#before that that's likely because cairo was the one who was posing most of the serious accusations. the theory that she was intentionally-

[writingformyblorbos]

It's cloudy above (Part 4)

[< previous chapter] | [next chapter>]

Jake Lockley/Steven Grant/Marc Spector × gn!Reader (hints of Layla × Reader in the future?) Summary: Harrow is alive, which means Ammit is as well. You have to find him before it's too late. Warnings: Things are going to get a bit angsty. Canon typical violence (guns, stabbing, wounds, murder in general), mentions of DID and anxiety. A somewhat grafic wound description. Not proof read (I don't know if I don't get my things proofread because I'm too lazy to ask or because I'm afraid of being judged by others. Guess we'll never know) Word cound: 4.3k (don't ask me how I did it, idk either) a/n: I want to thank Jennifer Saunders for making the I need a hero cover for Shrek 2, otherwise I would’ve had no idea on how to vizualize the action scene, which would’ve led me to give up on ica altogether. Also it’s probably going to be bad, but I beg you to please cut me some slack, it’s my first time writing a fight scene. Anywho, please enjoy!!!

If you had asked yourself a few days ago what you would be doing Wednesday evening, your best guess would’ve been watching a movie, reading a book, perhaps going out for some drinks with Colt if you were feeling a little bold. However, getting ready to infiltrate a cult to try and get some information on its leader’s whereabouts who posed a worldwide threat was definitely not something you planned on adding to your schedule.

You’d had your fake story revised by Layla, Steven, and Marc: your name was Sunny, and you had just been kicked out of your flat because you couldn’t afford rent anymore. You were one of the many people lost in the Snap, and once you’d returned, your life had been turned upside down. Your job? Terminated. Your parents? Dead. With no support system, you were an ideal target for a cult. You only hoped the fanatics would find it convincing enough.

Marc and Steven had stayed back at their flat, most likely coming to terms with the fact that there was another alter within their system, Jake. While they were doing that, Layla was driving you to your home to change into different clothes.

“I had a feeling,” Layla revealed to you as the doors of the elevator closed, “About Jake’s existence.”

You pressed the button to take you to the ground floor, “How so?”

“In Cairo, Harrow’s men were shooting at me, and he was about to kill Marc. But then, something changed in him. It’s like… he wasn’t holding back anymore.” The elevator dinged and its doors opened. “He took down everyone, including Harrow. After things died down, he said he’d blacked out,” Layla stepped out of the elevator alongside you. You opened the door for the both of you and exited the complex. “I only hope the three of them figure things out.” You nodded in response.

Layla walked to a motorbike parked next to the building. She grabbed one of the black helmets and handed it to you, “Put this on, you’re gonna need it.”

The air was hitting your face as you drove through the streets, gripping Layla’s shoulders for dear life.

“How did you meet Steven, anyways?” she looked at you through the rear-view mirror.

You proceeded to explain the whole Tesco situation, how that led you to get Steven’s number and going out on a date with him.

“A date?”

“It was going well, actually. Best date I’d had in a while. That was, of course, until he got stabbed.”

She laughed, “I wouldn’t want my date to be stabbed, either.”

Her motorbike came to a halt as you got to a red light. Layla quickly glanced back at you, “You’re gonna fall off if you keep holding onto my shoulders, you know.”

You knew hugging her from behind would be more efficient, but you didn’t want to be inappropriate. “Wait, can I…?”

It was obvious what you were proposing, and Layla nodded, “Yeah, don’t worry about it.” You carefully slid your arms around Layla’s abdomen, feeling the warmth emanating from her body. “I’m happy for Steven,” she looked at you once again through the mirror, “You’re quite the catch.” You felt blood rushing to your cheeks in light of her comment. The traffic light turned green, and you were both once again on the move.

Once you arrived, you led Layla into your small flat. Signs of the hurried escape you made yesterday were evident, your suitcases still laid out on the couch.

“Sorry for the mess,” you apologized to Layla, “Last time I was here, I was in a bit of a hurry.” She shook her head and insisted you not to worry. You frantically started clearing the couch for her to have somewhere to sit, “Would you like some water, tea?” you asked, not wanting to be impolite in front of your guest.

“(y/n), I appreciate it, but we have to be quick.” That stopped you dead on your tracks. Right, you weren’t there to clean up. Her words stung, but you knew she wasn’t coming from a place of malice. You apologized and hurried back to your room.

You opened your closet and got to work. After a while, you managed to combine some old clothes you hadn’t worn in years along with dirty clothes in order to make an outfit that would fit ‘Sunny’. You exited your room and saw Layla examining the shelf behind the armchair, fixated on a particular picture frame you knew all too well. She noticed you out of the corner of her eye and jumped, excusing herself for prying. “It’s ok! I’m sorry for startling you,” you told her, trying to soothe her worries.

You looked at the picture as well. It was a family photo, a much younger version of your parents holding your baby self. You remembered the many lonely nights you’d clutched the frame tightly to your chest, crying your eyes out, hoping that maybe your parents would someday return.

“I lost them to the Snap,” you stood next to Layla, “That day, after seeing many of my co-workers disappearing into thin air, I called them to see if they were okay. When they didn’t answer…”. You felt your heart sink into your chest as you said the last sentence, yet you couldn’t quite put your pain into words. The hole you felt in your heart when your calls went unanswered. Opening the door of your childhood door to be greeted to the heart-breaking silence. You knew it was over, that they were back, but the gaping wound that remained open five years was only beginning to heal. A tear ran through your cheek, “I kept it to remind myself that they would’ve liked me to go on with my life.” You were thankful you had stuck with that philosophy, otherwise you would’ve never moved to London.

You could sense grief in Layla’s honey eyes, as if she empathized with your feelings, but couldn’t quite vocalize her sorrow. Nevertheless, she eyed you from head to toe and reached for your forearm, “Looking good, Sunny,” she smiled and headed to the door, “Let’s go.”

You were a few blocks from where the neighbourhood started, standing next to Layla’s motorbike while she was on a call with Marc. She hung up and made her way to you.

“Marc and Steven are on their way,” she grabbed a flip phone from her pocket, “If you get in trouble, call us or text us. This phone has both of our numbers” she handed you the phone and you took it from her hand.

“What about my phone?” you thought it would be easier to add her number to your phone and take it with you.

“They might try to take it away, it’s better if you use this one” She offered to keep your phone in the meantime. “Be careful. They are armed and dangerous. Never let your guard down.” Her warning gave you chills. Were these guys really that bad?

After walking a few blocks more, you arrived at the place, expecting to see everyone dressed in the same attire, maybe people sitting in a circle, chanting something in an unknown language around a fireplace and whatnot. Instead, you were met by some kids playing football on the streets, neighbours chatting in the stairs of their apartments and tending to the small community garden out on the street. By all means, this seemed to be a pleasant place to be at, not quite the cult-like environment you’d expected. Regardless of everyone acting normal, you stuck out like a sore thumb as you walked through the street. You seemed to have caught the attention of many of the people there, staring at you like as if you were carrying a grenade in your pocket. Despite this, a young lady appeared to have pitied you, approaching you tenderly.

“Can we help you?” she examined your face, “You seem… lost.”

You took this as an opportunity to begin playing the role of the lost lamb. “I am,” you nodded, “I… I need help.”

“That’s alright, love,” she stroked your back, “Come with me, I know someone who can help you,” she beckoned. You felt guilty for abusing the woman’s generosity, but you kept telling yourself it was for the greater good.

She ushered you down the street and asked you your name. You replied with your fake name, not wanting to give away your real identity. She nodded and walked towards a small pen where a man was tending to goats. “Marvin, do you happen to know where Bobbi is?” she patted your back, “Our friend Sunny here needs help.”

“Lynn!” the big man greeted the woman, “Yeah, she’s in the diner, I believe,” he said as he scratched the goat’s head. She thanked him and led you to a few steps further to a large brick building.

When you entered, you could spot a communal diner, more potted vegetables, and an area with a makeshift cinema. With her hand still on your back, she walked you to a tiny gathering of people. You were able to make out a bit of the conversation they were having “… need to find a way to get our hands on that Stela. Also, make sure to keep sending money to Chicago. We need to make sure that maniac doesn’t get to—”

“Bobbi!”, Lynn called out. “I believe we could use some help,” she squeezed your arm, “right?”

Bobbi gave some orders to the individuals she was talking to and they scattered. She walked towards you, reading your every move. “Don’t be scared,” she beckoned you towards a table, “Let us talk.”

You both sat across each other, Simple Twist of Fate playing faintly through some speakers. “Tell me, what’s your name?” she crossed her hands on the table.

“Sunny.”

“And what brough you to us, Sunny?”

You tried sounding as miserable as possible, “I… feel lost. Ever since the blip, really.” You continued telling your pre-made sob story, trying to channel some of the very real feelings you’d felt, hoping it would make your story more believable.

Bobbi listened carefully to your every word, clueless to the fact you were lying. “It’s still baffling I lost five years of my life.” You tilted your head, facing the plastic tablecloth of the table you were fidgeting with.

“You won’t have to worry about material things anymore, Sunny. We have clothes, warm food and a place for you to sleep,” Bobbi stood up from the table, encouraging you to do the same, “Just one thing, before I show you around, Can I hold your hands?” she held out her palms so they faced upwards. The tattoo of the crocodile scales on her forearm was now visible, tormenting you. You reluctantly agreed, placing your hands inside of hers. She held them tightly and you saw the tattoo begin to move. Panicked, you tried pulling away, but Bobbi made sure to keep you in place, “Shh, it won’t take long, I promise.”

The tattoo finally stopped moving, turning green and returning to its original state. Despite you thinking this was something good, Bobbi looked wearily at you. “Why don't you come with me?.” You had a bad feeling about following her, provoking you to quickly send a ‘SOS’ text with the flip phone. You walked through a set of wooden stairs and arrived to a storage room worthy of a horror movie. It was full of what you hoped were mannequins wrapped in cloth and plastic, but knew deep down were most likely dead bodies. A man pinned you to a wall and started emptying out your pockets, including the phone Layla gave you. He then pushed you into the floor, and the doors slammed shut behind you, leaving you to your own devices. “Enjoy your stay, ‘Sunny’.” Bobbi mocked you through the door, and you could hear the sarcasm in her voice when she mentioned your made-up name. How had she found out, though?

“No, no, no, wait!!” you began banging your hands on the wooden door, hoping someone would be able to hear you. You leaned into the door and heard Bobbi giving instructions to the people outside the door. “… with Khonshu’s avatar. Whatever happens, make sure they stay there. Station people outside that window as well. You two, come with me. We need to find Khonshu and Taweret’s avatars.”

You were at least glad you’d managed to warn Layla before they took the phone away.

You began scanning your surroundings, tying to find an exit in case neither of them arrived. The giant window was sealed of by wooden planks, and the stairs that lead to the terrace were far too high for you to reach. You came to the scary conclusion that the only way out would be through that door, otherwise, you were trapped there for good. The ambience of the desolate and eerie room started making your anxiety flare up; you could only wish they were already on their way.

Every minute gone by felt like an eternity, awaiting any sign of their arrival. You were sat in a fetal position, your head between your legs. You were beginning to feel lightheaded, your breathing increasing in pace, when suddenly sounds of a fight on the outside became evident. Then, BAM! The door flung open, the masked figure with the formal white suit coming right through it and greeted you with a “Hello there.”

“Steven!” at this point, you could’ve easily recognized his voice, even if it was miles away.

He ran to you and offered his hand to help you up, “Let’s get you out of here, shall we?” Two men entered into the room and stormed at you. Steven kicked one of them in the chest, and he knocked the other one throwing his baton at his face as you watched from a safe distance. He then went to the door and locked it from the inside.

“How are we going to get out of here?” you turned to him.

He eyed the sealed window and looked at you. “I think I’ve got an idea.”

Steven began ripping the wooden planks off the window, grunting as he did, leaving the glassless window exposed. “Marc?”

Almost as soon as Steven asked for Marc, the suit vanished and turned into the mummy-like costume.

“On it,” Marc exits through the broken window, gesturing you to do the same. You do so and stand on the window ledge next to him. He grabs you by the waist, positioning himself to jump off the edge. “Hold on tight.”

“What?!” Before you get an answer, he leaps down the building, with you hugging him as tightly as you can.

Harrow’s people notice your landing immediately and start shooting. Marc shields you with his cape. He finally pulls away and throws one of his moon-shaped darts into one of the man’s chest, charging and punching the other one.

“Come on, let’s go!” he turns around and grabs you by the arm, running off with him. You made your way down one street, only to find it barricaded by men with guns. “Over here!” Marc shouted as he dragged you down the other street, except there were more people. You were surrounded from both sides.

You thought that would be the end of you, until a pair of golden wings pierced through one side of the armed crowd.

“This side is clear!” Layla yelled as the bullets bounced off her wings. The three of you headed that way. You could feel your heart leaping out of your chest as you ran. The rest of the mob was catching up with you, though. You grabbed a crowbar laying on the street to defend yourself. As the swarm of angry fanatics got nearer, Layla looked at Marc. “Right?”

“Left.”

Soon enough, both of them began taking down the group of people, Marc occasionally switching to Steven and vice versa.

Someone charged at you, and out of instinct, you fiercely struck them in the head with the crowbar. You paused to look at what you had just done. The man laid there, unconscious.

BANG!

You began feeling an intense burning on your thigh, the pain so intense you fell against a wall. You’d never felt anything like that in your entire life. The stinging sensation didn’t cease even when you pressed your hand against the source of pain. Your eyes grew wide as you freed your grip from your thigh, your palm now covered in crimson red. Layla swiftly ran to your aid.

“Leave me here! You two go!” you cried out to her.

She instantly shook her head, “What?! Not a chance!” and dragged you to a corner. Marc seemed to have noticed her since he followed the two of you.

As soon as Marc spots you and Layla on the ground, something seemed to have snapped inside of him, as if the gravity of the situation was dawning on him. He throws his head back and, once again, his costume switches to the version you were very familiar with. Jake's costume. A cult member tries to ambush him from the back, but he throws him on the ground and immediately slices his throat, blood gushing all over his costume.

Layla shares the same dumbfound look in her eyes as she sees Jake hurries towards you. He lifts you off the floor bridal-style, and asks Layla, “Where’s your bike?”

“We’re almost there.”

He adjusts you in his arms, and both of them start sprinting out to the street. Fortunately, Layla’s motorbike was close enough. You were hastily sandwiched between Layla and Jake, with Layla at the wheel. You dashed through the streets as you held onto Layla with one arm, you other hand preoccupied with your wounded leg. You began feeling a cold spot where the breeze was hitting your blood-ridden trousers.

After some time of going through twists and turns all over the place in what you assumed to be an attempt to lose anyone following you, you deicded to speak up.

“We’re going to the hospital, right?” you asked Layla, the pain from your leg refusing to die down.

“We can’t. Harrow has people all over the place,” Jake interjected, “Imagine this, you're hooked up to an IV. One of Harrow’s followers cranks up the morphine and boom, you’re a goner. Let’s just get back to Stevie’s place and I’ll patch you up. You’ll be good as new on Friday; you have my word.”

He could be right, but you didn’t want to die from an infected bullet wound, “Thank you, but no thank you. Please take us to a hospital, Layla”

“Don’t! This whole plan’s going to shit if you get killed,” he yelled.

“I won’t! I’ll notice if they mess with my dosage!”

“Oh really? What are you now, a doctor?” he teased.

“No, but I’d rather be treated by a professional, not Mr. Mercenary over here.”

Jake scoffed, “Now that’s real nice of you. Remind me who dealt with the guy that mugged you on Sunday? That’s right, Mr. Mercenary himself! Now Layla, would you be so kind as to—?”

“Will the two of you just shut up?!” the motorbike brusquely stopped on the side of the street next to an apartment complex. She stood up and made her costume disappear, whipping out a set of keys from her pockets. “We’re staying here for the night. I have things to treat that wound upstairs.”

You both stayed silent from the shock for a moment. Layla unlocked the main entrance of the building, “Are you two coming or what?” she shouted from the door.

“Yup, sorry,” you muttered

“Sí, señora,” Jake replied soon after, “O bueno, más bien señorita,” he said under his breath

He made his costume vanish and carried you once more bridal style through the entrance. After an uncomfortable elevator ride, you finally made it inside Layla’s apartment. Jake waited for Layla to place a towel underneath the leather couch. After she did, he carefully laid you down. He took off his jacket and threw it on the other couch.

“I’ll get the med kit,” Layla announced.

Jake followed suit, “Yeah, I’ll go wash my hands.”

You took this moment alone to scan your surroundings to distract you from the pain. Unlike Steven’s place, Layla’s home was all tidied up, although it still carried the maximalist aesthetic, having many trinkets and books placed neatly on shelves and bookcases. On the sideboard near the entrance, you spotted a framed polaroid picture of who you supposed to be a younger Layla besides a man you assumed was her father, with some sort of archaeological site behind them. Perhaps that’s why she was drawn to the family photo you had on your bookshelf. Next to it was another picture. This time, it was Layla with a flowy, white dress, holding a bouquet, and the person next to her wearing a tuxedo was… Steven?

Layla appeared from the kitchen with a box and a glass of water, her hair now tied up. “Sorry I couldn’t take you up on that water back at your place,” she handed the glass to you, “It would’ve been nice to simply sit there and chat,” she placed some pills on your other hand and muttered, “This should help with the pain.”

You took the pills and watched Layla as she knelt on the ground to lay out the contents of the med kit on the coffee table. The photo of Steven and Layla kept nagging your conscience, so you decided to do something about it. “I know it’s none of my business but…” it was sort of your business, since Steven did agree to go on a date with you, and if he was married, it meant he had either cheated on her, or they just had open relationship, “A-Are you and Steven… married?” you couldn’t help but stumble on your words.

She diverted her focus from placing things on the table onto you, smiling and shaking her head, “No, I was married to Marc,” she stood up, “And we officially ended it about a week ago. Although we had been separated for a few months now.”

She went on to seat next to you on the couch . “We realized we needed time alone to figure things out.”

Before you could reply, Jake came bursting out from the bathroom. “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

He knelt next to you and inspected the wound. “Luck seems to be on your side today.” you would argue otherwise, but at the very least that meant he had good news, “The bullet doesn’t seem to have hit any arteries, it’s mostly superficial.” He sprayed you with lidocaine, “Let’s fish this little bastard out.”

Layla offered her hand for you to squeeze, but you refused, not wanting to hurt her. “The lidocaine won’t do much,” she insisted, “Wanna see who’s stronger?”

You acceded to her proposal, unsure as to what she was referring to, and began squeezing as soon as Jake started the recovery efforts. To counteract you crushing her hand, Layla, tried to squeeze as the same amount of force you were. That’s what she meant by finding out who was stronger.

“In the meantime, tell me: did you find anything?” she asked. You had almost forgotten the reason you’d gotten shot in the first place.

“I did,” you managed to say through gritted teeth, “They said something about getting their hands on a Stela.”

“Did they specify what Stela?” Layla inquired. You shook your head.

“They also said something about sending money to Chicago to— Ouch!” you angrily turned to face Jake.

“Can’t you speak without moving so much?” he argued for himself.

You carried on, “To keep some maniac away from someone.”

Layla concluded, “That’s probably where Harrow is.”

After a while of doing who knows what, Jake, at last, recovered the bullet from your thigh with a proclamation of victory. “Congratulations!” he announced as if he was talking about a new-born baby, “It’s a bullet. And his name will be… Carlos!” You couldn’t help but giggle at his silly comment.

After Jake stitched and bandaged you up, Layla excused herself to her bedroom. Even though she’d offered her bed to you, you had declined. It’s not like you could’ve moved much, anyways.

Jake, on the other hand, had occupied the spot next to you on the couch once you were sitting. He sprawled out his limbs and closed his eyes. For a while, you thought he was asleep. That was until you heard the faintest ‘I’m sorry’ escaping his lips.

"I'm sorry for earlier," he paused, "And for threatening you yesterday". Jake didn’t look like the kind of guy to be very open and vulnerable about his feelings, which made his apology appear even more sincere.

He most likely wasn’t expecting you to hear him because of the look he gave you when you replied, “It’s okay,” he straightened his position on the couch, scooting closer to you. It seemed he doubted what you were saying.

“Besides, you’ve saved my arse twice now,” you smiled and moved closer to him as well.

You hadn’t noticed how little space had been left between the both of you; you could practically feel his breath on your face, hear his quickened heartbeat. Warmth and desire were radiating off you both, it was only a matter of either of you closing that gap with a kiss.

You could imagine every ounce of him pressed against your body, every strand of hair on his head brushing softly against your forehead, his lips pressed up against yours.

It would be easy, really, just to close the gap, easy to give in.

The dream like trance you were on dissipated as quickly as it had appeared when Jake stood up from the couch and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” you mentally ask yourself if you did something wrong.

“I have a car not far from here. I’ll sleep there,” he turned off the lights, opened the door and left, not even saying goodbye.

Alone in the darkness, you couldn’t help but wonder what it would’ve felt like kissing him.

Another a/n: I'm sorry I left you guys hanging there!!! I promise a kiss will be coming soon. In the meantime, thank you so much for reading!!! Taglist: !!IMPORTANT!! The crossed out usernames are ones Tumblr wouldn't let me tag. Please check your visibility settings, since that may be the reason I can't tag you. @dont-feel-so-good-peter @stilllivindue2spite @dreamtogether2000 @simonsbluee @sunnysidesidra @harrys-tittie @n0ripeaches @soggumm @victoriacourone @beebslebobs (Btw, if you want to get removed from the taglist, feel free to dm me and I'll do it right away, no strings attached.)

#tagging is the bane of my existence #moon knight #moon knight disney+ #moon knight fanfic #moon knight fanfiction #moon knight fic #moon knight series #jake lockley #jake lockely x reader #jake lockely x you #jake lockley x you #jake lockley x reader #steven grant #steven grant x reader #steven grant x you #steven grant x y/n #steven grant x gender neutral reader #marc spector #marc spector x gender neutral reader #marc spector x reader #marc spector x you #marc spector x y/n

[hislittleraincloud]

Children.

You need to fucking run your fics through the appropriate tech checks before you publish your shit.

Yeah, I get that some of you aren't EPL (English Primary Lang). But that doesn't mean your fucking writing program is, or that you can't translate it then run it through.

My gods. If you want to sell me a shitty WFJ story with fkn multiple Jennas in it bc you are obsessed with your fantasies, then you better make it as smooth a ride as possible. I know you're all fkn virgins (most of the writers are, apparently, according to a poll a little while back), but don't let that fucking extend to your Spellcheck & Grammar function.

However, I think that ultimately it might be the dialogue that rips me out of everything. It's the terrible goddamn dialogue. I just cannot read Cairo with completely AU characters, because y'all can't fucking write it. You want people who aren't braindead obsessed with fucking Ortega to read it? Or do you just want to rub n' shoot with others who're rubbin' and shootin', because a quick, shitty fuck is better than no fuck at all? Cairo would have a field day in a critique with y'all, and it would end up a big, bloody mess where y'all would be running to the bathroom in tears. (Or maybe that would be Wednesday, since she doesn't give two fucks. But I feel like the reason Cairo has only one friend is probably more than just her being a typical loner. Both have competitive superiority complexes, so when unleashed on those whose skills are lesser in a competitive arena, they are both likely reach for the heart of their enemies...Wednesday with Bianca (and Sheriff Galpin to a degree), Cairo with Jon and Winnie.)

But I'm starting to whine about content rather than tech specs, so. Do better if you're writing wild AUs. Actually, do the least that is expected of you as an author.

Ugh, speaking of checking shit, people who write articles about RPF need to understand the difference between historical fiction, self-insert/Mary Sueing, and RPF. There are differences. Pretty big ones, even if the genres can overlap/intersect in places.

ETA: I tried to force myself to keep reading it.

Nope, nope, nope to the nope.

CAIRO DOES NOT HAVE HAZEL EYES. DO THESE LOOK FUCKING HAZEL TO YOU? NO. THEY NEVER HAVE.

There is no reasoning given for this change...none. 🤦🏽‍♂️ She's never worn contacts for her roles because people love her big, obsidian-dark eyes. It's dark, dark brown, almost black. I have the exact same eye color. Yay Mexicans!

*GASP* an EYE reveal 🫠 Sorry about the scary Orwellian BIG BROTHER pose, but it seems that no matter how I take a pic to show my eye color, my brows furrow when I'm looking at the camera. Or at you, oh she who writes less than her potential.

For the love of all that's holy, stop. 😭 Or at least GET a second opinion for edits before you publish, preferably by someone who you will be expecting tech wreck from. Not active authors, because we're too busy...but active readers who can take the time to help you run through bad tech (spelling, typos, some grammar) and through spec check (specs = character consistency with canonical aspects you're trying to achieve, but if it's totally AU this isn't a priority, obvs.).

There's a culture going on right now where people can't critique others' works without being seen as meanie or anti. You all get rubber stamped on your creations at AO3 because no one is able to offer meaningful critique, and that means being able to take criticism. Not everyone's writing is great, or even good for that matter. I'm not perfect either, but at least I can do the bare minimum for the readers. But Tor, that's how we prac —

If you keep writing the same shitty, un-edited stuff over and over again, that's not practicing to write better. That's spewing sub-par 💩 for fleeting wet fantasies.

Write your shit, whatever it may be, but god damn, respect your readers a little more but moreover, respect yourself as a writer enough to want to publish something that isn't riddled with easy fixes.

#bad fic #bad writing #on writing #writing #writer problems #writer probs #writer probz #creative writing #writing for characters #writing to character #ic vs ooc #IC used to mean 'in character'/OOC 'out of character' #bad characterization #things that rip me right out of a fic #miller's girl #wednesday netflix #netflix wednesday #write whatever you want but learn to do it better #fan fic writers #fan fic writing #eye reveal #lol

[toxic-gorgon]

Yandere Dio Brando x Reader: Useless

Synapsis: You are one of the last hamon users and while the practice itself has died along Lisa Lisa, except for a tiny handful of users. While most are willing to allow their gifts to die out and go about their daily lives, you want to put yours to good use and join the crusaders.

Content Warning: Extremely dark themes, click the read more at your own risk! Non-con, blood, yandere Dio, depression/hopelessness, corruption kink, breeding kink, dirty talk, talks of su*cide, violence, and extremely spicy themes. 18+, minors DNI! By continuing to read, you understand the risk.

When you joined the Speedwagon Foundation, you knew the chances of you dying for Mr. Joestar’s cause was almost inevitable. Your gifts were nothing compared to the powerful and unique stands that you came across during the start of your journey. You were one of the last remaining hamon users, but instead of allowing it to fizzle out like the others who trade their gifts for normal lives, you wanted to help and be useful! Lisa Lisa long passed and you heard stories of how hamon saved the world. Allowing hamon to die was allowing a part of yourself to die. 

Hamon was useless against stands, but worked wonders against humans and vampires. However, you primarily used yours for healing and support! The crusaders could use all the help they could get, so it made sense when the directors approached you for the task. Their lives are in your hands, and if it means to put an end to the vampyric Dio’s reign, then you’ll do your part and make sure these boys stay alive.

That’s what you thought at the beginning, back before your days meshed together and all time seemed to stagnate. 

You weren’t sure how many days it’s been since you first arrived in this suffocating manor in Cairo. The dark and coldness inside the manor contrasts the warm and vibrant colors outside your window during the day. You were ever the spunky one when you first arrived, you knew your friends were well on their way and you had no problem voicing that fact loudly in Dio’s presence. He would scoff, flashing you an amused grin, after all you were (as what he puts it) like a fangless, clawless feline. You don’t pose any real threat, but it’s cute to see you try. 

Dio is every bit what the rumors said. His raw charisma and power alone should frighten you, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle that’s Dio Brando. His beauty was truly breathtaking, much more so in person, his shirtless form proudly displayed like a painting hung carefully in the Louvre. His voice charmingly suave, almost a mesmerizing melody that beckons you closer like a siren’s call that you can’t block out. Worst of all was his eyes, that piercing gaze of his that can see right through you, all your worst fears and highest hopes, nothing can be hidden from this man. 

When you first arrived at his mansion, you were awestruck. Cat-got-your-tongue indeed as you drank in the imposing monster of a man, your enemy. What could he possibly want from you? His smirk makes your chest clench as the hairs on the back of your neck stood up. You wanted to run, and you would’ve if it wasn’t for you being so goddamned weak. You were completely at his fucking mercy, all he had to do was give the word and you would meet your end. You expected to die right then and there, surely a man like Dio would take out his enemy while he had the chance, just so later down the line it won’t bite him in the ass. You weren’t sure if it was out of pity or amusement, but your death never came. Instead, the cocky asshole smriks and gives you his blessing to tour his home. Hell, he even allowed you access to his library, on the grounds that if you did decide to run, you would be all too easy to catch. You were convinced this man had no real plan for you being here, besides making things much harder for the crusaders by stealing away their healer. 

You were determined to keep your head held high and wait for your knights in shining armor. 

But now, you’re just a shallow husk of despair. All the hope and conviction you had died little by little as the days went by, as those dark thoughts that Dio would mock you with began to take root. There’s no point in brainwashing you when your conviction can be shattered so easily. During the day, Vanilla Ice and Pet Shop watch over you. You absolutely loathe Vanilla Ice. His blind devotion towards his master churned your stomach, all the while he’s looking down on you and lack of stand ability. His words stung, but now they mirror static, background noise for your chaotic thoughts. 

Pet Shop was your preferred caretaker. He’s a bird, so he can’t talk like your other wardens. However, you could’ve sworn you saw that bird smirk once or twice, and his steely gaze mirrored his cocky yet powerful master. Perhaps the bird was silently judging you, even mocking you for being more caged than he was. After all, Pet Shop was allowed to move past the mansion’s windows and enjoy the fresh air and sun, even though he stayed within his bounds. A murder hawk has more freedom than you do.

The nights are always the worst. Screams of ecstasy or pain, you weren’t sure which anymore, filled the halls. After a while of being imprisoned, they all sound the same. How long before you’re next? You felt like it was any day now, and eventually your captor will grow bored of your constant banter. Perhaps that would be for the best, you’re dead weight anyway as long as you remain here.

Your friends were on a mission to save Holly, which you admit is more important than rescuing you. You knew the risk after when you joined this crusade, you just didn’t think it would end here in the lion’s den. You contemplated jumping out the window, not caring how painful the initial impact would be. You always decide against it, and instead sit and wait, chalking it up to being a coward as well. Everyday when your saviors hadn’t come, the little bit of hope inside was crushed gradually until barely anything was left besides tears of frustration and a luxurious queen sized bed to help you sleep.

Since you’ve been here, Dio took the liberty of making sure you’re fed three five star meals a day and accompanying you with a wine glass of blood. Such a gentleman, he even made idle chit-chat while you refused to take a bite (no matter how many times he told you it would be a waste poisoning you). Dio boasted about his many achievements, including how he stole Jonathan Jostar’s body, which you weren’t sure if he was just bragging or making sure that even in a casual setting, the threat still lingered. Was this supposed to impress you? Because the only responses you ever gave him were snide remarks and silence. Sometimes he would treat this like a silly game, but on days when he was more temperamental, you wisely chose to nod your head and actually eat what’s in front of you.

He made sure you were treated well, despite your situation. You bathed in a tub fit for a princess with fancy soaps and perfume, and was dressed in the finest of authentic Egyptian gowns that money could buy. All of which were gifts from Dio. He even took the liberty to do away with all your drab belongings and anything that didn’t fit his opulent aesthetic. He even gave you art supplies once. Whenever he gave one of these gifts, he always made sure to attach a rose with it. You always throw them out.

To occupy yourself when your host is gone and taking time for himself, you like to venture to his library and thumb through his vast selection. You’re sure you read over half of his stock by now, but something new always catches your eye to pass the time with. Usually you would saunter off into your room, avoiding the underlings as much as possible, but tonight was one of those nights where Dio met you there. 

“There you are darling, I was worried I missed you.” His smooth voice did little to put you in ease. 

“What do you want?” you sighed, making your way to the bookcase and browsing through different titles. Dio playfully scoffs, as always everything you say is just a game to him, and the disdain in your tone goes unnoticed. You didn’t move an inch when he moved closer to you, towering over your much smaller frame.

“You wound me dear, I only wish to spend time with you.” He leans in close next to your ear, his warm breath tickling your lobe. “Alone.” Now that’s laughable! Dio Brando isn’t a man who did anything out of kindness or ‘quality time’ without something in return. Did he run out of bodies to satisfy his hunger? What could you possibly offer him besides a snack?

“Spend time with you? I’ve seen what you do to the men and women who throw themselves at you for a sliver of attention. Their dead carcass lay about your manor like furniture when you’ve drained them.” You barely whispered. Why were you explaining his misdeeds to him like a child? You weren’t sure if you were trying to reason or reach the last thread of humanity within, but doubt was clearly written on your face. You wanted this to end.

You balled your hands into fists and shook with rage. “Just kill me and get it over with! I’m tired of you and I’m tired of being here!” 

Dio couldn’t help but sneer at your sudden outburst. How can you say these things? He’s given so much to you, and this is how you repay him? Do you not realize what you do to him? How weak he is while in your presence? How absurd. You had to have known, and perhaps you were testing his patience on purpose.

Reaching up and gripping your chin roughly, Dio kept your gaze on him. “I ask very little of you and have given you everything you could ever ask for. Tell me darling, are you truly unhappy?” his lips brush against your own, and his voice dangerously low that it sent shivers down your spine. Your voice was caught in your throat, this tower of a man standing over you so domineering makes you seem insignificant. Like a large cat ready to pounce on his prey. 

Tears run down your cheeks and you had no will to stop them. Why was he doing this to you? As if to answer your question, the blonde captures your lips and wraps his arms around your trembling form. With a jolt of energy you tried to shove him off you in defiance for your space. “Please stop, I don’t want…” you mumble. Growling, Dio pulls away and glares into your glossy puffy eyes, his brows furrowing when you don’t give in so easily.   

“Pet.” he said through gritted teeth, his hand drifting down to your neck and squeezing rough enough to cut off air supply. “You’re being selfish. All I asked from you in return is your loyalty and to surrender yourself to me.” He picks you up by your neck and amusingly smirks when you gasp and attempt to wiggle free, your hands desperate for air. Your nails grazing his skin with little scratches did nothing to phase Dio, instead he chuckles.

“Funny, isn’t it? The man’s body I’ve taken, the only man I would ever call my equal, possesses the same power as you do.” Black dots formed in your vision and your legs grew tired from flailing. He lets you drop from his grip, and while you sit slumped over and choking on air for your burning lungs, Dio looks down with his ruby hues. “Suppose my interest in you is fate, or perhaps you remind me of him.” Bending down to kneel in front of you, Dio pulls you towards his chest and picks you up bridal-style with very little resistance from you. He smirks and leans in to whisper in your ear “However, your strength will never match his.” 

Dio took flawless strides towards the desk on the other side of the room and pinned you down on your stomach against the harsh oak surface. With the wind knocked out of you temporarily, Dio traced his long nails along the soft chiffon fabric of your golden gown before tearing it to shreds down the middle, revealing your back and ass as the now useless fabric pools at your feet. Looking back at your captor’s sadistic smirk, your bloodshot eyes widen with realization. You were observant, he didn’t need to spell out what his intentions were. 

Almost immediately, Dio parts your legs with his knee and runs his fingers along your slit, examining it’s beauty before he decimates it with his cock. Squirming, you tried to push yourself up from the desk. As weak as you were, you had to try! Even though you knew Dio had more than enough strength to overpower you. As if he read your mind, he takes both of your wrists in his strong grip and pins them against your back. 

“Careful dear, you wouldn’t want me to break your arms, would you?” You stopped your struggling and stilled. It was best to get it over with and maybe if you comply, he won’t be as harsh with you, right? Just let him do what he’s going to do and don’t make it worse for yourself. “That’s better!” He smiles. “Lay there and trust your Lord Dio. Don’t worry about a single thing.” Don’t worry? How can you not? But, you did as he said and Dio goes back to running his fingers along your pussy, this time his index flicking against your clit. 

Biting your bottom lip, you shut your eyes tight. Be strong….be strong…. You chanted, but the small shocks of having your clip played with after being in turmoil for so long, it was difficult to not give yourself over for anything that can make you feel a moment of blissful ignorance. You were convinced that either Dio was a mindreader, or you were just so painfully obvious, but he stops his ministrations with your heat and leans in closer, he carelessly grinds his clothed hardened cock against you. He was quite proportioned. 

“Let’s enjoy ourselves, hmmm?” You shuddered at his words (and sizable bulge), a small whimper escaping you. Pleased with your sudden turn around, Dio leans back and without missing a beat, undoes his pants, allowing his cock weeping of precum to spring free. You swallow down a moan when his cock rubs against your clit, teasing your lips. Your cunt quickly became sloppy, as you were beginning to come around and throw caution to the wind. Dio must’ve noticed, because chuckles and mutters. “Don’t hide your cute noises from me now.”

With his cock soaked with your juices, he thrusts in and you do as he says, allowing a hoarse moan erupt from your throat that’s muffled by your face against the desk. This wasn’t going to do, not for Dio. While thrusting at a brutal pace, he yanks your hair back and lifts your head so he can listen to your lustful melodies more clearly. While you pant like a bitch in heat whenever he hits that spot to make you see stars, Dio releases your wrists in favor of gripping your hip tightly, leaving bruises. 

Gasping, you didn’t move your wrists for fear of your lord stopping or worse. Pleased by your obedience, Dio’s pace quickens, just for him to slow down to a tortuous pace. Flustered you cry “W-Why? Please….please….m-more!” You try to turn your head, but his strong grip keeps you in place. What a wonderful development! Definitely a change in the right direction from how you rejected him a few moments ago. But, Dio wasn’t quite satisfied yet. He wanted your everything, not only your spur-of-the-moment submission. He’s Dio Brando, Lord Dio to his brood. He doesn’t settle for less than satisfactory.

With a grin, Dio knew just how he would achieve this. “You beg so pretty darling, I see you’re finally coming to understand who owns you. But begging isn’t enough.” When he started moving again, this time his cock kissing your cervix, your mouth hung agape in a silent scream. Your thoughts thoroughly scrambled with nothing but the pleasure that Dio was offering you. Hell, you weren’t even coherent when your position changed to you being on your back with your legs spread wide and exposed, only for Dio. 

He picks up his pace, your cunt constricting around him as he pounds into your sore pussy, his hand now free from your hair pressed down your abdomen. He felt the slight belly bulge from him delving into your sweet cunt, simply delicious. “Darling-” He said too sweetly. “- You’re absolutely stunning so full of my cock, but I have a wonderful idea. I didn’t appreciate your attitude this evening, but I know how we can fix that!” You were too fucked out to comprehend his words, but nodded like the dumb slut you were. His dumb slut. “I’m going to breed this pussy of yours, fill you up with my cum, and you’re going to take everything I give you. Wouldn’t that be great? You grow big and round while your breasts are full with leaking milk.” He pauses as his hips sputter, his cock pulsating with the vision of you growling his children within your womb. 

“Yes..I think motherhood will suit you well. Forever my ___.” 

Whimpering, you nod in agreement. Whatever he wanted, as long as he didn’t stop. You were so very close! You mumble a breathy fuck when Dio pushes your legs up to your shoulders, diving in much deeper than before. Chanting strings of curses under his breath, Dio’s hand on your stomach drifts down to vigorously rub your sensitive nub and in almost no time at all you cum around his member, your juices rushing out to soak the desk and his cock. 

“Oh god...oh god...oh god..” you chanted, making Dio’s ego inflate more if that were possible. Smirking, he lets you ride out your orgasm, before picking up the pace yet again, this time losing control of himself for once. Brutally he fucks you, his cockhead slamming against your cervix, as your pulsing walls from your aftershocks urges his throbbing shaft, begging to milk it. After a few final thrusts, Dio stills and his cock paints your womb with his seed. 

He wasn’t done yet. Chuckling at your fucked out expression, it was so much like Dio to push for more. He wanted to mark you, make everyone but mostly yourself to know who you belong to. Your chest will do and his mark will be on full display. Using the nail on his index finger, Dio carves his name into your chest, pebbles of blood dripping down your sweaty and spent body after each scrape was made. When he is done, he admires his work, his name etched into your skin almost makes his cock spring back to life. What was he kidding, he could go a few more rounds anyway. But first, he leans in and laps up the blood, waste not want not right?

“There you are, how stunning. Darling, I wish you could see yourself right now.” Your eyes grew heavy, you were so exhausted and ready for a nap. Dio picks you up and doesn’t bother to cover you with your shredded rags. “No, no, don’t pass out now. We have a long night ahead of us.”

#jjba #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #jojo no kimyō na bōken #dio brando #yandere #yandere dio #dio x reader #hamon user reader #y/n #dio x y/n #extra spicy #dark themes #part 3 #stardust crusaders #jojo's bizarre adventure x reader

[mhacentral]

MHA World Heroes Spoilers Thread

First off this will be updated over the next couple days so check back if you are interested

One thing I will say above the spoiler line, and its something I was hoping wouldn't happen but alas it does... this movie is mainly Deku and Rody..... though Bakugo and Todoroki have big battles towards the end. From what Audrey on Twitter said its, 80% of movie is Rody and Deku on a road trip as wanted fugitives. Rest 20% is action scenes + Deku, Bakugou, & Todoroki solo fights

Audrey aka aitaikimochi, posted a WHOLE summary right HERE

Audrey also posted a Q&A from Volume World Heroes HERE

Here are some other random stuff I found out on Twitter..... but I recommend clicking the links above. This stuff was just collected while things were coming out

I hear many saying it was rushed

No LoV

Some students get spotlight but not all, and pros don’t get a lot of focus. Class A and B are in the movie

Whatever rody feels it shows on the bird even if his face doesnt show the emotion

Rody has two younger siblings- roro and lala. He provides for them since their dad isnt with them anymore

The movie is mainly Deku and Rody running as fugitives

No team up with Endeavor and Hawks

The movie starts off with Humarize committing an act of terror and bombing a bunch of people to remove their quirks, but this also causes their quirks to explode, killing a ton of civilians.

Deku become framed as a huge murderer because of something to do with Rody and that Brief Case in the trailer

Deku trusts Todoroki to help him and knows he won't stop until he finds him and they are always communicating on the phone. Deku sends clues by texting similar to Hero Killer arc

Only final battle is in the suits... stealth suits

Flect's quirk is reflection. Whatever damage you do to him, the force will go back to you

Deku got beat very badly by Flect and nearly died, he fought him alone, but Rody arrives to save him, 3 minutes before the bomb goes off. So Rody saves him somehow (don't know how yet)

Bakugo gets very injured in his fight, he fights some twins. And cause they shred his clothes up, we get to see a lot of abs.... or how a lot of people are saying, we get to see his boobs (not my words, look on twitter lol)

At the end of the fight Bakugo is all bloody and sweaty, but stands up and does the “All Might” pose

Kirishima doesn't want to lose, cause Bakugo never loses

Todoroki was extremely badass in his final fight, even more than the Chimera from Heroes Rising. Leviathan swallowed Todoroki, like in the trailer. He punches a hole in the villain and uses his ice to create some crazy stuff (dont know what yet)

There’s this part where Todoroki catches deku and they slide along his ice thingie and todo is holding deku by the waist

Aizawa, Iida, Mirio, Koda are at school when everyone returns

Deku hugs Rody at the end. Rody is trying to hide his feelings but the bird is crying before they part ways

Locations

Oseon (Deku, Bakugou, and Todoroki, Endeavor)

Tokyo, Japan (Kirishima, Tetsutetsu, Amajiki, Jirou, Shoji, Fat Gum, Cementoss, Present Mic).

Cairo, Egypt (Mineta, Kaminari, Sero, Shiozaki, Edge Shot, Mt. Lady, Kamui Woods)

Paris, France (Ochako, Tsuyu, Nejire, Ryukyu),

New York City, USA (Tokoyami, Hawks, Ojiro, Satou, Shishida, Shoda)

Singapore (Yaoyorozu, Setsuna, Majestic)

All Might is with the Hero Association overseeing the teams

Info from the book released with the movie in Japan, Vol W: source is aitaikimochi

Ojiro thinks Deku’s various t-shirts are really cool

Ojiro isn’t just an average Joe- he has great fashion sense -

Some students know that Kirishima and Ashido went to the same middle school, but they didn’t really ask further. No one knows about Kirishima’s “high school debut”

Aoyama makes his own luxurious lunches (so he can cook apparently)

Number 1 hero Ranking of “who looks most like a villain”: Endeavor

The students whose dorm rooms we haven’t seen can be described as: Bakugou: smart style, Tsuyu: sort of ethnic vibes, Mineta: Dreadful (lol)

And more from ShibuyaSmash HERE

#mha world heroes mission #bnha world heroes mission #mha whm #bnha whm #deku #midoriya #rody #bakugo #todoroki #movie #mha #bnha #flect

[cheemers-writing-archive]

If They Were in Smash: Jotaro

Yeah. You knew I had to start with him. Literally one of the most iconic anime characters, and the most recognizable from my favorite series.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Attacks

Jab: just a quick little punch

Three-hit jab: punch, punch again, and knee. No flurry attack.

Side tilt: long kick

Up tilt: fist swings upwards

Down tilt: Jotaro bends down and trips the opponent with his feet in whatever direction he’s facing

Side smash: Jotaro leans forward and punches. Another button press will have Star Platinum elongate the punch.

Up smash: Jotaro punches upward. Another button press will have Star Platinum elongate the punch.

Down smash: Jotaro does the splits and kicks opponents from both sides. Another button press will have Star Platinum elongate the kick from both sides.

Nair: Jotaro punches in front of him, Star Platinum punches behind

Fair: normal punch forward

Bair: stylish kick backward

Up air: stylish kick upward

Dair: Star Platinum punches downward

Neutral special: same as Jotaro’s jab, but with Star Platinum. Also, instead of a three-hit jab, Star does a flurry attack.

Side special: Star Platinum uses Star Finger, which covers about an eighth of Final Destination

Up special: Star Platinum blows air from his mouth really hard and sends Jotaro straight up. This move doesn’t hurt, but it can blow opponents downward if they aren’t standing on a platform. Inspired from Enya’s Justice fight, except instead of inhaling, Star is exhaling.

Down special: Star Platinum: The World. Works like Wario’s Waft, when fully charged time stops (including the music and timer if there is one) for two seconds (not canonically accurate, but Jotaro would be broken if you could stop time for 5 seconds). Anyone who is hit moves a bit then stops until the effect ends. All normal launch rates will continue after time resumes.

Forward throw: tosses the opponent’s body aside in front of Jotaro

Back throw: tosses the opponent’s body aside behind Jotaro

Up throw: throws the opponent’s body upward, and Star Platinum adds one last little punch

Down throw: slams the opponent’s body down, and Star Platinum adds one last little flurry of punches

Final smash: Jotaro’s final move against Dio. Star Platinum puts so much pressure on the opponent they explode (in a cartoonish, non-gory way. Gotta keep that age rating low, folks). Kills instantly if the opponent is over 100 percent.

Extra animations

Entrance: Jotaro punches through the ground, similar to the Wheel of Fortune fight

Idle animation 1: Jotaro adjusts his hat

Idle animation 2: Star Platinum appears and punches the air

Up taunt: Jotaro points to the sky, like in the DiU openings

Side taunt: Jotaro points to the side

Down taunt: Jotaro pulls his hat down and says his famous line, Yare Yare Daze

Victory poses

End music: the last five bars to Stand Proud (if you don’t know anything about music, it’s basically the final few notes before the end)

First pose: Jotaro looks up from the brim of his hat and says nothing.

Second pose: Jotaro throws a piece of paper at the camera and says, “here’s your receipt.” The dramatic slowdown (when the screen shows the victor’s name) happens as the paper passes in front of the screen, and Jotaro just keeps walking away after the slowdown.

Third pose (which only happens if Jotaro won while over 100 percent on his last stock with any of his part 4 outfits): Jotaro looks at the ground, and says, “I’m glad I got to see your growth.” Right after the dramatic slowdown, Jotaro falls to the floor.

Stage: Cairo

The stage is one of the types that moves around and lands in different locations. It starts on the side of Dio’s castle at sunset. It moves to the clock tower after some very long traveling, where you can see Joseph, Kakyoin, and Dio flying through the air. After some time, a stage hazard will appear: Hierophant Green’s tripwires. If you land on one, you’ll be barraged with emeralds. The stage moves away before *major spoiler* happens, and lands after some time on the sidewalks of Cairo. No stage hazards in this part, but in the background you can see the scenery change slightly from time to time. While the stage is moving for a third time, it stops suddenly in the air, along with the music and timer, for five seconds. The players can still move. In those five seconds, some knives fly through the air, and can hit players. The final part of the stage is the bridge. On this part, the stage hazard is a huge road roller that slams on a random part of the stage after some time. Anyone who gets hit by it has an instant KO. However, you can see the shadow coming before it lands, so you can get out of the way. After that, it loops back to the beginning of the stage.

Palette swaps

Default colors (swap 1): Jotaro’s anime outfit in part 3

Swap 2: Jotaro’s manga outfit in part 3

Swap 3: Jotaro’s outfit in part 4

Swap 4: Jotaro’s outfit in part 6

Swap 5: Jotaro’s part 3 outfit, with Dio’s colors (yellow cap/hair, yellow overcoat, black shirt, yellow pants, green shoes)

Swap 6: Jotaro’s part 3 outfit, with Kakyoin’s colors (red cap/hair, green overcoat, green shirt, green pants, brown shoes)

Swap 7: Jotaro’s part 4 outfit, with Josuke’s colors (purple cap/hair, dark purple overcoat, yellow shirt, dark purple pants, brown shoes)

Swap 8: Jotaro’s part 6 outfit, with Jolyne’s colors (green hat/hair, light blue overcoat shirt pants and shoes)

Classic mode: Helping Hands

Theme: fighters that have helpers, and the helpers are not playable. Kind of replicating the idea of Stands.

First battle: Joker in Mementos

Second battle: Duck Hunt in Duck Hunt

Third battle: Pokémon Trainer in Pokémon Stadium (this is an exception to the rule because it’s really the trainer that tells the Pokémon what to do, similar to Stand users telling their Stand what to do)

Fourth battle: Banjo and Kazooie in Spiral Mountain

Fifth battle: Olimar in Distant Planet

Sixth battle: Rosalina and Luma in Mario Galaxy

Final boss: Master Hand and Crazy Hand (I know this is kind of a stretch, but you try naming another classic mode boss battle with two bosses on screen at the same time. Also, helping HANDS.)

Palutena’s guidance

Pit: Look at this guy! He probably thinks he’s so tough.

Palutena: Jotaro thinks he’s tough because he is tough. His looks do not deceive the eye.

Viridi: It’s a shame his friends call him Jojo. Really brings down his intimidation levels if you ask me.

Palutena: Jotaro has fought lots of strong enemies before. He fought against a vampire who could stop time… and won!

Viridi: He can also stop time himself. If you suddenly go flying without Jojo punching you, or you see him teleport, don’t be surprised.

Palutena: Well, he also has that Stand, Star Platinum. Unless you have a Stand, too, Pit, you won’t be able to see his, which means you’re wide open for any attacks.

Pit: Just say I’ve already lost the match, why don’t you?

Palutena: Just like every fighter in Smash, Jotaro is a formidable opponent, but not impossible to beat. You can do it if you try.

Pit: Right. Just gotta stay away from him at all costs. *pause* You don’t think Star Platinum has that big of a range, do you?

Viridi: Good luck, Pit. You’re gonna need it.

Reveal trailer

The trailer starts with Joker comboing Mario into oblivion in the actual game. After Mario is defeated, it cuts to a cutscene with Joker falling back to the ground. Morgana says, “Woohoo! Another one down! There’s nobody here who can combat against you, Joker!”

This next scene has the camera on the ground a ways away from Joker. He taunts when he gets back to the ground, saying, “Alright, who’s next?”

In front of the camera, a leg stomps to the ground. As the camera pans up around the new figure, he says, “So, I finally found you…” When the camera gets to Jotaro’s face, he finishes with, “...copycat.” He summons Star Platinum and the splash screen appears:

Jotaro stands up to fight!

After that is the moveset showcase. You already know Jotaro’s moves.

The extra scene after the Smash logo fades away is Jotaro meeting with Simon and Richter. “Vampire hunters?” he asks. The two Belmonts nod. Jotaro nods back and goes on his way.

Extra tidbits

Jotaro would have an option to play his Japanese voice or English voice in the English version of the game.

Like many of the godlike characters in this game, Jotaro teleports when dodging.

Star Platinum only holds one item in the entire gam, the baseball bat. Jotaro holds the rest.

#super smash bros #jjba #Jotaro

[benditlikepress]

texted you a picture where you looked pretty

@indestinatus @coffeedepablo @ncisjes

all day long I waited for my phone to ring

I counted every glow star on my ceiling

texted you a picture where you looked pretty

and wondered if you saved the ones you had of me…

[illuminati hotties – (you’re better) than ever]

The first time Tony sent Ziva a picture, she’d only been gone a week.

He hadn’t left the apartment for anything other than work since getting back - first because of jetlag, and then out of plain exhaustion. It didn’t help that both work and home were full of things that reminded him of her, of them, so much so that it was beginning to feel like a strange form of self-flagellation to stay cooped up there.

It was easy to convince himself he wasn’t thinking about her, talking himself into thinking about any and every other topic on the planet until he was lying in bed wide awake staring into space wondering where it had all gone wrong. It was then, and only then, that he allowed himself to obsess: to think over things he should’ve said, things he never said, or ways he could try and fix what he knew deep down was unfixable.

This particular night was worse than most – someone at work had stopped him in the elevator and asked him what was happening with Ziva, and if she was coming back – and he’d found himself seeking out reminders of her rather than pretending he wasn’t hyper-fixating on them. His phone was a great source for that: text messages and phone records and her name, over and over and over. His photos and videos, too, were full of her, and his tired fingers paused on one she’d never known he’d taken. The most recent one he’d taken of her - asleep, wrapped in sheets, the Israeli sun hitting the bare skin of her shoulders and back. Her hair was spread out over the pillow and her hand was spread over the vacated side of the bed, as though reaching out for him.

He couldn’t bring himself to scroll past it even when it caused a ball to form in his chest that made it hard to swallow.

It was 2am and he found himself opening a conversation thread and dropping the photograph into it, pressing send quickly.

“I really miss you”

He typed the words with nervous fingers and pressed send even quicker still before throwing his phone in a drawer and turning away from it.

He woke up three hours later and saw she hadn’t opened the message yet. He deleted it, and thanked the gods of modern technology that she never would.

———————–

The next time was a month later, and he thought he’d been doing better until he found a stack of old photographs piled at the back of his top desk drawer. They had been collected over the years and though some pre-dated her arrival in the States, she was a prominent feature in most of them.

Though they still hurt, he was finding himself increasingly able to appreciate them for what they were. He found one, near the bottom of the pile, that even had a smile threatening on his lips. A doctor-themed party from a lifetime ago that had to be up there with the more ridiculous ideas of his life.

The picture had been taken not long after Gibbs had left for Mexico and Tony had relented into Abby’s plans for a surprise party for Jimmy’s birthday, still keen to make sure that people didn’t stop seeing him as a friend instead of just a boss. It was him and Ziva, posing, with Jimmy’s drunkenly sleeping head face-down on the table inbetween them.

He remembered everything about that night: how her hand kept brushing his leg under the table, and every time he’d snapped his neck up to look at her but found her looking in a different direction. How they’d shared a cab home and he’d insisted on walking her to her door, in spite of her drunkenly listing a handful of ways she could kill any man who approached her with only the costume on her back. How she’d invited him upstairs and there was no pretence but he’d said no, trying to be diplomatic, though they’d only lasted another week of summer before that had all came tumbling down.

He opened a message again and snapped a photograph, the edge of his fingers visible holding it up to the camera.

“Remember this? Do you still have that picture of me piling stuff on top of him?”

He didn’t get a reply. Then again, he hadn’t really been expecting one.

He flipped the photograph over and placed it back on the pile.

———————–

The next time he sent her a photo, it had been over 9 months since he’d last seen her and she’d been on his mind all day.

It wasn’t unusual for him to get wrapped up in thoughts of her but it had been plaguing him in a way it hadn’t in a while – starting with a dream in the middle of the night that woke him up startled and coursing through his brain all morning. When it wasn’t better by night-time he’d gone for a drink with the team to take his mind off it, and when that hadn’t helped he’d found himself scrolling through old messages and photos and videos that he’d sworn he was going to delete (or at least put on a flash drive, out of sight out of mind).

When he still had that feeling that something was missing, that he was categorically in the wrong place right now, he got out of bed and walked into the living room in search of a cure.

He remembered, later, one photograph he’d never been able to take down. He lifted his head upwards to the top of his DVD shelves and grabbed for the card, bringing it down and sitting on the sofa with it in his hands.

A Paris street. Years ago now. She looked like a 50s movie star, frozen in time, and he could remember how enraptured he’d been as he’d approached her - watching her in her own world, flicking through postcards and wrapping her coat tighter around her.

Him capturing it in a photo had been what alerted her to his presence, but instead of asking him to delete it like he’d expected she’d simply rolled her eyes and told him with a smile that he was late.

He thought so fondly of that weekend even now. They’d both been overcompensating in the dust of everything that had happened, nervous and eager and hurting deep down, and Paris had come along at the perfect moment to show them both that the thing they’d been orbiting around for four years wasn’t lost. Could be stronger, even. And it was.

Before he could change his mind he went to grab his phone and snapped a photo of the image, opened the long-gone conversation thread and ignored his previously unanswered message.

“Weird day - you’ve been on my mind. Hope everything’s good. Open invitation: call if you need me.”

———————–

Almost two years down, he got a social media reminder of something he tried not to think about.

He didn’t have a photograph of the actual day Ziva became an American citizen. In spite of his promises he’d be there, he’d ended up in another country entirely as she swore her loyalty to his.

He’d felt sick even now that he’d missed her ceremony, knowing how much it had meant to her, even if she tried to play it down when he’d told her. He looked at the photograph that had popped up in his notifications, the two of them smiling with her certificate, and ran his hand over it. Her eyes were so bright and he could barely remember her looking so young.

He remembered how proud she’d been. Wondered if she still was, after how it had ended.

He found himself wondering, selfishly, if he still crossed her mind sometimes too.

“Happy anniversary Miss America”

Part of him was worried it would sound spiteful, but hoped she still knew him well enough to see the good meaning behind it. He pressed send and turned off his phone.

———————–

The first time he thought about sending a photo but didn’t, he was holed up in a small Paris apartment wringing his hands.

He’d known he wasn’t going to hear from her often – she’d took great pains to explain that, voice shaking, reminding him over and over that it was for his own safety. But Tali had been asking for her for days and Tony couldn’t stop looking at the photo they’d taken in Cairo, the one he swore he’d destroy soon, where Tali was curled up in Ziva’s lap and Ziva was looking down at her like she’d hung the moon and stars.

It was the same night, as if by magic, that his phone beeped. He scrambled around for it in the dark, heart in his mouth. A  withheld number flashed on screen.

“Checking in. Everything is OK. On my mind tonight and always.”

———————–

The first and last time Ziva sent Tony a photo, he hadn’t been able to sleep all night.

When Ziva had been away he’d been non-negotiable on work trips and conferences. Now she was back he’d considered it a miracle he’d managed to get 18 months out of the way before being offered a spot on a 3 day conference that was taking place in London. Two hours in it became clear that nothing being shared was particularly relevant to his role, and any number of other members of staff could’ve been sent in his place. He knew he had no more right to be at home than any of them, but it made being away that much harder.

It was 3:18am in London and he knew it was even later in Paris but he couldn’t help himself as he flicked his screen on.

“Still awake? x”

“You sound like a teenage boy.”

“Take that as a yes”

The photo she responded with was a simple one from her slightly pixelated front-facing camera on the phone she refused to upgrade. She was sat up in bed, hair tipped over one shoulder. Wearing one of his t-shirts.

“How is it possible you’ve got even more beautiful in my absence?”

“Hush.

We missed you today”

“Never leaving again. Can’t wait to be home.”

“Pizza and movie night. Your pick.”

“Marry me?”

“Maybe the gigantic block on my finger in that photo did not give it away, but unfortunately I am already getting married 3 months from now.”

“That’s too bad. Lucky guy.”

“Yes, he is.”

“(Just so you know, it’s a rock. Not block.)”

“Goodnight, Mr DiNozzo. X”

“Night Mrs DiNozzo”

#tiva #ncis #ziva david #tony dinozzo #tiva fanfiction

[zainyaxley]

QUICK FACTS

☆ ━━ 𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄 |  -- 🔐 Zain Jamal Yaxley ☆ ━━ 𝐒𝐎𝐂𝐈𝐀𝐋 𝐌𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐀 | @zyaxley ☆ ━━ 𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐃𝐀𝐘 |  -- May 28th, Gemini  ☆ ━━ 𝐀𝐆𝐄 | -- 47 ☆ ━━ 𝐇𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐎𝐖𝐍 | Cairo,  Egypt  ☆ ━━ 𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐎𝐃-𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒 | Pureblood, Sacred 28  ☆ ━━ 𝐒𝐄𝐗𝐔𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘 | Heterosexual  ☆ ━━ 𝐇𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 | 6'2 ☆ ━━ 𝐇𝐀𝐈𝐑/𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒 |  brown and blue   ☆ ━━ 𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐄 |  -- Slytherin ☆  ━━ FORMER 𝐂𝐋𝐔𝐁𝐒 |  --  Head Boy, Dueling (President), Art, Inquisitorial Squad, Slug Club & Drama  ☆ ━━ 𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐃 | 12 inches long and made of ash, with a unicorn hair core that is loyal, unwavering and pretentious  ☆ ━━ 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐂𝐈𝐀𝐋 𝐀𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐄𝐒 | -- Zain has been practicing his dueling for years, something that his father insisted on for the boy. His best class was DADA and he has mastery of nonverbal and wandless magic. He also loves the muggle sport of basketball. He is highly skilled in occlumency and legilimency  ☆ ━━ 𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐋 𝐀𝐅𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐈𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 | Purist and not too crazy about it. His family has always been supportive of Lord Voldemort but he did not take the Dark Mark. His father debated if he wanted his favorite son to take the mark or not. As a pureblood Slytherin, he doesn't know if he agrees or not, but he would  follow the will of his father.   ☆ ━━ 𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐄 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐈𝐌 | Michael Ealy ☆ ━━ 𝕮𝖔𝖉𝖊 𝕹𝖆𝖒𝖊: 𝕬𝖇𝖆𝖉𝖉𝖔𝖓

BIOGRAPHY HAS TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR SUICIDE, MATERNAL DEATH, PHYSICAL ASSAULT & GENERAL EVIL.

ZAIN JAMAL YAXLEY was the youngest son born to CORBAN YAXLEY. His older brother is EMYR, with a middle sister named AALIYAH, but the two could have not been more different. Both men in a strict family with Muslim values, the boys were expected to marry but they could have fun beforehand. With their mother dead, they had nannies and aunties who took care of them. They did have fun, growing up a YAXLEY meant everything was fun for ZAIN except for being trained for war. He had anything he wanted, but it all came at a prince. His father put EMYR and ZAIN through intense training courses, hitting the boys with spells that were simply unforgivable in an attempt to make them strong. ZAIN received the worst of it. His father succeed in making the perfect son. ZAIN was cold, calculated and would do whatever it took to remain in his father’s good graces.

In school, he was at the top of his class, besting everyone in DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS, POTIONS & ANCIENT RUNES, his favorite course. He worked hard and played hard. Because of how he was brought up, he saw people as disposal and he absolutely knew one thing: BLOOD MATTERS. No matter what anyone said, it mattered and mudbloods and halfbloods were the reason things were going to hell and his father told him that repeatedly and he believed him. However, it didn’t stop those girls from being pretty and because he was good looking, he could have any of them he wanted, especially with his blue eyes. His father always said that they were straight from hell, but he didn’t mind it as much as he got older. However, those devil blue eyes got him in trouble. 

During his time at HOGWARTS, He charmed his way to being a prefect and with that, he found himself in an ENTANGLEMENT with a mudblood RAVENCLAW. The girl was in love with him and he loved playing with her. ZAIN is absolutely capable of being charming and he does let it out in certain circumstances when it benefits him. If he doesn't see an immediate need for him to be charming, he is not. He comes off cold and aloof. But when he is sharing an intimate moment, he's much warmer. He knows there's no way to maintain a relationship being cold to the person you're wooing. But this doesn't mean he's genuine, he's just a good actor. But to him, everything is theater and an act. This is why he joined the drama club, he's really good at becoming a character. There's a logic to doing so that he can absolutely get behind. The girl didn’t know this about him, but ZAIN wasn’t going to tell her. Once he had her virginity, he grew tired of filth clinging to him. He had made his sister be a SECRET KEEPER between them, before he even fucked her and the girl couldn’t tell anyone about their ENTANGLEMENT. Because of that, when he broke it off, she sent him numerous owls and letters about how much she missed him. One of them stated that she couldn’t live without him anymore. He saw her that evening and told her if she couldn’t live without him, then she simply shouldn’t. The next week, they had a memorial for the RAVENCLAW who killed herself. To this day, ZAIN can’t figure out of he cares someone killed themselves because of him or not. He went on to continue being the SLYTHERIN  star that he was.

When the battle of HOGWARTS erupted, he was at the school having his HEADBOYSHIP while his dad and brother battled. Because he was still a student, he was able to claim he was doing what he had to do to survive during the battle and the school year under the CARROWS leadership. He helped get the younger kids to safety and that worked on making him the innocent looking YAXLEY. He never apologized for anything he said, he never said that was the reason that he helped the CARROWS torture people during their reign. He simply was quiet as he normally was. ZAIN is an insanely private person and he holds a lot of things in secret. He doesn't like to use many words because he feels they are a waste of time with most people. So it comes as no surprise he moves secretly with a lot of things. His family fell, but he didn’t look as bad as them. Something that CORBAN loved about ZAIN. He was able to get a job translating RUNES and working to build his own name. His mother’s family was sacred 28 and helped him get on his feet, while shunning EMYR & CORBAN because they had been sent to prison. He was able to marry well, a girl with sacred blood and they have two children together, both sons. He got a job at HOGWARTS teaching his favorite  subject. While he was  never loving father, there was some coldness between the pair. Even then, ZAIN was CORBAN’S favorite, simply because he wasn't afraid to say blood mattered. ZAIN saw the way his father interacted with his sons, and it was just different between them. Like his father, he spoiled his children though both of them seemed to lack the burning desire to CONSUME everything that was in their path that he had. Neither men spoke about it, but there was this unspoken knowledge that they both blamed ZAIN for his mother’s death. That was why his father had spent most of his time out of the country, away from his murderous younger son. The distance was intentional and ZAIN had always knew it. That’s why he was always at his uncle’s, they both understood he had committed his first murder while drawing his first breath of air.

There’s only one person who truly knows him, his murderous deeds and the nature to eliminate anyone who posed a threat to him. She was the woman he could never marry because she wasn’t pure enough for his family and she lacked the name he needed. But it hasn’t stopped their long affair since they had been in school.The affair where ZAIN blatantly told TRACEY’S husband he had no plans to stop fucking his wife and then violently assaulted him when he threatened to tell his wife. He father her two children and is proud of it.

APPLICATION

❝ Get to know somebody and you learn a lot about ‘em. ❞ Merlin’s beard, what is ( ZAIN YAXLEY ) doing out at this hour? For a ( PUREBLOOD ) who is ( 47 ) years old, ( HE ) really ought to know better. You know, I hear that they’re aligned with ( THE ARCHANGELS ), but that could be just a rumor. I do know that they’re ( MALE ) and a ( SLYTHERIN ) alum who works as an ( ANCIENT RUNES PROFESSOR ) though. They’re very ( ARTICULATE ) and ( PERSUASIVE ) but also quite ( NEUROTIC ) and ( VIOLENT ), which could be why they remind of ( GOLD CUFF LINKS AND FENDI SCARVES. MYSTERIOUS PLAYBOY, TROUBLED PAST BUT TROUBLED FUTURE, JACK DANIELS AND CUBAN CIGARS, THE HEART FILLED WITH RAGE, SMOOTH LIKE SILK AND VELVET. SMOKEY BEDROOM EYES, PEACE? I HATE THE WORD ). Some people say they’re the spitting image of ( MICHAEL EALY ), but I’ve never heard of them. Word on the street is that they’re ( THE ORPHIC ) and their prophecy is ( PROPHECY 5 ), but only time will tell if that’s true or not. [ A, 28, SHE/HERS, EST ]

#*( niggas is faker than anime )* headcanons #rev intros

[tomasorban]

Lunar and solar eclipses in ancient Astronomy

The ancient Chinese astronomer Shi Shen (fl. fourth century B.C.E.) was aware of the relation of the moon in a solar eclipse, as he provided instructions in his writing to predict them by using the relative positions of the moon and sun. The ‘radiating influence’ theory for a solar eclipse was opposed by the Chinese philosopher Wang Chong (27-97 C.E.), but he admits in his writing that it was nothing new. The Chinese astronomer and inventor Zhang Heng (78-139 C.E.) wrote of both solar eclipse and lunar eclipse in the publication of Ling Xian, 120 C.E.:

The sun is like fire and the moon like water. The fire gives out light and the water reflects it. Thus the moon’s brightness is produced from the radiance of the sun, and the moon’s darkness (pho) is due to (the light of) the sun being obstructed (pi). The side which faces the sun is fully lit, and the side which is away from it is dark. The planets (as well as the moon) have the nature of water and reflect light. The light pouring forth from the sun (tang jih chih chhung kuang) does not always reach the moon owing to the obstruction (pi) of the earth itself—this is called ‘an-hsü’, a lunar eclipse. When (a similar effect) happens with a planet (we call it) an occulation (hsing wei); when the moon passes across (kuo) (the sun’s path) then there is a solar eclipse (shih).

Furthermore, the later Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031-1095) used the models of lunar eclipse and solar eclipse in order to prove that the celestial bodies were round, not flat (which promoted spherical earth theory and went against flat earth theory). He wrote of this in his Dream Pool Essays of 1088 C.E., relating back when the Director of the Astronomical Observatory had asked Shen if the shapes of the sun and moon were round like balls or flat like fans. Shen Kuo explained his reasoning for the former:

If they were like balls they would surely obstruct each other when they met. I replied that these celestial bodies were certainly like balls. How do we know this? By the waxing and waning of the moon. The moon itself gives forth no light, but is like a ball of silver; the light is the light of the sun (reflected). When the brightness is first seen, the sun (-light passes almost) alongside, so the side only is illuminated and looks like a crescent. When the sun gradually gets further away, the light shines slanting, and the moon is full, round like a bullet. If half of a sphere is covered with (white) powder and looked at from the side, the covered part will look like a crescent; if looked at from the front, it will appear round. Thus we know that the celestial bodies are spherical.

When he asked Shen Kuo why eclipses occurred only on an occasional basis while in conjunction and opposition once a day, he wrote:

I answered that the ecliptic and the moon’s path are like two rings, lying one over the other, but distant by a small amount. (If this obliquity did not exist), the sun would be eclipsed whenever the two bodies were in conjunction, and the moon would be eclipsed whenever they were exactly in position. But (in fact) though they may occupy the same degree, the two paths are not (always) near (each other), and so naturally the bodies do not (intrude) upon one another.

Historical observations of Solar Eclipses

Solar eclipses have been observed throughout history. Recent research has demonstrated that solar eclipses had been depicted in the fascinating mythology of ancient Egypt, and produced evidence that the ancient Egyptians observed solar eclipses over 4,500 years ago.

Ancient eclipse records made in China and Babylonia are believed to be over 4,000 years ago.

Beginning as far back as 2400 B.C., and especially during the Shang dynasty (1600 B.C. to 1046 B.C.)—a thousand years before the Chinese began to use paper—oracle bones were commonly used for divination.

Questions were posed, and animal bones or shells were then heated until they cracked into patterns that expert diviners were believed to “read.” The bones or shells were then inscribed with the interpretations and predictions.

Many astronomy-related inscriptions survive in these objects, but they are often cryptic and difficult to comprehend, sometimes lacking even the dates of the eclipses to which they refer.

(above photo from 19th century)

“Because of the nature of the subject matter, oracle bones are not necessarily meant to be literal descriptions,”

Odenwald explained.

Accuracy aside, the bones are the earliest known evidence of an interest in tracking eclipses.

Ancient China‘s eclipse record keeping steadily improved over the centuries thanks to continued refinements in the calendar system driven by a search for signs that might tell the emperor’s future.

Systematic, dated eclipse records began in China in 719 B.C.

Astronomical computations enable astronomers to calculate the dates and paths of future and past eclipses with great accuracy. Some ancient eclipse records have been particularly significant to astronomers and historians as they enabled certain historical eras and events to be dated accurately. Astronomers can also examine ancient eclipse records to measure the rate of Earth’s spin about its axis over the past millenniums.

Astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used Chinese observations of five solar eclipses that occurred between 1161 B.C. and 1226 B.C. to study the rate of Earth’s axial rotation over the past 3,200 years. These eclipses were scratched on oxen shoulder blades in the Chinese city of Anyang.

By determining exactly when each of these eclipses was seen and where the Moon’s shadow fell on Earth in each eclipse, the scientists found that the day in 1200 B.C. was 0.047 second shorter than the present day.

By 20 B.C., Chinese astronomers realized the true nature of solar eclipses, and by 206 C.E., they were able to predict solar eclipses by analyzing the motion of the Moon.

Astronomy flourished in Mesopotamia, the plain between the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates, in the dawn of civilization. Like the Chinese and Egyptian astronomers, the Babylonian astronomers observed the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets carefully and kept records of the celestial events. They are also credited with remarkable contributions to ancient astronomy.

A fragment of a lost poem by Archilochus (ca. 680 B.C.–645 B.C.), who was a Greek poet and soldier, seems to clearly depict a total solar eclipse:

Nothing there is beyond hope,

nothing that can be sworn impossible,

nothing wonderful, since Zeus,

father of the Olympians,

made night from mid-day,

hiding the light of the shining Sun,

and sore fear came upon men.

Herodotus, the father of history, who lived in the 5th century BC, cited that Thales (ca. 624 B.C.-547 B.C.), the Greek philosopher, predicted the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 B.C. that put an end to the conflict between the Lydians and the Medes.

Herodotus wrote:

… day was all of sudden changed into night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very year in which it took place. The Medes and the Lydians when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and were alike anxious to have terms of peace agreed on.

Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 87-150 C.E.) wrote about eclipses in his epic work Almagest. His writings show that he studied the lunar orbit carefully and had a sophisticated scheme for predicting both solar and lunar eclipses.

One of the most important historical solar eclipses is that of the annular solar eclipse of 27 January 632. It was visible in Medina during the lifetime of Prophet Mohammad, Peace Be Upon Him (PBUH), and coincided with the death of his little son Ibrahim. The Prophet stated explicitly and definitely that the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon are not bad omens, but are cosmic spectacles that demonstrate the might and knowledge of Allah the Great.

The Egyptian astronomer Ibn Yunus (950-1009), who was regarded as one of the greatest observational astronomers of his time, made important, precise observations of lunar and solar eclipses in Cairo.

#solar eclipse #astronomy #ancient #history #science #archeology

[extraneousdominomask]

Plot-twists are like plants.

They need time and attention to grow. Seeing something bloom at just the right moment is beautiful. Getting handed a cactus out of nowhere, not so much.

The reason Neyla works as a traitor is because they lavish her with screentime - she appears in Cairo, Paris, and both India levels before they pull the trigger. That gives her time to establish herself, mainly by telling Sly things that sound like one thing but, with hindsight, mean another.

She says: “I want to help you find the Clockwerk Parts.” Sly hears: “I am also concerned about the danger they pose.” She means: “You find them, I’ll take them. Perfect plan :)”

She says: “I don’t see things like Carmelita does.” Sly hears: “I’m a smart, flexible cop who gets results.” She means: “I’m a smart, flexible villain who is just The Worst :)”

People trash the Penelope Twist so much because it completely lacks this kind of build-up. Once you get to England, the game telegraphs the Black Knight is Penny, but at no point does it telegraph how or why. Penelope is completely absent from most of the game, and the brief times she is allowed to speak, the microphone is soon snatched away from her again.

I was gonna make a derisive shitpost to the tune of “Sly 2 AU where Sly mentions Carmelita has a partner but you don’t meet her until 80% through the game and OH MY GAWD she’s EVIL NOW”. But flip the script.

AU where Penelope gets buildup for her twist like Neyla.

It’s simple; Penelope is still evil and still working for Le Paradox for some reason, but she’s with the Cooper Gang. She could be in a less active role, maybe monitoring from the present like Dimitri. But we get to see her interact with the Gang.

Still cutesy with Bentley, but with a few awkward moments indicating a growing friction. (“Trouble in paradise?” quips Sly. “It’s - we’re fine,” stutters Bentley.) Still friendly with Murray. Very wary of Carmelita once she arrives - perfectly reasonable for a thief, right?

And icy toward Sly.

Penelope’s actions are foreshadowed by her words and attitudes. The audience actually has a fighting chance to realize what’s wrong before the big reveal. It works especially well if she dislikes Sly and Sly alone. Consider the example:

She says: “Murray wouldn’t be a great fit for this mission. Send Sly instead.” Sly hears: “This situation is more inclined toward stealth than muscle.” She means: “I know for a fact that Le Paradox has boobytrapped this area and while I’m very prepared for Sly to die nothing must harm my sweet boy Murray.”

This wouldn’t solve every problem with the twist; there’s still no firm reason why Penny would turn evil to begin with, or ally with Le Paradox specifically. But this would give enough space to explain why. 

And actually, it solves other issues too! The fact the Gang wins every boss fight only to have a single rat run onstage, grab this era’s cane, and scurry off feels incredibly cheap. But what if the last-minute defeat was more subtle? Le Paradox always gets the cane when they aren’t looking... almost as if he has someone on the inside.

#long post #penelope sly cooper #neyla #penelope twist

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/the-latest-vaccine-makers-figuring-out-tweaks-national-world-news/

The Latest: Vaccine makers figuring out tweaks | National/World News

WASHINGTON — The makers of COVID-19 vaccines are figuring out how to tweak their recipes against worrisome virus mutations — and regulators are looking to flu as a blueprint if and when the shots need an update.

“It’s not really something you can sort of flip a switch, do overnight,” cautioned Richard Webby, who directs a World Health Organization flu center from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Viruses mutate constantly and it takes just the right combination of particular mutations to escape vaccination. But studies are raising concern that first-generation COVID-19 vaccines don’t work as well against a mutant that first emerged in South Africa as they do against other versions circulating around the world.

The good news: Many of the new COVID-19 vaccines are made with new, flexible technology that’s easy to upgrade. What’s harder: Deciding if the virus has mutated enough that it’s time to modify vaccines — and what changes to make.

———

THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:

— COVID-19 conspiracy shows the reach of Chinese disinformation around the world

— Here’s a look at the key superspreaders of virus disinformation

— In Germany, carnival organizers found other ways to have fun — including floats poking fun at the likes of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

— Peru minister resigns amid uproar over government officials being vaccinated before country received 1M doses for health workers

— Britain reaches a vaccination goal: Giving first shots to 15 million most vulnerable

— Israel decides not to send a delegation of defense companies to a prestigious arms fair in the United Arab Emirates

— Italy won’t open its ski slopes due to fears of virus variants

— Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

———

HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

BERLIN — The European Union’s health agency is urging countries to address what it calls “pandemic fatigue” that is leading to increasing protests and unwillingness to follow virus restrictions.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said Monday that properly addressing pandemic fatigue was “a matter of urgency if further waves of infection are to be avoided.”

The Stockholm-based agency said governments should emphasize the risk of more cases and deaths if hygiene measures are ignored and be transparent about uncertainties regarding issues such as the vaccine rollout, which has raised widespread hopes of an imminent end to lockdowns.

ECDC said that the appearance of variants of the virus in the Europe posed a particular concern and could undo the drop in cases seen on the continent in recent weeks.

The agency said countries should increase testing sequencing of samples for variants, warning that its analysis suggests unless pandemic restrictions such as mask wearing are continued or strengthened during the coming months, “a significant increase in COVID-19-related cases and deaths” in Europe can be expected.

———

ZAGREB, Croatia – Croatia is another European Union state after Hungary that has shown interest in procuring Russian developed Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine after hiccups in deliveries of Western-made shots.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said Monday that Russia is ready to provide the vaccine and Croatia’s health authorities will decide on its use after approval from the European Medicines Agency.

Croatia earlier this month launched its vaccination campaign with AstraZeneca shots, imposing none of the age limits that have been put in place by some other EU states.

Hungary has become the first EU member to start using Sputnik V and hopes to deploy China’s Sinopharm vaccine soon, despite neither having received approval from EU’s medicines regulator.

Non-EU member Serbia has been the first to start administering both the Russian as well as Chinese vaccines in Europe, helping it become one of the top states on the continent in the speed of the vaccination rollout.

———

BEIRUT — Coronavirus case numbers are stabilizing in parts of the Middle East but the situation remains critical, with more than a dozen countries reporting cases of new variants, the World Health Organization said Monday.

Ahmed al-Mandhari, director of WHO’s eastern Mediterranean region, which comprises most of the Middle East, said in a press briefing from Cairo that at least one of the three new coronavirus variants was reported in the 13 countries in the region. He did not name the countries.

All three of the new variants are more contagious, according to WHO.

Al-Mandhari said there are nearly 6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the region and about 140,000 deaths. WHO urged people to continue taking precautionary measures against the virus.

———

WASHINGTON— A top American epidemiologist says Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic are sufficient but schools will face major challenges in the coming weeks because of virus variants.

Michael Osterholm is head of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and was named to Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force before Biden became president. Osterholm says there’s low virus transmission at schools, especially for younger students, but virus variants are “a real red flag coming down the road.”

Osterholm told CBS on Monday he thinks a virus variant from the United Kingdom in particular is going to cause such a surge in U.S. cases over the next 14 weeks that “a lot of schools are going to be challenged to open at all.”

The CDC said Friday in-person schooling can resume safely with masks, social distancing and other strategies. The nation’s top public health agency says vaccinating teachers is important but isn’t a prerequisite for reopening schools.

Osterholm says health authorities don’t have enough vaccine doses for everyone so he’d prioritize vaccinating older people over teachers.

———

LONDON — Britain’s newly established quarantine hotels have received their first guests as the government tries to prevent new variants of the coronavirus from derailing its fast-moving vaccination drive.

Passengers arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport on Monday morning were escorted by security guards to buses that took them to nearby hotels.

Britain has given a first dose of coronavirus vaccine to almost a quarter of the population, but health officials are concerned that vaccines may not work as well on some new strains of the virus, including one first identified in South Africa.

Under the new rules, people arriving in England from 33 high-risk countries must stay in designated hotels for 10 days at their own expense, with meals delivered to their door. In Scotland the rule applies to arrivals from any country.

———

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Some 500 people have gathered in a theater in the central Dutch city of Utrecht for the first in a series of test events aimed at charting a path toward a post-pandemic normality for large-scale gatherings.

Economic Affairs Minister Mona Keijzer says that, “returning to normal, whether it’s a conference with your colleagues, a sports match or a concert: everyone wants that.”

When that might be possible remains unclear. The Netherlands is in a tough lockdown until at least next month, with large-scale gatherings banned altogether, shops, bars, restaurants and museums closed and sports like professional soccer happening behind closed stadium doors.

Participants in Monday’s trial had to present a negative COVID-19 test result, had their temperatures taken on arrival and will have to undergo another test after attending the event.

The government says it will use data gathered at the event to help decide “how to work toward safe and responsible events” in the future.

The event came with Dutch infections on a gradual downward trend in recent weeks and vaccinations ramping up after a slow start that made the Netherlands become the last of the 27 European Union nations to begin its vaccination campaign.

———

BERLIN — German authorities say police have turned back some 5,000 people at the country’s borders with the Czech Republic and Austria’s Tyrol region since tight controls were introduced on Sunday.

Germany imposed checks to slow the spread of the British coronavirus variant from the Czech Republic and the South African variant from Tyrol. It is restricting entry to German citizens and residents, truck drivers, transport and health service workers and a few others including cross-border commuters working in “systemically relevant sectors.” All have to show a negative coronavirus test.

Interior Ministry spokesman Steve Alter said, by Monday morning, federal police had checked about 10,000 people and turned back some 5,000.

The checks have prompted strong criticism from Austria.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, defended the German measures. He said that “the German government had to act here” to prevent the rapid spread of more contagious virus variants.

———

BRUSSELS — The EU’s anti-fraud office, OLAF, is urging member states to be vigilant against scammers offering to sell fake COVID-19 vaccines as the 27-nation bloc faces delays in the supply of shots.

In a statement Monday, OLAF said it was made aware of a number of reports of scammers offering to sell vaccines in a bid to defraud EU governments trying to speed up the pace of vaccination.

The EU has been criticized for a slow rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in comparison with other parts of the world, lagging behind the pace of countries like Britain or Israel. The EU commission has signed six contracts for more than 2 billion doses of various coronavirus vaccines, but only three of them have been approved for use so far and the delivery of shots has been disturbed by production delays.

———

BELGRADE, Serbia — Authorities in Serbia’s capital Belgrade on Monday held an emergency meeting over a surge in night clubbing that has drawn thousands of partygoers in violation of rules against the new coronavirus.

Belgrade’s mayor announced stepped-up controls of clubs, cafes and other venues that are allowed to operate until 8p.m. with limited capacity. but have widely flouted government restrictions.

Serbian police said they detained five people over the weekend after breaking up two big parties in different parts of the city. A party in central Belgrade gathered about 1,000 people and the other, held in a new part of the city, around 600, police said.

Before the virus outbreak, Belgrade was known for its wild nightlife that centers on clubs situated on rafts on the capital’s two rivers, the Danube and Sava.

———

MADRID — Police across Spain have wrapped a weekend of cracking down on parties and boozing in public contravening restrictions to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

Large parties ignoring social distancing, mask wearing and existing curfews were closed down in Ibiza, northeastern Tarragona and many other parts of the country, which has only recently slowed down the sharp increase of contagion seen after the end-of-year celebrations.

In Madrid alone, police fined 450 people for street alcohol consumption in groups and busted 418 illegal parties in entertainment venues and private homes from Friday to Sunday, including a rave in a warehouse with 55 adults and 11 minors who were not wearing masks and were using drugs.

The National Police also found over 50 people in a small apartment rented for tourists in the center of the Spanish capital.

The parties are increasingly better organized to attract foreign visitors and avoid scrutiny, the local police say, with no cash exchanged and payments via phone. In contrast with much of Europe, where entertainment venues have been closed, bars and restaurants in Madrid are allowed to open until 9 p.m.

Spain has managed to lower its 14-day rate of infection per 100,000 residents, from nearly 900 cases in Jan. 27 to less than 500 on Friday, but experts are warning against relaxing restrictions too fast, given that COVID-19 wards in hospitals are still grappling with high occupation rates.

———

BERLIN — Officers trying to bust a clandestine Carnival celebration in eastern Germany were left red-faced when most of the revelers escaped police on skis.

German news agency dpa reported Monday that police in the town of Marienberg, near the border with the Czech Republic, received information that about 100 people were partying Sunday without abiding by the requirements to wear face masks or respect minimum social distancing.

Police were unable to determine how many people had broken the law, however, because their arrival prompted a hasty on-ski departure by most of the party-goers.

Saxony, where Marienberg is located, has the second-highest infection rate of Germany’s 16 states. Germany has restricted entry from the neighboring Czech Republic and Austria’s Tyrol state to prevent the spread of variant viruses from those countries.

Police across Germany have broken up numerous Carnival celebrations across the country in recent days.

———

LONDON — People arriving in Britain must quarantine in hotels starting Monday as the government tries to prevent new variants of the coronavirus derailing its fast-moving vaccination drive.

On Sunday the government reached its goal of giving the first of two doses of vaccine to 15 million of the most vulnerable people, including health care workers and over-70s.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the vaccination drive is now being extended to people over 65 and those with underlying health conditions.

Health officials are concerned that vaccines may not work as well on some new strains of the virus, including one first identified in South Africa.

People arriving in England from 33 high-risk countries must stay in quarantine hotels for 10 days at their own expense. In Scotland the rule applies to arrivals from any country.

Critics say the move comes too late, with the South African variant already circulating in the country.

———

HARARE — Zimbabwe has received its first COVID-19 vaccines with the arrival early Monday of an Air Zimbabwe jet carrying 200,000 Sinopharm doses from China.

It is one of China’s first shipments of vaccines to Africa, after deliveries to Egypt and Equatorial Guinea.

The first Sinopharm vaccines are a donation from China to the southern African country. President Emmerson Mnanagagwa’s government has purchased an additional 600,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine that are expected to arrive early next month, according to state media.

Mnangagwa, in a Twitter post, said the Chinese vaccines will be administered to Zimbabweans this week.

———

JERUSALEM — A large-scale Israeli study has pointed to the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at preventing symptomatic infections with the coronavirus.

Clalit, the largest of Israel’s four health care providers, released a study Sunday that compared infections in 600,000 Israelis who had received the vaccine compared to 600,000 who were not immunized.

The study found a 94% drop in symptomatic infections and a 92% drop in serious cases of the disease among those vaccinated. It said “the efficacy of the vaccine is preserved in every age group,” particularly a week after the second dose of the vaccine.

The researchers said the preliminary findings of the ongoing research “is aimed at emphasizing to the population that has yet to vaccinate that the vaccine is highly effective and prevents serious illness.”

Israel launched its COVID-19 vaccine campaign in December. Since then, over a quarter of the population — 2.5 million people — have received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and over 42% have received the first shot, according to the Health Ministry.

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window,document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1022689164882457'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

#figuring #latest #makers #tweaks #vaccine #World

[aldar2030]

Best Things to Do in North Coast

The North Coast is that the ultimate shake Cairo during the recent summer months. The season this year isn't quite an equivalent as before, and not during a bad way! most are returning to the great old Sahel days and that we like it . 

Fresh out of the strain of the lockdown, people are wanting to catch a breath of fresh air by Egypt’s most stunning shoreline. Lucky for you, the season remains going strong and we’re here to inform you all about what to try to to in North Coast.

north coast attractions

1. Try Yoga by the Beach

One of the foremost peaceful activities in North Coast is finding your zen state as you hear the soothing waves sounds as your backdrop. Yoga and meditation will allow you to forget the hardships we all had to face this year and relax a touch . 

Time to practice all those yoga poses on the sand and obtain back to Cairo able to boast your moves. A yoga session by the beach within the early morning will desire heaven and a clean slate to your day ahead. Here are a couple of suggestions for classes:

STAMINA Sports and Fitness

The Mala

north coast activities

2. Go Fishing

If there’s one thing we were all forced to find out this year, it's patience! Maybe this is often the simplest time then to undertake your hand at fishing since it’s all about being patient. Fishing is additionally a kind of meditation and detaching from the stresses of life.

Give it an attempt and it'll skills great it feels once you catch your lunch or dinner and cook it during a cozy barbeque setting. Here’s a destination which will guarantee a fishy outcome!

Ghazala Bay

things to try to to in north coast

3. Head to the Cinema

Who doesn’t enjoy getting to the movies? simply because you’re enjoying a summer vacation within the North Coast doesn’t mean you get to miss the newest blockbuster movies within the theater. 

The recently opened North Coast attraction O Cinema is where you would like to travel for the right night out. It’s definitely one among the fun things to try to to in Sahel for movie lovers.

north coast places to go to 

4. Slavor a Popsicle by the Beach

Pop City showed up this year in Sahel all the way from the UAE and other people are going crazy over their healthy popsicles. The beach? Check! the last word summer refreshment? Check! Healthy? Check! What more does one need? 

They don’t have a selected location yet, but they deliver anywhere in North Coast. You don’t need to leave your temperature in any case .

things to try to to in sahel

5. enjoys Seafood

Being round the sea all day only means you absolutely need to satisfy your taste buds with fresh seafood. We’re talking delicious fish, shrimps, calamari, crab, mussels, and everything in between. 

Here are a couple of seafood restaurants in Sahel you would like in your life:

 Play Games together with your Family and Friends

It’s time to recreate the wonderful memories of summer once we were young. Gather around to play card games and board games together with your family and friends after a satisfying dip within the ocean.

Here are a couple of ones that are really fun:

Monopoly Deal

Jenga

Backgammon

Chess

Scrabble

Sequence

UNO.

A puzzle may be a good way to unwind and luxuriate in some time together also , unless you get all wired up once you cannot find the right piece. therein case, avoid!

activities to try to to in north coast egypt

7. Spend each day in Alexandria

Alexandria is that the city of culture and history infused with beauty like no other destination. Walk along its cozy shorelines in good company eating frozen dessert from its famous little place called Azza. It’s located literally on every corner! 

For lunch, nothing beats the grills at Balbaa Grill and Fish Village. you'll visit the grand Alexandria library if you’re a bookworm or head to the Citadel of Qaitbay for a few historical insights.

Read More أسعار الشقق في العلمين الجديدة

8. Have Lunch or Dinner at The Smokery

The Smokery is one among the most well liked places to go to in North Coast this season. It provides the last word dining experience on the beach. The floating restaurant is ideal for a classy night out with the family or a comfortable romantic dinner (you’ll get major points for that one!).

[superman86to99]

Superman: The Man of Steel #23 (July 1993)

REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN! In this issue: Steel vs. Superboy! I mean, "Superman” vs. “Superman”. The Man of Steel is battling some hoodlums armed with hi-tech killer weapons when the Metropolis Kid decides to butt in and "save him" in front of the cameras that follow him 24/7. (Side note: Was Superboy the first '90s reality TV star?) The Kid draws all the firepower to himself... accidentally causing the bad guys to shoot down a Daily Planet helicopter containing Lois Lane. The chopper blows up, signaling the death of a classic and beloved DC Comics character: Frank the helicopter pilot. RIP.

Lois, meanwhile, manages to jump out of the exploding chopper in time (probably out of pure muscle memory) and is rescued by Steel in a rather familiar-looking scene.

Lois tries to turn the tragic situation into an exclusive interview with Steel, but Steel has something more important to do: chewing Superboy's butt for scaring off those criminals he was trying to interrogate (and, you know, causing a man's death). The Kid is like "I'm da real Superman, yo!" and bails... but as he flies away, he actually starts questioning his half-assed approach to superheroics. I'm sure Frank's wife and 12 children would find great comfort in that.

Meanwhile, Steel is approached by Lex Luthor Jr., who wants to offer him a job as one of his armored security guards (because having one S-shielded superhero in his pocket isn't enough for him). To butter Steel up, Lex offers him the location of the White Rabbit -- aka, the lady distributing all those highly advanced weapons to street gangs. Steel thanks Lex for the tip and immediately ditches him, making it clear that his services aren’t for sale.

Steel drops by the White Rabbit’s penthouse, and she turns out to be an old flame from his time as a weapons designer for the military. Things almost get steamy for a second in there, until Steel remembers that this lady has made him indirectly responsible for countless deaths (all those weapons are his design). Once she takes the hint that Steel won’t work for her (either), White Rabbit just shoots him point blank with one of those big-ass guns, launching him off the building and into a convenient tanker parked outside.

Superboy (who was following Steel to apologize for being a dick) flies in just in time to pull Steel’s body from the resulting tanker explosion:

By the time Superboy and Steel return to White Rabbit’s penthouse, the place is already empty. The two Supermen then bond over that whole “we’ve both caused innocent people to die today” thing and part amicably. Awww!

Plotline-Watch:

Ponytailed scumbag Jeb Friedman, having given Lois Lane WEEKS to recover from her fiance’s supposed death, urges her to “forget Clark” and go to Cairo with him. Don Sparrow says: “I hesitate to even mention that the hated Jeb Friedman appears here, and even Jimmy doesn’t want Lois rebounding with him. Serious question, though: are we supposed to hate Jeb? Or is it just happenstance?” If we weren’t supposed to hate Jeb, would they have given him a ponytail, Don?

After meeting Steel, Lois reflects on the fact that the other Supermen may look like Clark, but Steel is the only one who acts like him. Obviously she doesn’t think Clark’s already been reincarnated as an adult black man, but she does seriously wonder if ghostly possession is a real thing.

I love how efficiently Steel’s backstory is presented in this issue. As he and White Rabbit are about to lock lips, we see a handful of black-and-white panels showing the two working together for the military, hooking up, finding out his weapons were being used against innocents in Qurac, and then a flashback-within-the-flashback of Steel’s grandparents having just become victims of gang violence. It’s only half a page but it tells you everything you need to know about this dude and his motivation.

Superboy burns his hands while rescuing Steel, even though a clone of Superman should be equally invulnerable. Hmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmm.

The issue ends with Supergirl telling Lex she’s going off to look for Superboy, which leads to the next issue of Adventures.

And this leads to the end of my section! For more commentary, Easter eggs, and gratuitous images of White Rabbit, check out Don Sparrow’s section after the jump:

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow​):

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like none of the other four Superman titles seems as swayed by the importance of the storyline as SMOS.  What do I mean? I mean that when it’s a big storyline, like Panic in the Sky, or Doomsday, the art on the title really seems to rise to the occasion, and there’s some standout stuff being produced.  But in the meantime, when a story doesn’t feel as important, the quality seems to dip a little. To me, this is one of those issues.  We begin with the cover, and it’s not one of Bogdanove’s best.  Sure, his artwork could be called cartoony at the best of times, but this one really took on a loose, loony tunes sketchiness, particularly in Superboy’s “ain’t I a stinker?” expression and giant wall of teeth. He looks less like a 16 year old than he resembles Rex Leech, a character we’ll come to know better in time.

Inside, the story gets off to a slow start, as we’re abruptly thrown into a video of wannabe gangsters, moving in on where they think they’ll find John Henry Irons.  The double page splash revealing his location is an exciting one, and Dennis Janke does some interesting things with his hatching to indicate the shine of the metal, leaving certain areas unhatched to show a glimmer. 

Bog’s depictions of The White Rabbit continue to push the envelope for how much skin a comic code approved book can show, both on page 7, and then later in the book. [Max: This next sequence of panels burned itself into my young mind. Because of the cool panel layout, I mean.]

[December 2018 edit: White Rabbit’s body has been covered with Mike Carlin’s face so that Tumblr doesn’t delete this post. Sorry.]

Page 8 brings us a long sought after in-comics cameo.  If you’ll recall, back on one of my first reviews on this site, I interviewed the great Tom Grummett and asked him if there were any Easter Eggs that we should look out for while we were reading.  He answered that "My personal favorite moment was when Jon Bogdanove drew me in a scene with Jimmy Olsen in one issue of Man of Steel. I’m the one with the moose on his shirt. Happy hunting.”  Well, we need hunt no more, as a certain fellow pops up, arguing with Jimmy Olsen, and what’s that on his shirt?  A moose?! Found you! [Max: Are we the first on the internet to point out this cameo? I don’t have time to look it up, so let’s go with “Yes”.]

I also love the little gag in the lettering, where the first part of “Saskatchewan” (Tom’s home province) is shown as “Saskatch” and then below that Bog has written “W-1”, phonetically completing the phrase.   It’s also a very Neal Adams-y couple of panels when Jimmy and Tom start to get heated debating who the real Superman is.  [Max: I wonder if the Neal Adams-esque panels above are homaging a specific Adams comic, or just his “intense argument” poses in general...]  Then a page later, there’s an unmistakable rendering of another Super-Teamster, none other than group editor Mike Carlin, scanning the police radio for scoops.

As the story progresses, there’s a great shot of the Metropolis Kid (who they refer to as Superboy on this page, without a rebuttal from the Kid) showboating and holding one hand behind his back.  But, on the page that follows, a pretty heavy end for Daily Planet chopper pilot “Frank”, made all the more sickening by the lack of concern from the Kid leading up to this point. 

Some great visual callback on page 12, as the mob scene when the Man of Steel rescues Lois Lane recalls the meet-cute at the shuttle disaster wayyyy back in MOS #1.

The scene were John Henry confronts the Kid about his carelessness is well-done, even if it gives way to another mention of the preposterous ‘spirit-walk-in’ idea, which even these characters seem to find tenuous.  

The flashback with White Rabbit does a good job of filling in the gaps of John Henry’s history (interesting how similar Irons’ motivation is to that of Tony Stark’s, at least in the movies) but it’s an odd scene—not just because of the aforementioned vamping from White Rabbit, but also Irons’ inaction in the scene—he went there to capture her, but mostly just stands around and then lets her stroll back over to the bed, where a weapon is clearly visible from where he’s standing. [Max: Can’t imagine what else he could be looking at.]

As The Metropolis Kid rescues The Man of Steel, we get more looney tunes-style comedy, when the Kid comedically blows on his burning hands, trying to cool them. They seem to be working hard to establish how different his powers are from Kal-El’s, though they eventually go back on almost all of this stuff.

Moving on, we get a really nice look at Lois at a rainy window, once again musing on how the Man of Steel, while physically the most removed from Kal-El, seems to embody his “soul” more than the rest.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

Is the cameraman gangster supposed to be a riff on Spike Lee? The glasses seem pretty similar to ones Spike wore at the time.

How is it that we never noticed such a giant, futuristic tower on the Metropolis skyline before?

Jimmy Olsen wearing a Spin Doctors t-shirt is a little too meta for my head, since one of their biggest hits was “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues”.  What does the DC Universe Jimmy think when he hears a song about himself, lusting after Lois Lane?  They were also one of my favourite bands when this issue came out, so my mind was doubly blown.

What is it with Lex hanging onto VHS tapes?  Thank God he never got his hands on that one of Big Barda! [Max: Dammit, I’d JUST managed to erase that from my mind, Don.]

#superman #louise simonson #jon bogdanove #dennis janke #steel #superboy #sydney happersen #white rabbit #ron troupe #tom grummett #mike carlin #jeb friedman #spin doctors #supergirl #possibly spike lee #rip frank chopperson #reign of the supermen

[ratherhavetheblues]

INGMAR BERGMAN’S  ‘THE RITE’ “I have undefined feelings of fear…”

© 2020 by James Clark

     The films of Ingmar Bergman present a double dilemma. First of all, their dramas pose a very seldom recognized alert. Moreover, when in fact recognized, the intimacy almost always proves to be unwelcome. Secondly, those players actually game for the dare, find themselves unable to maintain serious coherence. Our film today, namely, The Rite (1969), is somewhat unusual in as much as all four of the characters (of this cameo production) are significantly in-the-know. But they perform poorly amidst others, and also amidst their self. (That we have declared the film, In the Presence of a Clown [1997] to be Bergman’s swan song, does nothing to end more instances of absorbing volatility.)

    Whatever blood feuds Bergman might have embroiled himself in, toward the bureaucracy of the theatre and the bureaucracy of the law, his raison d’etre here was to spotlight the care and carelessness of disinterestedness. He had had from the very early outset of his endeavors, in the film, Summer Interlude (1951), a deep concern for those few with an instinct for attaining to a sensibility of kinetic disinterestedness being trampled by hordes of selfish, cowardly brutes. Accompanying that debut was a galaxy of optics and sonics intent upon interrupting theatricals hitherto seeming unassailable. The church of Bergman, thereby, tasted with pleasure the atmosphere for its pristine spirit, while clutching, as if a mathematical truth, melodramas of domestic nefariousness and nothing else but scraps of integrity, because the “something else” would take real guts. Seeing that those early communications might as well be Hollywood, by the end of the sixties there came to pass another ingredient to open a closed door. On the heels of two films, now-homicidal, in their destructiveness (in the form of Hour of the Wolf and Shame [both in 1968])—and just before the mass murder movie of The Passion of Anna (1969) rounding off a trilogy—the helmsman saw fit to up the ante in the form of a strange and yet mundane touch, namely, silently pushing with hands and fingers. This could be called a form of rite, with the proviso that rites take many forms. The display of this action features three millionaire experts in making a splash, along with one bungler killed by the trio. The former wends its sort-of merry way. The bungler alone has lived, despite largely missing the boat. Here’s how it went, in a nine-day production hustle, that no one chose to take seriously.

    After some vintage-style harsh percussion discordance, we see the unimpressive protagonist looking through a magnifying glass. (“Dear, dear,” the wayward pundit pounces. “That’s pretty ordinary, for an investigation.”) However, the first scene requires consciousness of that mid-century flare-up, called “The Theatre of the Absurd,” and particularly that flaccid form of the playwright, Eugene Ionesco, he of the once recognized (for a few days) invention, called “Rhinoceros,” pounding along the streets of a sleepy downtown, to maintain that other engines exist. The bemusing get-go today involves the demanding  peripatetic theatre group, called, “Les Riens” (“The Nothings”), of great interest to a judge, being tasked to get to the bottom of a charge of pornography, which, on the face of it is trivial (absurd);  but it becomes a life and death challenge none of them can handle. The approach of the official and the putatively dangerous vagabonds is a classic of parody, aimed toward those readily losing any creative traction. The judge fusses with his reading glasses, rubs his face with his handkerchief, and, with a forced smile, ushers in “The Nothings,” themselves. “Welcome! How do you do? Please come in. This weather’s very trying. Record temperatures, I hear. 34 degrees, most unhealthy! Yesterday’s thunderstorm didn’t help, although it was pouring down…” (Though the matter must figure more fully, later on, we have to digress from Ionesco to point out the presence of that trio forming a moment of the “very trying,” the interplay of a cluster—the judge all but eclipsed—which speaks to an audacity not happening. During the moment of the magnifier, two lights are prominent. The judge is positioned between those lights, but magic interactive initiative is very far away.) One of the artists complains, “The show was interrupted twice while the lights went out [only two singularities]. Odd when it happens in a big city… A kind of panic…”

    Panic, it seems, becomes a watchword, inasmuch as the atmosphere skips from Ionesco’s easy going, bourgeois quirkiness to a very different, darker absurdist register, namely that of playwright, Jean Genet, specifically his play, “The Balcony,” set in a brothel, with a judge overarching his mandate, to say the least. Drinks are offered, and it starts slowly with two Coca Colas and a sherry. (“The Government is paying!”) As with the anything but gentle Genet judge, our considerably gentle Bergman judge approaches (absurdly) an infraction on the same level of a parking ticket, as if needing to straighten out the universe. “Every day is a work day for me. I’m a workaholic. My doctor has warned me… If I had a loving wife at home… We’re not here to talk about me, agreeable though it is…” The judge, unlike the Genet glutton, has been galvanized by the three exotics in hopes of gaining from their supposed intensities a greater understanding. (That twist, never to be seen in the annals of Theatre of the Absurd and its fulsome nihilism, brings to the occasion something unique.)

   It was one thing that the workaholic would pry into their business in hopes of measuring increases of wisdom. It was something else that they would stand for it. Having culled a mass of controversial data, the roaring little pedant has touched so many nerves that their usual aplomb has failed. (Here absurdity drama races along a track of old-timey, screwball comedy, as hitting heights, in Bergman’s film, A Lesson in Love [1954].) The documentarist who never sleeps peppers his guests in this way: “The Dutch police were utterly shaken, that’s for sure!” (That they were, on one occasion, performing for a group of politicians and industrialists, at a chateau near Liege could be the complication.) “You jumped a set of lights in 1956.” The group’s income having been hidden away in a Swiss bank.

   With all their advantages, the sensationalists reveal to be looking toward an oncoming rhinoceros, enflamed by the mouse’s modest hopes. Now crazily shackled to a routine of solo interrogation, the top dogs lose poise in remarkable ways. Two of the worriers, Thea and Sebastian, back at their hotel, rattle off an inventory which would somewhat put to shame their feeding a fan base of assholes. She starts slowly, first of all by clasping her hands, only to increase her stress. She regards her fingers with dismay. “I’d love to sleep on my own, but I can’t sleep if you’re not here.” She goes on to fault him for having slept with the wife of a terminal cancer victim. He retorts, “My contract expires in six months. Then we’ll dissolve our friendship.” He begins to kiss her crotch. Her fingers are seen in close-up, tightly splayed. He recounts a juvenile dream. She, not only telling him that he’s a dull lover, but also surprising us with an anecdote. (Prior, however, to sitting on top of the back of a plush seat, as if on a throne, she hopes to still the spectre of scandal by wielding a tennis-racket size mirror. We see, from our perspective, only the void of the mirror’s back. Introspection impossible. That being a second coming of the cheap haute couture model, in Bergman’s Dreams. To round out the impasse, she places the mirror over her crotch.) “I’m going to tell you what a psychiatrist once said to me. He said, ‘You’re not solid matter, you’re movement. You flow into others, they flow into you. Nothing’s constant… When you realize this, your neurosis will go…’ And then he said, ‘The islands in the river are a sign of approaching death… They grow and solidify, rising out of the flowing darkness. One day the stream will be suffocated—by islands.’” Sebastian had slept through her highlight. (There is a long history of such failing to thrive, in early and later films.) Then there is Sebastian, who might not have slept at all, with, “I remember something a director once said about actors. ‘I never cease to marvel that suddenly lilies will shoot up out the arses of carcasses.’” (Is that a dig or a homage?) A cut to her finds her with one hand over her face. She proceeds, by departing with, “Lord have mercy on me…” That elicits from him, “Take me unto You. Deliver my soul, let it perish in the void.” A pan to her, discloses both of her hands covering her face like a grill.  After she’s gone, Sebastian burns his bedding. The physical source of that recklessness is seen to be, “Union Match.”

    The optics of Sebastian, on his burning bed, spread back to the televised Vietnamese suicide demonstrator, in the Bergman film, Persona (1966). Whereas that sacrifice had believed that major change could happen, with the play of destruction here nothing vivid and progressive has a hope. Sebastian becomes the first of the trio to be interrogated as to motive and punishment. The interview, in fact, finds the overly circumspect and curious bureaucrat being “burned” by the fire-bug’s studious spleen. Withal, however, there occurs the mole’s very awkward bid to join such hoped-for “splendor.” Not yet having revealed the frustrations under which the seeming buoyancy occurs, Sebastian goes over the top in conjuring away any weakness. He establishes that he belongs to a line of circus stars; that his father was a musician (“He could have been great, but he was a drunk”); that he was divorced from a professor of archaeology (“She lives in Cairo”); that he murdered his former business partner (once Thea’s husband, and now she being nominally married to Hans, the third member of the troupe). The judge, acknowledging that curiosity, not law, is up for grabs, thrills in knowing that Sebastian killed with his first dagger thrust and stabbed three more times. (But the little man’s documentation has become radioactive.) “I support some four or five children; my lawyer has all the facts.”

   The judge, then, touching upon “your invention,” drives the proud (or at least vain) vicious one to show something he knows would be deflating. This push-back demonstrating how dialogue functions as a deadly weapon, a poisonous emission, in the hands of rabidity. “Christ, you’re ridiculous with your bloody self-esteem, your lower-class curiosity and tastelessness. Your lack of education and sympathy. I’ve noticed you’re not very clean, Mr. Abrahamsson. You neglect your personal hygiene.” (This causes the judge to shake slightly.) “Underneath your aftershave is a sour smell and filthy corpulence. You put on a clean shirt every day, but I see a tidemark on the collar.” (The judge rubs his face in his handkerchief.) “Your nails aren’t very clean. I despise you.” (The judge is frozen in anger.) “I find you officious, unbelievably ridiculous… Not bad to mix with three world-famous artists.” (The judge bends over and holds his handkerchief over his nose.) “It feels good to pester us with humiliating questions under pretense of decency and discretion. Pulling down our trousers and giving us a spanking… I’ll demand a judge who is on my level. You’re unable to either understand or judge our work. You’re dull! Lock me up now, for contempt or whatever…” (Whereas Sebastian has touched upon the reckless incorrectness of the matter, the Tom Ewell-like mouse, with his Marilyn suddenly in the vicinity, is a far more considerable player than the pyromaniac is able to fathom.) “I admit I sweat profusely. I’ve seen many specialists about it, it’s all metabolism.” (The emissions of the judge cannot, in fact, be wrapped up by medical analysis.) “I can understand that it bothers you. The smell, that is. But I will not accept that I am dirty. No one washes as often as I do…” (Do these libations link to a wide-ranging ripple of sensibility?) “You say I’m lower-class. I don’t know about that, it’s a flexible concept—like everything else. My parents were well-off, my father was a lawyer, my mother a teacher. I dare say we [he and his siblings] were brought up well.” (Cut to the adversary, sneering behind his hand, and behind his nearly eternal shades. The former jail inmate has, with this interplay, shown to be not only cynical but a deranged cynic, perhaps driving the other two to the trademark of graft in their dubious fortunes.)

    “I immediately sensed your animosity,” the host attains, putting into to a level of reflection beyond the sensationalist’s rude and stupid hopelessness. “And as I pointed out, it grieves me and makes me insecure.” (Now Sebastian sees that he’s over his head, and begins to inhale in some stress.) “All this has been upsetting to both of us, so I suggest we say goodbye. I won’t take your outburst to heart. Will you find your own way out? I wish you a speedy recovery and look forward to tonight’s performance. I can understand your strong emotions.” (Quick pan from judge to Sebastian, now incensed again, the latter’s cigarette hand covering his eyes as he lolls on the sofa, perhaps seeing weakness in the sense of civility and perhaps relishing a trump card along lines of holy impudence.)  “Not only are you nasty and repulsive, but you’re a crappy actor to boot… You’re ruthless, immoral and rotten. People like you don’t deserve to live.” (That latter, pointed ugliness, eventually returning in the Bergman film, Autumn Sonata [1978].)

   That jailbird, no longer seen to be part of a profound endeavor, becomes an oblique alarm in a very dangerous surrounding. The judge remonstrates, “I’m embarrassed on behalf of you and myself. I’m incapable of feeling aggression. I’m only seized with a feeling of impotence”—Thea having told Sebastian what a lousy lover he was. Same word, different meaning. “I beg you,” the judge calls out, “go at once!” This elicits from the burning man a melodramatic stance with hands clasped over his head and shaking like a holy roller. “That’s how it is… Mother of God! That’s as it should be… I have seen it and there’s no return!” (Cut to the judge, pouring sweat.) Sebastian, voice-over: “I have no family. Nothing to live for…” The summoned,  now the crazed summoner. “Don’t worry, I won’t touch you, that would be too vile. Just sit down.” Sebastian tears off his jacket in the mode of a matador and puts on another show. “I’ll tell you about an act that Hans [the third wheel] and I have performed. ‘A man enters a police station to report something peculiar [something like the play, “Rhinoceros”]. What is it he wants to report? He’s been seized by a huge appetite. He ate his wife, a shop assistant, his two children and his grandmother. [NB, hungry to be notorious, and then be handsomely apologetic, and live forever—a cheap scammers resort]. Then a bearded man entered the shop, God himself. He cut out a fillet of God’s shank and ate it. He had an irresistible urge to shit and then he went to the police’—“Calm down, I’m near the end.” ‘He lifts his cranium, which he’d sawed off.’ (Blasphemy and advantage. Immortality by way of drama!) ‘His head was empty. At the bottom was a string for the eyelids, but that was it.’” (Recall the surrealist eyebrow, in the film, Dreams [1955].)

    “Are you calm now?” Sebastian, the paradoxical catechist asks. One more question, the literal, somewhat absurdist pedant poses—your religion? And that ignites more nonsense. “I have no religion. I don’t belong to any faith. I don’t need a god, salvation or eternal life. I’m my own god, I supply my own angels and demons. I reside on a stony beach which sinks into a sheltering ocean. A dog is barking, a child is crying. The day closes and turns to night.” He slaps the judge on his chest and grabs him, saying, “You can’t intimidate me! No human being will ever frighten me again. I have a prayer that I say to myself in the absolute silence. ‘May there be a wind to stir the sea and the sultry dusk. May a bird fly in from the sea and scatter the silence with its call.’” The hardness of life savoring its gifts; and this all too inventive, scattered player sending them promptly back.

The judge, not in the business of easiness, enters a church in search of useful ingredients. The stone statues are archaic, but with some gentle expressivity. Four candles burn. There is the ingredient he needs, being elusive. “Father, I don’t want to confess, but I need someone to talk to. “I’m listening,” he hears from the priest, being Bergman himself, far from cordial. Into the confessional, we find the judge on the other side of the grill between them, his presence dispersed within the vertical field—that being a graphic rendition of the “movement” Thea embraced, only to ditch it. “I think I’m going to die. Strangely enough I’m, scared. On my way home yesterday, I had to sit down on a bench. I felt as if I was already dead.” (Panning close to him.) “My body had a stench I’ve never noticed before. There’s an abnormal heat, of course, and my weak heart. And then my old father’s death.” (He wears a commemorative armband.) “Try as one may, everything changes… What am I saying. I’m talking through my hat.” (His faced plunging into a handkerchief.) “People can pardon each other, can’t they?” (An odd place to touch upon the possibility that much must  be held in solitary.) “There is an earthly grace. But outside the fragile circle of human warmth cruelty reigns, forever in all eternity… I know you’re not laughing at me. You must be familiar with the phenomenon from your practice. You’ll know that non-believers often pray…” (to something hard to define). “It gives me relief in my pain… My mother has died. No one will hear me if I call out…” And, then, a troubling capitulation: “I daren’t walk on the floors because of the animals. I have to stay in bed.” (Cut to the stone Madonna. Three candles to left, and at right, a flame glowing. In that place of refuge, but not innovation, he dallies, “If I start to cry from anxiety, I’ll be even more afraid.”)

   The last careful eccentric under a tiny cloud, namely, Hans, considerably older and far more congenial than the first two strutting their stuff, had been kept two hours waiting on account of the judge’s rocky night. Such missing the boat, for the actor playing, Hans, namely, Gunner Bjornstrand, had become a stock measure of knowing better and yet ultimately sliding back to superficiality, in several Bergman films. We’ll see Hans disgusted with the troupe and yet carrying on, long after the judge’s death. We first see him this day, in the course of the pedantry of the judge, in close-up, with his hands tightly covering his face from the specific boredom and a long-term boredom. Soon, however, the two more mature figures smooth over the irregularity and begin with the subject of Sebastian’s remarkable hostility. Hans quickly excuses his colleague by way of his apparently being struck by a series of infections. “He takes the matter too seriously… I’ve stopped fretting over professional matters long ago. I do my best, that’s all. It’s only natural your judicial system wants to investigate this. The penalty is lenient if we’re found guilty. The fine has been deposited in a bank nominated by you.” The judge replies, “I’m delighted to hear that we have the same attitude.” Do they, though? Hans had been part of a revolutionary-cum-hot-entertainment package for years (forget about their register). There would be volatile factors based upon an avant-garde of long-standing. The reflective judge and his moonlighting would look to the sunny side and shun the vast darkness of the matter, a matter of “movement,” which, despite the millions they reap, has beaten them down to a cheap rite.

     Once again the little scholar asks, “Who among you is the creative force?” Hans, the smoothy, feels the need, then, to emphasize that incisive cooperation has shone upon their labors of love. “We share thoughts and feelings, we know one another’s reactions. If you perform day in, day out, in such an utterly demanding environment, you eventually merge into an integrated body. That doesn’t prevent our having different views on this and that.” The not so shabby savvy of the questioner had asked for specific dimensions of their magic; he was given a scheme of corporate wealth, not unlike the priorities of Hollywood.

     As if mired in quicksand, Hans, with the theological judge awaiting the troupe’s romantic complications, feels the need to call for Thea’s being exempt from interrogation, on the basis of her emotional lack of equilibrium. Instead of reminding the little man that the matter is an infraction hardly more severe than walking upon a precious lawn, he pushes the health card which seems to the functionary very weak. (We never learn of the antiquated place making the fuss, but it probably involves a silly pseudo-country, like Monaco.) This pushes his image of mature control off a ledge—madly spilling out his humiliation that, though married to her, Thea spends most of her time with the sociopath. “My biggest fear is to be left alone.” Consequently, he offers a bribe of $100,000 to keep his nominal wife out of the process. (“Now I’m really curious,” the student masticates.) Playing along, only to rip up the cheque, he balloons in his studies as to being in the hunt. “I’ll disregard the enormity of your attempt to bribe a civil servant… You must have strong reasons for wanting to stop the meeting.” The meeting occurs. Thea has a sexual fit; the judge rapes her, seemingly requiring a trip to the hospital; and next day, it’s as if nothing happened.

    A few declarations before that fuss maintains the real passion. She tells the judge, “I pretend I’m a saint or a martyr, hence the name, Thea.” (Her hands are clasped, as in prayer. “I can sit for hours at the table and look at my palms… I play at going into ecstasy and talking to the Holy Virgin. Belief and unbelief. Defiance and doubt. It’s all a game…I knew you’d be bored.”) The night before the interview, Thea, the saintly player, sits in her dressing room after another lucrative show, and she’s very drunk, by way of a potion called, “Doctor’s Special.” Panning close to her face, she has such a premium of thick cosmetics and a clown nose that she resembles Sebastian and his broad nose. She cries and groans, and Hans asks, “What’s wrong?”/ “I’m so bloody scared of that judge!” Hans counters, “If you panic, I’ll be sitting next door. The day after tomorrow it’ll all be over. We’ll go to the country. I know an inn with great food. If it’s not too hot, we’ll go walking in the woods, sleep under a tree…” (recalling Bjornstrand’s empty rendezvous, in the film, A Lesson in Love, 1954). Feeling some imminent blow-up with Sebastian due to his leaving the troupe, she reminds Hans, “Not long ago you said it was your life’s mission to look after me. You’re my only security”—“security” being a hot-button notion coming to bear in a matter of weeks, with the horror of The Passion of Anna (1969). (“Security” at any cost, being pathologically disastrous.) Hans asks, “Isn’t it better if it’s one big insecurity with other little bursts of security? That’s much closer to reality.” But it strays from the mechanism, the rite, of the demanding clever. His bemusement opens a floodgate of painful candor. “I am tired of you. And I’m tired of Sebastian. I’m tired of you and Sebastian. I’m tired of touring with two lunatics. I’m tired of our so-called artistry. I’ve lost belief in our purpose. We’re pointless, disgusting, ridiculous. We’ve lost our relevance [Thea remarking, “I don’t know what ‘relevance’ means”—a moment flowing back to the film, Dreams, where a crude glutton fails to understand the word, ‘infantile’]. We’re not needed, we’re obsolete… My tedium is limitless. I don’t even feel sorry for you.” The dressing room mirror has been lipsticked, Merde, Shit… “ We’re not worth a tenth of what we earn.” And with classic Bjornstrand weakness, he catches himself, “I don’t know what I’m saying… I never speak about myself…” He takes off his mask and has a drink. “Still, I love you, I do… I feel sorry for you. I’d do anything to spare your discomfort or trouble. Seeing you and Sebastian’s passion worries me. I see you tear each other to pieces. But I should know better. You can say anything, commit any barbarity. Nothing works on you two. You’re monsters. I know it. I recognize it. I can never be like you two. I don’t want to be. Try to listen to me! We have reached the extreme limit. It’s humiliating, degrading. Enough is enough… Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m tired of you… You haven’t understood a word. The world is falling to pieces, burning and bleeding…” She sneers (as Sebastian had sneered upon the judge), “Poor Hans, poor little conscience… It should be this and not that.” He backs himself into, “I believe in common sense” [only recently subscribing]. She asks, “Have I got ugly?” He insists, “No, no, no!” (In the film, Dreams, things come down to, “One has to say ‘no,’ at some point.”)

    As an ambulance is (absurdly) dispatched to bring Thea to what she does almost every night on stage, the “assailant” takes a high road: “The deceit must end! I’ve tried to be nice but to no avail.” The next day, Hans and Sebastian (without a word of Thea’s little ride) discuss a shift in their cash-flow in light of international unpleasantness—a Far East tour cancelled by a war, and their U.S. tour in danger because of the indecency fuss—amounting to a loss of about a million each. Sebastian, a picture of chic, cosmopolitan wealth, remarks, “How annoying, to say the least.” Hans deduces, “You’ll realize I can’t go on lending you money forever. Here’s an account of your finances: balance in my favor, 296,000 franks.” The debtor reminds. “My part of the house in Ascona will be worth something.” The creditor reminds him, “I bought your share when you had that tax bill in Scandinavia.” No problems, it seems, Sebastian merely borrows some more money! The tenor of such burning away of money (as in burning away of bedding) appears to be some vague, rather ridiculous idea of disinterestedness, in the light of their wretched rite, rigged to be coming up roses. The jailbird rebounds, “Tell Baur I’ll do another season, but I need an advance…” (Hans continues to describe a changed world, but it seems they’ve all amassed fortunes never to encounter poverty. The next big shift would be working as solo acts. Hans, at least for that afternoon, is very bullish on this because he was almost ready to retire. He floats the [now ideal] idea of Sebastian and Thea  becoming a duo act. No dice, apparently.) Going back to the solidity of  money, Hans has taken care of remembering that the expensive dresser is 12,000 kronor overdrawn in his chequeing  account, which is met with more strong spirits. Also, there is Hans’ concern about who should pay Thea’s hotel bills (one guess), she being beyond such transactions. (More cut-price disinterestedness.) Before running off to pick up his no doubt rare car from the repair shop, Sebastian, having shown an outlaw style, drives Hans to divulge his hots, his advantage, namely, the way to induce Thea into a multiple orgasm. With the tricks proudly described, he’s driven to scripture, no less,  “I love her in the spirit of the Epistle to the Corinthians,” which prompts Sebastian to rattle off the text, “Love always trusts, always hopes… also perseveres, and so on…” Then, from out of that union, Sebastian asks, “Tell me something, do you detest me?”/ “No, far from it,” Hans assures. “But I used to like you more… Before you started drinking and got sloppy… I even admired you. I thought you were a warm person, full of life” [though a murderer]… You had something, Thea did, too… Light… You may smile. There is no other word for it, light! It’s the light that Thea and I are busy extinguishing.”

     As that nadir begins to bite, Hans and Sebastian visit the judge to propose a  presentation/ interpretation of the troupe, at its succinct best, after that evening’s show. The student of art records, “I agreed to their modest request that no other audience be present” [at a room in the courthouse]. The preamble spotlights Thea and the judge seeming to be fast friends. “I was so relieved when the doctor said it wasn’t serious. You’ve quite recovered?”/ “Just tired from the medication…”/ “I hope this won’t be too hard.”/ “Not for me. I just beat the drum and talk some nonsense.” The scenario propounds to carry the passions of Hans when he was a child. “Our imaginations were stimulated!” (Stimulated by anger?)

    The little man presiding formally, is in fact at their mercy, like the sheep and a whole roster of victims about to explode in, The Passion of Anna. His “curiosity,” his need for cogency, can’t resist daring, in the middle of the night with a fragile heart, to cross a mob, one of the billions who have, in fact, nothing to offer a serious reflection, a serious love of life. The first optic becomes a medieval sword (for medieval hearts), thrust in his face. Still underestimating his peril—a perilous Pauline in the offing, years hence—the host walks into, “So it’s not that simple?” Sebastian barks out, “No, it’s not that simple?” despite his being a pig for the simple. Hans adds, “Call it an intercession”—he still stinging from a refusal to be a smooth intercessor. “Artists are such sensitive creatures.” (How would he know, having been nothing all his life but a Hollywood joke? Surely knowing where the money is, Hans melodramatically intones, “It may be meaningless but now and then we’re all seized by the desire to kneel or pray. A ritual game,” a rite. (The judge in the church had, in his adult way, eschewed facile showboating, while maintaining, however awkwardly, true interplay, true rite.)

   Getting around to the rape—“You, yourself experienced weakness, a sensual longing for surrender. Perhaps as a child”—Sebastian continues, “At a given moment I raise a bag filled with wine and stab it from underneath. The wine gushes down, into a vessel.” Thea beats the drum. Each of the actors places a threatening mask to intensify aggression. By this time, the judge is sweating profusely and begins to tremble. He calls out, “I have something to tell you. My father wanted me to be a lawyer like him and his father before him. I had no choice in the matter.” (This connectivity blooms virulently in subsequent films of Bergman.) “I’m only doing my duty! I wanted to see the act at close range.” (More Ionesco, as if lawyering breeds rape.) “Maybe it was a secret need to… I don’t know. I take and give orders… I don’t understand what drives you or your relationships… I have always been afraid… What am I saying? I must calm down. It’s two in the morning, we’re all tired. Why are you smiling Mr. Fisher?” (Sebastian fishing for trouble.) The judge covers his face, leaving him more lost than he really is. His fingernails have been bitten to the quick. (Far from a rite that could lift him. ) A buzzer explodes. They surround him, and he finds a way to say, “No more fear… Dear artists, you’ll never have a more rewarding and involve audience.” Fisher’s sword now shows the handle to be sexually erect. He slaps the judge’s face many times. The judge calls out, “You hit it on the head, Mr. Fisher. I admire your physical daring. Your hand touched my skin which is burning. But it also touched my memories as a human being. You have hit me and humiliated yourself…” The violence is in the mode of Jenet’s, The Balcony. The latter two sentences are in the mode of Bergman.

    “Maybe not, maybe you feel satisfaction and pleasure,” Sebastian crows. (More Genet.) Sebastian smashes the judge’s face, and the latter falls off his chair and on to the floor. The judge tells them, “Look how my hands are shaking. And I want to cry. I suppose it’s a form of desolation… To lean against someone, to find warmth and security in someone’s arms.” He struggles to stand up.  “What a drama! I’ll happily admit there’s a measure of cruelty also in my profession. How else would it be possible.” (“The Theater of Cruelty,” a notion of French theatrical inventor, Antonin Artaud, comes by as another strange homage to the little man who cherished something necessarily wild and necessarily gentle. He calls out, close to death, “I’m asking you artists. You must know. You know. Start your performance.” Their “performance” is a few obsolete postures, in lifting the vessel, and surrounding the judge. Hans adds, “I then drink from the vessel, swallowing the reflection. That is the act in short…” Cut to the judge, sweating and gasping and looking up. He says, “I understand.”

    In an epilogue we are treated not so much to the conflict’s irony, but the irony of sensibility itself. “A doctor was summoned. He established that Dr. Abrahamson had dies from a heart attack. The three artists were subsequently convicted for the pantomimic art they called, ‘The Rite.’ They paid their fines, gave some interviews and toward the end of the summer they went on a holiday. They never returned to the country in question.”

#ingmar bergman

[bountyofbeads]

'Shattered': Inside the secret battle to save America's undercover spies in the digital age

https://news.yahoo.com/shattered-inside-the-secret-battle-to-save-americas-undercover-spies-in-the-digital-age-100029026.html

This is a fascinating look at the secretive CIA, the tools they use, as well as the ongoing fight for superiority and intelligence in the digital age. It also looks at how our national security has been compromised by devastating hacks by Russia, China, North Korea and and Iran. It's well worth the time.

SHATTERED: Inside The Secret Battle To Save America's Undercover Spies In The Digital Age

By Jenna McLaughlin and Zach Dorfman | Published December 30, 2019 5:00 AM ET | Yahoo News | Posted December 30, 2019 |

|

When hackers began slipping into computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management in the spring of 2014, no one inside that federal agency could have predicted the potential scale and magnitude of the damage. Over the next six months, those hackers — later identified as working for the Chinese government — stole data on nearly 22 million former and current American civil servants, including intelligence officials.

The data breach, which included fingerprints, personnel records and security clearance background information, shook the intelligence community to its core. Among the hacked information’s other uses, Beijing had acquired a potential way to identify large numbers of undercover spies working for the U.S. government. The fallout from the hack was intense, with the CIA reportedly pulling its officers out of China. (The director of national intelligence later denied this withdrawal.)

Personal data was being weaponized like never before. In one previously unreported incident, around the time of the OPM hack, senior intelligence officials realized that the Kremlin was quickly able to identify new CIA officers in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow — likely based on the differences in pay between diplomats, details on past service in “hardship” posts, speedy promotions and other digital clues, say four former intelligence officials. Those clues, they surmised, could have come from access to the OPM data, possibly shared by the Chinese, or some other way, say former officials.

The OPM hack was a watershed moment, ushering in an era when big data and other digital tools may render methods of traditional human intelligence gathering extinct, say former officials. It is part of an evolution that poses one of the most significant challenges to undercover intelligence work in at least a half century — and probably much longer.

The familiar trope of Jason Bourne movies and John le Carré novels where spies open secret safes filled with false passports and interchangeable identities is already a relic, say former officials — swept away by technological changes so profound that they're forcing the CIA to reconsider everything from how and where it recruits officers to where it trains potential agency personnel. Instead, the spread of new tools like facial recognition at border crossings and airports and widespread internet-connected surveillance cameras in major cities is wiping away in a matter of years carefully honed tradecraft that took intelligence experts decades to perfect.

Though U.S. technical capabilities can collect reams of data, human intelligence remains critical. In 2016, for example, a high-level Russian asset recruited by the CIA confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered plans to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  After fleeing to the United States, that same covert source was forced to relocate because of his digital trail. Without the ability to send undercover intelligence officers overseas to recruit or meet sources face to face, this type of intelligence might all but disappear, creating a blind spot for U.S. policymakers.

During a summit of Western intelligence agencies in early 2019, officials wrestled with the challenges of protecting their employees’ identities in the digital age, concluding that there was no silver bullet. “We still haven’t figured out this problem,” says a Western intelligence chief who attended the meeting. Such conversations have left intelligence leaders weighing an uncomfortable question: Is spying as we know it over?

Some have tried to address this crisis. Within the last decade, the CIA assembled a diverse group of intelligence personnel to create the Station of the Future — an ambitious Silicon Valley-style startup costing millions and nestled within a diplomatic facility in Latin America where a team of top spies tried to imagine, build and test innovative tools and techniques that could withstand the digital barrage.

But the project, which has not been previously reported on, was battered by bureaucratic resistance and hollowed out by financial and administrative neglect; it died an unceremonious death over the last few years. What began as a bold experiment was eventually reduced to what other agency officials saw as simply an expensive proposal to design an open-office floor plan for CIA outposts around the world, say two former intelligence officials.

The Station of the Future was just one crack at tackling the challenges wrought by a world defined by pervasive digital footprints, biometric trackers and artificial intelligence — challenges that have bedeviled U.S. intelligence agencies and divided their senior leadership. So serious is the concern about biometric tracking that in late December the Defense Department’s chief intelligence official co-signed a memo, obtained by Yahoo News, advising all military personnel to avoid using consumer DNA kits, noting worries about surveillance, among other security concerns.

These problems are now being recognized by Congress as well. 

“Very few people, maybe shepherds in rural Afghanistan, don’t leave some form of digital trace today,” Rep. Jim Himes, who leads the House Intelligence subcommittee on advancing technology, told Yahoo News. “And that poses real opportunities in terms of identifying bad guys … but it also poses real challenges [in] keeping our people from being identified.”

Though the FBI and CIA declined to comment, current and former national security officials who spoke with Yahoo News said efforts to address these issues are underway. CIA Director Gina Haspel, who served decades undercover herself, has doubled down in support of sending spies overseas to track “hard targets,” like Russia and Iran.

These changes come at a critical time for the intelligence community. President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for his own intelligence agencies — an attitude underlined by his push to publicly name the anonymous CIA whistleblower whose complaint sparked the ongoing impeachment proceedings.

Whether the U.S. intelligence agencies will be able to make these radical changes is unclear, but without a fundamental transformation, officials warn, the nation faces an unprecedented crisis in its ability to collect human intelligence. While some believe that a return to tried and true tradecraft will be sufficient to protect undercover officers, others fear the business of human spying is in mortal peril and that the crisis will ultimately force the U.S. intelligence community to rethink its entire enterprise.

The following account, based on interviews with more than 40 current and former U.S. and Western intelligence officials, reveals previously unreported CIA and FBI cover programs and operations, and details U.S. intelligence agencies’ deep relationship with the private sector in facilitating these efforts. These officials, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive government matters, also described high-level deliberations within U.S. spy agencies about the digital threat to cover, and how U.S. adversaries are themselves responding to digital pressures and opportunities. Many believe that, despite the numerous benefits provided by technology, the protection of undercover spies’ identities is becoming next to impossible.

“The foundations of the business of espionage have been shattered,” says Duyane Norman, a former senior CIA official and architect of the Station of the Future project. “We haven’t acknowledged it organizationally within CIA, and some are still in denial. The debate is like the one surrounding climate change. Anyone who says otherwise just isn’t looking at the facts.”

The beginning of the CIA’s cover and tradecraft crisis dates back to at least February 2003, when a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar disappeared off the street in Milan. He didn’t resurface until 2004, when he called his wife from Cairo to tell her about his kidnapping, detention and torture at the hands of the CIA.

Italian investigators, eager to get to the bottom of the audacious abduction on their streets, were later able to track a web of cellphones communicating only with each other in close proximity to the disappearance, leading them to a series of hotel bills, credit card statements and other identifying indicators, according to a 2007 investigation unveiled at an annual hacker conference in 2013. Italian authorities charged 23 Americans, including the CIA’s former Milan station chief, for their roles in the scheme — most in absentia.

While Omar was just one target of the CIA’s aggressive post-9/11 antiterrorism campaign, several former intelligence officials described the Milan operation’s aftermath as a “come to Jesus” moment that revealed just how vulnerable the agency’s operators were to technology. At the time, some undercover officials naively believed that methods like using potato chip bags would mask cellphone signals, and operatives were generally “freewheeling,” according to one former senior intelligence official. In the space of a few short years, the rapid advance of technology, including nascent international surveillance systems, increasingly endangered the CIA’s traditional human intelligence gathering.

Singapore was one example, recall three former intelligence officials. By the early 2000s, the agency ceased running certain types of operations in the Southeast Asian city-state, because of the sweeping digital surveillance there. The Singaporeans had developed a database that incorporated real-time flight, customs, hotel and taxicab data. If it took too long for a traveler to get from the airport to a hotel in a taxi, the anomaly would trigger an alert in Singaporean security systems. “If there was a gap, they’d go to the hotel, they could flip on the TVs and phones and monitor what was going on” in the room of the suspicious traveler, says the same former senior intelligence official. “They had everything so wired.”

“You used to be able to fly into a country on one name and have meetings in another,” recalls this person. “It limited a lot of capabilities.”

The Singaporean Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Those concerns spread to other places, like London, where CCTV cameras are omnipresent, and the United Arab Emirates, where facial recognition is ubiquitous at the airport. Today there are “about 30 countries” where CIA officers are no longer followed on the way to meetings because local governments no longer see the need, given that surveillance in those countries is so pervasive, said Dawn Meyerriecks, the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology, in a 2018 speech.

In the 2000s, the explosion in biometrics — such as fingerprints, facial recognition and iris scans — propelled the conversation forward, according to multiple former intelligence officials. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that in many parts of the world, within a short time, all alias work would likely become impossible.

These fears were largely borne out, say former CIA officials — especially in “hard target” countries like China and Iran. But this trend also affected CIA operations in friendlier countries. By 2012, recalls one former official, some officers were temporarily forbidden to travel for missions in the European Union over fear of exposure, due to widespread sharing of airport biometric data between EU member states. “Facial recognition and biometrics make it very difficult to travel in alias,” says Mike Morell, former acting CIA director and host of the “Intelligence Matters” podcast.

The rise in popularity of consumer DNA kits, which allow people to send in samples of their own DNA, is a growing part of the biometrics problem. Even if an undercover operative hasn’t used a consumer DNA kit, it’s highly likely, say experts, that one of their close relatives has. The Pentagon’s Dec. 20 warning to members of the military not to use these kits appears to be partly in response to that threat.

Greg Hampikian, a biologist at Boise State University and a leading DNA expert, says that with the advent of commercial genetic databases, exposing a spy or other covert operative could be as easy as taking a saliva sample from a cigarette butt or a drinking cup. A suspicious foreign government could send the sample in and potentially find out if the person has been operating under an assumed name.

“It’s right out of a spy novel,” he says.

For spy services, biometric data has become a highly valued currency — leading to a widespread and ongoing campaign by the U.S. and its allies, as well as hostile states, to hack into biometric databases from important airports worldwide. The U.S. has spearheaded breaches of its own, successfully hacking biometric data from the Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports, says a former official. Stealing biometric databases is an attractive strategy for other countries as well. In one case, Chinese intelligence successfully hacked into the biometric data from Bangkok’s airport. “The Chinese have consistently extracted data from all the major transit hubs in the world,” says another former senior official.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Even before the explosion in biometrics, the CIA sought to take advantage of the new digitized era of border control, working with, and training, other allied countries in the mid-2000s on how to use certain software to identify false passports and other forged documentation, say two former officials. But aside from the obvious information-sharing benefits of this arrangement, officials also discussed inserting a secret backdoor into the software that would allow the agency to surveil participating countries’ passport control systems — and to manipulate the program to allow CIA operatives to slip in and out of these countries undetected, the officials say. Something like these alterations was carried out, says one of the officials, with CIA operatives “moving more freely in and out of Middle Eastern countries than they should have been able to.”

CIA officials also concluded that the days of operating under multiple personas in a single country were over, and began moving toward a “one country, one alias” rule. Undercover officers could no longer fly into a country on one passport and use a separate ID to check into a hotel, and all future trips to that country had to be conducted under the same fake identity. “It’s made the work much harder,” says a former senior agency official, who recalled a time when he possessed multiple fake IDs he kept in a safe for use within the country where he was based, as well as fake passport stamps. “You can’t do that now.”

Starting in 2009, the CIA learned an even more devastating lesson when the Iranian intelligence services, looking for a mole that had given up details on Tehran’s nuclear program, uncovered the agency’s web-based covert communication tools. The discovery set off a deadly chain of events, leading to the exposure — and in some cases death — of CIA sources in China and around the world, according to an investigation by Yahoo News in 2018.

The game was changing for undercover officers and their assets. “It’s extremely difficult now to run cover operations when so much is known and can be known about almost everybody,” says Joel Brenner, a former top counterintelligence official. “Now you show up at the border of Russia, they’ve got your high school yearbook out there where you wrote about your lifelong ambitions to work for the CIA. All that stuff is digitized.”

America’s adversaries were also forced to adapt. By the early 2010s, Chinese intelligence operatives started adopting old-school Russian-style tradecraft, like dead drops in the woods or “brush passes,” which involve surreptitiously exchanging objects in a public place, says one former senior intelligence official. “It was unheard of for the Chinese,” says this person. “The conclusion was that they felt the world was too digital and traceable.”

U.S. officials believed that Chinese intelligence may have shifted to more low- or no-tech methods after cracking the CIA’s covert communications system around this time, or because of training with their Russian counterparts, says this person. Russian intelligence operatives, meanwhile, began shifting their meetings with sources to countries with less sophisticated biometric systems, say two former senior officials, favoring certain Central and South American countries.

Peru was one such meeting place, says one of these former officials. In the United States, Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives have also transitioned into operating more under their true names, says this former senior official. “The Russians,” says this person, “have moved to traveling in plain sight.”

Nothing — not even the CIA’s most secretive human intelligence gathering programs — has been spared from this digital onslaught.

In the years after 9/11, the CIA invested heavily in sending more officers under nonofficial cover known as NOCs (pronounced “knocks”), who lack diplomatic recognition, into targeted areas, including al-Qaida strongholds, in order to glean on-the-ground information that CIA officers posing as diplomats might have trouble securing. The CIA was responding to lawmakers who slammed the agency for relying too heavily on “embassy cocktail parties” over embedding in extremist groups. The committees “pushed money on us,” recalls a former senior intelligence officer.

Even so, while Congress pressed the CIA to use more NOCs, who often pose as businesspeople, the intelligence oversight committees were concerned about the officers’ security. In the 2006 Intelligence Authorization Act, the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded a report from the CIA that would address “the emerging threats posed by technological developments to NOC operations.”

By the late 2000s, Congress’s ambitions were dashed. These deep-cover spies working outside the embassies often didn’t speak local languages, their cover identities didn’t make sense and they were often stationed far away from anyone they might try to recruit. The effort was dubbed a “colossal flop,” according to the L.A. Times. It was a “failed multi-billion dollar” program “shot through with waste, fraud, and abuse,” according to a 2015 lawsuit filed by a former NOC.

Top CIA executives tasked a senior agency official in charge of the NOC program to initiate a vast paring back of these types of deployments, and instituted a moratorium on new recruitments — earning the enmity of a generation of CIA officials working under him, fairly or not, say two former senior officials. “Some of the NOCs out there were fat, dumb and happy, taking advantage of being a spy and a businessman,” recalled a former senior official.

In response to this downsizing, the agency searched for cheaper, more flexible alternatives to NOCs, ramping up its use of diversified cover officers, foreign nationals who are recruited to spy for the agency, often in areas where it is difficult for Americans to operate, say four former officials. Described by these officials as a sort of “asset on steroids,” these undercover officers undertake polygraphs and are given limited clandestine training, but are contractors rather than career employees, like NOCs.

Around 2010, the FBI also began experimenting with new ways of maintaining cover, particularly when trying to recruit foreigners on U.S. soil, through a new initiative known as the National Security Recruitment Program, according to five former officials. The FBI program, which has not been previously reported on, involved close cooperation with the CIA’s National Resources Division, the agency’s clandestine domestic operational wing.

The program deployed U.S. officials under very light cover, with false backstories and business cards but lacking online footprints or connections to long-running brick-and-mortar undercover operations. That way, officials could approach individuals who had potentially useful information with some level of plausible deniability. The CIA helped provide funding for the FBI program, and FBI and CIA officials paired up in major American cities. While the program was successful, it was met with bureaucratic pushback and was ended by 2014 amid a turf battle, say former officials.

One roadblock, say former senior officials, was the bureau’s long-standing national program for creating legends — that is, fake backstories and identities — and cover, known as Stagehand. The program, based out of Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and other major American cities, sets up and maintains undercover FBI operations. Stagehand employees purchase cars, rent office space, buy homes, design cover identities for FBI officials, create fake companies and buy real ones, say six former officials. 

The bureau employs former real estate brokers, physicians and dentists, among others, who become FBI agents but can assume their former jobs as needed, recalls a former senior official. “The deepest layer [of cover] might begin years before you even use it,” the official says.

But the program was saddled by bureaucratic red tape and was sometimes “sloppy,” says one former senior official. A second former senior official recalls the closure of an undercover operation based out of a 100-person office space in the San Francisco Bay Area because of “careless activity by FBI employees” and “possible digital compromise.”

In recent years, the bureau has stopped relying on Stagehand for especially sensitive counterintelligence operations because of fears that the entire program has been compromised, says one former senior official. In a 2017 letter to then-FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Chuck Grassley raised concerns about a potential compromise of Stagehand. A whistleblower alleged that “every single investigation or criminal prosecution that involved Stagehand between 2008 and 2011 was compromised, and the identities and sensitive information of FBI undercover agents were disclosed to foreign governments,” wrote Grassley.

A Miami real estate broker who worked with Stagehand and was convicted of embezzling over $60,000 in FBI funds was the source of the potential compromise, according to a 2016 letter from the FBI to Grassley provided by the senator’s office to Yahoo News. As a result, the Stagehand operations in Miami “were dissolved; assets were liquidated and personnel reassigned,” and “field offices that had received Stagehand services were made aware of potential compromise,” said the letter.

Meanwhile, as these efforts faltered, the CIA was looking toward its past to engineer its future. That meant that, by the early 2010s, the agency was once again ramping up its NOC programs — this time with a focus on recruiting and deploying spies in technical fields, such as predictive analytics or data brokerage, according to former officials. But the immense amount of data publicly available — with everything from retirement accounts to Social Security numbers being searchable online — increased the danger for undercover intelligence officers.

The NOC program, which was always expensive, was becoming even riskier, a concern that has prompted ongoing conversations within the agency about whether it’s worth the investment, according to two former officials.

One former NOC who served in China as an undercover businessman in the mid-2010s approached Congress with specific concerns about the program, says a former national security official. The NOC was frustrated that his colleagues lacked experience in the field, didn’t speak local languages and were expected to recruit unrealistic targets, like top political figures or very senior businesspeople.

The NOC believed there were fundamental problems with the program, says the same former official, as the people working at headquarters assigned to design legends had “no idea how business and finance work.”

By mid-decade, the agency concluded that the best way to hide was in plain sight. Nowadays, say former officials, NOCs must truly “live their cover” — that is, actually work as the professional engineer or businessperson that they present themselves to be. NOCs live and work under their true names, say former officials, though they are known to their CIA counterparts by a pseudonym. Fewer than 10 percent of individuals within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations regularly use alias passports or credit cards, says a former senior official.

The intelligence community has developed sophisticated “backstopping” procedures, which seed a cover story through web traffic, emails and other digital channels. But in an interconnected world, “good backstopping can be defeated in a Google search,” says one former senior intelligence official. Because of that reality, the use of front companies for NOCs has become increasingly untenable, necessitating closer coordination and cooperation with private American businesses for the placement and recruitment of NOCs, say former senior officials.

It’s not always easy, however. “The CIA is very good at this, but they are getting the door slammed in their face,” says one former senior official. In Silicon Valley, recalls another former senior official, it was difficult to convince these companies to participate. The situation got worse in 2013, when Edward Snowden, an intelligence contractor, gave a trove of classified documents to journalists, exposing the extent of tech companies’ cooperation with the National Security Agency. “Before, it was hard,” says this person, and “it was harder to do post-Snowden.”

Even a switch of employer, or an unexplained gap in one’s résumé, can be a giveaway to a foreign intelligence service, say former officials. In response, the agency has also shifted to recruiting individuals within the companies they already work at, and, with the approval of corporate leadership, secretly transitioning those persons onto the CIA payroll, and training them intermittently and clandestinely, far from any known CIA facility.

Sometimes, when these individuals are finished working for the agency, they simply transition back to a full-time job for the company where they already “work.” In one recent case, a NOC who had worked at a U.S. company as a “full-time career employee” and was transitioning out of his CIA work was “softly landed” back into another position at the same firm — with the agency paying for his moving expenses and a government severance package, says a former senior intelligence official.

The agency, which former officials say recruits and emplaces NOCs in the technology, finance and film industries, among other sectors, targets both major U.S. corporations and smaller U.S. companies, which are sometimes preferred because they are not beholden to shareholders.

Often, say former officials, only a few select executives within a company are aware of its relationship with the agency and the “real” identities of the people in their employ. To encourage or reward cooperation from businesses, agency officials will sometimes provide special, tailor-made briefings to executives on the political and economic climate of countries of business interest to that company, say two former officials.

“There is a serious legal and policy process” in place at the CIA to manage these relationships, says a former official. Otherwise, “you could break industries.”

By President Barack Obama’s second term, conversations and concerns about cover were ricocheting through executive offices at U.S. intelligence agencies. A special roundtable group was assembled at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations to work through the challenges wrought by the advancing digital age. And top FBI and CIA intelligence executives met together repeatedly to discuss how, and if, the practice of undercover human intelligence work could survive the 21st century.

The digital threat to cover “was a major issue, even before I arrived at the agency,” says Avril Haines, who served as CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015. “One way to frame our approach to the many challenges posed by technology was to ‘do less, but do it better,’ which meant focusing on what was most important and then spending the time and resources needed to keep it secret. We had conversations with other allied services who were experiencing similar challenges.”

In late 2015, then-CIA Director John Brennan also created a new Directorate for Digital Innovation to focus on threats in the digital world and “safeguard the cover of our clandestine officers,” as part of Brennan’s wide-ranging modernization effort for the agency. It was “over 10 years” overdue, says a former CIA official, who believed its impact was stymied by turmoil within the agency over the broader reorganization.

By this time, massive amounts of digital records were being stolen — by insiders like Snowden and by adversaries like China, which also targeted private companies like Anthem, Marriott and others, in addition to spearheading two breaches into the OPM, which were revealed in 2015. The full extent of that theft, which included personal disclosure forms, clearance adjudication data and perhaps other linked intelligence community databases, has never been revealed.

“Part of the discussions we had was, post-OPM hack, we didn’t realize that digitizing government records profoundly changed the threat profile,” says a former senior national security official. The intelligence community did not fully understand how much of its own information was stored outside its own walls until personal data began being stolen by China en masse, says a former senior intelligence official.

For the bureau, the single biggest takeaway from these high-level discussions, say two former senior officials, was the need to create programs where undercover employees would have no link to the FBI whatsoever. That meant no training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.; no history of overt FBI work before being selected for undercover assignments; and no data trail of text messages or emails linking these personnel to the bureau in any form. It required a “monumental change in thinking,” says one of these former officials.

Generational issues have also frustrated officials. Recruitment to the CIA of younger people, particularly those born in the age of social media, has become more difficult, say former officials, with the agency lacking clearly defined policies for social media use. The CIA has adopted a position of “we’re not going to help you, but you better not do it wrong,” says one former agency official. Until a few years ago, agency officials were still counseling younger employees to quit social media, even though such behavior could be seen as suspicious, say former officials. The CIA still considers a Facebook friendship a “close and continuing relationship” for security purposes, say multiple former officials.

Bureaucratic slip-ups also remain a routine threat to cover. On at least one occasion, when the CIA sent a new alias package to an embassy overseas, the documents were placed on the desk of a foreign national employed there who was presumed to be working for the local hostile foreign intelligence service, says a former senior CIA official. CIA officers stationed in embassies were also provided with new cars and flat-screen TVs, unlike “real” diplomats, says the same person, a fact that frustrated diplomatic security officers.

But progress has been made on other fronts, say former officials, particularly in the creation of legends and alias documentation that can withstand digital scrutiny. The CIA’s alias documents are “the best in the world,” says a former senior official, because they’re real. For example, employees travel to the DMV to receive actual drivers’ licenses. At the CIA, a program called Checkpoint provides “tailored identity and travel intelligence products,” according to an agency document that WikiLeaks published in 2014.

By midway through the Obama administration, the CIA and FBI were creating “extensive digital legends with increasing sophistication,” as one former senior official puts it, with cooperation from key government agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and the IRS.

U.S. intelligence agencies also work with “friendly digital companies,” like commercially available ancestry databases, to alter personally identifying information, say former officials, and also backdate work histories. Concerned about digital leakage, and cognizant of the need to strictly quarantine deep-cover intelligence officials from their organizations, U.S. officials have adopted a strategy of “eclipsing” these individuals slowly into their cover identities before they are allowed to undertake their missions.

The CIA and FBI both concluded that every person connected to these organizations’ “black side” undercover programs had to be completely sealed off from the rest of their colleagues, say former officials. This firewall is an immensely complex undertaking in a world where electronic emissions from a single cellphone traveling, say, from CIA headquarters in Virginia to an unmarked office building nearby could blow multiple undercover operations. The FBI has also struggled with this transition. As of a few years ago, “none of this was completed yet, and none of it was even remotely being done easily,” says a former senior official.

The CIA, at least, had its own past practices to draw from, especially in its training of NOCs, say former officials. Years ago, the school for NOCs was entirely quarantined from that for normal future CIA operations officers, who undertake rigorous instruction at “the Farm,” a Williamsburg, Va.-area base, say two former senior officials. NOCs “never came to the East Coast” and were trained at separate secret facilities, says one of these former officials. But because of their often “rebellious” attitudes in the field, and in order to “increase their behavioral consistency,” senior CIA officials decided to move their instruction to the Farm. This move produced better-trained NOCs but also increased the threat of exposure. As of recently, the programs were sealed off from each other again, says a former senior official.

The pressures of the digital age have led the CIA to favor flexibility and deniability. The agency has formed a new reserve officer program to allow spies to work in the private sector, especially the tech industry, says a former intelligence official. The program is designed to allow those operatives to maintain their clearances so they can return seamlessly to the agency after a few years, says this person.

Another measure the CIA has used involves paying companies to gather intelligence for the government without even knowing it. In the last several years, the CIA has ramped up its use of “cutouts” to pay third parties to gather intelligence for them unwittingly, posing as data brokers looking into trends in the oil and gas industries, for example, says the same former official. 

The intelligence community needs to “think creatively about” intelligence collection, says Rep. Himes, who believes the traditional model of CIA officers who train in Virginia and then serve in an embassy overseas undercover will be difficult to continue. “This new panopticon that we’re beginning to live in” makes it “very hard to put people in physical proximity to each other,” says Himes. “That’s obviously dramatically true in some of the cities in China; it’s a little less true in La Paz, Bolivia. But nonetheless, there’s going to be a strong tidal pull away” from traditional human intelligence gathering, he says.

Yet he remains concerned about a tighter embrace between private industry and espionage. “We don’t, I think, want to be in a world where entire professions, whether it’s medical [workers] or journalists, are now at even more risk than they already are because people worry that they might be collecting intelligence,” says Himes.

If the old models of human intelligence gathering are compromised, the new alternatives may be inconsistent with democratic values, and it’s unclear what is — or whether there is — a good path forward. “Some people believe that within 10 years, espionage as we know it is going to be done,” says a former intelligence official.

Still, some within the CIA are sanguine about the future of the profession. “Anyone who says that human intelligence will become outdated is dead wrong,” says Marc Polymeropoulos, a recently retired CIA senior operations officer. “Intelligence services will always find ways to meet their agents.”

But even publicly, some intelligence officials are lamenting the dangers posed to cover, though they disagree over whether the problem can be addressed with new programs or procedures. Many are pessimistic that tweaking existing approaches will suffice.

“We can’t protect identities anymore. Tech is going to make it almost impossible. I think we need a new paradigm,” said Eric Haseltine, the former head of the NSA’s research directorate, at a lunch event in Washington in late October, when asked about the problem.

“Our officers overseas are known,” he said. “That’s a hard pill to swallow.”

 ______

Sharon Weinberger contributed reporting to this article.

#trump administration #president donald trump #trump scandals #trumpism #president trump #trump impeachment #cia #nationalsecurity #national news #national security #top news #top stories google news #republican politics #politics and government #us politics #politics #trump china #china news #china #russia #putinwork #trump putin #vladimir putin #house intelligence committee #intelligence agency #national intelligence agency #national intelligence #u.s. news #u.s. military #u. s. military

[trying-hard]

Trans Issues and Christianity

For my first post, I’d like to talk about something I care about in depth - Christianity, transgender issues, and how they intersect. As a trans woman, devout Christian, and politics junkie this intersection comes up very often for me, and I have a lot invested in it. The effects of this go far beyond just me and people like me, though. The topic strikes deep into the core of Christian notions of gender and sex, making the consequences of this debate extremely important - not just because it impacts trans people’s lives and the current political climate, but also foundational ideas of the extremely powerful and influential religion of Christianity.

In the big picture, trans issues being at the forefront of social discussions is a somewhat new thing. In 2015, Slate released an article titled “Conservative Christianity’s Discovery of Transgender Issues Worries Trans Christians“. It discusses how a group of self-described biblical counselors held a conference on “transgender confusion”. The results were not surprising; the article gives it the description of a “one-sided succession of rants against modernity and cultural change that made little or no attempt to address how religious congregations could go about welcoming individuals who are transgender and/or struggling with gender dysphoria.“ Since then, discussion has only picked up.

For example, the Church of England had visibly warmed up to trans people, going so far as to consider special services to mark gender transition. This predictably brought backlash along with it. Meanwhile, the twitter of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee, the social issues arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, regularly brings up transgender issues, and is currently advertising a book on the topic. On the flip side, the United Methodist Church recently commissioned a nonbinary deacon.

To truly understand this debate, we need to understand not just the arguments commonly brought up, but the relevant traditions within Christianity. It is no surprise that gender roles are prevalent within it. The two major ancient, apostolic churches (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) have never supported women within any of the major religious roles. Methodism was a pioneering group for women preachers within Protestantism, and they started as recently as 1761. Even then, complete gender equality in church roles within Methodism wasn’t achieved until 1956.

In terms of scripture, there seems to be clearly defined gender roles. Paul does a majority of the complementarianism, with writings such as Ephesian 5:22-33, 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, and 1 Timothy 2:8-15. While there is a lot of exegetical work (which I won’t spend time elaborating on here) that goes into interpreting these seemingly plain verses, some of which suggests gender complementarianism is a misinterpretation, the majority agrees that the Bible does mandate certain gender roles.

Lastly, the issue of sex, both the biological kind and the action, is fundamental to much Christian thought, even if most don’t even know about the important conclusions which have led to our present. A long time ago, a person known as Augustine came into the Christian fray. Augustine had some ideas, among the most notable being the doctrine of Original Sin. Augustine posited that sex and sexuality is intimately tied to the curse of sin, passed through mankind. This is why Adam and Eve were ashamed to be naked; this is why an erection, basically a prerequisite to procreation, is involuntary; and this is why all humanity is cursed for the sins of the first humans. Sex is inherently bad, in a way, according to Augustine. The reason Augustine’s thoughts are important is because he was an extremely important figure in the development of Catholic doctrine, and even if many tenants of his thought are disagreed with today, the consequences of his thought - for example, that sex is something which should not be talked about lightly - remain in conservative doctrine.

These three points - gender and tradition, gender and the Bible, and sexuality - are important to this topic, because modern gender theory throws it all into chaos. It challenges notions of innate differences and the connection of genitalia to psychology. When so much revolves around sexual biology, what happens when that is disturbed? What about when the existence of intersex people becomes a key point? It requires rethinking longstanding views, and to institutions based in preserving the heavenly truth once and for all delivered to mankind, that’s scary.

I understand the challenges it presents to conservative and moderate Christianity, and how it’s unnerving. Despite this, I still have huge criticisms with how it’s been handled. Even discarding the very obvious criticism of “they disagree with me”, the topic has been handled atrociously by major powers in Christianity, such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church.

Appearances and reports suggest the Catholic Church has butchered transgender issues badly alongside LGBT issues in general. Right before the Catholic Church held the Synod on the Family in 2015, a priest by the name of Kryzysztof Charasma came out as gay and in a relationship with another man. This priest, who had formerly been a part of a major doctrinal organization within the Church and had written much on theology, was rapidly fired and defrocked (removed as a priest). He later was interviewed and had many interesting things to say about the inner workings on the Church.

“The reaction to gender really began after the UN conferences, after Cairo and Bejing. The Vatican responded to those conferences with panic and disorder...

“In this situation, you cannot reflect about reality, about this thing you refuse. Therefore, the reaction to gender studies is to reject... When Darwin wrote his book, the reaction of the Catholic Church and of Christianity as a whole was to reject it. The only strategy was prohibition – not objective study, reflection, or dialogue – of human thought, which the Church perceives as not coherent with the doctrines of the faith. The same thing is now happening with gender studies.”

There is much more like this in the interview. This confirms what I had suspected beforehand about Catholicism: it is either unable to handle new challenges to gender and sexuality, or refuses to. With all due respect to the beautiful and fascinating theology of Catholicism and the intelligence of the people who study it, it seems clear to me that in this field it has grown outdated and is now entering a state of petrification. It doesn’t even need to necessarily shift completely towards the more modern perspective to avoid this; it just has to actually engage with modern gender philosophy in an intellectually honest way. As of right now, this is not what the Catholic Church is doing.

While Catholicism is the larger and more influential group, the Southern Baptist Convention’s rhetoric is worse. While acknowledging the existence of gender variance and the scientific research on the subject, they pose opposition with essentially no real solutions. While Catholicism may be inherently neutral in basically refusing to engage, the discussion surrounding the resolution to condemn transgender identity involves complete anti-intellectualism, suggesting no longer classifying being transgender as a mental illness was political and not scientific. Other lovely descriptors involve “revolt”, “confusion”, and “rebellion”; as well as suggesting being transgender involves a lack of humility. It’s not just a refusal to engage - it’s harmful, anti-intellectual rhetoric that is explicitly aimed at the political scene. While it’s been a while since that resolution was passed, if the ERLC twitter is anything to go by, the SBC hasn’t gotten much better.

Many of my criticisms could be fixed through honest, open dialogue. Intellectual isolation does not lead to finding the truth, but to other-ing people, relegating them to the threat and not to someone trying just as hard to get through life as you are. In this exchange of ideas, people are humanized, and bad ideas are shown for what they truly are. Earlier it was mentioned how the Catholic Church uses intellectual isolation to handle trans issues. It’s been noted more than once that the SBC has a similar issue, although intentionality is more unclear. Simply put, they appeal only to their own “experts”, and anyone with an outside perspective is not included. This is always bound to lead to intellectual stagnation, and it has.

I believe there are Biblical ways to reconcile the concept of transgender people with the Bible without even touching topics like Biblical infallibility. The Bible does acknowledge, if passively, the existence of intersex people within the category of “eunuchs”, and in one case explicitly lays out that they have exception from normal rules. Given that modern scientific research suggests that trans people’s brains are literally the opposite gender, should it be true, it’s not a stretch to posit that they are the exception to the rule. I don’t believe that the idea that God forms everyone in the womb is particularly Biblically founded, given the only two relevant verses I know of are poetic. There is the traducian view of reproduction as well, which suggests that souls are created along with bodies in procreation, autonomously. There is more to my views which I may cover in a later post, but not here; the point is that there is a legitimate case to be made for conservative and moderate Christians that being trans is Biblically acceptable.

This debate is complex and has far-reaching implications. Beyond even the very significant effect it has on trans people, it touches foundational principles of what is arguably the most important religion in today’s world. The debate deserves respect and understanding from all involved, and while a solution likely won’t be found soon, it is imperative that Christians, politicians, and LGBT people collaborate to ease tensions and understand each other. There is more to it than hatred or rebellion; it is something which touches the deepest parts of people.

#politics #lgbt #religion #original #transgender #trans #christianity #catholicism #catholic church #sbc #southern baptist convention #anglican communion #anglicanism #christians #christian #lgbtq