The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, then told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.
“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”
“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.
“I did,” he replied. “But someone had to go first.”
That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.
“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”
I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.
“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”
I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.
“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”
I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.
--- --- --- --- ---
Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.
After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.
He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.
The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now.
That was an eternity during a siege.
The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.
Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.
A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:
Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.
Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch that was driving his ship flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s deuterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned brighter than the sun.
The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to reach the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, sacrificed to move the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.
It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.
Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.
“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-
“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry as soon as I land. And I don't need your help landing it.”
He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.
I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.
But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.
I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.
“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”
“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”
I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside - to call it gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.
“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.
“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.
We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.
“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.
“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”
“Good,” he said.
I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.
It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.
AO3 has reached 18 million fanworks on the site! Come celebrate with us and learn about collections features. Read more at https://otw-news.org/3zd6mwss.
It's so important to acknowledge the very real and sometimes truly horrible failings of the healthcare profession and the pharmaceutical industry while never ever ever letting them drive us into the arms of pseudoscientific bullshit. This is something I feel really strongly about.
Two years before he died, my father came to my synagogue. For many of my fellow congregants, it was the day they learned that my father was the Rev. Jesse Jackson — a stalwart of the civil rights movement, an African American Baptist minister and one of the architects of multiracial coalition politics. To me, he was simply Dad: a gentle father who reached back for my hand on every car ride and taught me to meet difference with curiosity.
As the Saturday morning service proceeded, my father sat in the front row — holding my hand, dancing to prayers in a language he did not speak, eating the Sunkist candies the congregation had tossed to celebrate a bar mitzvah. Beside him, I banged on my siddur like it was a tambourine, weaving into those ancient prayers the rhythm of the Black church I was born into.
On June 12, carrying my parents’ blessings, I completed my conversion — a journey I held close until now. I was raised to believe that faith must lead to action. In Judaism, I found an enduring expression of this belief. Ancient ritual and the rigors of textual study were accompanied by the calling to “repair the world.” The Hebrew liturgy felt familiar on my tongue before I understood its meaning. On my first Rosh Hashanah, the shofar’s cry touched a depth of my soul I had not yet reached, and tears poured down my face.
As my father looked on, I reflected on the identity I would claim as a Black and Jewish woman, a twin inheritance filled with sorrow and wonder. Sorrow because, for Black Jews, racism and antisemitism can surface in even the most intimate and familiar spaces. But wonder, too, in the meeting of two diasporas: kosher soul food, Black oral tradition finding its cousin in Jewish debate, twin memories of an exodus from slavery.
So much of my life was determined before I was old enough to choose it: who I was expected to become, what I would inherit, how the watching world would understand me. My parents understood the burden of those expectations and were careful to give me the freedom to become a seeker — of knowledge, meaning and God.
Though I was raised among people of many faiths, Judaism became personal to me almost by accident. In college, my studies kept leading me back to questions of faith and justice, and during the pandemic, a serious illness and the long isolation that followed gave those questions new urgency. I happened across an online conversation about Jewish life and became captivated. That encounter led me to read about the faith and eventually attend my first Shabbat service. I kept going back. In that community, I recognized myself, and over time, we became bound to one another.
The connection between African Americans and Jewish Americans was forged in the struggle for civil rights. This shared history is now under attack. In some communities, speaking out against antisemitism is seen as siphoning attention from the fight against anti-Black racism. In others, confronting anti-Blackness is seen as a threat to Jewish identity and belonging.
About 1 percent of American Jews identify as Black. Their experience — my experience — shows that the alienation between these two communities can be overcome. The ethical language of my childhood was shaped by a Black prophetic tradition that responded to dehumanization with an unyielding insistence on the sanctity of life. Judaism supports this struggle for dignity, affirming that whoever destroys a single soul destroys an entire world, and that whoever saves one saves an entire world. Both traditions tell a liberation story that begins with a particular people but does not end there.
At the end of my father’s Shabbat visit, my rabbi, Sharon Brous, called his name to offer him a blessing. Before she could speak, the congregation was already on its feet. My father — one of the most recognizable Baptist ministers in America — wept as the congregation offered him a spontaneous ovation.
It was a moment of mutual recognition. Speaking a year and a half later at my father’s funeral, Brous said, “What a holy thing it is to be seen for who you really are.” That morning, my father and my Jewish community saw one another clearly.
A few weeks after my conversion, I stood before my community and announced my Hebrew name, Miriam Yiskah — the latter a feminine echo of Jesse, carrying my father’s memory into the covenant. I feel as though I have been entrusted with a sacred charge: to do for others what my father and my rabbi had done for me. Amid widespread concerns about antisemitism and anti-Blackness, it is necessary to recall that our differences do not preclude unity.
Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).
When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".
When the boat is still being built, your say "it".
When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".
When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".
When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.
If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").
If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")
If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").
If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.
If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.
I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.
“Cats don’t shoot laser beams out of their eyes either, Carl!”
“Mama needs a night off.”
As a proud member of the Princess Posse (aka: the Cult of Dungeon Crawler Carl) I had to honor the illustrious Donut with a portrait… I imagine Mongo is not so patiently waiting his turn, so he’s up next!
like i know venezuela is going through a huge humanitarian crisis right now and their political regime is low in the list of priorities when tallinmg about it obviously it's just it shocked me to read trump congratulating his secretary of energy on how well he's running what used to be a sovereign country until a few months back you know
in queer theory today we were learning about aids activism so my prof passed around safe sex comics from the 80s that are rly hard to find these days and i saw a donelan one! these pics r just the front and the back page!
every single comic had explicit gay sex in them it was meant to eroticize safe sex because to combat the idea that safe sex isn't as hot
"GMHC" visible in the margin of the second panel is the Gay Mens' Health Crisis, a nonprofit activist group that had the mission of educating people about safer sex.
when jorge luis borges wrote in a copy of beowulf that he was working on translating, “beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”
here’s the full poem! it’s so. something so transcendent something so inevitable and real and conceptually like looking into the abyss and hearing a choir sing your humanity back to you
"I’ve lived with incontinence for all 25 years of my life, and I’ve yet to see my experiences reflected in any form of media."
If incontinence was treated as a human rights issue, as something many people face and need proper resources to manage, I could have had a vastly different childhood. Even now, shame and stigma surrounding incontinence has caused severe damage to my self-worth and interpersonal relationships. At points, I’ve avoided sex and dating out of fear that I’ll be left humiliated and alone again. Even in my current long-term relationship, I still wonder if and when my incontinence will be too much for my partner to look past.
I know I’m not the only person who must feel this way. 25 percent of young women and 44 to 57 percent of middle-aged women (“women” is presumably used here to mean “people assigned female at birth”) also experience “some involuntary urine loss,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists journal, Practice Bulletin. And doctors can’t be prepared to offer long-term solutions to incontinence if they’re not even prepared to even talk to their patients about it. 50 to 70 percent of people who experience incontinence don’t seek treatment for it, likely due to the same stigma I’ve experienced for most of my life, which can lead to greater health risks.
I’ve done everything I can to shorten the amount of time I use the bathroom. But the habits I’ve developed to do so actually jeopardize my health, increasing the risk of potentially life-threatening infections. To change these habits now would require another $50 per month for the extra supplies at minimum — a price increase I cannot afford as someone who does not have access to comprehensive health insurance. If I don’t self-catheterize everyday, I put myself at greater risk for kidney infection, and kidney failure down the road. But I pay for these necessary supplies out of pocket, and they aren’t cheap.
I have approximately 500 something hours in BG3 now and am certifiably autistic about it what do you MEAN there’s a dwarf chef npc in the brothel named Sauceman Chorizo. Sauceman Chorizo. And he turns you down because he’s gay. How have I never seen anybody bring him up. This man should be more revered than Withers. There should be a fully modded companion storyline for him. His existence embodies the true spirit of DnD. I love you Sauceman Chorizo. The world will know your name
gracieabrams
origamiaround
discoholicmusic
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
