forty-nine of them. The watch, which Ono bought at Tiffany on Fifth Avenue, records time in eight different ways; the dial houses three apertures (day, month, moon phase) and three subdials (seconds, elapsed minutes, date). If you never memorized the mnemonic “thirty days hath September,” no worries—the 2499 Patek hath. Its miraculous ganglia of tiny wheels and levers will adjust its readings to the quirky imperfections of the Gregorian calendar, including leap years. No other watchmaker was able to produce a perpetual-calendar-chronograph movement small enough to fit into a wristwatch until 1985.

What makes this 2499 even rarer—and perhaps the most valuable wristwatch in existence—is how little we know about it. Ono gave it to her husband for his fortieth birthday, on October 9, 1980, two months before he was fatally shot by a deranged man outside the Dakota. For the next three decades, the existence of the watch remained unknown except to a handful of family and close friends.

But, sometime around 2007, in the early days of social media, a new kind of watch obsessive materialized, equipped with native computer skills and an appreciation for the places where pop culture and the luxury market intersect. In those pre-Instagram years, fanboy wonks traded watch esoterica online: an image of Picasso wearing a lost Jaeger-LeCoultre; Castro with two trendy Rolexes strapped to one arm; Brando, on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” “flexing,” as watch geeks say, a Rolex GMT-Master without its timing bezel, a modification he made to better inhabit the role of Kurtz; and—the Google image-search find of them all—two frames of an uncredited snapshot of Lennon and his Patek.

“I’m not a watch guy,” Sean Lennon said. “I’d be terrified to wear anything of my dad’s. I never even played one of his guitars.”Photograph by Bob Gruen

Since its discovery, around 2011, the image has appeared online again and again, fuelling a speculative frenzy about what the watch—which cost around twenty-five thousand dollars at Tiffany in 1980—might bring at auction today, with estimates ranging from ten million to forty million dollars. (Bloomberg’s Subdial Watch Index tracks the value of a bundle of watches produced by Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet, like an E.T.F.; the Boston Consulting Group reported that, between 2018 and 2023, a similar selection outperformed the S. & P. 500 by twelve per cent. In 2017, Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona broke records by selling at auction for $17.8 million.) But all the clickbait posts about the Lennon Patek, as it had come to be known, were regurgitations that contained few facts. There was never a mention of who took the photo, where it was taken, or even where the watch might be.

During the long, dull days of the pandemic, I decided to see what I could find out. Several years went by, as I traced the journey of the watch from where it was stowed after Lennon’s death—a locked room in his Dakota apartment—to when it was stolen, apparently in 2005. From there, it moved around Europe and the watch departments of two auction houses, before becoming the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, in Switzerland, to determine whether the watch’s rightful owner is Ono or an unnamed man a Swiss court judgment refers to as Mr. A, who claims to have bought the watch legally in 2014.

Having reached its final appeal—Ono has so far prevailed—the case is now in the hands of the Tribunal Fédéral, Switzerland’s Supreme Court, which is expected to render a verdict later this year. Meanwhile, the watch continues to sit in an undisclosed location in Geneva, a city that specializes in the safe, secret storage of lost treasures.

Lennon holding up his birthday Patek in the fall of 1980 is one of the happiest moments captured on film in the final years of his life. That summer, he’d begun making music again, during a trip to Bermuda which he’d hoped would help repair the well-publicized strain in his marriage to Ono. Lennon’s “lost weekend”—more than a year spent living in Los Angeles with May Pang, a former assistant who became his lover—was not that far in the past, and Ono had fallen into an infatuation with an art-world socialite named Sam Green. (It was in Bermuda that Lennon wrote “I’m Losing You.”)

Lennon had spent the previous five years holed up in the Dakota as a self-proclaimed “househusband,” raising his son Sean so that Ono, whom Lennon called Mother, could take her turn at being the decision-maker of the music-business enterprise they’d named Lennono. While Ono dealt with Beatles headaches, controlled the purse strings, and invested in real estate, Lennon occupied himself by watching soap operas, eating bran biscuits and rice, smoking Gitanes, and listening to either classical music or Muzak. “If I heard anything bad,” he later explained, “I’d want to fix it, and if I heard anything good, I’d wonder why I hadn’t thought of it.”

In the photograph, Lennon, trim and fit from a macrobiotic diet, wears jeans and a loosely knotted striped knit tie adorned with a jewel-encrusted American-flag pin. The picture was taken in the Hit Factory, where he and Ono had been recording “Double Fantasy,” his first album in five years. The room is dim, but he has on sunglasses, celluloid horn-rims recently bought in Japan. Buckled on his left wrist is the Patek 2499.

In order to find out more about the photograph, I tracked down Jack Douglas, the noted record producer who oversaw “Double Fantasy,” and sent him the picture by e-mail. He replied right away. “Bob Gruen took the photo,” he wrote, referring to the well-known documenter of the seventies and eighties rock scene.

When I contacted Gruen, who is now seventy-eight and lives in New York City, he had no idea that his photograph had become the talk of the horological world or why he’d never been given credit for it; he’d published the image in a book, titled “John Lennon: The New York Years,” in 2005. But he remembered the night he took the photo—Lennon’s fortieth birthday. Since late that summer, Lennon and Ono had been spending a lot of time in a multiroom studio on the sixth floor of the Hit Factory building, then on West Forty-eighth Street. “I was one of the few people who had an open invitation,” Gruen told me. “They liked to work late.” Gruen, who said he was living on a “steak-and-Cognac diet” in those days, showed up after midnight, having attended the thirty-sixth-birthday party of the singer Nona Hendryx. “I thought I’d bring John a piece of her birthday cake,” he said.

When Gruen arrived, Lennon was enjoying his presents: the knit tie, which Ono had made herself (a copy of the one he wore at school in Liverpool); the flag pin; and the Patek, in yellow gold, which had a rare and highly coveted double-stamped dial, meaning that both the watchmaker’s and Tiffany’s logos were printed on it. Gruen remembered Lennon being abuzz over the tie and the pin, a nod to Lennon’s fourth anniversary as a green-card holder. He doesn’t recall talking about the watch. But Lennon nonetheless strapped the black lizard band onto his wrist when Gruen reached for his Olympus OM4.

A few other photographs that Gruen took that week have never been seen by the public. One shows Lennon at a mixing board with Douglas, who is wearing a recognizable watch himself, a Porsche Design Chronograph I—stainless steel and coated in black—which Porsche had presented to him and to the members of Aerosmith in 1976, after the band’s German tour for its album “Rocks.” Douglas told me that he and Lennon later wrist-checked each other. “Although I thought his watch was beautiful,” he wrote in an e-mail to me, “I told John it didn’t have the pizzazz of my black beauty, and we had a good laugh.

After Lennon’s death, Ono had a full inventory taken of her husband’s possessions, a document that amounted to nearly a thousand pages. She then put the Patek in a locked room of her apartment. And there the watch remained for more than twenty years.

I found a clue as to what happened next by putting together shards of information from various members of the watch intelligentsia who had all “heard” that the Patek had been stolen. “I think the guy was Turkish,” one said. Another remembered “something about a chauffeur.” This led me to a 2006 article in the Times about a man named Koral Karsan (Turkish: check), who had served as Ono’s chauffeur (check two) for the previous ten years. Karsan, a veteran member of Ono’s oft-shuffled staff—trusted enough that he had full access to her apartment—had simply gone berserk in December of that year, threatening to release embarrassing photos and private conversations he’d been recording unless Ono paid him two million dollars; he allegedly said that if she refused he would have her and Sean killed.

A tall, square-jawed man with a thick burr of white hair, Karsan, then fifty, was arrested. In a series of preliminary hearings in a Manhattan courtroom, he defended himself against charges of extortion and attempted grand larceny by claiming, as the Times reported, that Ono had “humiliated and degraded him, wrecking his marriage and making him so nervous that he ground eight of his teeth to the bone.” A letter he’d written to Ono describing himself as her “driver, bodyguard, assistant, butler, nurse, handyman and more so your lover and confidant” was also entered into the record. Ono disputed Karsan’s claims about a romance, but the prosecution allowed him to plead guilty to a lesser charge, and he was ordered to return to his native Turkey.

According to a story that Karsan would later tell, Ono—who was known to consult psychics—became worried one day in 2006 that a forecasted heavy-weather event might endanger some meaningful Lennon items, including two pairs of Lennon’s eyeglasses and several New Yorker desk diaries (which he used as journals during the last five years of his life); she asked Karsan to find a safer place to keep them. Unbeknownst to Ono, when Karsan was subsequently deported, these items, along with the Patek, followed him.

Ono, who is ninety-one and lives in seclusion in upstate New York, declined to comment. Of Karsan, Sean Lennon told me, “He took advantage of a widow at a vulnerable time. Of all the incidents of people stealing things from my parents, this one is the most painful.”

Karsan, back in Turkey, was in the market for a house. Around 2009, he showed Lennon’s watch to a Turkish friend visiting from Berlin named Erhan G (as he came to be known owing to German privacy laws). Karsan let Erhan G flip through the diaries, including one marked 1980, which includes Lennon’s final entry. Karsan threw out an idea: he’d give the Lennon Patek to Erhan G as collateral for a loan. Erhan G agreed.

One evening in 2013, in Berlin, Erhan G met an executive who worked for a new, much hyped digital auction platform called Auctionata. He couldn’t resist boasting about the Patek 2499 and the rest of the Lennon trove—some eighty items. In short order, a dinner was arranged with Oliver Hoffmann, Auctionata’s twenty-eight-year-old director of watches. “He told me the story of how he’d gotten the watch,” Hoffmann recalled, of his meeting with Erhan G. “It was strange, but it felt whole and true. It was credible because of the many details.” Erhan G, who said that he was the watch’s rightful owner, per an agreement with Karsan, didn’t strike Hoffmann as a man desperate for money. “He owned a successful business and lived in a large apartment in a building close to Potsdamer Platz,” Hoffman said. (Erhan G could not be reached for comment.)

Auctionata, which live-streamed its auctions, was one of Germany’s dot-com darlings, lauded in the press for disrupting the old auction-house model, dominated by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which had yet to develop a digital-first business. Investors including Groupe Arnault, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Hearst Ventures had put up more than a hundred million dollars of venture capital for the company. Hoffmann says that the C.E.O., Alexander Zacke, recognized what a publicity boon selling John Lennon’s lost watch would be and pushed for a way to do it with or without notifying Ono. (Zacke did not respond to a request for comment.) Teams of lawyers studied the watch’s provenance and puzzled over how to offer it for sale without raising eyebrows. A document called an extract was obtained from Patek Philippe, which meant that the watch had not been registered as stolen, and Karsan himself travelled to Berlin, where he signed a document in front of a notary testifying that Ono had given him her husband’s Patek as a gift in 2005. As for the authenticity of the watch, there was no doubt: on the case back is an identifying inscription that has never been made public outside Germany.

In late 2013, in preparation for an auction, Auctionata had the watch professionally photographed. (In the photo, the watch floats in a vacuum, a carefully lit token of commerce, divorced from all human and emotional context.) But Erhan G got cold feet. Some years earlier, Ono had sued a former employee who had slipped out of the Dakota with Lennon memorabilia; Frederic Seaman, Lennon’s last personal assistant, confessed to having stolen diaries similar, if not identical, to those which Karsan and Erhan G had stashed away. (He later returned them.) Searching for a private buyer, Hoffmann approached Mr. A, a man he knew from the rare-watch circuit. A deal by “private treaty”—a sale undisclosed to the public—was reached, and in March, 2014, Mr. A agreed that he would consign a selection of Rolex and Patek watches from his own collection, whose sale proceeds would go toward payment for the Lennon 2499, which was priced at six hundred thousand euros (about eight hundred thousand dollars). “This, in some ways, was more helpful than auctioning the watch,” Hoffmann told me, explaining that Auctionata’s watch department needed the inventory. The vintage watches Mr. A consigned, most of which Hoffmann valued at between twenty thousand and forty thousand euros apiece, were in total likely worth more than the 2499.

Mr. A told Hoffmann that he planned to keep Lennon’s watch in his collection, which has included pieces owned by Eric Clapton. But, within months, he took the Lennon Patek to the Geneva office of Christie’s. As part of the auction house’s appraisal process, a Christie’s representative reached out to Ono’s lawyer, who promptly notified his client. Ono rushed to check the locked room, only to discover that the Patek wasn’t there. She had no idea how long it had been gone.

In August of 2023, a reporter named Coline Emmel, who works for a small but enterprising Web site in Switzerland called Gotham City, found something interesting in a backlog of documents filed that summer by the Chambre Civile in the canton of Geneva—an appellate judgment in a civil case that had been going on for five years. European privacy laws, especially those in Switzerland, make legal documents unusually hard to decipher. The Swiss judiciary uses a system of letters and numbers to create pseudonyms for appellants, respondents, and anyone else involved, turning a case file into a cryptogram. Emmel knew enough about Beatles history to recognize that “C_____, widow of late F_____, of Japanese nationality and domiciled in [New York City]” was, in fact, Yoko Ono. Although the appeals court affirmed the lower court’s decision that Ono was the “sole legitimate owner of the watch,” Mr. A—“a watch collector and longtime professional in the sector, of Italian nationality”—was launching another appeal. Emmel posted a brief synopsis on Gotham City, along with the news that a final judgment was now being awaited from the Swiss Supreme Court.

“Mystery solved!” was the gist of the message that ricocheted around the watch world. But, to me, the mystery had only deepened. The basic itinerary of the Patek’s odyssey and its current location had been discovered, but the human detail of how it had passed from wrist to wrist, hiding place to hiding place, still hadn’t been reported. What’s more, where had Ono ever got the idea of giving a guy like John Lennon—eater of carob-coated peanuts, singer of a song about imagining no possessions, peacenik—a watch that was a status symbol of lockjawed good taste? And what was its famously secret inscription?

I had already been in contact with Mr. A; three days before Emmel posted her scoop, he’d cancelled a planned meeting with me in Italy. Instead, we arranged to speak over Zoom. Seated in a panelled room, he told me that, when Ono had found the watch missing, her counsel demanded its return. It was a tricky legal situation, because Ono, having never realized that the watch was gone, hadn’t reported it stolen, and because the case spans several national jurisdictions. Mr. A explained that he didn’t return the watch because he didn’t believe it to be stolen property. He mentioned the inventory that had been taken of Lennon’s possessions after his death, which was referred to in the judgment; he claimed that only two watches were listed—a gold watch (presumably the Patek) and another that Mr. A said was a pocket watch Ono had auctioned through Sotheby’s in 1984, two decades before Karsan swore she gave him the Patek.

Mr. A pointed to Ono’s own version of the story. “Following the death of the late [John Lennon],” the Swiss court’s judgment reads, in a summary of a deposition that Ono gave to investigators from Berlin at the German consulate in New York City, “[Ono] wanted to give something belonging to her to those who had worked very faithfully for her. So, she told [Karsan] to take a watch.” Ono, however, added that she in no way meant the “watch she’d given the late [John Lennon].” What watch did she mean? Mr. A asked rhetorically. “There was only the Patek.”

Christie’s, informed that the watch had been stolen, kept the 2499 secured in its Geneva vault, where it sat for several years. The judgment states, “On December 17, 2015, the parties and [Christie’s] SA entered into a consignment-escrow agreement under which the Watch would be consigned to [Mr. A’s lawyer], until agreement or right is adjudicated on the property.” (Christie’s did not respond to a request for comment.) Mr. A told me that he eventually decided to go on the offensive. In 2018, he initiated a civil lawsuit against Ono to prove that he was the Patek’s rightful owner.

What Mr. A never expected was that his fate would become intertwined with that of Auctionata, which went bankrupt in early 2017. A German court brought in a bankruptcy expert and lawyer named Christian Graf Brockdorff, who, in a review of the company’s inventory, stumbled on the eighty-odd other Lennon items that Erhan G had consigned for a high-six-figure sum. “I doubted that everything that had happened in the past was legally correct,” Brockdorff told me in an e-mail. He contacted the police; a criminal case was opened, and Erhan G was found guilty of knowingly dealing in stolen goods. He served a one-year suspended sentence, having admitted that the story that Karsan had told of how he got the Lennon items “did not correspond to reality.” (A Europol warrant was issued for Karsan, whose whereabouts are unknown; he could not be reached for comment.) That the case itself ever came to be is curious, but its verdict set a legal foundation that the Swiss judgment cited in declaring that Mr. A is not the watch’s rightful owner. According to Guido Urbach, a knowledgeable Swiss attorney, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will decide any differently.

The secret dedication that Ono had inscribed on the back of the Patek Philippe 2499: “(JUST LIKE) / STARTING OVER / LOVE YOKO / 10 • 9 • 1980 / N. Y. C.”

In a series of follow-up e-mails, I asked Mr. A about what John Lennon’s Patek meant to him. “I’m more of a Rolling Stones man,” he replied, mentioning that he has played bass in a local band for years. Still, “to own the JL watch is really a double good feeling,” he said, adding that he remained hopeful that he could “wear it as soon as possible.”

But, if the Supreme Court confirms the appellate court’s ruling, the watch will likely return to New York. “It’s important that we get it back because of all we’ve gone through over it,” Sean Lennon told me. He added, “I’m not a watch guy. I’d be terrified to wear anything of my dad’s. I never even played one of his guitars.” He paused. “To me, if anything, the watch is just a symbol of how dangerous it is to trust.”

The watch never seems to have given anyone peace and happiness for long. When Lennon was in Bermuda, writing what he described as the best kind of songs—“the ones that come to you in the middle of the night”—Ono was spending time with Sam Green, whom the Times once described as “an unabashed poseur blessed with good looks.” Green had a way with rich and eccentric women. He’d had an affair with the Bakelite heiress, Barbara Baekeland, and by 1980 he was spending his time juggling Greta Garbo, Diana Vreeland, and Ono.

Looking through Green’s papers, which are at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I got an eerie feeling. I found a number of diary entries that corroborated his close relationship with Ono (“Yoko all day and night,” numerous notations read), and a handwritten tally for more than twenty-five thousand dollars—the cost of furniture that Green had sourced to appoint the Hit Factory studio. Whether Green was the one who suggested the Patek as a birthday present for Lennon is hard to confirm, but the cursed history of the watch invites speculation.

The secret engraving, which I found in the never-published Auctionata photo of the watch, is haunting in another way:

Was there a new start? By the time “Double Fantasy” was finished, Ono had lost interest in Green, and Lennon, who had just written and recorded no fewer than four love songs about her, appeared to be a happy man. The weeks they spent together at the Hit Factory that year had been charmed, which means that the Lennon Patek captures a measure of time that no other watch ever will—the little they had left together. ♦

Published in the print edition of the June 24, 2024, issue, with the headline “In Search of Lost Time.”

[emmersreads]

Matrix by Lauren Groff - review

Maybe I just don’t get Lauren Groff. While I was reading Matrix (almost entirely in one go during a frustrating eight hour plane delay), I thought mostly of The Vaster Wilds, the other Groff book I’d read. The two works felt very similar, even though their subject matter is different, to the point that I’m confident this is Groff’s style and the thing that her fans like. It’s not for me. I don’t particularly understand why anyone else likes it either.

Both books are conveyed with a certain amount of emotional distance. It feels like one encounters the characters as though through glass, even in their most intimate and emotional moments. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it leaves me grasping for some kind of point. I felt I understood what the novel was grasping at better in The Vaster Wilds, a story that deals primarily with alienation. The emotional distance underscores the alienation of our protagonist from the settler village where she is enslaved, from the local indigenous population to whom she is a potentially dangerous stranger, and from the land itself, which is massive and unfamiliar to her.

If I had to describe Matrix’s theme in one word, I’d go with awe. Not the transcendent awe of the romantic era but the religious awe we associate with the medieval period. Matrix shows us not just awe in divine inspiration and devotion, but the awe of human (and specifically women’s) achievement. While Marie is a very calculating protagonist, she is also captured by rapturous divine visions which inspire her with a supernatural conviction. It was hard to feel the power that the book (with its starburst cover) so clearly wants to evoke. In a genre where emotion is frequently a key throughline, I found the coldness disorienting.

Partly as a result of this I remained (perhaps) unaccountably suspicious of Marie for the whole novel. I’m a good little fourth generation atheist and without any particular groundwork to sell me the religious engagement, I find it hard not to remember the inadequacies and abuses of church organizations. Yes, I know the point is not that the inherent misogyny of medieval catholicism in particular is a systemic issue that cannot be solved by simply self-exiling from male church authorities. I know it is about the liberating power of re-framing this world of women as something unique and special and precious, as de facto revolutionary. I just can’t stop the first thing long enough to dig into the second.

Storygraph | Goodreads

[blowflyfag]

Inside Wrestling: Volume 25, 2009

data sheet

NIGEL McGUINNESS

HEIGHT: 6’1”

WEIGHT: 220

HOMETOWN: London, England

GREATEST MOMENT TO DATE: October 6, 2007–at Ring of Honor pay-per-view Undeniable, McGuinness defeated Japanese legend Takeshi Morishima to capture his first-ever ROH championship, becoming only the second foreign-born champion in the history of the promotion. McGuinness had previously held the ROH Pure championship before ending Morishima’s eight month title right. 

HE DOES IT SO WELL: McGuinness is a physically gifted agitator with a wealth of experience, and a conscience that rarely interferes with the choices he makes in ROH. He wrestles much larger than his 6’1” frame would suggest and can alter his style to match his opponent’s. Still, he‘s a brawler by nature, which has served him well in an organization that prides itself on pure wrestling. 

WHERE HE NEEDS TO IMPROVE: Slowly but surely, McGuinness is getting to the point where he can put his rabid emotions in check and simply focus on being the man in ROH. Throughout his career, McGuinness has been guided by his emotions. His head needs fixing more so than his game right now. 

PET FINISHER: Tower of London

BIGGEST TEST TO DATE: Surviving Austin Aries has been the most difficult challenge to McGuinness since becoming the ROH champion. Aries has a knack for exploiting McGuinness’ few weaknesses, and while Nigel has been able to hold on to the title, it could well be that Aries wears him down over the long haul.

OUTLOOK: Nothing is a lock in ROH, primarily due to the array of talent and available challengers pursuing McGuinness. But, a savvy veteran of the promotion, McGuinness should stay on top as long as he stays healthy and keeps his attitude in check.

QUICKIE EXPERT ANALYSIS: “The guy’s insane, but that’s what the fans here enjoy. He’s as tough a fight as he is a knowledgeable wrestler. I can honestly say I didn't enjoy a minute of our fight.” -Adam Pearce

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

Gaming on the same mid range laptop for eight years really set me up for a spectacular experience now that I've upgraded. Borderlands 3 at 222 frames per second was not something I was prepared for.

[demifiendrsa]

DOOM + DOOM II | Official Trailer

 DOOM + DOOM II, a combined re-release of the first two DOOM games and plenty of additional content, is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam, GOG, and Microsoft Store for $9.99. Users who already own DOOM or DOOM II will receive DOOM + DOOM II as a free upgrade.

About

Developed by id Software, and originally released in 1993, DOOM pioneered and popularized the first-person shooter, setting a standard for all first-person shooter games. The critically acclaimed sequel, DOOM II, followed in 1994. Now the definitive, newly enhanced versions of DOOM + DOOM II are available as a combined product.

Included Content

DOOM

DOOM II

TNT: Evilution

The Plutonia Experiment

Master Levels for DOOM II

No Rest for the Living

Sigil

Legacy of Rust (a new episode created in collaboration by id Software, Nightdive Studios and MachineGames)

A new Deathmatch map pack featuring 25 maps

Altogether, there are a total of 187 mission maps and 43 deathmatch maps in DOOM + DOOM II.

New Enhancements

Online, cross-platform deathmatch and cooperative play for up to 16 players.

Community-published mod support (PC) with an in-game mod browser.

Choose between the original midi DOOM and DOOM II soundtracks or the modern IDKFA versions by Andrew Hulshult (including brand-new DOOM II recordings).

Improved performance with multithreaded rendering supporting up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Now on the KEX engine.

BOOM source compatibility makes it possible for hundreds of community-created mods from the past 25 years to be published in-game.

Accessibility options, such as a modern font to improve legibility, high contrast mode, text-to-speech, speech-to-text multiplayer chat, and more.

Translated into eight new languages: Mexican Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

Existing Enhancements

Upgraded visuals.

Modern controller support.

Weapon carousel for faster weapon switching.

Gyroscopic aiming on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Switch.

Improved mouse and keyboard controls.

Local split-screen deathmatch and cooperative for up to four players.

Featured community mods, including REKKR, Revolution!, Syringe, Double Impact, Arrival, and more! Expect an ever-expanding list of single player mods to be added by the community modders.

60 frames per second and native 16:9 support—up to 1080p.

Restored original in-game music using original hardware.

Quick Save / Load support.

DeHacked mod support.

About the Included Games

DOOM (1993) (Original Version) – The demons came and the marines died…except one. You are the last defense against Hell. Prepare for the most intense battle you’ve ever faced. Experience the complete, original version of the game released in 1993, now with all official content and Episode IV: Thy Flesh Consumed.

DOOM II (Original Version) – Hell has invaded Earth, and to save it, you must battle mightier demons with even more powerful weapons. This beloved sequel to the groundbreaking DOOM (1993) introduced players to the brutal Super Shotgun, the infamous Icon of Sin boss, and more intense FPS action.

TNT: Evilution – The UAC relocated their experiments to one of the moons of Jupiter. A spaceship, mistaken for a supply vessel, was granted access. But when it got close to the base, demons poured out. All your comrades were slaughtered or zombified. This time it’s not about survival. It’s about revenge.

The Plutonia Experiment – Every effort has been made by the nation’s top scientists to close the seven interdimensional Gates of Hell, but one portal remains open. Alone, you must infiltrate the ravaged base, defeat the demon Gatekeeper, and seal the last Hell portal before the undead take over the world.

Master Levels for DOOM II – This expansion includes twenty additional levels, all with the same hell-spawned horrors and action of the base game. Each level was created by independent designers and supervised by id Software.

Sigil – Created by id Software co-founder, John Romero, and released as an episode-sized mod consisting of 18 new maps, Sigil fits in between the timelines of DOOM (1993) and DOOM II. Baphomet, the gatekeeper of Hell, “glitched the final teleporter with his hidden sigil, whose eldritch power brings you to even darker shores of Hell. You fight through this stygian pocket of evil to confront the ultimate harbingers of Satan, then finally return to become Earth’s savior.”

Legacy of Rust – Created in collaboration by id Software, Nightdive Studios, and MachineGames, Legacy of Rust is the newest episode for DOOM, and the first official episode since DOOM II to feature new demons and weapons. This 16-map Episode is broken up into two eight-map sections: The Vulcan Abyss and Counterfeit Eden.

[satoshi-mochida]

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II ‘Obelisk’ update now available - Gematsu

Publisher Focus Entertainment and developer Saber Interactive have released the “Obelisk” update for third-person action game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II, which adds a new replayable map for the Operations mode, a new Chaos enemy, PlayStation 5 Pro support, and more.

Get the details below.

A Free New Operations Map and a Slew of Cosmetics for Season Pass Owners!

Today’s update takes players back to the burial world of Demerium with a new Operation titled “Obelisk,” available today to all Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II players for free! In addition, players will now have to face the Tzaangor Enlightened and avoid its deadly, fast-paced attacks as it careens across the battlefield on its Disc of Tzeentch. Stay alert, as this new enemy will be found in every Operation (player-versus-environment) mission featuring the Thousand Sons from now on. Season Pass owners also receive the “Dark Angels Chapter Pack,” which comes with a new Champion skin for the Bulwark class, three weapons skins for the Plasma Pistol, Auto Bolt Rifle and Power Sword, a new Storm Shield skin and over 40 unique cosmetics celebrating eight of the Dark Angels Successor Chapters.

PlayStation 5 Pro Support, FSR 3, and Frame Generation for DLSS Are Now Available

On top of today’s gameplay additions, the “Obelisk” update comes with a number of tech improvements for console and PC players alike. PlayStation 5 Pro owners can now enjoy the grimdark atmosphere of the 41st millennium with increased maximum resolution at up to 60 frames per second in Performance Mode and 30 frames per second in Quality Mode thanks to the PlayStation 5 Pro’s Spectral Super Resolution technology, allowing for upscaled 4K resolution. PC players can also now take full advantage of AMD’s FSR 3 and Nvidia’s DLSS3 with the addition of frame generation support.

Celebrate Secret Level’s Warhammer 40,000 Episode With New Twitch Drops!

With Secret Level’s Warhammer 40,000 episode freshly released, players will be able to collect two unique cosmetics (a breastplate for the Bulwark class and an Iron Halo for the Heavy) starting today at noon ET / 9am PT by watching two hours of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II streams on Twitch before December 31. More information on how to get them here.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.

Watch a new trailer below.

“Obelisk” Update Trailer

[jinmukangwrites]

For the prompts:

An old photograph with Bruce?

Ao3 down, Drabble prompt request post

---

Credits rolled, and for the first time in awhile, Bruce found himself the only one awake at the end of the weekly family movie.

Probably because he was the one who chose the movie this week. He personally didn't think his movie choice was boring, per-say, but well, Inception is long. So he wasn't offended.

He carefully lifted Cass's feet from his thighs, and it said something about how comfortable she was when she didn't stir at the motion; she just continued to breath a small sigh against Dick who had become her pillow while he collapsed over the chair's arm.

Jason stirred a little from his arm chair—it was a miracle he even showed up this week—but that wasn't because of Bruce, it was because Titus's tail wagged in his sleep at his feet. Damian laid on the floor, curled up next to the dog, while Alfred the Cat had found himself comfortable placed between his bent knees. However, luckily, Jason didn't wake as he carefully stepped passed Tim and Duke, who were both passed out on the over loveseat. Tim had his phone hanging from his hand, give it a few minutes and it'll drop. Duke leaned against Tim's shoulders, snoring softly, as if the two had fallen asleep looking at memes on Tim's phone.

Bruce padded a small distance from the group, then pulled out his own phone, opened the camera app, and turned it horizontal. He had to take a few more steps back, but eventually he got everyone within frame. Only Alfred the Cat had his eyes open as he contentedly blinked up at Bruce when he took a single picture.

He went back down to his spot beside Cass, and she naturally put her feet back on him like he'd never left, shifting slightly and making Dick snort in fleeting awareness. Bruce then grabbed the remote and clicked the TV off, looking down at his phone and going through the photos, wondering if his kids would kill him if he posted it online.

His kids.

He smiled fondly, zooming in on all the sleeping faces before finding himself clicking out and moving toward organized folders based on years.

He lost himself in the memories, unsure how it came up on him so suddenly. One second, he was on the most recent, the next he was looking at an old picture of a younger Damian sitting by a river bank, sketching ducks. The next, he's chuckling to himself at another that Cass took when he wasn't looking, she had her face in the corner, throwing a peace sign, as Bruce helped Tim with business emails. The next, Duke reading some book within a cranny at the library, so engrossed in the story he didn't notice Bruce take the picture as the rays of the sun hit his face just right. The next, Jason, before Ethiopia, smiling proudly as he held a metal for getting number one in the spelling-bee. The next, Dick, eight years old and swinging from the chandelier as Alfred looked the most pale and upfronted Bruce had ever seen him.

Memories after memories. He couldn't help but think to a time he used to say he worked alone. Yet now, sitting in this room with Inception credit music playing softly, he couldn't even to begin to imagine his life without them. He clicked his phone off and leaned back with a sigh, closing his eyes and letting the peace of his families precence lull him into a peaceful rest that he'd surely regret in the morning when his spine and neck disagree with the position.

It would be worth it. It's not often he got all of them together like this. Bruce never intended to be a father, but damn, he was the luckiest man in the world to call these ones his.