#War is fucking awful

[redeyedroid]

Donald Trump has a thing. He has lots of things, being a creature made of personality defects, narcissism and high-tensile racism, and who looks like a semi-sentient block of cheese that has somehow gained a rudimentary understanding of fascism, but in this case I’m talking about his thing is to attack the US military of today by valourising two of its past leaders: Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.  

"Remember the old days of General MacArthur and General Patton, and these great generals," Trump told CPAC in 2015. "General MacArthur is spinning in his grave when he sees what we do." 

He’s also used them to attack his opponents: “[Hillary Clinton] tells you how to fight ISIS on her website… I don't think Gen. Douglas MacArthur would like that very much."  

These are two examples among many of something as close to admiration a man like Trump can ever display and it’s easy to see why he picks these men to elevate. Trump is a man given over to the projection of an image, a man who, like many authoritarians, impersonates the man he says he is, not unlike those fraudsters you see in the news from time to time. Tricksters convicted of conning millions out of dumb rich people while pretending to be German nobility. Impression and publicity are the thing, so naturally, not being a well-read man, or one prone to anything but superficiality, Trump would gravitate to the most self-aggrandising, most flawed of America’s military leaders. 

Some of Patton’s tough talking character was bluster. Delivered in a characteristically high-pitched voice, his bloodthirsty quotes were often intended to inspire in his men confidence in his leadership and in themselves. But sometimes it was not. In Sicily, he was fired when he slapped men suffering from PTSD, and then again soon after the end of the war in Europe, because he wanted to go to war with the USSR and his absence of political nous meant his superiors had little use for him in peacetime. He never rose to the highest rank. Eisenhower, the great coalition builder and politician, favoured Omar Bradley. 

Like many of their ilk, image was key to both – Patton’s cavalry boots and trousers were topped with a ridiculous shiny, polished helmet; MacArthur habitually wore aviator glasses, pipe and leather jacket.  

A man of gargantuan ego, MacArthur was obsessed with liberating the Philippines from the Japanese after being defeated there in the early part of the war. He threatened to run against Roosevelt for President in order to get his way and ensure he was given command of vast forces for the task, his famous 1942 declaration of “…I shall return” was followed up with “…I have returned” after landings on Leyte in October 1944 (Never a man who used ‘we’ where ‘I’ could fit, he earned the enmity of men under his command in the first Philippine campaign who nicknamed him Dugout Doug, noting in disgust his insistence in lauding himself in dispatches to the USA and the exclusion of their own sacrifices). 

It’s not hard to see why Trump, a man who has a child’s understanding of strength and a perpetual, diseased need to take credit would be attracted to a man who took backhanders from the Philippine government and had a friendly press baron amplifying his voice at home. 

(There’s also the less well-known pre-war part of MacArthur’s biography where he, a man in his fifties, took a sixteen-year-old Filipina as his mistress, which Trump, a rapist, would surely see as unproblematic if he ever learned of it). 

To be clear, both Patton and MacArthur were highly competent, knowledgeable and precise, and responsible for extraordinary victories in Europe and Pacific, but both were massively flawed characters, and neither were in the top tier of American commanders. It’s emblematic of Trump’s character that he would gravitate to the egotistic, meddling MacArthur ahead of Chester Nimitz, architect of the Navy’s drive through the Central Pacific, which got underway in earnest on the 20th of November 1943 with landings on Betio and Makin Atolls, Tarawa. 

The land campaigns of the Pacific all have their own unique, awful characteristics. There are the battles over the Kokoda Trail, fought in the mountain forests of New Guinea. The jungles and rain of the Solomons campaign. The heat of Peleliu, where bad Marine leadership threw men uselessly against Japanese fortifications dug into the rock caves in the centre of the island. The massive numbers of civilian dead of Saipan and Okinawa, often victims of murder-suicides – Japanese, taught to fear the American and to never be taken captive killed themselves and/or their families in terrible numbers. (There is colour film of people throwing themselves to their deaths from the cliffs of northern Saipan.) And the sulphuric rock of the volcanic Iwo Jima, the only battle where US casualties outnumbered Japanese. 

On Tarawa, a stereotypical Pacific Island of sand and palm trees, there was a beautiful tropical lagoon. 

Betio Atoll, lying 2,400 miles southwest of Hawai’i is a tiny island that today is part of Kiribati, but it was not quite small enough for war to pass it by, for it was the right shape and just big enough for the Japanese to build an airfield on it. And so, to protect their supply lines from interdiction during the campaign westward, the Americans decided it must be seized and assembled a fleet of 191 ships to transport and support a force of 35,000 troops to attack it.  

GALVANIC, as the operation was designated, was unknown territory. Amphibious landings had been done at Guadalcanal and throughout the Solomons, for Operation TORCH in North Africa, and recently HUSKY, BAYTOWN and AVALANCHE in Sicily and Italy. But none of these had been against heavily fortified defences of the type the Japanese, well aware of their vulnerability, had built. Tarawa had a garrison of about 5,000 men, half of whom were Rikusentai – the Special Naval Landing Forces that were the Imperial Japanese Navy’s equivalent of Marines. The rest were construction crews and engineers, and they made a complex of bunkers, pillboxes and trenches, reinforced with concrete, timber and coral that proved enormously difficult to reduce. 

While the Americans had studied and planned for the kind of opposed landings they would now attempt, there was no proof of concept and, worse, they were short of vital resources. 

A year previously, the US Navy had contested control of the Pacific with two operational aircraft carriers. Now, in the autumn of 1943, its industry had built a fleet of Essex- and Independence-class carriers that came to dominate the rest of the war. One day, during the two-week voyage from New Zealand to Tarawa, a crewman on the USS Saratoga counted 13 different carriers among the fleet. But they were sorely lacking in landing craft.  

The landings in Italy had already suffered from this shortage – both BAYTOWN and AVALANCHE had been allocated far fewer landing craft than they needed and now GALVANIC would. They were desperately short of the LVTs – amphibious tractors – which would carry the first wave of Marines onto the invasion beaches. They had cannibalised older vehicles that had been used on Guadalcanal and welded makeshift armour to others they acquired. But the following waves rode in Higgins boats – the classic, familiar-looking assault craft from movies like Saving Private Ryan. These craft would never reach shore. 

The invasion coincided with Tarawa’s neap tide and while many of the people the Navy consulted about the depth of water in the lagoon opposite the invasion beaches were confident about the depth of water they would find, there was no consensus. One man, a New Zealander named Major F L G Holland warned that there would be less than 3 feet of water over the coral reef that bordered the lagoon. He was right. The tracked amtracs of the first wave could grind their way over the reef and into the lagoon, but the Higgins boats following hit it and the invasion stalled. 

Men were disgorged into the water at the reef and had to wade through chest and neck-deep water to get to shore. Some transferred to amtracs that took them halfway before being told that it was too dangerous for the amtrac to go further, that the diminshing number of amtracs were too valuable to risk and that they would have to trek through the maelstrom of fire that the lagoon had become. Men struggled past the dismembered and mutilated bodies of their comrades, the burning disabled wrecks of craft that had made it into the lagoon, through water turned crimson with blood, alongside the floating corpses of thousands of tropical fish killed by the concussion of hundreds of explosions to reach a beach where the tempest of the lagoon was replaced by a world of sand, blood and slaughter.  

On land, the marines found themselves against a sea wall made of timber and beneath this were able to regroup. Communications were difficult. The few senior officers on the scene found that many radios were lost, or so waterlogged as to be ineffective. The battle had little direction, devolving into small groups of marines led by lieutenants, NCOs and privates slowing creeping inland, clearing bunkers as they went. Sometimes they were forced back, sometimes they held on to the territory they took. Always they took grievous losses. 

Things were no better on the Japanese side, for early on the first day, the garrison commander, Rear Admiral Shibasaki Keiji was killed. 

Artillery fire is a terrible thing to be under, naval gunfire orders of magnitude worse. The standard 105mm M2 howitzer used by the US army fired a 40lb shell. The battleships USS Maryland and Colorado which bombarded Betio fired 16-inch shells that weighed 2,100lbs. A broadside from either sent more than seven and a half tons of high explosive at a target up to 14 miles away. Combined with fire from cruisers and destroyers the pre-invasion bombardment killed perhaps 40% of the island’s defenders, wrecked much of its defences, and - because wires could not be buried deeply enough in the sand of Betio - destroyed its telephone network. Shibasaki, frustrated at his inability to communicate with his men decided to move his command post and, out in the open, was killed along with his entire staff when a 5-inch shell from an American destroyer landed in the middle of them. Whatever was left of his body was never recovered. 

In this, the Americans were lucky. Their position on the first day was precarious and Shibasaki’s death meant the Japanese defence became uncoordinated and prevented them from mounting a counterattack on the first night. They did sneak men onto the wreck of a freighter in the lagoon, from where they continued to rake it with fire. Strikes by aircraft on the freighter were inaccurate and often hit US troops. Friendly fire from both air and sea would be a problem throughout the battle for American forces.  

The Marines, with few of the flamethrowers and bazookas they would have in later battles, reduced the island pillbox by pillbox, often having to silence them multiple times as Rikusentai reoccupied firing positions thought eliminated by means of hidden trenches. The long wooden pier leading out into the lagoon would be the source of constant fire throughout the battle. 

It took 76 hours to take Tarawa. Slightly over three days of small unit fighting, men rushing firing positions and pouring grenades and bullets through openings. Frontal attacks against pillboxes, or flanking attacks that exposed men to fire from another position in overlapping network of defence. Tanks, immobilised by mine or Japanese fire would provide support, but mostly this was a battle fought by the infantry at short range with rifle, sub-machine gun and grenade. At the end of it, 1,009 Marines of the 2nd Division had been killed and another 2,101 wounded - roughly 25% of the men landed on the island. 

687 more men were killed when the relatively small escort carrier USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Makin. The torpedo detonated her magazine, and the resulting explosion blew her in half. The fireball rose a thousand feet in the air and debris fell on ships miles away.  

Of the Japanese garrison of nearly 5,000, 146 survived, 129 of whom were Korean construction labourers. The rest fought to the death, or were simply denied the opportunity to surrender, the Americans having learned on Guadalcanal that Japanese would often feign surrender in order to lull their enemies and kill them with bayonet or grenade. 

Life Magazine published photos of American dead floating in the surf of Tarawa, washed up on the beaches of Betio. The journalist Robert Sherrod, who had been on a Higgins boat and waded through the lagoon on the first morning wrote detailed dispatches for Time. The American public were shocked by the bloodbath on the atolls of Tarawa. One New York paper declared that the US should have used poison gas. Nimitz received letters from bereaved families. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” a mother wrote. Nimitz read each of them and answered them personally, considering it his responsibility. The burden of command. 

The Japanese were told the defenders had been overwhelmed, but at such a cost to the Americans that it was to all intents a victory for the Japanese Empire, a lie habitually told after defeats. Midway had been a great victory in their press. 

Lessons were learned. Coordination between US land, sea and air forces improved. Invasion troops carried less unessential equipment and more ammunition and explosives. They learned to rely on supply from the sea. Future invasions had more amtracs available, of improved design, with more armour and more firepower. Napalm was introduced and used in staggering amounts, dropped from plane and shot from tanks to incinerate bunker and cave and kill the defenders within.

Japanese strategy leaned on the assumption that the Americans would not have the stomach for the fight. That the American public would not support the casualties needed to defeat them. They were wrong. Before long, papers in the US were warning of the need for America to steel itself, for Tarawa was a foreshadowing of future battles, on larger islands closer to the Japanese homeland. That the tiny, blood-soaked atolls of Tarawa heralded unprecedented carnage and butchery.  

In this, they were right. 

#ww2 #world war 2 #war is fucking awful #however bad you've imagined war to be it is much much worse #tarawa #wwii

[thebibliosphere]

I'm watching Justice League: War, and I'm sorry, but Green Lantern shielding himself and Batman in a green ball of light while Superman proceeds to kick them around Metropolis like a dodgeball is so fucking funny.

Bruce just saw the inside of three buildings go past real quick because they got punched through them by Superman, and he's relying on Hal to keep him alive. A man who a mere few hours ago accused him of being a vampire then went off on him for not having any superpowers and whose ring Bruce managed to steal with a sleight-of-hand trick to make a petty point.

His control freak issues must be screaming.

#Justice League: War #dc #also Bruce's shit eating grin when Hal finds out he's a regular guy in a bat suit is mwah*chef kiss* #he's so fucking pleased with himself for being a normal human and being able to go toe-to-toe with literal gods #like aw #sorry #do your magic powers not seem so special now? #suck on it

[so-i-did-this-thing]

Please look at what this house flipper did when they remembered that microwaves exit.

Just.

I would like to believe that is a painting of a microwave, and if you pivot it to the side on its little wire and nail, you will find a wall safe full of 50 bottle caps, some ammo, and a stimpack, if you're lucky.

#what is this fallout bullshit #actual house we were considering until the flippers got greedy and tried to engineer a bidding war #the rest of the flip is tolerable we knew we'd have to fix this awful kitchen #but we told them to fuck off lol

[chamerionwrites]

Now and then I have a little giggle when I recall that JJ Abrams made Rey Palpatine's grandkid via some sort of nonsensical cloning plot. It's not the worst thing in the ST but I do think it's emblematic of why it's bad. Signifier without substance. Derivative *and* gutless. Tried to rip off ESB without understanding how the Vader reveal works as a narrative beat, gave Sheev spawn, and didn't even have enough courage of their convictions to admit that he fucks.

Like we all know Vader spent two decades pining gloomily after Padmé. But Palpatine? Sheev Palpatine? The guy whose two modes are smiling smug self-satisfied secret smiles to himself and crowing POWER, UNLIMITED POWER? The guy who cackles with maniacal relish anytime he gets to let his hair down and have a lightsaber fight? That guy is a hedonist. Tell me I'm wrong. That man is at all times enjoying the hell out of being irredeemably evil. He is a literal emperor, the vastly powerful and mostly unchallenged ruler of the galaxy, reveling in a victory he spent many years plotting and scheming for. And they had to invent some half-assed narrative afterthought of a cloning program rather than simply allowing us to assume that at some point in the two+ decades between ROTS and ROTJ, that man got laid? The cowardice. The incompetence. The sheer commitment to taking every conceivable L

#sheev probably fucked somebody on the THRONE #what else was he doing? lounging around the jedi temple and giggling to himself? subjecting vader to awful medical procedures for fun? #he has people to rule the galaxy with an iron fist dude is fully living his best life watching operas and doing lil sith research projects #i'm sorry i just find this SO funny. literally what is the point of the cloning shit except the creators nervously wringing their hands #and assuring us that we don't have to contemplate the evil toad man/walking corpse in bed #COMMIT TO THE BIT COWARDS #obvs i'm being a bit facetious but i'm also not #star wars #palpatine #my posts #also #on writing

[dirtytransmasc]

saw someone say they're we're happy Alicent's and Otto's deaths forced them "realize what they had done" and like...

Otto's one thing, I get the animosity. but Alicent? your getting hot and bothered over her realizing she failed, she failed to save her children, she failed to protect them, to them alive? that she tried so hard, so fucking hard, making every hard decision, trying to get between her children and the fate they were damned to by Viserys and Rhaenyra? that she damned her kids, who were already damned to die to begin with, and had to suffer the guilt of them dying to her own hand? that she's going to drive herself mad with grief over her children, her grandchildren?

like... it's not satisfying (especially for show Alicent) watching a woman go so mad with grief it literally kills her because she fought with everything she had to save her children only for them to die anyway. ever since her father's exile, when Rhaenyra's lies took Viserys's favor, when Viserys ignored the Rhaenyra's sons bastardhood at the risk of the whole house, or when Luke took Aemond's eye and Viserys demanded good will; she knew her children's lives were forfeit. then Daemon killed Vaemond and her children's coffins were built, catching cobweb's all the while. she knew and she fought it desperately, taking risk after risk, living in fear until her moment came, she could out Aegon on the thrown, she could protect her kids, maybe, just fucking maybe they'd be safe... only for it to lead to a war that would kill her entire family.

her death, slow and tragic as it was, is heartbreaking. she didn't deserve it, she deserved to feel safe, to feel as though she could allow her past friend take the thrown without her children being at risk to feel as though she and her children weren't being circled by wolves and picked at by vulture's. she didn't deserve to live alone and die alone. she didn't deserve to have her hands coated in her children's blood.

#the fact that her (amongst many other greens deaths) get so many TB fans dicks hard is actually nauseating #like do you not realize how fucking awful her death is going to be? #like I cant imagine her pain #imagine risking it all after years of literal torture by her own families hand #her father manipulation. Viserys's abuse snd neglect. Rhaenyra's betrayal. #to save her kids #knowing they were damned #thst they would die if she didnt try #and than they died horrifically anyway #despite her efforts to save them #to be a good mother #to not fail them??? #and this isnt to blame her if that isnt clear #its just such a fucked up situation she was in #they were going to die regardless (in my opinion the war was going to happen no matter what they did and it would have claimed their lives) #but in trying to save them it felt like it was her fault #if you get what i mean #which makes her descent into madness so sickeningly horrific #alicent hightower #alicent my beloved #pro team green #pro alicent hightower #hotd #house of the dragon

[swaps55]

...did I really just see a poll asking how much art an artist should be EXPECTED to produce?

The answer is zero expectations, jesus fuck. Art you consume for free is a fucking gift, and if you're paying for it, the schedule is between you and the artist.

Can you even imagine feeling that entitled to someone else's creativity. What kind of capitalist dystopian hellscape do we live in.

#adventures with swaps #hell i put an awful lot of expectations on myself to produce stories #to the point i am rewarding myself on finishing fugue by playing god of war guilt-free #as if that wasn't something i could just DO whenever i feel like it #because i don't get paid to write fanfic #AND YET I FELT GUILTY playing a game instead of writing #and even devoting MOST of my free time to it #I STILL went without posting an update for over three months #which i felt TERRIBLE about #HOW MUCH ART SHOULD AN ARTIST BE EXPECTED TO PRODUCE? #fuck right off

[leverage-ot3]

not going to give the blog any attention or time of day but this is your reminder that the leverage crew would never be zionists or support israel whatsoever

I wasn't going to engage with it because I value my mental health but yeah. absolutely fucking NOT

y'all really think that this group of people that actively go out of their way to go against the rich and powerful, who make it their goal to help people that are oppressed, devalued by society and taken advantage by those more powerful would at all EVER align themselves with israel? bffrrn

I'm going to go off for a few paragraphs about why this is such a horrendously ridiculous and delusional idea, but I'm not going to clog up your dash so it's going under the cut. I want to respect people who already participate in activism and need fandom space for lighter things

tw for discussion of the atrocities and war crimes happening in palestine

over 25 THOUSAND innocent people have died as a result of israeli terror the last few months alone. over 10 thousand children. entire family lines have been erased from the world forever- grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren all martyred, often together as they are sheltering from bombs and bullets until they are murdered by soldiers that laugh as they shoot and detonate bombs.

you really think that eliot 'I adopt every child I see' spencer would support a regime that let a child stay trapped in a car where her family members were martyred, not let paramedics in for days and then when they finally let the paramedics approach they kill both her AND the EMS? you think he would stand with the government that arrests children as young as 6 years old for *checks hand* being terrorists (because what fucking 6 year old is a terrorist let alone any kind of national threat. they're fucking SIX). that snipes children for throwing rocks at tanks and their apartheid walls

he and all of them would weep at the picture released the other day of the little girl handing from rubble with her legs blown off.

all of them would be horrified of the bombardment that has murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians, women, children, men, elderly alike with no fucking care. that shoots people with their hands up waving white flags. that bulldozes graveyards and digs up bodies and probably steals organs from they dying and deceased. that bombs hospitals, governmental and archival buildings, mosques, churches, holy sites, schools and universities. whose soldiers have a trend where they go through women's underwear drawers and make lewd comments about their lingerie and how kinky they must be. who make tiktoks of them playing in decimated playgrounds and signing their children's names on bombs. who force parents to collect pieces of their children in plastic bags because they have been blown apart by relentless bombing. who shoot a grandmother holding a child's hand. who murdered a woman that dared say that she was older than the 'state' of israel.

the fact that you're posting this as israel relentlessly bombs rafa, the place they were told would be the only safe place to be, where 1.6 million people are living in tents living off animal feed because no sufficient humanitarian aid (if any) has been let through

these people that advocate for comeuppance and exposing wrongs would not support a regime that actively targets and murders journalists and their entire families.

you really think any of them would actively support a genocidal sociopathic government? fucking delusional

to a certain extent, I know that people want to keep fandom and advocacy spaces separate and I acknowledge and relate to that- when we are logged on every moment of the day we sometimes need to take breaks and engage with something else for our mental health. I need that too. and there is a very thin line when you try to apply fandom to current events because in all honesty, making headcanons about how your faves would react to X horrendous event can come off as extremely tone-deaf. I get you love your blorbos (I do too!), but actual people are suffering and it can come off as disingenuous to a lot of folks when you try to talk about your characters instead of the very real harm that is going on. HOWEVER, the other account posted in the leverage tag that the crew would be zionists and started that discourse and since it was already out there in our space I wanted to make sure that people know that this blog does not support that whatsoever.

and before this gets misconstrued: antizionism is not antisemitism. I have a lot of love for my jewish friends and followers, but saying that we can't be critical of war crimes and incessant aggression because it is a jewish state is fucking ridiculous. we should be able to hold any and all governments accountable when they do bad things (this absolutely also means I think we should hold the US accountable for enabling them and I live here. every country that is complicit needs to face consequences). saying that israel is exempt from criticism because jewish people deserve a right to a homeland isn't a great take. I completely understand fear of antisemitism and discrimination, but at some point we have to think critically and acknowledge that people are dying by the thousands and standing up for that and calling out atrocities takes precedence. jewish voices for peace has some really good content about this topic

anyways there's a random blog out there posting about how your faves are zionists splattering their rancid sponge and I want to make sure my stance on this subject is very clear: fuck israel, free palestine, and no one is free until everyone is free

#i got really fucking angry and this was kind of cathartic but honestly i'm just really fucking tired of this shit #thank u digitaldiscipline for talking me out of reblogging it with a response because that would just give the blog more undeserved attenti #free palestine #palestine #gaza #anti zionisim #fuck israel #fuck isntreal #leverage #leverage redemption #your fave is NOT a zionist #tw war crimes #also raf 'splattering their rancid sponge' is such an iconic phrase thank u for sharing that w me #I'm not going to talk about my real-life activism for privacy and security reasons but I regularly interact with people from jvp #and they are super awesome and lovely and courageous people #i really respect them. they are treated so awful in my area when we have protests at city hall from local rabbis. it takes a LOT of courage #ALSO there is a lot to be said about eliot as a character and how he isn't the best person but for the sake of him loving children i wrote #it that way. also hardison would be disappointed in you for supporting israel #mine

[folklorespring]

Back in December after russian missile attack Vasyl drove away in a burning car to stop the fire from spreading to other vehicles. Unfortunately, he passed away this month from stroke due to constant war-related stress.

#I'm so heartbroken over this #I remember being in awe of his actions and how humble he was after #may he rest in peace #ukraine #russia #russia is a terrorist state #fuck russia #genocide #stand with ukraine #support ukraine #genocide of ukrainians #russian war crimes #important #war #video #news #current events

[hella1975]

hiiii haha. hello. exceptionally awkward introduction bc idrk how to start something like this so let's just jump right in. im taking a break from this account for a bit. i know i said i wanted taob out before halloween and currently im fine sticking with that deadline, but if i decide i need longer away then i will take longer away. every time ive reassured people that id never abandon a fic and updates will always come eventually i never once considered that my writing and ability to feel safe and comfortable on this site would be actively taken from me, so im not even going to apologise. i dont want this either and more importantly i dont fucking deserve it. i dont know what it is in the past year, if ive hit a certain amount of followers or 'popularity' that's made it so the natural ratio of positive to negative interactions must in turn go up, but there's been a serious uptick in weird asks for me. the annoying part is that a very small amount of them are actually objectively mean and hateful, the rest are just weird and invasive from people who seemingly dont realise that's what they're being. ive reached a point where i dont care if the intentions are good. it's not my job as a 20 year old tumblr user of all things to defend the morality of someone who couldnt even bother to come off anon. unfortunately, after blocking only one or two anons, the weird asks have decreased substantially, which says all you need to know about the fascinating and exhilarating lives led by these people, but ive also gone on to turn anon asks off entirely. this is something i actively fought against doing and had to be pushed into by my mutuals (who have been the coolest people on planet earth during this entire thing). turning off anon was a big deal to me even if it sounds silly. i felt betrayed and like id been backed into a corner because it was so vehmently something i DIDNT WANT that to feel like i had to do it anyway for my own mental health??? that sucks. so even though ive 'fixed' the problem, im still kind of reeling and uncomfortable every time i come on tumblr. i hope it's just something i need time to ease because i'll truly be devastated if this becomes 'ruined' for me. tumblr exists as the only place in the world where i am honestly every facet of myself without shame or hesitation; losing that would be insanely harmful to me. and to the people who cant appeal to the actual human behind the post, let me put that in words you can understand: we wouldn't get any more writing 😦😦😦 riots and fires and sirens, i know. so yeah. to anyone who has sent me an anon ask and you're now wondering if you were part of the problem, im firmly of the belief that you'll know if you are. when i say 'weird asks' i dont mean 'you sent me a para about your personal life just to vent or ask for advice' or 'you sent me a really deep emotional compliment about the impact me and/or my writing has had on you' - i love asks like that, so much that i put off taking a break and turning off anon solely for the joy they bring me. im sorry that it might feel like you're being punished too bc of the actions of what in reality is a HANDFUL of weird people, but this is what i feel like i have to do to feel safe and not go insane every time i log in. love you guys, hopefully ill see you soon x

#seriously another shout out to my mutuals #id particularly like to say thank you to boom who's always right there for me no matter what's happening or how insane im being #and also everyone in our little discord that wound up having to make a whole new channel for venting #bc i was there so often like 'today's weird ask isssss.... telling me about my cupsize!! rip them to shreds!!!' #hannah and theo especially being there and pushing me to finally turn off anon. war is truly over #and of course rori bc the shamelessness u show when hating on my anon asks has been genuinely really cathartic #sometimes u really do just need a rottweiler mutual to tell random people online to kill themselves 😭 #okay weird oscar acceptance speechcore gratitude over. i do just rlly love my mutuals #like i went three years not telling anyone about the worse side of internet popularity for fear of looking spoiled and ungrateful #so for the first time to open up about it and be met with outrage on my behalf and people saying in fact it's MORE fucked up #than i initially realised bc ive grown desensitised to it is. yeah cathartic i guess #they are singlehandedly reassuring me of the good this cursed app still holds #so everyone thank them and send them flowers NOW #okay im done i think. see you guys soon. i truly do want to come back asap bc like i said i NEVER EVEN WANTED TO FUCKING LEAVE #SOME ASSHOLES JUST HAD TO PUT GRENADES ON WHAT I ASSUMED WERE VERY UNIVERSAL AND OBVIOUS BOUNDARIES #if you're reading this like 'ohhh fuck i defo sent something invasive lately. i thought it was a joke/we were friends' #then 1) we arent friends if you're on anon. it immediately creates a power imbalance where you know me and any necessary context #but i have no idea who you are or how much you know about me. that's already a fucked dynamic #and 2) I HOPE YOU FEEL BAD. LIKE GENUINELY I HOPE YOU FEEL AWFUL AND HAVE A GOOD LONG LOOK AT YOURSELF #okay i think that's all. ta-ra lads??? how tf do u end something like this #ive queued this to reblog a couple more times throughout the day

[babygirl-but-a-boy]

A gift...

... a Failsafe

#the cultural effect that the movie night Jason Todd and Bruce image is irreversible #in case yall havent got the update #fuck gotham war #shits awful #fuck bruce wayne #he was yoUR SON #YOUR SON #AND YOU SCREWED HIM OVER #web weave #comic books #bruce wayne #batman #dc batman #alfred pennyworth #dc comics #batman comics #jason todd #failsafe #red hood #how dare you #long tag #long post #comic book post #comic book panel #i will tag this shit til the cows come home #or however the phrase goes

[redeyedroid]

CW for war.

How Do You Hunt a U-Boat, or: How a Scottish Lesbian Became a Leading Expert on Anti-Submarine Warfare.

The Allies - and here, I'm mostly talking about the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy. More Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea than Tom Hanks in Greyhound. Because it was the British and Canadians that did the bulk of fighting in the Atlantic - had a lot of problems when it came to sinking U-Boats, even when they roughly knew where one was. For one, the primitive and less sophisticated forms of sonar (asdic, in the parlance of the day) the ships of the time were equipped with had blind spots. The sonar pointed forward and the depth charges were pushed off the back of a ship. A clever U-boat commander, and many of them were, would move away and make the destroyer or corvette miss.

One way they solved this was by developing a system called hedgehog. A spigot mortar, firing a pattern of bombs ahead of the attacking ship while the U-Boat was still in sonar contact. The bombs exploded on contact with a submarine, cracking it open and allowing immense water pressure to crush the hull and kill the crew. (Just over 40,000 Germans went to sea in U-Boats in the Second World War. About 75% were killed. It was, by far, the most dangerous service to be a part of in the Second World War.)

That's just one of the issues - and there were many - the men at sea had when it came to hunting U-Boats, in this case a technical one. Solved with engineering in a very typically British way (a part of British wartime R&D decided spigot mortars were the solution to every explodable problem), but there were others that could not be fixed by a man in a white coat.

Questions about U-boat tactics. Questions about how to predict where the Germans would be. Human questions that required human answers to be found.

Militaries love to play games as much as they love bombing around fields in tanks. You can predict a lot from a game, if the game is played honestly. Very famously, the Japanese wargames before Midway were not played honestly. And, well...

Enter Western Approaches Tactical Unit. Based in Liverpool, Western Approaches was where the Battle of the Atlantic was co-ordinated. And on the top floor, Captain Gilbert Roberts played games to try to divine German tactics. And he did so with a staff made up of young women in the Women's Royal Naval Service. Wrens. One who joined in 1942 was a 19-year-old called Janet Okell, another a chartered accountant in her twenties by the name of Jean Laidlaw.

Roberts and the Wrens played games. Working collaboratively, they refought battles, plotting out the courses and fates of convoys and ships to work out the tactics used by U-Boats, and when they had, they played more to develop countermeasures, trying and rejecting existing tactics and replacing them with ones of their own design. Ones that worked. Then they taught those new tactics to the men who commanded the ships and escort groups that sailed the Atlantic, running courses that lasted 6 days, Monday to Saturday, for over 3 years through the worst, most critical phases of the Battle of the Atlantic. Roberts the ringmaster as the Wrens made it work for the thousands of men who went through the course. Men with years of seagoing experience from all the Allied navies. Canadians, Americans, Australians, British, South Africans, Poles, French. Up to 50 at a time. All receiving instruction and training from Wrens, playing games against them on the floor of WATU, courses plotted in chalk, with cotton wool representing burning ships, deferring to the tactical knowledge of women in their teens and early twenties who never commanded at sea. One of those officers, Nicholas Monsarrat, later wrote the novel of The Cruel Sea.

On one occasion, Okell and Laidlaw played against Max Horton, the admiral commanding Western Approaches, himself a distinguished submarine commander from the Great War.

Playing from behind a screen as escort commanders, with Horton the U-Boat, they sank him 5 times in a row. As they stood there sheepishly, having humiliated their commander, Horton accused them of cheating. They had not. They had not needed to.

The existence of the unit was well known. A picture of Roberts hung in U-Boat HQ with the words "this is your enemy" on it. But WATU's success was as much down to the Wrens and their - sometimes instinctive, sometimes learned, most often both - tactical expertise.

The courses ran until July 1945, long after the U-Boat threat had been crushed. Many of the Wrens who served in the unit transferred out after a short or even a long time, but Okell and Laidlaw remained part of WATU until the end.

We don't know much about Jean Laidlaw. The memoir she left was unthinkingly thrown away by her nephew after her death. Few of the Wrens left any record of their time at WATU. She went back to work as a chartered accountant after the war and lived with her partner, Beryl, then alone, quietly, until she passed in 2008. I hope she continued to play games and I really hope she continued schooling men on how to win.

#WW2 #WWII #War is fucking awful #however bad you've imagined war to be it is much much worse #Diversity is strength #The Cruel Sea is a top 5 war film

[enlichened]

The thing thats consistently bothered me the most in the fallout show is the racism. I would hesitate to recommend it because of that alone. And there was obvious love that the set and prop designers, actors, costume department, and even maybe the writers put into the show! There are themes and characters in fallout that i'm certain would resonate with fans of color!

It KILLS me that so many of the fallout entries are damn well unplayable/watchable in this regard because the writers simply Don't Care how the people in their work are presented. That this like hugely popular world with a lot of worldbuilding and thought behind it does such wrong to so many people, fans and otherwise, that you cannot find any game in the series that does it right or well. It alienates a lot of people who might've been fans just because the majority white creators and fanbase don't give a shit, and I'm sick of it.

it's not enough to say "in the fallout in my head that racism doesn't happen," you actually have to put some things into PRACTICE. Allow space in your head, your games/show, your fan spaces for people of color! notice and say something when you see racism coming from media, yourself, and others!

#like its not AS bad as other fallout media but isnt that the fucking kicker. that its not AS bad #and in fact the games im thinking of that are most egregious in their racism ARE interplay/obsidians games. #bethesda is NOT free from criticism or racism. just look at the elder scrolls. #all of the fallout games have been terrible to different extents to their black characters #the games are TERRIBLY sinophobic. the great war being pinned on china allows for SO much racism in the writing and in fan spaces #but fallout 2 and new vegas specifically have awful and degrading representations of indigenous people. to the point where i wont play 2. #and now this show treating maximus nearly one to one with how star wars writers AND fans treated finn? its not okay #personal / #fallout show #fallout blogging #racism #antiblackness #colonialism #fallout #if not for this i would have thought that the show was GOOD. surprisingly compelling. anti capitalist messaging. but its just. all the time #and this is coming from a white person! i can only listen and imagine how painful it is to play these games or watch the show #and be the butt of the joke every time!!! or the villain or the fool or the one who dies or the nameless entry. #maximus gets to have Some time in the light as a protagonist but for the beginning half of it he's treated SO awfully by the writers #and the latter half does not do enough to make up for it #EDIT: I JUST FINISHED THE SHOW AND THEY FUCKING MADE IT WORSE.... #taking max out and having lucy leave him. for what exactly. why did they have to undermine him and make him look stupid at every opportunit #AND. two of the more major black women being evil capitalists juxtaposed by some white guy who opposes? ......................... #like im glad moldaver was there. i guess. but even she is posed as the villain for the good majority of it and kills innocent people #for no reason and. UGH

[heart-of-a-rebel16]

rise of skywalker au where everything is the same except kallus’ force ghost follows hux around for the sole purpose of annoying him

#kylo (the only other person who can see ghost kallus other than hux): ayo who the fuck are you #I just like the image of kallus ragging on hux for being an awful defector #star wars rebels #swr #sw rebels #agent kallus #alexsandr kallus #rise of skywalker #general hux #armitage hux #I’ll probably draw something for this later

[littlesparklight]

Gently holds Stesichorus' "Apollo saves Hecuba after the fall of Troy and settles her in Lycia" version close to my heart.

Let that poor woman rest!!!

#hecuba #trojan war #greek myth thoughts #the idea of her spending eternity AS AN ANIMAL is fucking awful #let her rest with her family damnit! she doesn't deserve this! #the only way I accept the dog transformation versions #is if she dies immediately after and just goes to the Underworld as usual

[chirpsythismorning]

Somebody said this is Mike watching Willel reunite in the desert 🤣🤣🤣

#byler #stranger things #willel twins #no but in the context of the theory mike thinks Will is in love with el #this is fucking hilarious #like he thinks Will is so in love with el that he uses his expertise on dnd to make it so she can be happy with Mike instead of him #and that’s why when Will cries he ignores… bc he thinks Will is crying over not being able to be with el… #and then when he looks between them at the desert he’s like: here Will. hug your love 😩 #*willel reuniting with Mike watching in the background* #argyle: ahhh shit aw shit awh shit #*​queue the Star Wars parallels in s5 when Mike asks if Will loves el* #leia: he’s my brother! #will: she’s my sister! #Mike: yeah but that never stopped me… you guys look like your in love… #Will: Mike… what your referring to is a familial platonic connection… it’s important to me you understand that… #Mike: oh shit…

[fandomfluffandfuck]

I am very normal about this behind the scenes photo 😮‍💨

#🤌🏻it's the dick sucking angle🤌🏻 #🤌🏻it's the way he's fucking holding that pipe🤌🏻 #(that... yeah... looks phallic 👀) #hnnnng #sebastian stan #bucky barnes #bts #behind the scenes #capatain america: civil war #the quality is awful BUT the content is golden