As recently as the late 90s, many low support-needs autistics would have had even more severe social challenges and suffered even more isolation than they currently do.¹ The internet provided tons of informational resources that are very useful to autistic people, and made joining in discussions much easier because of the somewhat removed, text-based format we all know and love. But the internet also did something else that was very important: it broke down barriers that prevented the formation of autistic communities.
The internet fixed the geographical density issue that had long made the formation of autistic communities difficult or impossible, and of course online communities have significant accessibility advantages as well.
And as a result all of this new interaction between autistics, websites like wrongplanet.com, groups like Aspies for Freedom and the ASAN were founded, and the Neurodiversity Paradigm became the prominent understanding of autism among these autistics. In the early 2000s, the neurodiversity movement really took form in the heart of those online forums and communities made for autistics.
However, there is a problem with all of this.
Lately I’ve been reading some of the foundational texts of the neurodiversity movement, such as essays by Nick Walker, because I was curious to see how some of the ideas of the neurodiversity paradigm formed in their early stages. Although I agree with what they have to say, largely, one key issue stands out to me: the way they talk about autism almost completely seems to neglect level 2s/3s who are more severely disabled (for example, intellectually, or otherwise) because of autism.²
The social model does NOT completely explain autism, as some may claim. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, and sometimes that creates some really big problems with development during childhood in a way that means you don’t really ever start developing at all, or only extremely slowly. As they grow up, that is not something that will go away. Some autistics struggle even with things like using the bathroom as fully grown adults. Some cannot form full sentences. My boyfriend’s brother is one such person. Texts on neurodiversity, while very helpful to me, often seem to have completely forgotten people like him.
Lower support needs autistics also often speak over and invalidate those with higher support needs.³ I came across a perfect example of this in a comment a couple of weeks ago, from a non-autism related subreddit:

As someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, nothing frustrates me more than seeing anyone, autistic or no, try to use their mental health condition as an excuse instead of, at best, an explanation.
Sure, it's a lot harder to learn social behaviors, but it can be done.

300+ upvotes. Sad.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to break down what’s wrong here.⁴ You guys know. But what I’d like to discuss is the why. While they may seem unrelated, I think these two things, the lack of inclusion of severely disabled autistics in writings about neurodiversity, and the tendency of some level 1s to say bullshit like that, have the same underlying cause:
I think there is a survivorship bias problem in the autism community.
While the inernet allows us to meet so many other autistic people, it’s only a limited subset of autistics. Those with very high support needs, or whose presentation of autism makes them wholly uninterested in joining online communities/discussing autism online, never make it into such communities.
It’s very easy to see the broad neurodiversity of these online spaces and think that it must be most of the autism spectrum. But it isn’t, it’s only autistics that would be in such places in the first place! And so, it is very easy to walk away with a view of autism disproportionately skewed towards those with lower support needs, with many autistics completely missing from this vantage point.
I hope that one of the best solutions to this is simply awareness. So, here is that for you. Consider yourself aware.

1. If you’re curious to see what life was like, I recommend the book, Aquamarine Blue 5. It’s a short little collection of autistic autobiographies published in 2001, each one describing their experience in college. I’ve only read some of it so far, but I’ve found it illuminating and extremely interesting to compare and contrast my own life.
   
2. Frankly, the only online group that consistently seems to remember that such people exist is the “Autism Moms”. Granted, they also sometimes think it’s the ONLY kind of autism that exists.
   
3. Shoutout to SpicyAutism for first calling attention to this for me. If you visit, please make sure to respect that it’s a space for those with moderate to high support needs — dont go posting here regularly if you are not. I only ever comment, personally, when I decide that a particular discussion is probably also open to me.
   
4. Please comment and ask for a breakdown if you need it :)
   

As recently as the late 90s, many low support-needs autistics would have had even more severe social challenges and suffered even more isolation than they currently do.¹ The internet provided tons of informational resources that are very useful to autistic people, and made joining in discussions much easier because of the somewhat removed, text-based format we all know and love. But the internet also did something else that was very important: it broke down barriers that prevented the formation of autistic communities.
The internet fixed the geographical density issue that had long made the formation of autistic communities difficult or impossible, and of course online communities have significant accessibility advantages as well.
And as a result all of this new interaction between autistics, websites like wrongplanet.com, groups like Aspies for Freedom and the ASAN were founded, and the Neurodiversity Paradigm became the prominent understanding of autism among these autistics. In the early 2000s, the neurodiversity movement really took form in the heart of those online forums and communities made for autistics.
However, there is a problem with all of this.
Lately I’ve been reading some of the foundational texts of the neurodiversity movement, such as essays by Nick Walker, because I was curious to see how some of the ideas of the neurodiversity paradigm formed in their early stages. Although I agree with what they have to say, largely, one key issue stands out to me: the way they talk about autism almost completely seems to neglect level 2s/3s who are more severely disabled (for example, intellectually, or otherwise) because of autism.²
The social model does NOT completely explain autism, as some may claim. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, and sometimes that creates some really big problems with development during childhood in a way that means you don’t really ever start developing at all, or only extremely slowly. As they grow up, that is not something that will go away. Some autistics struggle even with things like using the bathroom as fully grown adults. Some cannot form full sentences. My boyfriend’s brother is one such person. Texts on neurodiversity, while very helpful to me, often seem to have completely forgotten people like him.
Lower support needs autistics also often speak over and invalidate those with higher support needs.³ I came across a perfect example of this in a comment a couple of weeks ago, from a non-autism related subreddit:

As someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, nothing frustrates me more than seeing anyone, autistic or no, try to use their mental health condition as an excuse instead of, at best, an explanation.
Sure, it's a lot harder to learn social behaviors, but it can be done.

300+ upvotes. Sad.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to break down what’s wrong here.⁴ You guys know. But what I’d like to discuss is the why. While they may seem unrelated, I think these two things, the lack of inclusion of severely disabled autistics in writings about neurodiversity, and the tendency of some level 1s to say bullshit like that, have the same underlying cause:
I think there is a survivorship bias problem in the autism community.
While the inernet allows us to meet so many other autistic people, it’s only a limited subset of autistics. Those with very high support needs, or whose presentation of autism makes them wholly uninterested in joining online communities/discussing autism online, never make it into such communities.
It’s very easy to see the broad neurodiversity of these online spaces and think that it must be most of the autism spectrum. But it isn’t, it’s only autistics that would be in such places in the first place! And so, it is very easy to walk away with a view of autism disproportionately skewed towards those with lower support needs, with many autistics completely missing from this vantage point.
I hope that one of the best solutions to this is simply awareness. So, here is that for you. Consider yourself aware.

1. If you’re curious to see what life was like, I recommend the book, Aquamarine Blue 5. It’s a short little collection of autistic autobiographies published in 2001, each one describing their experience in college. I’ve only read some of it so far, but I’ve found it illuminating and extremely interesting to compare and contrast my own life.
   
2. Frankly, the only online group that consistently seems to remember that such people exist is the “Autism Moms”. Granted, they also sometimes think it’s the ONLY kind of autism that exists.
   
3. Shoutout to SpicyAutism for first calling attention to this for me. If you visit, please make sure to respect that it’s a space for those with moderate to high support needs — dont go posting here regularly if you are not. I only ever comment, personally, when I decide that a particular discussion is probably also open to me.
   
4. Please comment and ask for a breakdown if you need it :)
   

I have managed to collect a lot of books over the years. I am having a health condition and I need money so I am selling my books. They are in pristine condition. All the books are plastic covered. Most of them are hardbacks or quality paperbacks. I have made a reddit account specifically to make this post. If anyone is interested I can list all the books.
THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ ISBN-10 ‎1785763679 ISBN-13 ‎978-1785763670
All the Light we Cannot See ISBN-10 ‎0008172420 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008172428
Tomb of Sand ISBN-10 ‎0143448471 ISBN-13 ‎978-0143448471
The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea ISBN-10 ‎0007554850 ISBN-13 ‎978-0007554850
The Palace of Illusions: Autographed 10th Anniversary Edition ISBN-10 ‎9386215659 ISBN-13 ‎978-9386215659
The Island of Missing Trees ISBN-10 ‎0241988721 ISBN-13 ‎978-0241988725
The Forest of Enchantments ISBN-10 ‎9353573572 ISBN-13 ‎978-9353573577
Last Queen ISBN-10 ‎9390351952 ISBN-13 ‎978-9390351954
The Mistress Of Spices ISBN-10 ‎9780552996709 ISBN-13 ‎978-0552996709
Celestial Bodies ISBN-10 ‎9386797569 ISBN-13 ‎978-9386797568
Henna Artist ISBN-10 ‎9354226523 ISBN-13 ‎978-9354226526
The Secret-Keeper of Jaipur ISBN-10 ‎9354226469 ISBN-13 ‎978-9354226465
A Woman Is No Man ISBN-10 ‎0008341060 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008341060
The Hidden Life of Trees : What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World ISBN-10 ‎0670089346 ISBN-13 ‎978-0670089345
Indian Snakes: A Field Guide ISBN-10 ‎8179253899 ISBN-13 ‎978-8179253892
Entangled Life: The phenomenal Sunday Times bestseller exploring how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures ISBN-10 ‎1784708275 ISBN-13 ‎978-1784708276
The Bird Way ISBN-10 ‎0735223017 ISBN-13 ‎978-0735223011
God Talks With Arjuna (Hardcover) ISBN-10 ‎8189535005 ISBN-13 ‎978-8189535001
Inner Life of Animals, The: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World ISBN-10 ‎1784705950 ISBN-13 ‎978-1784705954
Oxford Student Atlas for India, Fourth Edition - Useful for Competitive Exams ISBN-10 ‎9391050840 ISBN-13 ‎978-9391050849
A Song of Ice and Fire - A Game of Thrones: The Complete Boxset of 7 Books [Paperback] George R R Martin ISBN-10 ‎0007477155 ISBN-13 ‎978-0007477159
Eleven Minutes ISBN-10 ‎0008173575 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008173579
Yajnaseni: The Story of Draupadi ISBN-10 ‎8171673236 ISBN-13 ‎978-8171673230
The World's Favourite: And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ISBN-10 ‎9780008158613 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008158613
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas ISBN-10 ‎0007234503 ISBN-13 ‎978-0007234509
The Mystery of the Blue Train (Poirot) ISBN-10 ‎0007234384 ISBN-13 ‎978-0007234387
The ABC Murders (Poirot) ISBN-10 ‎0007527535 ISBN-13 ‎978-0007527533
It Starts With Us ISBN-10 ‎1398518174 ISBN-13 ‎978-1398518179
One Hundred Years Of Solitude ISBN-10 ‎0140157514 ISBN-13 ‎978-0140157512
The Secret History: 30th anniversary edition ISBN-10 ‎0241621909 ISBN-13 ‎978-0241621905
Babel: The SUNDAY TIMES and #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller ISBN-10 ‎0008501815 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008501815
Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition ISBN-10 ‎0241387485 ISBN-13 ‎978-0241387481
FOURTH WING: DISCOVER THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON THAT EVERYONE CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT! (The Empyrean) ISBN-10 ‎0349436991 ISBN-13 ‎978-0349436999
REBECCA (80TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) ISBN-10 ‎0349010269 ISBN-13 ‎978-0349010267
Pachinko: The New York Times Bestseller ISBN-10 ‎1837933529 ISBN-13 ‎978-1837933525
Slaughterhouse 5: 50th Anniversary Edition ISBN-10 ‎178487485X ISBN-13 ‎978-1784874858
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ISBN-10 ‎9780141439761 ISBN-13 ‎978-0141439761
War & Peace (Penguin Classics) ISBN-10 ‎0140447938 ISBN-13 ‎978-0140447934
NEW SPRING: A WHEEL OF TIME PREQUEL (REISSUE) ISBN-10 ‎0356516997 ISBN-13 ‎978-0356516998
The Color Purple [Paperback] ISBN-10 ‎9781780228716 ISBN-13 ‎978-1780228716
THE COLOR PURPLE (HB): A Special 40th Anniversary Edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ISBN-10 ‎1474625584 ISBN-13 ‎978-1474625586
DUNE ISBN-10 ‎0340960191 ISBN-13 ‎978-034096019
Shuggie Bain: Winner of Booker Prize 2020 ISBN-10 ‎1529064414 ISBN-13 ‎978-1529064414
THE GOLDFINCH ISBN-10 ‎9780349139630 ISBN-13 ‎978-0349139630
Trust: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction ISBN-10 ‎1529074525 ISBN-13 ‎978-1529074529
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (SF MASTERWORKS): The must-read literary science fiction masterpiece ISBN-10 ‎1857989384 ISBN-13 ‎978-1857989380
Behave : The bestselling exploration of why humans behave as they do ISBN-10 ‎009957506X ISBN-13 ‎978-0099575061
Lessons in Chemistry ISBN-10 ‎1804990922 ISBN-13 ‎978-1804990926
At The Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails ISBN-10 ‎0099554887 ISBN-13 ‎978-0099554882
Autobiography Of A Yogi (Complete Edition) ISBN-10 ‎9788190256209 ISBN-13 ‎978-8190256209
IT (FILM TIE-IN A FORMAT) ISBN-10 ‎9781473666931 ISBN-13 ‎978-1473666931
The Book Thief ISBN-10 ‎9781909531611 ISBN-13 ‎978-1909531611
The Exorcist ISBN-10 ‎9780552166775 ISBN-13 ‎978-0552166775
Gravity's Rainbow ISBN-10 ‎0099533219 ISBN-13 ‎978-0099533214
Harry Potter Box Set: The Complete Collection (Children’s Hardback) ISBN-10 ‎1408856786 ISBN-13 ‎978-1408856789
The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings Boxed Set: The Classic Bestselling Fantasy Novel ISBN-10 ‎0008387753 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008387754
The Hobbit & The [Hardcover] Tolkien, J. R. R. and Alan Lee ISBN-10 ‎0008376107 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008376109
The Valmiki Ramayana (Box Set) ISBN-10 ‎9780143441144 ISBN-13 ‎978-0143441144
SHADOW AND BONE (B PB) : THE GRISHA BOOK 1 ISBN-10 ‎9781510105249 ISBN-13 ‎978-1510105249
SIEGE AND STORM (B PB): THE GRISHA BOOK 2 (Shadow and Bone) ISBN-10 ‎1510105263 ISBN-13 ‎978-1510105263
RUIN AND RISING (B PB): THE GRISHA BOOK 3 ISBN-10 ‎1510105255 ISBN-13 ‎978-1510105256
Six of Crows (Collectors Edition) ISBN-10 ‎1510106286 ISBN-13 ‎978-1510106284
SIX OF CROWS: CROOKED KINGDOM(COLLECTOR'S EDITION) ISBN-10 ‎1510107037 ISBN-13 ‎978-1510107038
The Kite Runner ISBN-10 ‎1408850257 ISBN-13 ‎978-1408850251
A Thousand Splendid Suns ISBN-10 ‎9781408844441 ISBN-13 ‎978-1408844441
And the Mountains Echoed ISBN-10 ‎9789384898083 ISBN-13 ‎978-9384898083
Fire and Blood: The inspiration for HBO and Sky TV series HOUSE OF THE DRAGON from the internationally bestselling creator of GAME OF THRONES (A Song of Ice and Fire) ISBN-10 ‎0008307733 ISBN-13 ‎978-0008307738
The Boy in the Striped Pyjama ISBN-10 ‎9780099572862 ISBN-13 ‎978-0099572862
Girl Who Drank The Moon ISBN-10 ‎1848126476 ISBN-13 ‎978-1848126473
MYTHOLOGY: TIMELESS TALES OF GODS AND HEROES, DELUXE ILLUSTRATED EDITION ISBN-10 ‎9780316438520 ISBN-13 ‎978-0316438520
Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt ISBN-10 ‎0141021764 ISBN-13 ‎978-0141021768
The Night Circus : An enchanting read to escape with ISBN-10 ‎9780099570295 ISBN-13 ‎978-0099570295
Project Hail Mary : From the bestselling author of The Martian ISBN-10 ‎1529157463 ISBN-13 ‎978-1529157468

SFF here means all speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, alternate history, magical realism etc).
The following SFF books will be published in the U.S. in May 2024. Other countries may differ.
If you know of others, please add them as comments below. If I've made any mistakes, just let me know, and I'll fix them up.
The published book formats are included with each entry (mostly hardcover and/or trade paperback with the occasional ebook). This information is obtained from the isfdb website which lists one format type for each entry but mostly omits ebook entries. If it's a new hardcover and/or trade paperback book, it's very likely that an ebook is also coming out at the same time.
If you are using the Chrome browser, you might find the Goodreads Right Click extension useful, to find out more information on books that you are interested in:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goodreads-right-click/fbicpmopjallgdpklipffmihodimmcbe?hl=en
​
Key
(A) - Anthology
(C) - Collection
(CB) - Chapbook
(GN) - Graphic Novel
(N) - Novel
(NF) - Nonfiction
(O) - Omnibus
(R) - Reprint
(YA) - Young Adult and Juvenile
[eb] - eBook
[hc] - Hardcover
[tp] - Trade Paperback
​
May 1

• Chaotic Aperitifs (Hidden Dishes 2) - Tao Wong (N) [eb] tp
  
• Primal Hunt (Midnight Hunters 9) - L. L. Raand (N) [tp]
  
• Rocking into the Night (Wartime Druid 4) - Shawn McGee (N) [eb] [hc] tp
  
• The End of Time (The Cruel Gods 3) - Trudie Skies (N) eb
  
• The Ghostlands of Natalie Glasgow - Hailey Piper (CB) hc
  
• Undead Folk - Katherine Silva (CB) [eb] [hc] tp
  
• Voyage of the Wanderlust (Spaceship Initiative / Tri-Galactic Trek) - Mary E. Lowd (N) [tp]
  
• Whispers of Apple Blossoms - Brett Mitchell Kent (N) eb
  

May 3

• The Ill-Fitting Skin - Shannon Robinson (N) tp
  
• Marked for Sorrow - Y.M. Miller (CB) eb
  

May 5

• Thorns of War (The Smokesmiths 2) - Joao F. Silva (N) eb

May 6

• The Harvest - Diego Rauda (N) [eb] tp

May 7

• A Glitch in the Protocols (Terminate the Other World! 2) - Icalos (N) [tp]
  
• An Intrigue of Witches (Secret Society Mysteries 1) - Esme Addison (N) [hc]
  
• Archangels of Funk - Andrea Hairston (N) [hc]
  
• Barbarian Incursion (Sapiens 1) - Persimmon (N) [tp]
  
• Beastly Beauty - Jennifer Donnelly (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Beyond the Isle of the Lost (The Isle of the Lost 5) - Melissa de la Cruz (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Beyond the Ranges - James Aidee, John Ringo (N) [hc]
  
• Black Shield Maiden - Willow Smith and Jess Hendel (N) [eb] [hc] tp
  
• Blood at the Root - LaDarrion Williams (N) (YA) [eb] hc
  
• Burning Crowns (Twin Crowns 3) - Catherine Doyle, Katherine Webber (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Can't Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea 1) - Rebecca Thorne (N) [tp]
  
• Chromatic (Color Theory 3) - Ashley Bustamante (N) [hc]
  
• City of the Undead (Zombicide: Black Plague) - C. L. Werner (N) [tp]
  
• Coco Twinkles - Maddy Mara (CB) (YA) [tp]
  
• Dawn of the Last Dragon Rider (The Last Dragon Rider 1) - Shawn Wilson (N) [tp]
  
• Death's Country - R. M. Romero (N) [hc]
  
• Dungeons Just Wanna Have Fun (Dungeons Just Wanna Have Fun 1) - Maxlex (N) [tp]
  
• Dusty in the Outwilds - Rhiannon Williams (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Elevation of Mana (Elevation of Mana 1) - Wandering Agent (N) [tp]
  
• Fimbulwinter (Stranger Than Fiction 3) - T. B. Mare (N) [tp]
  
• Five Broken Blades - Mai Corland (N) [hc] [hc]
  
• For Eternity (Filthy Rich Vampires 4) - Geneva Lee (N) [tp]
  
• For a Lifetime (Timeless 3) - Gabrielle Meyer (N) [hc] [tp]
  
• Fortune's Envoy (Cyber Dreams 3) - Plum Parrot (N) [tp]
  
• Ghostroots - 'Pemi Aguda (C) [hc]
  
• Henry Heckelbeck Does Not Need a Sitter - Wanda Coven (CB) (YA) [tp] [hc]
  
• Hyde & Seek (Jekyll & Hyde Inc. 2) - Simon R. Green (N) [hc]
  
• I Ran Away to Evil (I Ran Away to Evil 1) - Mystic Neptune (N) [tp]
  
• Into the Sideways World - Ross Welford (N) (YA) [tp]
  
• Jerry, Let Me See the Moon - Jeffrey Ebbeler (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Loneliness & Company - Charlee Dyroff (N) [hc]
  
• Mother Knows Best: Tales of Homemade Horror - Lindy Ryan (Editor) (A) eb
  
• No Malto Left Behind! - Ryder Windham (CB) (YA) [tp] [hc]
  
• People in Glass Houses (Harmony) - Jayne Castle (N) [hc]
  
• Perfect Little Monsters - Cindy R. X. He (N) [eb] tp
  
• Queens of Themiscyra - Hannah Lynn (N) [tp]
  
• Quest for the Wishing Stone (Dungeoneer Adventures 3) - Ben Costa, James Parks (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Red Side Story (Shades of Grey 2) - Jasper Fforde (N) [eb] [hc] [tp]
  
• Rooster and the Dancing Diablo (Los Monstruos 2) - Diana López (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Seize the Day (Empress 1) - J. V. Simms (N) [tp]
  
• Shock the Monkey (The N.O.A.H Files 2) - Eric Elfman, Neal Shusterman (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Skandar and the Chaos Trials (Skandar 3) - A. F. Steadman (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Spin of Fate (The Fifth Realm 1) - A. A. Vora (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Supplication - Nour Abi-Nakhoul (N) [eb] tp
  
• Sweet Nightmare (The Calder Academy 1) - Tracy Wolff (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Brides of High Hill (The Singing Hills Cycle 5) - Nghi Vo (CB) [hc]
  
• The Daily Grind 4 (The Daily Grind 4) - Argus (I) (N) [tp]
  
• The Dark Side of the Sky - Francesco Dimitri (N) [tp]
  
• The Deer and the Dragon (No Other Gods 1) - Piper CJ (N) [eb] tp
  
• The Demon of the Absurd - Rachilde (C) [tp]
  
• The Downloaded - Robert J. Sawyer (N) [eb] tp
  
• The Eccentrics (Knight Watch 3) - Tim Akers (N) [tp]
  
• The Games of Olympus (Theos 2) - Arthur Wordsmith (N) [tp]
  
• The Hunting Dark (The Enlightenment Project 2) - Lynn Hightower (N) [hc]
  
• The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley (N) [eb] [hc]
  
• The Silver Curse (The Silver Curse 1) - Anna Orr (N) [tp]
  
• The Silverblood Promise (The Last Legacy 1) - James Logan (N) [tp] [hc]
  
• The Sins on Their Bones - Laura R. Samotin (N) [eb] [tp]
  
• The Skandar Collection (Skandar 1-3) - A. F. Steadman (O) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Sky King (Skyriders 2) - Polly Holyoke (N) (YA) [tp]
  
• The Sword Unbound (Lands of the Firstborn 2) - Gareth Hanrahan (N) [tp]
  
• The Things We Miss - Leah Stecher (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Traitor's Son - Dave Duncan (N) [tp]
  
• The Z Word - Lindsay King-Miller (N) [eb] tp
  
• Thelma the Unicorn - Kate Howard (CB) (YA) [tp]
  
• True Colors - Abby Cooper (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• When the Devil - Emma E. Murray (CB) tp
  
• World of Wreckage (Torth 3) - Abby Goldsmith (N) [tp]
  

May 8

• Forest of Swords (The Three Kingdoms Chronicles 4) - Baptiste Pinson Wu (CB) eb

May 9

• Flooded Secrets (The Chronicles of Nerezia 2) - Claudie Arsenault (N) [eb] [tp]

May 11

• Sundering (The Keepers of Midgate 2) - R.M. Krogman (N) eb

May 12

• 41: An Autobiography - J.D. Buffington (NF) [eb] tp

May 14

• A Battle Between Blood (Legend of Tal 5) - J.D.L. Rosell (CB) [eb] tp
  
• As the Sparrow Flies (Sojourners' Saga 1) - Chad Corrie (N) [tp]
  
• Blood & Fury - Tessa Gratton, Justina Ireland (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Blood on the Tide (Crimson Sails 2) - Katee Robert (N) [tp]
  
• Burning Sky - John Darnton (N) [hc]
  
• By Blood, By Salt (Land of Exile 1) - J.L. Odom (N) [eb] hc
  
• Cinderwich - Cherie Priest (N) [tp]
  
• Clairboyance - Kristiana Kahakauwila (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Cloaked Deception - Timothy Zahn (N) [hc]
  
• Dry Lands - Elizabeth Anne Martins (N) [tp]
  
• Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop - Joshua S. Levy (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Fleet Champions (Titan Hoppers 3) - Rob J. Hayes (N) eb
  
• Flyboy - Kasey LeBlanc (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• High Priestess and Empress (Arcana Oracle 2) - Susan Wands (N) [eb] tp
  
• Horizon of War (Horizon of War 1) - Hanne (I) (N) [tp]
  
• Howls from the Scene of the Crime: An Anthology of Crime Horror - Jessica Peter & Timaeus Bloom (Editors) (A) [hc] tp
  
• I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons - Peter S. Beagle (N) [hc]
  
• It Waits in the Forest - Sarah Dass (N) [hc]
  
• Moon Madness (Camp Sylvania 2) - Crystal Maldonado, Julie Murphy (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• My Darling Dreadful Thing - Johanna van Veen (N) [tp]
  
• Onyeka and the Heroes of the Dawn (Onyeka 3) - Tọlá Okogwu? (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Player Manager 3 (Player Manager 3) - Ted Steel (N) [tp]
  
• Puzzleheart - Jenn Reese (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Rise of the Strongest Sovereign 2 (Rise of the Strongest Sovereign 2) - Kaz Hunter (N) [tp]
  
• Road to Ruin (Magebike Courier 1) - Hana Lee (N) [tp]
  
• The Amethyst Kingdom (The Five Crowns of Okrith 5) - A. K. Mulford (N) [tp] [hc]
  
• The Boo Hag Flex - Justina Ireland (CB) (YA) [hc]
  
• The City Beyond the Stars (The Kingdom Over the Sea 2) - Zohra Nabi (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Dangerous Ones - Lauren Blackwood (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Dragon Legion (The Sunborn 1) - Isaac Hill (N) eb
  
• The Garden of Delights - Amal Singh (N) [tp]
  
• The Gift of Guthix (RuneScape) - Erin M. Evans (N) [tp]
  
• The Haunting of Lake Lucy (Ghost Writers 1) - Sandy Deutscher Green (N) (YA) [tp] [hc]
  
• The Honey Witch - Sydney J. Shields (N) [tp]
  
• The House That Horror Built - Christina Henry (N) [eb] tp
  
• The Last Rhee Witch - Jenna Lee-Yun (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Many Faces of Ista Flit (Tidemagic 1) - Clare Harlow (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Red Grove - Tessa Fontaine (N) [eb] hc
  
• The Witches of Bellinas - J. Nicole Jones [eb] hc
  
• The Wolf's Eye (The Order of the Seven Stars 2) - Luanne G. Smith (N) [tp]
  
• The Worst Perfect Moment - Shivaun Plozza (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Thornbane the Demon Witch (Thornbane Trilogy the Hexed Heroes Saga 2) - Paul Sating (N) eb
  
• Tomorrowing - Terry Bisson (C) [hc] [tp]
  
• Truth or Wolf - Anne Marsh (N) [tp]
  
• When Among Crows - Veronica Roth (N) [eb] hc
  
• Woodworm - Layla Martinez, trans. Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott (CB) [eb] tp
  

May 16

• Lost in the Garden - Adam S. Leslie (N) [eb] tp

May 17

• Bloodfeather Heartsong (Bloodsong 2) - Amber L. Werner (N) eb
  
• Kosa - John Durgin (N) [eb] tp
  
• Religion and Science Fiction: An Introduction - James H. Thrall (NF) [tp] [hc]
  

May 20

• The Lamplighter - Crystal J. Bell (N) (YA) [tp]
  
• The Switchboard (Connections 1) - Christina K. Glover (N) eb
  

May 21

• A House Like an Accordion - Audrey Burges (N) [tp]
  
• Battlemaster (Victor of Tucson 5) - Plum Parrot (N) [tp]
  
• Blood Torn (The Immortals (Shelley Wilson) 2) - Shelley Wilson (N) [hc] [tp]
  
• Chained Destinies - D. Jordan Redhawk (N) [tp]
  
• Cruel Nights - Jason Nahrung (N) [tp]
  
• Escape Velocity - Victor Manibo (N) [hc]
  
• Final Strike (The Dresden Codex 3) - Jeff Wheeler (N) [tp]
  
• Freeset (Four Cities 2) - Sarina Dahlan (N) [tp]
  
• Goddess of the River - Vaishnavi Patel (N) [hc]
  
• Head Full of Lies (Harlan Winter 2) - Jordan Farmer (N) [tp]
  
• Heavenbreaker - Sara Wolf (N) [hc]
  
• Hidden Fury - Bjorn Hasseler (CB) [tp]
  
• How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (Dark Lord Davi 1) - Django Wexler (N) [tp]
  
• In Midnight’s Shadow (Tales of Isyr 2) - C.M. Debell (N) eb
  
• In Our Stars (The Doomed Earth 1) - Jack Campbell (N) [hc]
  
• In the Shallows - Tanya Byrne (N) [hc]
  
• Journey's Revenge (1544 2) - Simone Kelly (N) [tp]
  
• Keepers of the Stones and Stars - Michael Barakiva (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Liar's Test - Ambelin Kwaymullina (N) (YA) [hc] [hc]
  
• Little Sisters and Other Stories - Vonda N. McIntyre (C) [tp]
  
• Looking for Love in All the Haunted Places - Claire Kann (N) [tp]
  
• Lost Ark Dreaming - Suyi Davies Okungbowa (N) [hc]
  
• Mazi - Koji A. Dae (CB) [eb] tp
  
• Mind Games - Nora Roberts (N) [hc]
  
• Pliable Truths (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - Dayton Ward (N) [tp]
  
• Relight My Fire (The Stranger Times 4) - C. K. McDonnell (N) [hc] [tp]
  
• Reverberations (Manabound 2) - Travis Albrecht (N) [tp]
  
• The Charmed Friends of Trove Isle - Annie Rains (N) [tp]
  
• The Dead Spot: Stories of Lost Girls - Angela Sylvaine (C) [eb] tp
  
• The Lamplighter - Crystal J. Bell (N) [eb] tp
  
• The Last Murder at the End of the World - Stuart Turton (N) [eb] [hc] tp
  
• The Magic Paintbrush - Eric Darnell, Kat Zhang (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Menace at the Mall - Steve Behling (CB) (YA) [hc]
  
• The North Wind (The Four Winds 1) - Alexandria Warwick (n) [eb] [hc] tp
  
• The Road Trip Rewind - Danny Tamberelli, Kate Tamberelli (N) [tp]
  
• The Shabti - Mageara C Lorenz (N) [eb] [hc] [tp]
  
• Vainglorious (Ciaphas Cain) - Sandy Mitchell (N) [tp]
  
• Way of the Wizard 1 - Michael Michel (N) eb
  
• We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures - Rob Costello (A) [hc]
  
• You Like It Darker - Stephen King (C) [hc]
  

May 23

• Find Him and Kill Him - Cody J. Thompson (N) [eb] tp
  
• Cursed Shards: Tales of Dark Folklore - Leanbh Pearson (Editor) (A) [eb] tp
  

May 24

• Blood Covenant - Alan Baxter (N) eb
  
• Enchanted Skies (Enchanted Series 4) - Various Authors (A) eb
  
• Memories of Forgotten Waves - Niranjan K (N) eb
  

May 28

• Bespelled (Bewitched 2) - Laura Thalassa (N) [eb] tp
  
• Beyond the Aetherial Veil (Odyssey of the Ethereal 2) - Jamie Kojola (N) [tp]
  
• Dreadful - Caitlin Rozakis (N) [tp]
  
• Evan Miller Is Waking Down (Dreambending) - Jerel Law (N) (YA) [tp]
  
• Evocation (The Summoner's Circle 1) - S.T. Gibson (N) [eb] [hc]
  
• Flawless Girls - Anna-Marie McLemore (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• Ghostdrift (The Finder Chronicles 4) - Suzanne Palmer (N) [hc]
  
• NecroTek (NecroTek 1) - Jonathan Maberry (N) [hc]
  
• Ninetails: Nine Tales - Sally Wen Mao (C) [eb] tp
  
• Shadows in the Stacks: A Horror Anthology - Vincent V. Cava, James Sabata, & Jared Sage (Editors) (A) tp
  
• Song of the Mysteries (The Wars of Light and Shadow Arc IV: Sword of the Canon 3) - Janny Wurts (N) [hc]
  
• Soul Cage (Soulbreaker 1) - L.R. Schulz (N) eb
  
• The Burning Witch 3 (The Burning Witch 3) - Delemhach (N) [tp]
  
• The Fireborne Blade (The Fireborne Blade 1) - Charlotte Bond (N) [hc]
  
• The Only Light Left Burning (All That's Left in the World 2) - Erik J. Brown (N) (YA) [hc]
  
• The Rictus Grin and Other Tales of Insanity - Erica Summers (C) [eb] tp
  
• Waking the Dead and Other Fun Activities - Casey Lyall (N) (YA) [hc]
  

May 29

• A Memory of Song: First Verse of the Last Ballad - Scott Palmer (N) eb
  
• Feral - Bryan Alaspa (N) eb
  

May 30

• A Melody of Death (Isles of Bright and Shadow 2) - C.E. Page (N) eb
  
• Dark City Rising (The Edinburgh Doctrines) - CL Jarvis (N) eb
  
• Die Young (Runeborn 1) - Morgan Shank (N) eb
  
• From the Belly - Emmett Nahil (N) [eb] tp (#ehh)
  

​
Edit1: Added in horror books listed on Emily C. Hughes' blog that I didn't already have (tag #ehh)
Edit2: Added in books from the May io9 SF/Fantasy list that I'd missed (tag #io9)
Edit3: Added in books from Rob J. Hayes' May 2024 list of self-published fantasy books, that I didn't already have (tag #rjhspb)
​
Archive
Previous "SFF books coming ..." posts have been collected here. (Thank you mods).
​
Main Sources

• ISFDB forthcoming books at https://www.isfdb.org/fc.cgi
  
• Rob J Hayes' monthly blog posting on new self-published books: https://www.robjhayes.co.uk/blog/
  
• io9's monthly list of new sci-fi and fantasy books.
  
• Horror books mentioned on Emily C. Hughes' blog: https://readjumpscares.com/
  
• Upcoming Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books listed at Risingshadow: https://www.risingshadow.net/library/comingbooks
  
• Locus Forthcoming Books https://locusmag.com/forthcomingbooks/
  
• Publisher "new" and "Coming Soon" web pages such as: https://publishing.tor.com/coming-soon/ and https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/imprint/orbit/
  
• Reviews of ARC books by various users in this sub.
  
• Other occasional posts to this sub announcing up-n-coming books.
  

葉隠入門 Hagakure Nyūmon The Old Man Epilogue: Japan

^{January 1999, Chiyoda, Tokyo}
“When I was twenty years old Japan was less than the shell of a nation, it is more accurate to say it was less than the shell of a clam. Now I am seventy-five and Japan is the finest nation on earth; a leader in bioscience and technology, with a robust economy and a deep respect for human rights. Now at last I feel I can rest easy, alongside the Emeritus Emperor, and let a new generation lead us into the 21st century. Thank you Japan, thank you all the people of Japan. Now I can proudly announce I am stepping down from the Office of Prime Minister and leaving the Diet.” Prime Minister Mishima Yukio, Resignation Speech
Theme Music: 1980's Japanese City Pop Playlist
----

Contents

1. The Old Man: Mishima Yukio's Resignation
2. Kuril Islands Dispute, 1964
3. Computing Technology, 1970
4. Defence Rearmament, 1976
5. Emperor Akihito Abdication, 1983
6. The Economy Collapses, 1993
7. Post-Cold War, 1999 onwards: Inluding, Bharat, South Korea, Anime, HSR, Latin America

----

The Old Man

Mishima Yukio had been young when the bomb had brought hell on earth to Hiroshima and Nagaski. He was not young any more. He had held his father's seat, the Tokyo 3rd District, since the early 80’s, the same year as his father’s passing. He knew at nearly seventy-five he could no longer keep ruling Japan, he had been her Prime Minister for nearly twelve years. There was a time and place for all men, and it was his time to step down. The opening of the new Imperial Museum of Japan had been the perfect opportunity. Now in front of a class of eager eyed under graduates from the Emperor’s College Gakushuin, he was being asked to reflect on his years.
He stood at the podium, Minister for Foreign Affairs Koike Yuriko and new Prime Minister Koizumi Ichiro sitting in the crowd before him. Mishima’s determined eyes looked at the young graduates behind his friends. He had never been a shy man, he had demanded obedience from all those who worked for him. Now he commanded the room just by standing at a podium, even as a retired old man he had this power. It started when he was Prosecutor-General, staring down Yakuza leaders like Omori Shogen and his Black Dragon society in the wake of the failure in the Korean War. It continued when he was the deputy for Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, The Shogun, and the liaison between Nakasone and Reagan.
Prime Minister Mishima had been a hard man, with hard eyes, but now he was also an old man, with old eyes. Once he had seen people his own age, now he saw a new generation sprouting through the ground, and ready to take their place in the sun.
His hands gripped the podium in front of the old Tokyo Station. It was a beautiful building, black scallop-tile roof, crimson brick facade, and white detailing on the columns, and accents. It served the city well as the Marunouchi-side train station. It had seen just about everything from post-war recovery, to mid-year boom. The Government had elected to make it a museum, and open a new station directly opposite. It was a trillion yen project, but it would ensure smooth operation of the train lines beneath Tokyo for decades to come. It was the site of his resignation.
Mishima cleared his throat and returned to the great lecture hall of Gakushuin. Koike started the applause, she had been the youngest Foreign Minister in Japanese history, and first woman. Prime Minister Koizumi joined her, his silver mane of hair catching the light and reminding Japan why he was called Lionheart. The applause caught on like a gust of wind and Mishima raised his hand to thank them and quiet the room down. He smiled and tapped the mic.
“Thank you, it has been some time since my resignation, and I am surprised that anyone cares what I have to say. Thank you to Gakushuin, thank you to the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, and thank you to all the freshmen of the class of 2008 who are just starting their university degrees. Today I am proud to give my special lecture on the History of Japan. As many of you know, I have been involved with the Government since the early 50s, and today will be a highlight reel of sorts. I encourage you to be critical, to view my moments with an analytical mind and a poetic heart. I am an old man with an old man’s memories and fondness.”
He smiled and pressed the clicker in his hand, the slide behind him flicking off the title screen and onto his first moment.

Kuril Islands, 1964

Yoshida looked down at the islands from aboard the Prime Ministerial plane, smoke billowing from several areas of the city even as the plane began to descend.
“Is this a good idea?”
He turned to his advisor.
“It is not an idea, it is a plan.”
He replied coolly.
The local population had risen up in riots against the Soviet forces, a dozen Soviet soldiers were dead, many more had fled the four islands that Japan had once called its own. Self governance had been the objective of the rioters, Japan had been forced to respond, the Soviet Union had massed a police force in response. Yoshida had called on the Self Defence Force mobilised in Hokkaido. Escalation after escalation was occurring, a spiral of chaos Japan and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war.
The plan landed with a jarring thud and Yoshida re-read through his speech once again. It made no reference to the referendum that Japan had stoked on the islands. It made no mention of the census Japan had conducted with the support of the coast guard. It was silent on the old treaties which referenced the islands.
Yoshida’s mouth was a thin line, they were playing a dangerous game. Behind him Omori Shogen, the Architect, sat with his high collared black suit, his mouth a smirk.
Hours later Omori sniffed and breathed out a blast of frosty air, his smirk turned into a smile. The trap had been laid, set, and then sprung perfectly. The Black Dragon Society had weaved Japanese flags through the crowd gathered to hear the Prime Minister speak.
The critical line of the speech had sent the crowd into a roar of support - The Kurils are Japan, Japan is the Kurils, and Japan will not leave her sons and daughters of the north alone any more.
The Soviet call had come not an hour later, the police force had withdrawn, and an American aircraft carrier force had sailed through the straits.
Omori had moved his pieces, entraping the Soviets and the Americans. Japan would gain the Kurils back, America beholden to the San Francisco Treaty, and the Soviets forced to back down else risk American involvement in North-Asian Atlantic affairs. History would record this day as the day that Prime Minister Yoshida started the path of Japan back to full territorial integrity.

Computing, 1970

As the Japanese economy surged in the 1960s and 70s, it leapt ahead in technological advancement on the back of Sony's groundbreaking development of transistors. If Sony was the leading goose, then Hitachi, NEC, and Sharp were closely following. Together the four companies competed against one another and their US competitors. The result was the formation of the eight-bit gosanke personal computers. They were the formation of the Japanese second wave technological revolution, and the mass transition away from old style business and by the late 70’s Japan was on the cutting edge of global innovation. The widespread adoption of Sony computers, particularly by the elite in India and Latin America, not only strengthened Japan's economic ties with these regions but also positioned the nation as a technological powerhouse with a profound impact on global markets.
The personal computer uptake in Japan was miraculous and in large part led by the forge-ahead doctrine of the Sato Administration. Sato with his fascination for all things technologically advanced pushed all government agencies, at great cost, to transition off paper based reporting and onto modern computers. Computing power became the overriding objective of the newly formed Ministry of Technology which was headed up by Ohga Norio. Computer programming was added into the national curriculum, and computer engineers were brought in from the United States and Europe to deliver university courses. Technology literacy across the country soared and with it a demand for computer based mass entertainment. Enter the video game. Nintendo and Sony entered the home entertainment market with colour TV connected consoles in the late 1970s and kicked off the great console wars. By early 1980 the NES had taken over as the dominant video game console, and by mid 1980 Sony had released their Playstation to roaring success.
The age of the computer had arrived and for Japan there was no going back. As home computing took primacy for most Japanese, the Soviet Union and America took to the stars and the Space race of the 1970s kicked off properly. Not to be left behind, Japan was the fourth country to put a satellite into orbit, and with American help the third nationality into space. As the Americans put the space race front of mind, their minds reaching for a lunar landing ahead of the soviets, Japan turned to more earthly affairs and the pursuit of smaller more powerful computing. A dream was born in Japan amongst this surge in technological innovation, a series of interconnected computers, a web of sorts between the universities of the country, to share research and academic papers.

Defence, 1976

Admiral Uruhara stood on the deck of the JSDN Fuji, the first aircraft carrier to be put to sea by the country since the early 1940’s. In front of him sat the heads of state from a collection of nations calling themselves ASEAN. The American Ambassador had joined them, along with Australia, India, and a handful of South American partners. Japanese ship building was back at full capacity after a decade of rebuilding, the Kure Naval Arsenal leading the way for construction of ship building facilities from Sapporo down to Chishima Rettou. Japan was now the largest ship builder in the world, her naval self defence force rebuilding the hights of the Japanese navy.
The Americans had been forced to accede to rearmament demands following Chinese nuclear tests in 1964. The Kuril Islands affair spurred Soviet Support for North Korea’s and Communist China’s development risk taking.
Admiral Uruhara in his maiden speech declared that Japan would support all free and independent south east Asian countries to construct complementary navies. ASEAN would be free, fair, and independent. Japanese naval capacity would ensure that the region never felt the pressure of the Communists. Japanese manufacturing would elevate Indonesian, Thai, and Singaporean manufacturing through complementary programs, to new heights. Japan as the leading goose would ensure South Korea was supported in its struggle against the dangerous north, and the Republic of China would forever resist the cross-strait tension.
Japan in rearmament would ensure East Asian and Southeast Asian security from the forces best upon them. Japan in rearmament would be the single most important partner for the United States in weighing the scales of world peace in democratic favour.
The media afterwards had been dramatic, the Soviet Union and China had lodged a protest in the UN. The Admiral was called to speak before the Security Council, and the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations had been called on to explain Japanese civilian control to a body of democratic nations styling themselves as the Democracy-10. The frost had formed and the world had held its breath while the JSDF had recovered its strength. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nishikawa Motors, and others came online, Japanese manufacturing roared to life.
Across the Pacific Australia under the fear of communism embraced this new Japan, and a free trade agreement set the stage for a North-South channel of trade in raw materials from the southern continent. Democratic ASEAN with the same fear embraced the supply of easy to manufacture parts in exchange for economic uplift. As the US and Japan turned their engines towards the high end, ASEAN took up the slack in cheap and easy manufacturing, and the motorcycle entered Southeast Asia. The Pacific under the fear of Chinese military potential, and Soviet expansion of the Pacific Fleet coalesced into an economic machine. Fears of a renewed Japanese military were eclipsed by economic growth through the early 80’s and into the 90’s. Japan surged upwards into the highest echelons of GDP growth, democratic ASEAN empowered by the US Washington consensus followed suit.
Years later the Admiral would reflect that perhaps his speech went too far, that he had forced a wedge wider which had been opened by the Chinese. But he had been unapologetic, the crisis spawned from that day were the result of chain events no reasonable man would have foreseen. His tomb bears the phrase “From the Kurils to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Canberra, Japan will ensure peace across the sea.”

Emperor Akihito, 1983

The Emperor was not all that old, but he wasn’t young, he had three sons who he loved, and a country he had seen returned to prosperity from destitution. He had seen the world, studied at Harvard, and Cambridge, visited more countries than any Japanese monarch before him. He had delivered speeches in Wellington, Sydney, Washington, Paris, and Delhi. Akihito had become affectionately called The Boy. He had guided a half dozen Prime Ministers through their challenges, and befriended world monarchs from Brunei to England. He had a particular affection for Elizabeth II. They were not that different in age, and royals had a tendency to find comfort with one another.
Akihito sat and listened to the Imperial Household doctor, a man he had graduated from college with. The diagnosis was bleak, not dangerous, but bleak, the cancer was spreading.
Beside and around him sat more than two dozen advisors and half his close family. His wife, and his lover looked at one another. The shadowy back rooms of the Imperial Palace had reconciled the Emperor’s sexuality long ago. The Empress had managed the daily affairs for months ahead of this diagnosis. The Imperial Lawyer was the official title, but in truth the handsome man had been close to the Emperor well before then. The Empress has ascended only on ground that she be given control of the affairs of the children.
The decisions had been considered and then decided after that meeting. Akihito would, like his father, abdicate for his son. Ahead of the word of his cancer, and his lover spread into the public, because no secret could hold forever in the age of modern communications.
The abdication was announced on 1 April 1983, the 35th anniversary of Akihito’s ascent, it would take effect on 1 April 1988 the 40th anniversary. It would preserve the dignity of the Imperial office, the Emperor would take up his late father’s title Emperor Emeritus. Akihito would then retreat to a life out of sight of the public on the Izu Peninsula and the so-called Blue Palace where the last Korean King had lived out his days. Empress Yume would take to life behind her son, the incoming Emperor Naruhito, as an expert advisor on media matters, and women’s affairs. There she would ensure continuity of the Imperial line in the search for a wife of suitable stature.
In his retirement Akihito was visited by many former friends, the closest of which, the Kennedys and Kissingers came more than once. He published more than two dozen journal articles on medical research in his retirement. He is most famous for his pioneering new ideas in mental health for Japanese businessmen including paternity leave, and yearly mandatory cancer tests for men over forty. At the time of his death in the mid nineties Akihito held the highest approval rating of any leader in Japan, save his wife. His scandals had leaked of course; his male lover, his escapades at Harvard, and these had hurt his image, but in the end it was hard to hate a man who stepped in at the right time, and stepped out before his welcome had expired.
The Emperor had an autobiography published under the moniker Momotaro. In it he covered geopolitical struggles, Imperial Household operations, his time abroad, and his hopes for the future including same-sex marriage. It was published after his death, and public sentiment on his scandals turned around soon afterwards. The second print was retitled to his name, and a forward was added by his wife expressing her deep love of him, and his love for the new Japan that was coming into its own.

The Economy, 1993

The early 1990s brought an unprecedented milestone for Japan's economy when, for a brief period, it surpassed the United States as the world's largest economy. This moment of economic triumph, however, proved ephemeral as Japan witnessed the burst of its economic bubble. The subsequent three-year recession tested the resilience of the Japanese economy, ultimately leading to a return to limited growth. The Japanese miracle of annual 10% growth through the 70’s and 80’s was floated on the back of speculation, anti-competitive mergers, outrageous land valuations and unregulated banking practices. So hilariously out of touch had Japanese firms become before the burst that at one stage the land valuation of just the Imperial Palace in Tokyo alone was more than that of the entirety of California. The Emperor of Japan was the richest man in the world for all of 3 minutes before the markets corrected.
The bubble burst was spectacular. It started with a failed bank in Hokkaido, over leveraged to high risk ventures in Northern Pacific tuna, Hokkaido dairy, and grain. A drought crippled the entire northern agricultural market, and warmed sea water halved the amount of tuna caught in a single season. The bank collapsed overnight, and under the weight of its debts brought a dozen large firms with it. The market was spooked, and across Japan people went to withdraw their yen. A bank run formed, markets reevaluated their debt, and realised the entire structure was over leveraged both domestically and internationally.
In 1993 at the height of the economic period Japan had some 300+ banks, by 1994 it was 230, at the end of 1995 it had shrunk to just 70. The recession was severe, and a total contraction of 20% forced many of Japan’s best and brightest out of work. International reputation was their only saving grace and across the Pacific Japanese talent found new employment. Into Southeast Asia, Bharat, Australia, and the Pacific they went. What precious little work remained in the Home Islands was swallowed up quickly. Major firms consolidated and a return to Zaibatsu was on the cards, the Government stepped in to force large banks to keep companies separate, selling instead to preferred international firms. The Japanese market was at last broken open and with Microsoft, JP Morgan, Shell, and the European majors came English and French language skills. Despite the setback, Japan retained its position as the second-largest economy globally, solidifying its reputation as an economic powerhouse if also a warning sign of hubris and unregulated behaviour.
English became the second most spoken language in the country, with over 50% of Japanese citizens speaking limited English and 30% speaking confident conversational English. The French took a romantic third place. On account of the high school language programs set up in schools the Japanese English accent is heavily skewed to Australian English. Japanese-English as it came to be known follows British spelling traditions much to the chagrin of the American companies who entered the country. By the turn of the 20th century almost all university courses had made English a compulsory language for completion.

Post-Cold War, 1999 onwards

In 1999, Japan celebrated its 20th anniversary as a key development partner for ASEAN, marking two decades of collaborative efforts and shared growth. As the leading force in the region, Japan's commitment to ASEAN strengthened diplomatic ties and positioned the nation as a vital contributor to the bloc's economic and strategic development. Beyond ASEAN, Japan's role as a moderating voice within Western alliances' strategic thinking against the Soviet Union garnered international recognition, establishing the nation as a pivotal player in global diplomacy.

Latin America

Japanese relations with South America were a tumultuous affair. Privately, Washington had warned Japan against further investments on the continent. These warnings were countered by the free trade bloc Japan had formed at the start of the cold war. What South America gained in access to Japanese markets though, was tempered by Japanese revulsion for Latin Socialism. As the continent went through cyclical embraces of left wing socialism, Japan went through cyclical distance making. This included refusal to allow defence contracts to empower the regimes that came and went. The South Americans once again started looking north for their economic future. All except Peru that is, and today the largest proportion of overseas Japanese live and work in the country.

Bharat

The subcontinent became to Japan the closest of possible friends, it was Bharat who moved the UN to allow Japan entry. A geopolitical melting pot of issues, Bharat faced concerns both neighbourly and trans-oceanic that it could not tackle alone. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and International Cooperation Agency put Bharat in the highest of engagement echelons. From Mumbai and Delhi to Gujarat and Sri Lanka, Japanese firms found cheap land, and labour to mass produce for the booming population. Across Bharat Yamaha, Suzuki, and Toyota sold their cars and motorcycles. Along with this came the great road network, and the engineering power of Japanese rail.
Indians with all their creativity, and culture were the first group to be given longer term VISA status in Japan. Ethnic tensions followed, Japanese xenophobia was a constant complaint, but it did not stop the migration. Shibuya 3rd ward became India town, and like the China towns found across the world in the 80s and 90s, Japan helped Bharat export this cultural phenomena. In time Japan embarrassed certain elements of the sub continental culture, Japanese Golden Curry foremost amongst this, but so too fashion, and art. Across Japan desi-culture found its niche, and colour exploded through women's fashion in a vibrancy not seen ever before.

The High Speed Rail

Japanese development through the Cold War was miraculous, but infrastructure was where things made the developed world stop and take note. The Japanese rail network from Tokyo north to Sendai and onto Hokkaido, and south to Osaka and then down to Shimonoseki was the envy of the world by the late 1970’s. The establishment of a unified rail gauge worked miracles in streamlining development costs and planning. The crowning jewel was truly the Type-0 shinkansen, the fastest train in the world when it launched in 1963, travelling from Tokyo to Osaka at 220km/h. Built specifically for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics the shinkansen took the rail world by storm.
As Japan electrified its rail network during the rebuild of the 1950s so did it progress the expansion of it. If the Pacific coast was the original rebuild and the planned construction path of the shinkansen, the Sea of Japan coast was the luxury line. The so-called Blue trains and their sleeper cars took on new meaning and the eponymous ‘blue’ name came to reflect the floor to ceiling views of the Sea of Japan possible on the carriages.
These trains through the 1990s were taken up by developed countries, first in Australia, and then Canada. It was on the back of rail technology that Japan escaped her economic conundrum, and the export of this technology saved manufacturing and industry jobs in the millions. Eventually Japan came to fully dominate the high speed rail network until France entered the foray and then China afterwards. By the time of the early 2000s while she was head and shoulders above the competition, competitors had commenced the catch up in Europe and Eurasia.

Anime

In the late 1980s Japanese animation took a leap forward that launched it from a local domestic production of Mega-man and Sailor moon, to global prominence. Dragon Ball burst onto the TV scene in 1986 and captured the hearts and minds of a generation of young men across Japan and the English version across America, UK and Australia. Its sequel series Dragon Ball Z in 1992 was a cultural touchstone and translated into some 38 different languages for broadcast around the globe. This success though was just the precursor, these were Japanese manga transformed into tv cartoons for children. April 1 1997 changed the world forever when across Japan, the United States, Europe and Australia a new anime captured such a vast swath of children it sparked security concerns inside the CIA and MI5, it was called Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon.
In the original airing wake came the portable handheld gaming device explosion, the Gameboy and the headline games, Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. Catch ‘em All Fever consumed children across the planet, Nintendo was forced to front Senate hearings and submit technical specifications of the Gameboy to security agencies. Perhaps one of the most ludicrous moments of the late 90’s though was during the 1998 election in Australia where Mr John Howard dressed up as the character Pikachu. It was an effort to sell his vision of new investments in children’s programming, early childhood education, and regional relations. Unfortunately technical issues with his suit caused a power malfunction, and he was electrocuted to death. Kim Beazley went on to win the election, Paulin Hanson’s One Nation Party stealing away for the first time the balance of power in the federal House of Representatives. Until she too was felled by a pokemon scandal, an illegal trading card ring smuggling drugs in so called “booster packs”.

South Korea

The peninsula and the failure of the Korean War haunted Japan well after the cessation of hostilities. It bubbled away problematically between South and North for 50 years, the South moving its capital to Busan, a bastion of Japanese culture in the new nation. From military dictatorship to democracy, the Miracle of the Floating Port, and the formation of chaebols by the late 2000’s South Korea was well ahead of its languishing partner in the North. Japan’s role was the signature and leading trade partner, the older brother, and until the exposure of Japanese interventions in the Korean war, the former colonial master.
Tensions were never resolved between the two, but Mishima’s overtures and compensation to comfort women, and the ethnic Koreans who had called Japan home helped. The death spiral of post Cold-War Peace was on the peninsula though, a series of miscalculations, miscommunications, and accidents leading to the resumption of hostilities between South and North; Japan was quick to send aid, the Japan Self Defence Force learning the lessons of the First Korean War, joining only second behind the United States.

The Beating Heart of Asia

By the turn of the century Japan had retained its position as the second largest economy, become the central trade hub for Asia, and occupied a pivotal position in regional affairs. Following the bust of the mid 90’s the economy buckled but it did not break. France, Germany, and most impressively China were all on the surge towards Japan’s lofty second place. Storm clouds on the horizon though in the US debt market and Russia’s view on Georgia threatened the global economy though. Action on the Korean peninsula had put nerves to just about every major market across the globe. The Nikkei however was in recovery mode as the countdown ticked over to the year 2000 and in classic Japanese fashion, there was no issue to talk about, until the house was on fire.
Regionally Japan was the lead development partner for ASEAN and partnered with New Zealand and Australia for the Pacific. The US had retreated inward during the term of President Weinstein, made in America had brought manufacturing back to the mid-west. The cost had been ASEAN cooperation with the regional power to start up their own manufacturing and progression towards advanced production lines. The durability of these programs was unclear but incoming President Jobs had made strong commitments to return to free market economics. ASEAN, and the Pacific, looked to Japan to negotiate new deals.
The trading giants of PO-TEPCO, Nippon Yusen, and Port Authority Terminal set the standard for Asian trade. Together they controlled more than 60% of all incoming shipping containers in Japan, and a combined 15% of all global shipping trade. The ports of South Korea, China, Taiwan, and southeast Asia all adhered to Japanese monopolistic demands. Japan had once again become the beating heart of Asia.

I'm not sure how to format this post, and I'm on mobile so it might look a little weird. I'll refer to my friend as Ayin just for the sake of anonymity. We are both online friends.
Me and Ayin were talking the other day at night and I asked them what they were doing. They said they were looking for a book that was 350 pages long for a project, and the one they chose was 322 pages, so they had to find another one. I gave them a few (personal) recommendations based solely on the page count, with both being "cult that kill" and "no longer human".
Ayin declined both of them, for one because it was half fiction half autobiography, the other solely because they "like what they like". I tried offering them my hoopla account so they could look through my libraries catalog and find a book but they said they preferred hard cover. So I just ended the conversation there and said Goodluck. Time skip a few hours later, I asked if they found a book yet. They said yes, and I asked which. They didn't want to tell me because they were embarrassed of it. Sooo whatever.
I asked Ayin what they were doing, and they said idk. A few more general questions and still a "idk" or some other dry response. I got suspicious and asked Ayin what's wrong, and they said nothing and they just wanted alone time.
Okay... that's fine. But a minute later Ayin asked me why did I like talking to them. I told them because I enjoy spending time with them, and they basically started ranting about how they feel tired and that they're an introvert and they wanna isolate but also talk to people and help them. Completely unprovoked btw. I respond to it saying I don't blame them but they do have a tendencies of running away from their problems via. Dealing with other ppls. And that they should try to let someone take care of them.
Ayin responds by saying that's not true, and that they actually got diagnosed with MDD (Major depressive disorder) the other day. They said "that's not who I am" and "I cant afford to be in a codependent relationship again". I tell ayin that being independent doesn't mean you cant rely on others every now and then, and that believing codependency only forms from doing so is close-minded. Ayin responds by saying, and I quote "(name). im literally traumatized because of a codependent relationship."
For a bit of side context, me and Ayin used to date someone who was an abusive lovebimbing jackass at different periods and we both mutually know him and have been through shit because of him. We both know this about each other.
At this point, I was kind of pissed off. Ayin was coming off as condescending when i was attempting to help (in which, they don't even tell me what they want) and acted like I didn't know how trauma works or forms. I told them to please not talk to me like I'm dumb.
I'm trying to shorten this as much as possible without distorting it, but ayin essentially responds saying the same thing but explaining it to me like I'm 5. And they said they'll "open up when I feel like it" I responded saying they're talking to me like I don't know what trauma is even though I have post traumatic stress disorder and have been researching about it, confused and in the dark for years atp regarding what's wrong with me.
Ayin basically says I'm pissing them off and that I "always have to bring up how everything is worse for me in an attempt to empathize" Then they proceeded to say they're crying and they want to give up cause I called them close-minded. I do think I was wrong for that and apologized, but I don't understand what Ayin means when they say I bring up how everything is worse for me. I never do that shit, whenever I bring up my mental illness it's almost always because they either ignore or disregard that I have been through the same shit as them when im trying to comfort them and basically shun me for it.
TL;DR My friend always says that I bring up how everything is worse for me when i try to empathize with them when all i do is mention that ive been through the same things as them and im not a bystander. AITAH?

I was re-reading one of several autobiographies of Brigadier Frank Crozier (The Men I Killed), an officer of the First World War who would become an ardent pacifist in the 30s. Crozier is a very interesting person who brings a fairly unique perspective: he is absolutely blunt that the end justifies the means, and that the primary role of a military formation is to prosecute the attack, or hold the line in defence. In that regard, he is utterly honest that he not only used the threat of shooting wavering soldiers serving under him, but he was quite prepared to carry that out.
He describes turning his machine guns onto a Portuguese Division on his unit's flanks on the 9th April 1918, as they broke under German Assault, and also of shooting a fleeing panicking junior officer in early 1916. Crozier is very matter of fact in his prose: what mattered was The Line Must Be Held.
In accounts of the war, you occasionally get references to the threat of shooting to encourage those who were faltering - for instance, some of the men whose interviews which were used in They Shall Not Grow Old describe such threats. However, actual examples where the threat was carried out are absolutely few and far between, and a friend who has a similar level of interest found but one reference to a 2nd Lieutenant G R D Moor of 2/Hampshires shooting 4 men at Gallipoli to prevent a rout surprising for its openness.
It is rather understandable that the whole subject would of course have been incredibly taboo, not just for the action in itself, but the circumstances in which it would have been necessary (i.e. panic or breakdown in discipline), and the potential impact on the victim's family. Whilst I am mindful that Crozier is a sample size of one, whose narrative is not necessarily reliable, I still feel that his openness and lack of any remorse stand out all the more. In an army of millions drawn from all backgrounds, who faced many crises of battle, I doubt very much that he and Moor were the only ones who resorted to shooting their men out of hand at the height of battle.
Those who were formally executed as the result of the Courts Martial - all 326 men - have experienced considerable interest especially in the build-up to the Centenary. I won't presume to say that I have devoured everything on the war, but I'm more broadly read than the average (a low bar, let's be honest), and summary justice gets nary a mention.
All this to preface a very straight forward question: Could people elaborate on any wider views on summary justice in the war? Does anyone have an context on the Portuguese Division's action of the 9th April, or any consequences? Are there other examples of these practices? My thanks in advance.

[UPDATE: Hopefully the lack of any comments with corrections means I was in the clear and it was OK to go ahead and drop the episode, because I just did: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6u1RUWNONClUGfaZSaslot?si=Oos4uRB6Q7yaZC5o9ELhdQ ]
I host a radio-DJ-style podcast called, you guessed it, Songs of the Years. Last fall I started doing monthly episodes doing deep dives on my favorite recording artists, starting with the Beatles, then Dylan, the Stones, etc. On each of these episodes I play ten songs from the artist or group in question, and in between tracks I talk about their biography.
With a month to work on each one, I was able to take my time and be careful with meticulously fact-checking each one. But then a few weeks ago, Spotify announced that they were ending their "experiment" with the Music + Talk format in June. Well, that's the foundation of my whole deal! If I can't play tracks from the album I'm talking about, it becomes just talking about music, but taking away the music part. Which, to slightly repurpose the possibly apocryphal Martin Mull quote, is like dancing about architecture.
But I still had dozens of artists and groups I wanted to cover in these deep dives, so I started cranking up the pace, releasing multiple episodes per week. Unfortunately, this inevitably meant sacrificing some of that rigor when it came to fact-checking, and the result was that a few days ago I heard from someone on the Fleetwood Mac sub that I had gotten some important facts wrong about that band's early days.
I felt sick about this, since I can't go back and change the pod once it's released. So I resolved that going forward, I'm going to post my podcast scripts to Reddit once they are finished, and ask the people best situated to know this history inside out to help crowdsource the error checking.
Now, I can't pay anybody anything for this, as I don't get paid myself. No ads, no Patreon. Just a labor of love. But if you spot a goof and give me a citation from a solid source showing the correct information, I can (if you wish) credit you on the show for "research assistance provided by ________", using your Reddit handle or your real name, as you prefer. And you'll have the satisfaction of knowing the episode dedicated to Bruce will not spread false info like the Fleetwood Mac episode unfortunately has. (Spotify has said that although once June comes we can no longer create Music + Talk episodes, they will keep the ones already created up indefinitely, so this may well be the last podcast of this type, including full music tracks, you'll ever see dedicated to the Boss.)
Thanks in advance for your help. Below you'll find the full script. It's okay if you share portions of it with others, as long as you credit me, Alan Thomas, as the writer:
Bruce Springsteen, "The Boss," isn't just a musical icon: he is a blue-collar poet laureate, a voice for the working class. His music was born from the gritty streets of New Jersey and the vast expanse of the American dream. With a raspy voice, soaring melodies, and lyrics that pulsated with both hope and despair, he paints vivid portraits of everyday heroes, forgotten towns, and the struggle for something better.
His music isn't background noise; it is a freight train barreling down the tracks, carrying the hopes, heartbreaks, and resilience of the American working class. He chronicles factory closures and dead-end streets, but also the flicker of defiance and the yearning for a brighter horizon. Springsteen isn't just a singer; he is a bard of the blue-collar world, a champion for the forgotten, offering a flicker of hope in the face of hardship.
Bruce emerged from a hardscrabble Jersey town, the shadow of the American Dream flickering at its edges. Born into a blue-collar world with Dutch, Irish, and Italian blood flowing through his veins, his mother was the family's mainstay while his father was haunted by demons. His was a Catholic childhood, where rebellion against the nuns simmered even as something bigger whispered on the radio – Elvis, Sinatra, a raw power crackling with promise. His cheap rented guitar became a beacon, a pathway into the neon heart of the Jersey Shore. He haunted those boardwalk towns, absorbing characters and stories as the specter of Vietnam loomed. Then, in a stroke of luck, or maybe fate, a motorcycle accident kept him grounded while others went to fight.
The Beatles exploded onto the scene, upending everything, sparking that first ragged chord. His mom saw a flicker of something special, a fire worth feeding--the Kent guitar was a benediction, a baptism into rock'n'roll. From there, it was smoky Elks Lodges, beach bars, guys like Vinnie Roslin by his side – the apprenticeship years of the Jersey Shore. Names like Steel Mill and Dr. Zoom weren't just bands, they were battle scars. That raw Jersey sound, born on the Stone Pony's stage, rippled outwards. A San Francisco critic, Philip Elwood, caught the fire, proclaiming Springsteen a poet and composer with a blazing future. He wasn't wrong: the Boss was a fuse burning short.
His parents sought a new start out West, but the young rebel stayed behind. The restlessness wouldn't quit, though. The words flooded out, rough and urgent, attracting hustlers like Mike Appel, hungry for that spark. It was enough to get him in front of John Hammond, the legendary talent scout--the same man who unearthed Dylan years earlier. That audition was it: the last brick laid before the explosion.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was a calling card, a bolt of raw, unfiltered energy. Springsteen, restless and prolific, recorded most of the album at a shoestring studio, backed by his band of hungry Jersey misfits: the sax wail of Clarence Clemons, the relentless thump of Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez's drums. It was a whirlwind of youthful hopes and hard-luck stories, blending boardwalk bravado and poetic ambition.
Columbia Records boss Clive Davis saw potential but wanted a hit. Springsteen, with his rhyming dictionary and inexhaustible drive, obligingly whipped up "Blinded By the Light":
["Blinded By the Light" plays]
That tune's a kind of Dylanesque word salad: madmen drummers, teenage diplomats, summertime car chases. It defies easy explanation, but the energy was undeniable. There was something special in the air, even if its initial release barely registered.
Critics took notice, hearing echoes of Dylan, but also a voice all Springsteen's own. Words tumbled out, a torrent of vivid imagery set against rockabilly rhythms and Clarence Clemons' soaring sax breaks. Even with its grand ambition, it never lost that Jersey Shore grit. Maybe the world wasn't fully ready in 1973.
Manfred Mann's Earth Band later covered the song, scoring a massive hit and forever altering the popular understanding of the lyrics. Legacy? It's complicated. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is a time capsule, a portrait of an artist on the verge. "Blinded by the Light" remains its most famous--or infamous--track, proof that the journey from rough-hewn gem to pop phenomenon can be as unpredictable as the boardwalk scene Springsteen once chronicled.
In these lean years, the nameless group of musicians that would become the E Street Band took shape. Springsteen, handling the band's finances and forever ready for a Monopoly game, earned the nickname "The Boss"--a title that became synonymous with his leadership and their shared ambition.
They were back at 914 Sound Studios, the same cramped room where they'd cut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. But this time felt different. The E Street Band, though still unnamed, had gelled during those lean months. They were Springsteen's partners, not just sidemen. The music reflected this: it was bolder, the street corner poetry set ablaze by Clemons's saxophone and Danny Federici's organ swells. The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle was a testament to ambition, to dreaming big even with empty pockets.
The embodiment of that spirit was a seven-minute-long whirlwind of teenage yearning called "Rosalita":
["Rosalita" plays]
That is Springsteen at his most joyous and unrestrained. The lyrics, a playful tangle of boardwalk bravado and doomed romance, are pure Jersey, but the band brought a touch of epic grandeur, a sonic wall of sound that begged to be played at maximum volume. It was as if Springsteen was daring the world to ignore them this time.
No wonder it became a staple of those legendary multi-hour shows.
FM radio latched onto "Rosalita" even without an official single release, a testament to Springsteen's slow-burning breakthrough. Critics adored its energy and lyrical depth, understanding that beneath the raucous surface was a heart yearning for escape, for something greater. It wasn't a chart-topper in '73, but with time, its legend has only grown. "Rosalita" isn't just a song, it's the embodiment of youthful rebellion, a promise that the best nights, the best adventures, are always just down the road.
Springsteen's raw, unfiltered energy was undeniable, but fame remained elusive. Then came the Harvard Square Theater, that sweatbox of a venue where destinies change. Jon Landau, the critic with the power to make or break careers, was in the crowd. And that night, he saw more than just a skinny kid with a guitar and a heart full of dreams. "I saw rock and roll's future," he wrote, "and its name is Bruce Springsteen." It was more than praise; it was prophecy, a proclamation that the world was about to catch up to the fire that burned so brightly on those Jersey backstreets.
Born to Run wasn't just willed into existence – it was forged in the fires of frustration. Springsteen was coming off the modest success of his first two albums, but he knew he had something bigger inside him. The sessions were grueling, the pressure intense. Springsteen wrote and discarded songs relentlessly, demanding perfection from himself and the E Street Band. Stories abound of battles fought in the studio over the relentless wall-of-sound production, Springsteen's vision clashing with the band's desire for a rawer vibe.
From this struggle emerged what are, in my and many other people's estimation, Springsteen's best songs. I've managed to narrow the list down to three selections to share with you today. Let's start with the evocative harmonica and piano that open "Thunder Road":
["Thunder Road" plays]
"Thunder Road" went through countless iterations, Springsteen endlessly tweaking the lyrics and melody. But at its core, it always held that yearning for something more, that plea for escape that resonated deeply with his own restlessness. It wasn't just his story; it was a universal feeling painted in vivid detail. The band matched that intensity, crafting a musical landscape that felt like it could burst at any moment.
Next up is another beast entirely, a sprawling, ten-minute epic that showcases Springsteen's ambition and lyrical prowess in equal measure. This time we're opening again with piano, but with a sweet string accompaniment, as we listen to a tale of a barefoot girl sittin' on the hood of a Dodge, drinkin' warm beer in the soft summer rain, down in..."Jungleland":
["Jungleland" plays]
With "Jungleland", the Boss traded the open road of "Thunder Road" for the gritty underbelly of city life. Clemons recalled marathon sessions focused solely on that now-iconic sax solo, Springsteen demanding a performance that transcended notes on a page, something that cut to the emotional core of the song.
And of course we can't leave this album behind without spinning the iconic, anthemic, title track! This is "Born to Run":
["Born to Run" plays]
"Born to Run" came late in the recording process, and seemed to encapsulate the album's themes. It was a declaration of independence, the soundtrack for any kid who dreamt of escaping their small-town life to chase a better future. The recording was a testament to obsession: six months were reportedly spent perfecting that single track alone. Yet, even when the mix was finished, Springsteen's struggle wasn't over. Dissatisfied, he tossed the initial version into a hotel pool, nearly scrapping the entire album. It took the persuasive powers of Jon Landau to bring him back to the project, ultimately approving a final mix amidst the chaos of touring.
Commercially, the album was a breakthrough, peaking at number 3 on the Billboard charts and eventually achieving multi-platinum status. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece, with Rolling Stone later placing it at number 18 on its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. They praised its scope and raw emotion, calling it "a furious, romantic statement of youthful hopes". Born to Run remains an iconic work, the album that catapulted Springsteen into the upper echelon of rock stardom and proved that desperate dreams, fought tooth and nail for, sometimes really do come true.
August 1975 marked a turning point. The Bottom Line shows were proof that the hype was real, Springsteen playing with a raw, hungry energy that transcended the small stage. The press went wild, Newsweek and Time placing him front and center. It was the breakthrough he'd craved, but fame had a bite. Critics started circling, questioning the authenticity of this blue-collar poet turned rock star. Springsteen felt the sting, a flash of doubt amidst the whirlwind. The E Street Band was his anchor, the road his refuge. But the legal battle with Appel raged on, a creative prison when he was bursting with songs. The struggle was real, and it would shape the darkness that lay ahead.
Darkness on the Edge of Town wasn't a victory lap – it was a hard right turn. The legal battles may have stalled his recording career, but Springsteen's creative wellspring overflowed with frustration and a newfound maturity. Gone was the wide-eyed optimism of Born to Run; Darkness was a meditation on blue-collar ennui, the American Dream seen through a cracked windshield.
One track stands out as a stark centerpiece. It's "Factory":
["Factory" plays]
The opening lines paint a picture wearied by familiarity: "Early in the morning factory whistle blows / Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes." It's a scene dripping with resignation, a script handed down through generations. The factory isn't a symbol of progress; it's a relentless machine, stealing more than sweat – "takes his hearing," Springsteen sings, "gives him life." That dark bargain hangs heavy in the air.
This isn't a romanticized vision of the working class. Springsteen doesn't shy away from the grime and desperation. When he sings of "mansions of fear / through the mansions of pain," the anger feels like a physical force. You hear the echoes of his father's struggle, the frustration of a life spent chasing a dream that keeps receding into the distance.
Critics hailed Darkness on the Edge of Town as a masterpiece, a stark portrait of the working class grappling with a tarnished American Dream. "Factory" is a microcosm of that struggle – a song that burrows deep, leaving behind a gritty truth and the lingering sense that the relentless grind of factory life leaves scars that etch themselves onto the soul.
The late Seventies saw Springsteen's influence spread, a testament to his songwriting prowess. Patti Smith took the bones of his unreleased "Because the Night" and transformed it into a dark, desperate anthem that shot up the charts. The Pointer Sisters found similar success with his fiery "Fire." He fueled the Asbury Jukes' rise, penning hits like "The Fever" and collaborating with his E Street lieutenant Stevie Van Zandt.
Then came the No Nukes concerts, where Springsteen and the band unleashed their legendary live energy on a wider stage. It was his first foray into political activism, but the live album and later documentary gave audiences who had only heard the records a taste of his electric, sweat-soaked shows. These weren't just side projects; they were sparks from a creative engine that refused to slow down, a reminder that even as he grappled with his own demons, Springsteen had plenty of fuel left in the tank.
The River was a product of ambition and restlessness. Released in 1980, it was Springsteen's attempt to reconcile the exuberance of his previous work with the darker themes of Darkness on the Edge of Town. The double-album format allowed him to indulge his creative appetite for contrasting narratives and sonic experimentation, but it also presented a challenge.
The album's title track emerged from a batch of songs Bruce had been working on intermittently, initially written as a stark, acoustic ballad. Here's "The River":
["The River" plays]
The story of the unnamed protagonist and his girl Mary, with its themes of lost innocence and unfulfilled dreams, resonated deeply with Springsteen's own grappling with the conflicting desires for freedom and stability. As the recording sessions progressed, the song grew in scope. Roy Bittan's piano became a key element, adding a layer of melancholy. The band's arrangement straddles the line between rock energy and poignant introspective balladry, a testament to Springsteen's expanding musical palette.
Commercially, The River was a blockbuster, reaching number one on the Billboard album chart and eventually going multi-platinum. Though the title track wasn't a major hit, critical acclaim was overwhelming. Rolling Stone later placed the album at number 250 on its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. The title track became a Springsteen signature, its themes of yearning and regret amplified by the energy of his marathon shows. It remains a potent reminder of the transformative power of music, its ability to capture the complexities of the human experience.
The 1982 album Nebraska was born from a creative detour. Inspired by a book about the Starkweather murders, Springsteen began crafting a series of bleak acoustic demos. There was a raw intimacy to these recordings, a sense that he was tapping into a new and unsettling source. The decision to release the demos in their stark form was a bold one, defying conventional record label wisdom. He kept the E Street Band at arm's length, instead capturing the songs alone, using a four track cassette recorder. He even carried the cassette around in his pocket for a while, not even in a protective case, before he realized this wasn't just a demo, it was basically the master for the actual album!
The title track evolved from its initial form as a chilling portrait of a killer into a meditation on American violence and desperation. Springsteen recorded multiple takes, searching for that chillingly understated vocal delivery, a counterpoint to the brutality of the lyrics. Take a listen, this is "Nebraska":
["Nebraska" plays]
Bruce's guitar is sparse, almost skeletal, mirroring the empty highways and isolated towns his characters inhabit, accompanied by that mournful harmonica. That line about how "me and her, we had some fun" gives me chills.
I've got one more cut from this brilliant album to play for you today. It's a song that also began as a stark acoustic sketch. But as Springsteen honed the lyrics, the arrangement grew in subtlety. Hear for yourself, it's "Atlantic City":
["Atlantic City" plays]
The jangly guitar and shuffling rhythm create a false sense of hope, only adding to the pathos of the narrator's doomed gamble, somewhat reminiscent of the desperate scenario laid out in the earlier composition "Meeting Across the River", on Born to Run. The contrast between the upbeat sound and the bleak lyrics is disarming, a testament to Springsteen's increasing sophistication as a songwriter.
Critics hailed Nebraska as a stark, uncompromising masterpiece. It landed at number 224 on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. The record's stripped-down sound and relentless gaze into the darkest corners of human experience were an artistic risk, but one that paid off. Commercially, the album was a modest success, but its impact extended far beyond sales figures.
Nebraska is a testament to Springsteen's ability to inhabit characters far removed from his own life, to use music as a means to examine difficult truths about American society. These aren't feel-good songs; they're songs that force you to confront the bleak corners of the American Dream, a reminder that sometimes the most powerful journeys are those we take into the shadows.
Born in the U.S.A. arrived in 1984 with the force of a sonic hurricane. More than just another album, it was a cultural phenomenon, catapulting Springsteen into the realm of stadium-rocking superstar. Its anthems of blue-collar struggle wrapped in a flag-waving package resonated with a nation hungry for a new kind of patriotism. But beneath the arena-ready choruses and radio-friendly hits lay a restless heart, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction that hinted at the darkness of Springsteen's previous work. This tension--between populist anthems and a critical examination of the American Dream--created a fascinating and often overlooked subtext to the album, as exemplified by the titular track "Born in the U.S.A.", whose message of struggle and disillusionment was often misinterpreted by those swept up in jingoistic fervor.
I don't love this album like I do his earlier releases, but my favorite track on it harkens back to his older records with a slightly updated sound, standing as a stark contrast to the record's fist-pumping anthems. It's a haunting ballad, propelled by a repetitive minimalist synth riff and throbbing drumbeat reminiscent of a heartbeat. Here's "I'm On Fire":
["I'm On Fire" plays]
Bruce Springsteen originally wrote that song for Roy Orbison, but it resonates uniquely with his own voice--a tense, almost whispered confession of forbidden desire. The lyrics are a study in frustrated yearning, all unspoken longing and suppressed heat. The narrator is consumed by a desire he can't contain, the imagery crackling with sensual tension: "Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby / edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley / through the middle of my soul."
The song's production enhances its simmering intensity. Springsteen and his team experimented with synth sounds amidst the otherwise sparse arrangement, as the E Street Band provided a subtle pulse, creating a sonic backdrop that's both disquieting and strangely alluring.
The Born in the USA album was a commercial juggernaut, spawning seven Top-10 singles and going multi-platinum. Critics were largely swept up in the fervor, praising Springsteen's undeniable talent for crafting anthems that tapped into the American psyche. However, a more nuanced reading of the album reveals a streak of social commentary beneath the anthems, a critical eye turned towards the American experience. "I'm On Fire," with its hushed intensity and dark undertones, exemplifies this complexity. Though not one of the record's hit singles, the song remains a testament to Springsteen's ability to tap into universal emotions that lie beneath the surface of his larger-than-life tales.
In 1985, Bruce found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with pop royalty for "We Are the World." The charity single was a world away from gritty Jersey bars, the studio filled with stars at the height of their fame. Still, amidst the glitz, his raspy plea cut through with raw urgency. He may have later called it a "corny" song, but Bruce understood its power: even a simple song, sung by a chorus of voices, could spark a global movement. After all, it wasn't every day The Boss himself got to belt out a harmony with Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, not to mention being able to hang out with Huey Lewis and Cyndi Lauper. That kind of camaraderie, for a cause like this, transcended any reservations about the music itself.
Bruce Springsteen wrestled with fame's burdens during the late Eighties. The downbeat Tunnel of Love album found him probing love's rough edges, and as Berlin Wall fissures began appearing, his 1988 East Berlin show helped pry it open, proving that rock 'n' roll could be a force for liberation. But the E Street Band had to go in '89.
He cut "Human Touch" and "Lucky Town" in LA in 1992, risking accusations of going soft, and indeed these records didn't stick the landing like prior classics. Even a brave unplugged set did little to quiet growing dissent within Springsteen's ever-loyal fanbase.
Still, Hollywood came knocking: Springsteen snagged an Oscar in '94 for "Streets of Philadelphia". A brief E Street reunion led to a sprawling greatest hits collection. Then, inspired by Steinbeck, Springsteen hit the road with just an acoustic guitar for '95's "The Ghost of Tom Joad", a stark homage to the American downtrodden. But by decade's end, even he was confessing the Nineties had been a musical wasteland for him.
But the Boss came roaring back in 1999, reuniting with the E Street Band for a triumphant tour. 2002's The Rising was a gut-punch reaction to 9/11, reaffirming his gift for capturing the nation's pulse through rock. That led to stints on high-profile benefit tours and even an appearance honoring Joe Strummer.
A stark solo turn came with 2005's Devils & Dust, tackling America's growing anxieties. Then, Bruce dug into Pete Seeger's songbook in 2006, leading a giant folk ensemble on a tour many hailed as a creative rebirth. 2007's Magic was another E Street revival; then in 2008, Springsteen threw his weight behind Barack Obama's history-making campaign. He serenaded the crowd on Obama's inauguration night, his music the soundtrack to that dawn of a new era. Sure, his Super Bowl halftime show in 2009 was a nod to the mainstream, but the marathon sets on the 'Working on a Dream' tour, plus a Kennedy Center Honor, proved the Boss was more than a nostalgia act.
After 2012's fiery Wrecking Ball, Bruce found a new gear. No longer just a stadium hero, he got intimate with his autobiography, then even hit Broadway in a stark one-man show. He wasn't above campaigning for Obama or a Super Bowl romp, but that Springsteen on Broadway special? It was a reminder that he wasn't merely fueled by anthems: the Boss was a storyteller at his core.
But even when he dug into Americana on Western Stars or revisited old demos with High Hopes, Bruce refused to get nostalgic. He was too damn restless. So, covers albums felt inevitable, Springsteen putting his spin on the soul classics that shaped him on Only the Strong Survive.
And then came 2020: Springsteen's intimate Letter to You, a gut-level reflection during a bleak year, felt like a lifeline tossed from rock's elder statesman. It hinted that his hunger for connection hadn't faded at all. He even popped up on podcasts, bantering with Barack like old times. Proof that the Jersey bard still had a few tricks up his denim sleeve.
Sure, there have been pauses for health scares, and the decision to cash out his catalogue struck some as the final act. But Bruce kicked off an E Street Band mega-tour in 2023, proving he's far from the retirement home stage of rock 'n' roll. Hell, he's even promising more outtakes and soul covers on the way. The man who once raged against the dying light is now finding a thousand different ways to keep burning.
Few artists have captured the American spirit quite like Bruce Springsteen. For over five decades, he's been a tireless chronicler of its complexities: the grit, the glory, the shadows, and the unwavering hope. From anthemic stadium singalongs to introspective confessions whispered on Broadway, his music resonates across generations. He's a storyteller who paints vivid portraits of ordinary lives, reminding us of our shared humanity. He's a social conscience, unafraid to grapple with injustice and inequality.
More than just a rock star, Bruce Springsteen embodies a fundamental American mythology: the promise of hard work, the pursuit of freedom, the aching beauty of ordinary lives. His songs, belted out in sweat-soaked stadium concerts, evoke both a nostalgic longing for a simpler past and a fierce belief in the future. With his mix of gritty realism, yearning romanticism, and a profound faith in the human spirit, Springsteen's music is a soundtrack to both the American dream and the struggle to make it real.

This subreddit did not allow me to cross-post this post, so re-copying it as a new post with full credit to the original poster.
author: u/aegon-the-befuddled
original link: https://www.reddit.com/pakistan/comments/ge7dui/dispelling_the_myth_baluchistan_accession/
original title: Dispelling the myth: Baluchistan accession
"Our friendly neighbors, our own ethnonationalists often speak of how Baluchistan State hadn't acceded to Pakistan and how it was forcibly taken via a 'Police action'.
Let's set the facts straight, once and for all.
Firstly, there was no Balochistan state then & there was no princely state or parliament representing present day Balochistan in 1947. This is a map of how modern day Baluchistan stood in 1947 when British were leaving.
As you can see, there were 6 units of what we know today as Baluchistan.

1. British Chief Commissioner’s Balochistan (Included the leased territories of Quetta, Nasirabad and Nushki which were taken from Kalat by the British)
2. Princely State of Kharan (Considered vassal of Kalat by British but official principality rank).
3. Princely State of Lasbela.(Considered vassal of Kalat by British but official principality rank).
4. Princely State of Makran.(Considered vassal of Kalat by British but official principality rank).
5. Princely State of Kalat
6. Omani Enclave of Gwadar (Ceded by Kalat temporarily to aid an exiled Omani Prince who betrayed the Baluchs, occupied Gwadar and then cut deals with the British to keep possession of the city)

Now let us step back a moment and take a look at how Baluchistan joined British India.
Balochistan Agency was created to colonize Balochistan in 1877 after Treaty of Mastung 1854, Treaty of Kalat 1875 and Treaty of Jacobabad 1876.
Important articles of Treaty of Jacobabad here:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3

These treaties were negotiated so cleverly by Sir Robert Sandeman that he’s called ‘Peaceful Conquerer of Baluchistan’ by A.L.P. Tucker. A map of the Agency.
By signing these 3 treaties Khan e Kalat had effectively lost political control outside Kalat State by 1877 & accepted British Political Agent as the ultimate arbitrator in disputes amongst baloch sardars, In return for a payment & military support against Afghan incursions. Funnily enough, the reason Khan of Kalat Khan Khodadad Khan joined British India was:

the Khan was so enamoured by the titles and banners being given to Indian princes that he insisted to the Viceroy Lord Lytton that ‘But I am a feudatory quite as loyal and obedient as any other. I don’t want to be an independent prince and I do want to have my banner like all the rest. Pray let me have it.’ Thus, Kalat was an Indian state not because the British had deemed it, but because the ruler himself had practically begged for it.

Anyhow, Khan of Kalat, Nawabs of Makran & Kharan & Jam of Lasbela were called to the Royal Delhi Durbar of 1903 in recognition of their status as princely states. Nawabs of Sarawan & Jhalawan never received this invitation or titles since they’re considered under suzerainty of Kalat. Photo of the Baluch guests and another one.
The last Khan, Ahmad Yar Khan did try to return to previous state of affairs as before 1877. In a long memorandum to the British, the Khan claimed that his state was like Afghanistan and Nepal and should be treated separately from the other Indian states. The government of India replied in 1941, reasserting their decision that Kalat was an Indian state and had been treated as such for decades. So that was that.
Khan tried his luck again, this time with Pakistan's designated government. Unlike the British, Pakistan agreed to acknowledge Kalat's separate sovereign status. Lord Mountbatten realised the impacts of this agreement even if Kalat didn't. He wrote to British secretary for India:

‘it looks as though if the Khan of Kalat insists on his independent status it will cost him the leased territories including Quetta—a high price to pay for vanity.’

And this is what happened. Pakistan informed Kalat of legal implications of the agreement and how leased areas were not going to be returned to Kalat unless it became a part of Federation. With no hope for the retrocession of the leased areas, negotiations began between the Government of Pakistan and the Government of Kalat in September 1947 over accession.
So now that you have political structure and situation in mind, let's head back to where we started. 11 Aug 1947 when Khan of Kalat signed a Standstill agreement with Quaid to negotiate the future, Kharan, Makran, Lasbela categorically rejected Kalat’s claims of suzerainty.
Jinnah signed in good faith expecting all states to ultimately accede. Mountbatten refused to sign. The standstill agreement between Kalat and Pakistan. Do note, we are speaking only of Kalat.
Chief Commissioner’s Balochistan overwhelmingly voted for accession to Pakistan at ‘Shahi Jirga’ in Quetta after a spirited campaign by Qazi M Essa head of Baluchistan Provincial Muslim League. He not only rallied people in Baluchistan but also in KPK to vote for Pakistan. So one unit was down.
Princely State of Kharan was ruled by Mir Habibullah Khan Nowsherwani who favoured accession to Pakistan so highly that he wrote to QaideAzam lamenting delays in Kharan’s merger with Pakistan & proclaimed:

“People of Kharan are independent from Kalat & will die for Pakistan.”

Princely State of Lasbela was ruled by Jam Ghulam Qadir Khan, grandfather of current CM Balochistan Jam Kamal. He also repeatedly wrote to Quaid regarding pressure politics of Khan of Kalat after British rule ended & demanded a quick accession of Lasbela to Pakistan.
Princely State of Makran was ruled by Nawab Bai Khan Gichki who insisted on Quaid to accept an immediate accession of Makran to Pakistan & upon delays, grew impatient & threatened that:

“If Pakistan doesn’t accept Makran’s accession soon, then we may approach others.”

Princely State of Kalat mere 26% of today’s province of Balochistan was ruled by Mir Ahmed Yar Khan who was close to Quaid , his legal adviser.
Kalat had a nominated parliament dominated by pro Congress & anti Muslim League politicians of Kalat State National Party.
Khan of Kalat knew that independence wasn’t an option for him & princely states were to eventually choose b/w accession to Pakistan/India & accession to India wasn’t feasible due to the geography. He negotiated with QaideAzam to get max influence upon accession to Pakistan.
After Standstill agreement, Khan e Kalat asked Kalat’s parliament to vote on accession where politicians of Kalat State National Party Malik Saeed Khan Dehwar, Gul Khan Naseer, Alijah Ghous Bux Mengal, Ghous Bux Bizenjo allied with Indian Congress & voted against accession.
Khan of Kalat refused to ratify this vote of Kalat’s houses of parliament, instead lobbied for accession to Pakistan, while attempting to use this vote in negotiations with QaideAzam as leverage to maximise his own influence in any future political setup as part of Pakistan. Quaid's letter to the Khan after one such meeting with his PM. The Kalat PM mentioned in the letter had a frank talk with Pak Foreign secretary.

the Khan would eventually sign the Instrument as ‘if he did not, his sardars would turn him out, as they were determined to join Pakistan anyhow and were only waiting to be assured of their own rights.’

These negotiating tactics by KhaneKalat delayed the accession to Pakistan till Feb 1948.
It disappointed QaideAzam in Ahmed Yar Khan & Quaid also handed over the matter of Kalat to Foreign Service instead of personally overseeing it as he had deep bond of friendship with the Khan who used to refer to Quaid as a father figure. Quaid's Private secretary wrote to the Khan:

‘in view of the passage of time and the indecisive and changing attitude of Your Highness, he has now decided that it would be best to terminate his personal negotiations with Your Highness and to hand over the matter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs…’

Bureaucrats changed the game. Out of personal relations, Quaid had retained the British policy of considering Other princes of Baluchistan as vassals of Kalat. Foreign Service Babus however now recognised independence of Kharan, Lasbela, Makran as successor of British government in the region and these states gleefully acceded to Pakistan with Khan looking helplessly as his nominal vassals abandoned him. It isolated Kalat being landlocked in middle of Balochistan, as you can see in the map shared on top. Khan decided to play tough and the response by Pakistan government was that she would not object to individual Lords of Kalat acceding to Pakistan, given the nature of the state where each Chief was defacto independent and nominally under Khan. And that actually started happening. Tribal chiefs started abandoning the Khan and joining Pakistan. Khan tried to rally his sardars and invited them to his home. Only 2 out of 72 came, rest refused.
On top of Kalat’s isolation, on 27th March 1948 an All India Radio Broadcast announced:

“Kalat requested accession to India, which Nehru has rejected”

This humiliated Khan of Kalat, he denied making such a request & hurriedly announced Kalat state’s accession to Pakistan. This is the telegram he sent to Karachi:

‘It had never been my intention to accede to India. … This was nothing but a piece of false propaganda. … My first reaction after hearing the news was that no time be lost to put an end to the false propaganda and to avoid and forestall the possibility of friction between the Moslem brethren in Kalat and Pakistan.
It is therefore declared that from 9 p.m. on March 27—the time when I heard the false news over the air, I forewith decided to accede to Pakistan.’

Later, All India Radio clarified that it was a mistake, but by that time Kalat had long acceded to Pakistan.
Another gross misrepresentation of historical facts by nationalists is that Ahmed Yar Khan signed Kalat’s accession to Pakistan under PakArmy’s gun point!
He was indeed arrested, not in 1948 but on 6 Oct 1958, after his public opposition to the One Unit by Ayub Khan Govt.
But in 1948 not only was Khan e Kalat not arrested, he was honoured by Pakistan with a royal title & appointed as the ceremonial ‘Khan e Azam’ of a newly created Tribal Council of Balochistan called Balochistan States Union comprising states of Kharan, Makran, Lasbela & Kalat.
Nationalist leaders of Kalat, Mir Ghous Bux Bizenjo, Mir Gul Khan Naseer & Mir Ahmed Yar Khan himself have written books & they haven’t even remotely alluded to the accession as being forced in any way.
Another myth that goes hand in hand with gunpoint myth is that younger brother of the Khan, Prince Abdul Karim revolted against his brother's decision and Pakistan for Baluch independence immediately. That is false. Insurgency did happen but for different reasons. Prince Abdul Karim, who had been dislodged as governor of Makran by its Nawab who had acceded to Pakistan, declared an insurgency against Pakistan. However, this insurgency, which mainly included the Prince and his disgruntled friends and followers, was short-lived and died within a couple of months. He did not get his governorship back.
Written by: Khurram Khan Dehwar and some parts by me.
Sources:
1 - Mir Ghous Bux Bizenjo, In Search of Solutions An Autobiography, Pakistan Study Centre. Edited by B.M Kutty.
2 -Mir Gul Khan Naseer, Tarikhe Balochistan, Quetta.
3 -Mir Ahmed Yar Khan, Inside Baluchistan: Political Autobiography of Khan-e-Azam.
4 -People of Pakistan: An Ethnic History, Yuri V Gankovsky
5 -Back to the Future Khanate of Kalat & Genesis of Balochistan, Martin Axmann.
6 -Accession of Kalat, Professor Dushku Sayyid Wolfson College University of Cambridge.
7-Balochistan Problem, by Imtiaz Ali.
8-History of Baloch Race & Balochistan by Sardar Mohammad K Baluch.
9-Problem of Greater Baluchistan by Inayatullah Baluch.
10-Searchlight of Baloch & Balochistan, by Mir Khuda Buksh Baloch.
11-Baloch Nationalism: Origins & Development, Taj Mohammad Breseeg
12-Good for one but not the other: The Sandman System, by Christian Tripodi
13-Sir Robert Sandeman: Peaceful Conqueror of Balochistan by ALP Tucker.
14-Baloch in Search of Identity, by Naimatullah Gichki."
As an added bonus, here is a good write-up based on a scholarly source from another redditor:
https://www.reddit.com/pakistan/comments/18mbmwk/comment/kea9dlj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
"I do not know how credible this yogeena veena is from that specific website but sure, here is what I have found to support my stance. Firstly here is a reddit post refuting the accession myth while also providing sources from where the information has been taken. One of the most credible researches which I do often find being cited is of Yaqoob Khan bangash who has researched thoroughly on the accession of all princely states to Pakistan. Unfortunately I could not find any free pdf for the book, which happens to be locked behind a paywall. Another credible research is by Dushka H saiyid. The official source for this is: Accession of Balochistan
However I could not find any official method to access this so I had to go on another site which copied the research. The link is present here
To save you from the hassle of reading all of it, I will share some extracts I found to be really interesting.
"What complicated the situation was the desire of Kharan and Las Bela, two feudatories of Kalat, to accede to Pakistan, irrespective of Kalat’s decision. Moreover, Mekran, which was a district of Kalat, wanted to do the same. There are a plethora of letters from the rulers of Kharan and Las Bela entreating the Quaid to accept the accession of their states to Pakistan, irrespective of Kalat’s decision. Mir Mohammed Habibullah Khan, the ruler of Kharan, wrote to the Quaid on August 21, 1947: “I announce on behalf of myself and my subjects…and joins Pakistan Dominion as its suzerain and promises to serve Pakistan up to its extent.”28 In each successive letter, Habibullah Khan makes it apparent that the supremacy of Kalat is unacceptable to him. He wrote to the Quaid in November 1947, by then the Governor-General of Pakistan: “My State will never submit to the dictates of the Kalat State and will continue to oppose any moves aimed at an interference of the State’s freedom to act.”29 A few days later writing again to the Governor-General, he argued that it is not possible any longer for Kharan to bear the undue interference from the Kalat state, and described the legal status of Kharan in these words: “Following the lapse of the British paramountcy, Kharan repudiated the supremacy of Kalat and acceded to Pakistan.”30 Kharan also complained that Kalat was arming the “mischief mongers” in Kharan with the purpose of creating law and order situation in Pakistan-controlled areas."
And here u go with another one:
Mir Mohammad Habibullah Khan, the ruler of Kharan, wrote to the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah in December 1947 and explained why Kharan did not accept the suzerainty of Kalat. He said that before the advent of the British, Kharan was under the influence of Afghanistan, and that it was in 1883 that it accepted the paramountcy of Britain. Kharan, he said, received an allowance of Rs. 6,000 per year from the British until August 15, 1947 in lieu of the allowance it used to get from Afghanistan. He argued that Kharan was an independent state under the paramountcy of the British. Kalat, he said, has always wanted to subjugate Kharan, and even launched an armed attack against Kharan in 1939 to force it to accept Kalat’s hegemony. Habibullah Khan then declared: “After August 15, 1947, Kharan is absolutely an independent State. It has decided to accede to Pakistan. However, whether Kharan joins Pakistan or remains outside, this much is clear that it will never, in any way, accept Kalat’s hegemony.”34 His position about the Brohi Confederacy was that Sardar Azad Khan, the ruler of Kharan, had not recognized the Khan of Kalat as his Sardar during Sir Robert Sandeman’s tenure of office.35
The ruler of Kharan in Baluchistan, while visiting Karachi in October 1947, issued a statement, saying: “Kharan was equal to Kalat and would never suffer subordination to her; Kharan would live and, if necessary, die for Pakistan.” Kalat continued to deny that either of the two feudatories could be regarded as separate states. 36
(Forgive me for messed up format, there seems to be random numbers in between sentences)
Anyways, that is what I could find. If there is anything u can produce which refutes this then I'll be glad to know as I also am learning.
Other than that, the reason why I said it's economically hard to develop balochistan is due to its large barren land, low population, harsh terrain and lack of infrastructure. The state used this to justify lack of development in balochistan and I condemn that. I believe the development of balochistan is of utmost priority and the province has immense potential.
And I agree, nobody stood up for baloch and that is why I mentioned that our lack for respect for eachother is what has led us here. Nobody stood up for nobody. We need to stand up for eachother to ensure we build a more prosperous society for all. While I do blame the elitist system for many of the issues, our inability to organise ourselves against that system is what failed us."

Royal Road here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/80877/nop-atalors-fate
Discord Tag: notafurrylad
So we're getting up toward cruising altitude now for the story, midterms kicked my ass so I took a whole week to get this one out. Ah well. I'm thinking of the next chapter being fun, with perhappssss a bit more Qinal shenangians?
Anyway, I might also write another jokefic this coming week featuring The Ambassadow Genewal Bewwet going to Earth to negotiate terms with the humans in an alternative timeline. Stay tuned for that if you liked the last Helldivers crossover or the News logs I dropped.
Honestly I'm realizing that despite my initial timidness to start writing again for fear of not being able to follow through I've been able to consistantly find motivation to write. Even if it's not Atalor and just some memey one-shot. (If only I could apply that drive to my classes shiiiiit)

First Last Next
Memory transcription subject: Yivreen, Cyonian Survivor
Date [standardized human time]: February 18th, 2134
“Four nights, Yiv. Four nights and you haven’t got this working yet?” Came the voice of the annoying Cyonian as she leaned over the partially disassembled remains of the modern computer we’d scrounged from a nearby Ranger’s Station that’d been shot up and set aflame. Presumably by our visitors from the stars.
“Keick.... Remind me again. Who was it that dragged you out from under a tree?” I responded with a frustrated growl as I glared up at the panel both my paws were fiddling with. When we’d got it back here and plugged it into the energy cells I’d stowed away in my ‘get away’ station it’d almost immediately made an odd noise internally, and then flicked out of life before it’d even started. I’d been trying to take out parts and slot others in from the other computer we’d had the foresight to bring with us from the partially burned station for spare parts. “I’m not a computer science major, I’m a journalist.” Came my indignant tone with the older lady. “And I’ve only been working on it for two days, thank you. Two days to find the stupid thing.”
“Ahuh. So what you’re saying is we might as well let junior mess with it instead?” I huffed in response. Using my paws to push on the desk to slide out from under the mounting to look right at her. “No. We should /not/ let junior touch it. He’s a rowdy kid who’s still dealing with almost dying.”
“You mean he has anger problems? And you’re barely all that much older than him, Miss University.” Came the response with a raised brow from my conversation partner.
“Buh... I’m like... Five years his senior. At least! He’s a kid.” She gave a cheeky little swish of her tail in reply. “Keick! I’m serious!”
I stood up. Forget the stupid computer, it wasn’t going to work right now, I’d mess with it later. Instead I grabbed at my tablet on top of the desk. “He’s got anger problems because he nearly died, and he might take it out on the parts.” I affirmed with a dry tone. We’d been bantering like this all night. I couldn’t quite place if we were angry with each other, or just whinging at one another to pass the time. I felt restless, so that’s why I think I was engaging.
“Ehhh... If you say so, but you’re both kids to me. I’m gonna go ask if Junior can help. I don’t think that class you took helped much.”
“Do not.”
“Doin’ it.” And before I could give her a berating she was already stepping out. “See you in a minute article-writer.” Came the chime.
I felt myself sigh, my tail shaking in agitation that wasn’t all that convincing even to me. That impromptu rescue mission had been a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that we’d actually managed to save five of our own from the Arxur. The Villate helped too, but only because it thought it was competing to eat us. Stupid predator.
Junior. Or- well his actual name was Hens, and his father- also Hens. Hence the ‘Junior’ nickname he’d been bestowed. Those two had been willing to come with us after we got them from the ground and cages. Him and his pops had been out here with Alma, one of the local wilderness guides who’d been showing them the ‘deep’ wilderness out here when the invasion began. The other two had been some couple they picked up while hiding in the dugout. I don’t remember their names, they’d said they needed to go someplace else after a night here. Presumably after realizing we didn’t have enough food to last.
Which- granted was not my fault. I’d only stored enough food for me going out here for like maybe a week at most, not five mouths indefinitely! They’d been right to leave of course though, foraging the area for five of us would be... fine. Probably. It was easier than seven for sure though. Once Keick’s little pet project with the garden kicked off properly we’d be good on food. And we had some non-perishable rations from looting the Ranger Station.
The upper floor had been turned into a watchtower, with all the windows in the circular top floor cleaned on the inside, and then properly camouflaged with thick vegetation, so one could look into the valley on either side of us without far observers immediately realizing it was occupied. It’d just look like another ancient structure abandoned and overgrown inside. Which- it had been until I started using it I guess. That left the floor immediately above us, we’d had my cot of course, but some other makeshift sleeping spots had been tried and failed soooo.... We’d resorted to the age old Cyonian practice of just sleeping in a bundled pile on the cot. It worked. Just sucked when someone had to get up and go on their watch duty for their portion of the day.
Ah well.... I let my tail flick impatiently as I waited. This floor? This was under ground, built a bit into the hill the tower-outpost had been built into. I’d accessed some of the data on the older systems by plugging the old drives into adapters onto my pad. When we’d figured out this would be a good place to bunk and ride out the grey storm Hens Senior had suggested getting an actual computer and hooking it to the basement. This room was where the old computer systems had been for whatever the building had been for, so it made sense.
A lot of old tech like this was compatible thanks to it being just older formats of Federation stuff. The plugs, assuming they were still good and it was just a bad part that’d shorted the computer we’d brought, were the same and usable. We’d just need to power it on my energy cells and the solar panels.
I could hear the sound of two pairs of paws coming around the corner. One of my eyes drifted up to look. Ah.. There he was. “Hey buddy. Good to see you.” Came my voice, I felt like at least being chipper. The teen had been- well. He still had bandages over where that grey had dug its claws, and the mental anguish from ‘selling out’ his own pops and their friends had been a bit rough on him. He’d been in a dour mood.
I could see it in his eyes now as he came into view, those rainclouds over his head were still thick. He curtly replied with a not so adamant swish of the tail. I did notice though that Keick just leaned in the doorway, evidently letting the interaction act out how it would between myself and him.
“Keick told me I might be able to help with the computer?” He replied, his head half turned to look at the strapped together pile of parts and junk.
I found myself sitting in one of the few chairs left behind and crossing one leg over the other. “Yeahhh... Ah- I’ve been trying to get it working, but I think the big old board-card thing got fried when I plugged it in. Your pops said you hobby with computers right?” I realllllly didn’t expect much to come of this, but if Keick thought he’d do better than I did, so be it.
“Y-yeah. I do. I don’t know if these kind are going to be the same though.” He was mumbling as he stepped over, the stripes of his tail wistfully curling and shaking out. It was clear that at the least the distraction was actually starting to consume his focus. Hmh...
“Well good! Because I’ve tried swapping out the parts that looked the same from the ones that were all mossed up, but I can’t get it to even start-” Blink... He was already under desk with both paws touching at the parts just out of view. “Uh, hey. Atalor command to junior? Are you still listening?”
“Mhm.” Came the dry hum back from under the desk. That was a no. I looked over to Keick, she just smirked, giving me an indifferent tail shake. She found this amusing did she?
I stood from the chair, feeling my latent self confidence at stake here. He couldn’t just- “Hey. Be careful you might break it just messing with it like that.” As I leaned under to look at just what he was up to. To my shock, he’d removed the- “Hey! That’s the auhh. The roundy thing.”
“It’s a bladeless fan, and you put it on backwards. Even if it did turn on the inside of the computer would have gotten too hot to run after an hour. If it... Well if it even is powerful enough to generate that kind of heat.” He didn’t seem all that sure, but it sounded like he knew more about it than I did. These sorts of constructs were modular and supposedly idiot proof. We’d spent one week on them in my first semester since working with machines of these make was fairly typical in most media fields. “And you didn’t clip the fastener on right for this-”
I glared into the opening, his claw was poked to the.. the doo-hickey. “What is it?” I might not have studied. What? The tests had been open book, I hardly had to know any of this. Just parrot it. It’d been years!
“That’s the PSC module.”
“In Barronian please?” I replied dryly.
He visibly sighed, fully engrossed in his little teaching moment and evidently frustrated with his subpar student. “Power to System Coupler. It delivers power to the rest of it... When it’s properly fastened. It won’t even try powering on because that little tab-” He pointed a claw at the little square that appeared to be hollow for something to be stuck into it. “Is the sensor for telling if a PSC is installed. If none are, or when the sensor doesn’t see the coupler it won’t even try to forward power, even if the PSC is plugged in.”
“Well that’s dumb.” I managed indignantly. “And- that’s a dumb name, why don’t we just call it a power... something. Supplier, root- something like that.”
“It’s not dumb. You’d have electrocuted yourself if it wasn’t there. And its just what the Federation calls them. I don’t know, maybe it’s just how it translates.” Hhh... this boy. Whatever.
“Alright. Well. You can probably get it fixed then. Thanks for the help.” I managed, coming out from under the desk to an even more smug look from Keick. Her eyes practically screaming ‘told you so’. I started on walking toward the doorway, and past her form blocking half of it while leaning into the metal frame.
“I told you.”
Rub it in why don’t you?! “Yes Keick... Yes you did. Swampbrain.” I tacked the little curse on at the end with a grumble-y little flick of my ear as I stepped past. I could just hear her snickering behind me. Fine! Whatever! I decided to just accept the fact that I was bad with computers. So what?
________________________
Some time later I found myself flopped over in the watchtower room. It was my turn for tonight to take an hour or two to make sure nothing was coming. Then I had no more shifts the entire day, and I could sleep the whole sunshine away. The little military communicator I’d nabbed was laying on the ground next to me and left on, on the off chance something came through. We could recharge it reliably now so it wasn’t too much of a concern.
I glanced down at it, recalling those first couple days. That soldier I’d helped... It was harder to remember his name now. Els. I think it was? My paw reached to my tablet, typing it into a little note so I wouldn’t forget.
Almost on a whim once that was done, my paw swiped through to my pictures gallery. I saw the faces of a couple family members. Geal too was there. Pictures I’d taken of my screen to help me remember some dumb factoid about writing articles, or how to ethically source information. “Ah. Man.” I murmured. Here I was tired and staring at the faces of dead Cyonians I’d known. Well, dead or captured...and soon to be dead. It made me feel melancholy. I’d survived, I’d ran, I’d fought. I made it here. I doubted even one person I knew had done the same though. My escape had been fluke after fluke.
That was around the time my mind had the bright idea of perhaps beginning to catalogue my little obelisk damned ‘adventure’. Why not right? If I was going to be some mess of a Cyonian I could at least make something of it. “An autobiography of Yivreen, by Yivreen. The not-even-a-journalist-yet student famous for...” For what? Surviving? That’d be a good story. For...
“For killing?” Came a raspy voice behind me. My eyes widened, and I whipped around, how had something got into the narrow blindspot behind my head?! The only way up was a ladder! I’d have heard them! But.. But nothing was there. “Are you frightened, murderer?” It came from above, and I felt my neck muscles spike with energy to tilt my head up. Frantic breathing, my body was standing from the chair. Turning around to face- but it was just the ceiling. Nothing was there!
I began to reach for the radio. “No.” Came the voice again. A shadowy grey wisp came into view in front of my face, the claw on the Arxur’s digit tip tilting my head up to make one of my black eyes stare into the inconcrete shape. It was like a smoke cloud, moving in the shape of one of the savage things. Two glowing red pearls of hatred where the eyes should be. “That won’t help.” I felt that claw wrap to hold me in place around the neck, the terrifying spike in my heart was making me feel like I might just give out on the spot. “Write, and tell the whole rancid Federation you used a predator to murder. That you killed us.” Us? Murder? It’d-.. It wasn’t murder to kill Arxur. “Will an assessor see it that way? You acted like a predator, that’s all that’d matter.”
I felt a flash of imagery in my mind, the Arxur I’d shot while he was staring right at me at in the woods nights ago. The subsequent panic shots where I was only really aiming at him from a distance- the accidental glance I’d given his corpse up close while helping Keick with the locks on the cages. I’d been responsible for... four Arxur deaths now? I’d be applauded by the Federation, but he was right- how I’d handled that ambush. Would they really see me as anything but a danger if they knew how I’d fought?
I consciously dipped back into reality. He was holding me down on my back, a clawed, scaled paw crushing my chest in slowly while he grinned toothily down at me with malice. The teeth themselves- they seemed to glare a dim black, backdropping on the wispy nature of his body. I gurgled a “GGg-off!” Up at him, my paw reaching for my holster and finding my gun wasn’t present. Sss no no! I kicked, but his chest was incorporeal, I went right through! How did that make any sense! He was killing me like he was solid. “No-” I heard a crack, my chest caved and I-
I hopped back, reaching for the gun in my holster and pulling it out. My eyes frantically checking my options. The chair clattered from under me as I’d moved from it. There was the old door out to the balcony, I could probably slide down the ladder quicker than he could, and- But when I zeroed back in on where he’d been he wasn’t there. I blinked hard. Where? What? “Hey! H-hey!” I shouted. Looking around and finding nothing. Had it just been one of those- no way. My chest was pounding, it hurt like I’d actually been being crushed. Holy Obelisk what in the galaxy had that been!?
“You alright up there Yivreen?” Came the call a couple stories down from I.. I think it was Alma, that wilderness guide that’d come along with the other two, Hens Senior’s friend. “I-its alright- I think. Just a dream. I-” My eyes looked over to the clattered over chair. I was in a different spot then when my memories of the dead Arxur had popped in. “-must have just dozed off for a minute.” I answered back.
First I had little wisp visions any time I was vaguely in proximity to real Arxur and now they were in my dreams interrogating me? “It’s almost my watch anyway, why don’t you come down. I’ll take it early so you can get some more sleep today. It’s almost morning, go lay down early?” Came her raised voice again. Not actually that bad an idea.
“Alright.” I answered back, holstering my weapon and picking up my pad where it lay over on one of the counters.. Much too far away to have been with me in my chair. I... Reluctantly retraced one step I’d taken in my dream. I wrote down Els’s name so I wouldn’t forget. Geal too, just in case. I missed him, the idiot he was. I sighed with a turn to the ladder hatch to make my way down. Only for my eyes to see a wisp of night fog drifting by just outside one of the windows, and for a moment I thought I saw a red glimmer in it.
I shook my head. Screw these visions. “I’m not a murderer.” Came the murmur.
“Pardon?” Oh- She’d been climbing up and that fluffy brown head was tilted with one eye looking at me.
“N-nothing!” I replied, clamming up and stepping over to the ladder, quiiiiiite eager for her to get up, and me to leave.
A not so convinced brow raise came to me in visual reply as she popped up completely and stepped aside to let me down. “If you’re worried about being a murderer, don’t be. You saved us from the cages. You and Keick both. And the Villate too I reckon.”
My throat cleared awkwardly, and I could feel my tail flicking in an anxious figure eight as I started down. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Suit yourself.” Suit myself I would. This here Yivreen opted to go to sleep early as suggested, but not before writing down at least some of my encounters in the city out of spite for that creature in my mind. From now on I’d keep a journal at the least, something I could use to write that biography.
And... I felt something else brewing as I recalled my time in the city. I’d been afraid and tired. Snivelling and crying for help. Stampeding. Now though, as I thought back on some of my encounters I was feeling something hot in my chest, that anger, that rage I’d used in the woods to save some of our new friends. I wasn’t just afraid of the Arxur anymore. Could I... Could I use this to save others? Did we need to only just survive here? When I finally laid down to sleep it was all my mind could cycle through over and over.
Could I save more? Could I stay here, tending a garden and waiting for help that might not come? The atrocities I’d seen so far from the greys, the ones I could imagine, the ones yet to come- a growl escaped from my muzzle, and I rolled over. Letting my eyes close.

Generation One: Military Green
The founder of this legacy grew up amid the enigmatic mysteries of Strangeville, their fascination with the Mother Plant leading them to enlist in the military. In their modest, cluttered home, they honed their logic, handiness, and research skills, eventually marrying a comrade who played a crucial role in defeating the Mother Plant. Their relentless pursuit of answers laid the foundation for a legacy marked by military valor and insatiable curiosity.

• Main colours green and brown
• military career
• live in strangevill and complete the strangevill mystery asperation
• have the Paranoid, genius and nosey traits
• marry someone who helped you defeat the mother plant
• master logic, handiness and research skill
• Live whole life in small cluttered house

Generation Two: Rancher's Delight
You sought solace in Chestnut Ride's vast landscapes. Driven by a passion for open spaces and a love for horses, they aspired to become champion riders while embracing a gardening career. Despite a divorce from a childhood friend, they remarried and mastered gardening, horse riding, and parenting. Their story showcased resilience and a deep connection with the rhythms of nature.

• Red and white main colours
• champion rider asperation
• Gardener career
• live in chestnut ride on a ranch
• Love outdoors, Rancher and generous traits
• Have first child young (teen or as soon as they turn into young adults) with a childhood friend
• Marry and divorce childhood friend but stay close friends with them
• Marry another sim and have at least two children with them
• Master gardening, horse riding and parenting skills

Generation Three: Island Explorer
The third generation, inspired by the allure of Sulani, dedicated their life to conservation. Growing up as a child of the island, they immersed themselves in the local culture, mastering fishing, athletics, and guitar. Their off-the-grid lifestyle and commitment to the beach life aspiration ensured the family thrived in harmony with nature, leaving behind a legacy of environmental consciousness and island exploration.

• Blue and Yellow main colours
• The third generation, inspired by the allure of Sulani, dedicated their lives to conservation. Growing up on the island, they immersed themselves in the local culture, mastering fishing, athletics, and guitar. Their off-the-grid lifestyle and commitment to the beach life aspiration ensured the family thrived in harmony with nature, leaving behind a legacy of environmental consciousness and island exploration.
• Live in sulani in a off the grid lot
• beach life asperation
• Child of the island, Cringe and Vegetarian traits
• master fishing, athletics and guitar skills
• Marry a sulani local

Generation Four: Hollywood Glam
destined for stardom in Del Sol Valley, pursued a dazzling career in acting. Juggling fame and family, they navigated through relationships, dating multiple sims before marrying a renowned celebrity. Mastering the arts of acting, singing, and athletics, they left a legacy marked by the glitz and drama of the entertainment world.

• Master actor asperation
• Actor career
• Pink and purple colours
• live in Del Sol Valley in a celebrity home
• Date at least three sims before marriage
• Marry a famous Sim
• Have twins
• master Acting, singing and athletic skills
• self-absorbed, self-assured and outgoing traits

Generation Five: Extraterrestrial Genius
The fifth generation, a child of the fourth, pursued a scientific path and aspired to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Their life took a cosmic turn when they were abducted by aliens, becoming a parent to an otherworldly child. The subsequent marriage to the alien parent, along with mastery in logic, handiness, and rocket science, painted a legacy tinged with curiosity and extraterrestrial exploration.

• Scientist career
• nerd brain aspirations
• red and pink colours
• must be abducted and impregnated by aliens
• master logic, handiness and rocket science
• Marry the alien that abducted you
• Erratic, Unflirty and genius traits

Generation Six: Alien Politician
The sixth generation, the alien child of the fifth, transitioned into the political arena. Mastering charisma, debate, and comedy, they excelled in Sim society and joined the university debate team. Their autobiography chronicled a unique journey from the stars to political prominence, leaving a legacy etched in words and diplomacy.

• be a alien
• The fifth generation, a child of the fourth, pursued a scientific path and aspired to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Their life took a cosmic turn when they were abducted by aliens, becoming a parent to an otherworldly child. The subsequent marriage to the alien parent and mastery in logic, handiness, and rocket science painted a legacy tinged with curiosity and extraterrestrial exploration.
• friend of the world asperation
• yellow and orange colours
• master charisma, debate and comedy
• Join the debate team at university
• write a auto-biography

Generation Seven: Noir Detective
The seventh generation pursued justice as a detective in a monochromatic world of crime. Mastering athleticism, logic, and charisma, they married a co-worker before relocating to San Myshuno. The estrangement from neighbours and challenges faced with stoic resilience spoke to a legacy shaped by intrigue, investigation, and a dedication to the pursuit of truth. detective career

• Seeker of secrets asperation
• Black and White colours
• Master athletics, logic and charisma
• Marry a co-worker
• live with the heir of generation 6 till their death
• move to San Myshuno when 6th heir dies
• be enemies with all neighbours
• perfectionist, hot-headed and nosey traits

Generation Eight: Paranormal Investigator
You delved into the supernatural as a paranormal investigator. With a haunted house and the tragedy of losing a spouse, they navigated the mystical and mundane realms. Mastering mediumship, video games, and writing, their thrilling novels became a testament to encounters with the unknown, leaving behind an eerie yet captivating legacy.

• Paranormal investigator career
• Fount of tomarani knowledge asperation
• marry a Tomarani local
• Live in a haunted house
• have triplets
• have spouse die in an accident
• Black and Purple colours
• medium, video games and writing skills
• write thriller books
• have a spouse die in an accidenteek traits

Generation Nine: Eco Innovator
You embraced an eco-friendly lifestyle in Evergreen Harbor as a civil designer. Mastering fabrication, candle making, and handiness, they chose not to have children until the heir from the previous generation passed away. Contributing to sustainability by selling candles on the side, they left a legacy intertwined with environmental consciousness and a commitment to a greener future.

• civil designer career
• live in evergreen Harbour
• eco inventor asperation
• do not have children until heir 8's death
• be engaged but never marry
• white and green colours fabrication, candle making and handiness skills
• sell candles on the side for extra money
• recycle disciple, green fiend and cheerful traits

Generation Ten: Tech Savvy Engineer
The tenth generation, a tech-savvy engineer, secured a university scholarship. Mastering programming, robotics, and handiness, they married a childhood friend, introducing a servobot into the family. With a focus on family and technological innovation, they became the architects of a future that blended modernity with enduring connections.

• Engineer career
• Family-oriented, Romantic and Loyal traits
• white and orange colours
• master programming, robotics and handiness
• marry childhood friend
• go to uni on a scholarship
• have a servobot in your family
• soulmate aspiration

Generation Eleven: The Super Parent
You dedicate your life to education and parenting. Balancing a full household, they mastered parenting, charisma, and debate. Their collection of postcards documented the family's adventures, showcasing an outgoing and goofy nature that brought laughter and joy to the generations. Their legacy resonated with the warmth of familial bonds and the pursuit of knowledge.

• education career
• super parent asperation
• have a full household
• Master parenting, charisma and debate
• Pink and blue colours
• collect all of the postcard collections
• family oriented, goofball and outgoing trait

Generation Twelve: The Secret Artist
You pursue a career in a prestigious salary position; they harboured a secret passion for painting that flourished in the quiet hours of the night. Joining the chess club during their formative years, they developed a keen intellect and strategic mind. Entangled in a loveless marriage, they sought solace in an affair, navigating the delicate dance of passion and secrecy.

• salary person career
• fabulously wealthy asperation
• live in Tartosa
• master charisma, logic and painting skills
• secretly have a passion for painting
• join chess club in high school
• be in a loveless marriage,
• have an affair as an adult
• brown and white colours
• art lover, snob and materialistic traits

Just finished reading Bendtner's autobiography. Wow. A lot to digest.
Basically, I think he makes an enormous amount of excuses for his lack of focus and discipline that pervades his entire career.
Those crucial, formative moments from 18-22 where he could have made the most of his talent, but squandered it with terrible decisions like partying 4 nights a week, gambling, and a litany of other constant mistakes
It seems he has the self awareness to list all of his mistakes but he never truly takes responsibility for them and always has someone else to blame- that much is apparent in the book.
So many years of being wasted and bad decisions compounding...I'm honestly surprised his career lasted as long as it did
Edit: I also think he massively inflates his talent/potential. He quotes his hat trick against Porto constantly... it was two tap ins and a PK
Anyone else read it?

Reposting to fix formatting issues. The following short story was written as a kind of theoretical excerpt from a roguish retiree’s autobiography. Think medium fantasy Dungeons & Dragons. Is it any good? Is it engaging? Is the writing decent? Does the plot make sense and does it hook you in any way? How can I improve? Thanks in advance for any and all feedback!
_____________________________________________________
​
My passion for gambling started to feel more like an addiction as my wins turned to losses and my debts grew greater than my short life was worth. Soon I was indebted to every loan shark and bookie in Baldur’s Gate. But I couldn't quit. Nine out of ten gamblers quit right before their big win and I wasn’t about to become a statistic. So, having been barred from every dice and card game in a 10 mile radius, I had no choice but to pay my debts. The only problem was my measly work as a sell sword wasn’t nearly lucrative enough to cover my bills. At the time I was working mostly escort jobs, burglaries, protective services, and overall petty thug shit; none of which were sufficient enough to support my bank roll. But as luck would have it, that was all about to change, at least for one job.
There was a new character in town of the seemingly entrepreneurial variety. He was an old guy, human, maybe 80s or so, walked with a cane and talked with a lisp. With him was a 7 ft tall creature covered in black plate armor from head to toe. Tough to make out the exact look of the guy but if the make of the armor and the red scaled tail hanging out the back side were any indication, the creature was a Dragonborn and likely this senior citizen’s bodyguard. As they loitered around the typical thug scouting destinations, word spread that this crotchety old fuck and his furry of a boy toy were hiring. The job was simple, it was a hit. A weird one though. The man wanted some woman dead. A civilian. In fact, she was apparently a bum. A beggar who perused the streets of a village miles outside the city. Now why this strange old man wanted a helpless civilian dead, no one could figure. And although the hiring pool of Baldur’s Gate wasn’t exactly filled with bastions of morality, it wasn’t filled with idiots either. There was something off about this job and, for most eligible applicants, the pay didn’t outweigh the unknown. Most, except for me. While my peers spat on the 250 gold being offered for a hit with more red flags than a Vanthampur rally, I wasn’t in nearly as fortunate a position. That 250 would put enough of a dent in my debt that I could make my way back to the tables and hopefully string a few wins together to pay off the rest. I was no hitman, not yet at least, but I was an opportunist. So, I went off to meet the man behind the cane.
“Murko Bronzer, eh? What kind of name is that anyway?”
“Its the kinda name a tight lipped professional might have. Now do we have a deal or not?” As strange as the old man was, he didn’t have much of a poker face. He’d been in town for a week now and no one was biting on his offer. He was getting desperate. I told him I’d do the job no questions asked, but I needed the money up front. I fully intended to uphold my end of the deal, but this thing had set-up written all over it and if it was gunna go south, at least I’d have some gold.
“Deal” he said, as his plate-covered henchman handed me a sack with a familiar jingle to it. “There’s 250 and a map. Autumnvale Village. South… a day or two by horse, maybe less. The mark lives in a shack five minutes outside the town. There's a potion in the bag in case you run into any trouble. You shouldn’t need it. When its done… make it look like an accident. Don’t want anyone sticking their nose in this. And make sure its done within the week… Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it” I said, feeling up the sack like an Elturellean wench, making sure every last piece of gold was accounted for. “What about Tiny here, is he comin’?” I nodded my head towards the alleged Dragonborn. Aside from handing me my sack of gold, he hadn't moved a muscle the entire time, let alone said anything.
“He's busy.”
“Right… This woman. Who’s she to you anyway?”
“I thought you said ‘no questions asked’?” he said impatiently. His lisp managed to punctuate every word, ‘s’ or not. And the more the man spoke the more I wanted to be as far away from him as possible.
“Right. Welp, guess I’m off then. Its been a pleasure doing business with ya. Where will I find you once the job is done?”
“You won’t. Good day Mr. Bronzer.”
I set out for this ‘Autumnvale Village’ the next morning. I’d never heard of the place so it was no surprise when it turned out to be a complete shithole. A one tavern town type of vibe. Except the tavern was filled with the whole town and they all hated each other. They were very welcoming to me however, considering I had some coin to spend. And spend I did. I was still quite cautious about what I had got myself into so I chalked it up as a business expense and started greasing the palms of anybody who seemed like they could give me some information. Nobody knew a thing about my employer or his scaled and tailed girlfriend but the whole town knew about the mark. Adelaide was her name. There were all sorts of rumors flying around about this woman. Some said she was the ex wife of an infamous archmage turned lich. Some said she was descended from a mysterious royal bloodline, long lost to time. Others still, said she was an evil hag or a witch in disguise. None of it made much sense to me nor was there any proof. But there were two things the whole town agreed on. She had been there for decades, longer than anyone could remember really, yet she didn’t seem to age much. This was likely, however, because she was an elf, or at least a half elf. Depends who you asked. But half or full, she was the only elf in the village. Seemed a little strange to me, but certainly not alarming. The other thing the town agreed on was that she was a drunk. She’d spend her days begging in front of the tavern, and spend her nights drowning in booze for as long as her earnings would let her. She was a nuisance at best and a liability at worst. Not a single townsfolk had a nice word to say about her. Clearly she wasn’t going to be missed.
I spent the following day staking out her shack from the woods nearby. That’s when I got my first look at her. She was an older woman with long amber hair and sun spotted skin. She was kinda hot if you're into homeless drunks. I’m not. She left her “home” early that morning, presumably to go beg and drink (in that order) so I waited at the treeline for her to return. I figured she’d come home drunk, I’d sneak into her shack, make it look like a fall, and be on my way. But things got complicated. Sometime that afternoon the doors to her shack flung open as two young children spilled out into the tall grass that engulfed their home.
*What?* I thought. *Nobody in town mentioned kids.*
I crept out from the woods and inched closer to see if I could get a better look. They were twins, about 10 or 12 years old. Bright red hair. Elvish. They looked hungry. Maybe even hurt. But you couldn’t tell by their demeanor. They were playing and singing and laughing and went on doing so the entire day. Or at least until Adelaide got home. I sat unseen in the tall grass close enough to peer through the cracks in their shack. As my mark approached, the twins ran inside and remained eerily still. The silence only broken by the sound of Adelaide’s drunken footsteps clomping closer and closer to the door of the shack. Bottle in hand and reeking of mead and men, Adelaide fumbled with the door before swinging it open. What happened next I try not to think about in much detail but it was essentially this: Adelaide beat the shit out of those twins. I mean bad. Like this was some brutal shit. And to make it worse, the twins barely made a sound. I think I heard a single whimper in pain. They were used to it. They would adjust their body with each incoming blow to direct the impact in such a way that it’d do the least amount of damage… like some sort of seasoned fighter. It was clear this was no spontaneous act. This was habitual.
So I had a bit of a dilemma in front of me. Sure, on the one hand I was given all the moral justification I needed to get the job done… but I didn’t need any. I was willing and able to do what I had to do, regardless of the circumstances. On the other hand, these were helpless children. Yeah they were being beaten senseless but this was presumably their only carer, not to mention family. With Adelaide gone the children would be helpless. Best case scenario they end up orphans… but in a place like Autumnvale? Or worse, Baldur’s Gate? At least here their beatings come from someone in their own lineage. And how would they even end up as orphans? Gods know I was in no position to help em with that. I didn’t know a thing about my employer, or this woman, or these kids, or what any of them had to do with each other, so I had to assume that if I was caught associating with these twins - in any way - I’d only be putting them in further danger. Even escorting them to an orphanage was a risk to my life and to theirs. It was also possible that, much like the villagers, my employer didn’t know about the children. If he was a threat to their mother, he was likely a threat to them as well… maybe they were safer with their mother dead.
*Fuck it. I’ll let the fates decide.*
Soon the beating was over and Adelaide began to warm. She tended to the children’s wounds and made some dinner for the three of them before falling asleep. So I kicked open the door and stuck my rapier through her neck. The children’s screams were muffled by the sound of Adelaide gurgling on her own blood.
“You two, shut up.” I said, pointing at the twins. They complied. “You have an important decision to make so listen closely. My rapier, as you can see, is lodged in your mother’s throat. I will soon be leaving with it, but your mother has to stay. That means that she will be dead in less than 5 minutes.” With my freehand I reached into the sack the old man had given me and sure enough there was that health pot. “Potion of Greater Healing? Looks like its your lucky day, these ones are expensive.” I placed the potion on the ground in front of the quietly crying twins. “This potion can save your mother’s life. Just pour it down her throat and she’ll be good as new. Or, this potion can save your life, in a way. Its worth about a hundred gold. That’s enough money to give y’all a good life. Shelter, food, toys, all that. You could probably buy a new mom, or at least a pretty good babysitter. At any rate, its up to y’all. But you can’t have both. If you run to town looking for help, Adelaide here ain’t gunna wake up. She don’t have time for all that. So choose wisely. Clock…starts…NOW.” I pulled my rapier loose and spilled blood across the room as the twins dove towards the potion. They rolled from floorboard to floorboard trying to pull it loose from one another, pleading to each other to let their mother live, or to let her die. As they argued I sheathed my blade, turned around, and left. I had dice to roll.

I recently came by this book called The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism by Matthew D. Lassiter which I found pretty interesting. It was talking about how the politics of the South converged with the rest of the nation when the Southern social formation was destroyed at the end of Jim Crow. This is especially true of the southern states most prominent in the Sunbelt South (Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida). Republican success after the end of Jim Crow was not because of "white backlash" after the Civil Rights movement, but a colorblind suburban strategy which appealed to suburbanites all over the country. In other words, a suburbanite from Atlanta has more in common with a suburbanite in Seattle than someone in rural Alabama. Lassiter explains how the South transitioned from the direct de jure segregation of Jim Crow to de facto suburban/residential segregation afterwards. Patterns of racial segregation in the South started to match those in other parts of the country.
What I wanted to ask here is how far Southern regional convergence can go in terms of culture as the economic structures and voting patterns of the South converge with the rest of the country.
I wanted to use Texas for example. I am from here, and I can already see it taking place. One of the most obvious ways you can see it is in the form of dialect leveling. Go to any major city like Dallas, Houston, or Austin, and you will notice that the Texas accent is harder to come by. Instead, the accents most people from these places have is the "General American" accent. These cities have boomed over the past few decades and because of this, you have a lot of transplants moving in from other regions of the US as well as from other countries (Houston sticks out in this regard), so this is why we can observe this. The US is not special in this regard though. The loss of dialects is occuring throughout the world as they become more homogenized, which I think is a direct consequence of globalization.
You can observe this disappearance in Texan culture in other ways as well. What I have found is that the stereotypes people (including most Texans themselves) have of Texas culture (cowboys, big Ford pickup trucks, a country lifestyle, football, etc) are either non-existent now or is not something particular to Texas.
Take pick up trucks for example. The stereotype is that every Texan drives one, but this is not true at all. Turns out, pick up trucks make up only 19% of total vehicles owned in Texas, which puts them behind 22 other states. Surprisingly, the states that make up the top of the list are from up North or the West!
https://www.ktsm.com/news/national-news/which-states-drive-the-most-pickup-trucks/#:~:text=Wyoming%20is%20the%20state%20with,road%20and%20foul%2Dweather%20capability.
The preconception of Texans living a primarily country lifestyle is not true as well.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-rural-states
Only 15% of the Texas population lives in what the US Census defines as a rural area which puts it behind 35 other states. The only Southern state which is less rural than Texas is Florida. Most Texans either live in the cities or the suburbs. Also something that is really surprising as well is that Northern and Western states tend to be more rural than Southern ones. The top two most rural states in the country are Maine and Vermont (!)
The stereotype that Texans (and the rest of the South) are uniquely obsessed with football is also not true as well or at least not entirely. While SEC schools tend to dominate college football and high schools in the South tend to be hotspots for recruiting (Texas and Georgia in particular), it seems that football has increased popularity in the North as well. Turns out that the top three universities in terms of college football attendance are all in the North: Penn State, University of Michigan, and Ohio State.
https://www.d1ticker.com/2022-fbs-attendance-trends/
A general convergence in Southern culture can also be observed in country music. Compare the song "One Margarita" (2020) by Luke Bryan with "East Bound and Down" (1977) by Jerry Reed. Interesting to note that both of these artists are from Georgia and that the former is from a small rural town and the latter is straight from big city Atlanta! This exemplifies what I feel is a "Californication" of country music as I like call it. Nashville country shows this especially, but you can even see this emerging in Texas country, which prides itself on being more raw and traditional.
Y'all get the point that I am trying to make here. What I find interesting though is that a lot of suburban Texans will try to hold on to their own distinctive Texan identity despite the fact that it has no basis in reality anymore. Take the phenomenon of cowboy churches for example. Exactly as the name suggests, it is a church for cowboys.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/where-have-all-the-cowboy-churches-come-from/
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1520&context=etds
However, there is a problem:

As the number of literal cowboys in Texas dwindles, one begins to wonder, how do you grow a church based on a way of life that hardly exists anymore?

The solution is to make the barrier to entry extremely low:

Despite any sacralization of this archetypical cowboy, many Cowboy Christians still confess that they are not "real" cowboys, but are only part of the Western Heritage Culture. According to Cowboy Christians, the Western Heritage Culture includes anyone who currently or previously participates in or attends rodeos, raises cattle or crops, drives a pick-up truck, listens to country music, or (displaying populist sensibilities yet again) just wants to associate with the "rural lifestyle." In this context, the Western Heritage Culture is seemingly very welcoming and has few, if any, barriers (hence the easy marriage with the Low Barriers Model discussed in chapter one). Additionally, as evidenced by Cowboy Christians' occupations, which include industrial worker, teacher, farrier, IT technician, rancher, and doctor, the Western Heritage Culture cuts across socioeconomic lines.

Turns out that the majority of people in attendance at cowboy churches are suburbanites who have no linkage to rural life except through consumption. People's identities are no longer shaped by the occupations they work in, but rather in what culture they choose to consume (like picking between 50 brands of mayonnaise at the grocery store). White Southerners who work cushy six figure white collar jobs can go back to their suburban homes after work and just decide to go out in their backyard and build themselves a small bonfire, blast some country music, and have a few ice cold beers. They can probably own a few pairs of cowboy boots themselves even though they have absolutely no reason for them (rural Texans call these people "all hat, no cattle"). In other words, white suburbanites can simulate a rural lifestyle through consumption in their own free time.
This is even after ignoring the fact that the association with Texas with cowboys has no basis in reality in history whatsoever.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/is-texas-southern-western-or-truly-a-lone-sta

To captivate non-Texans, early twentieth-century Texas leaders had much more success with cowboy lore. Which is strange in its own right. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, polite Texans regarded cowboys with contempt, viewing them as unlettered ruffians with dirty jobs. In fact, evidence of this disdain for cowboy culture comes from my own great-grandfather John Avery Lomax, who claimed that his first attempt at gaining wider attention for the cowboy songs he had collected as a child in Bosque County was cruelly rebuffed. According to the story he related in his 1934 autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, in the late 1890’s English professor Morgan Callaway told him that the songs were “tawdry, cheap, and unworthy,” whereupon Lomax took his manuscript behind Brackenridge Hall and set it on fire.

The reason why this was done was because:

Nationally, Dixie was stigmatized as a backward, ignorant, and violent hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan and religious hypocrisy. Why remain linked to all that baggage? Why not, forward-looking Texans began to think, align with the West instead? Back then, and to a certain degree today, the West was seen as optimistic, the place of second chances, the land of the golden tomorrow, a stark contrast when compared to Dixie’s melancholy and tragic yesterdays. So Texas’s politicians, educators, and ad-men went to work, Cantrell says, and have since all but totally recast the very ideal of what it means to be a Texan.

To sum up, my main point is that with the end of the Southern social formation at the end of Jim Crow, Southern states seem to be losing their distinctive identities and their cultures seem to be converging with the rest of the nation. Whatever remains of Southern culture is either left to rural areas (which are dying out themselves) or are an arbitrary consumption choice of white suburbanites. My question is whether as time goes on, we should expect (white) southern culture to become a relic of the past? The only thing stopping me from saying yes is the existence of large amounts of black people in the South. Surely this must allow for divisions in whiteness to remain within the country? If it does, in what form does it take? How can we observe this now?
To be clear, I am not saying that Southern culture has disappeared entirely right now, but rather that it could disappear in the not too distant future. You can still see Southern distinctiveness in the popularity of Evangelical protestantism, hell I myself have Southern speech patterns.
At this point, I forgot where I was going with this. I just had some kind of word vomit. I just wanted to start some kind of discussion over this.
Also some closely related questions I have:

1. Southern culture seems to hold on the strongest in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. This comes as no surprise. These three states are the most rural states in the South (50% of the population being rural in Mississippi, 45% in Arkansas, and 40% in Alabama). Why is it that these three states were left behind from the boom that occured elsewhere in the Sunbelt South (TX, GA, NC, FL)? The contrast between Alabama and Georgia is striking.
2. I mentioned above Vermont and Maine are the most rural states in the country. If republicans consistently have support from rural Americans, why is it that these two states vote democrat? Is there still some lingering North/South divide that explains this?
3. Not a question, but it seems that the Sunbelt South is where the future of the Democrats lie. Texas, Florida, and North Carolina seem to becoming swing states instead of Republican strongholds. Georgia already turned blue back in 2020. As tech and finance moves into these states, you'll see an increased amount of young middle class suburbanites (from the South and elsewhere) moving into gentrified Southern cities like Austin, Texas or Nashville, Tennessee.

In a discussion in classics, I briefly gave an argument that the rending of the veil in Mark has to date to the second century. u/lost-in-earth drew me out on this and asked some sensible and skeptical questions, and after a little back and forth they suggested I might want to post something here. The following is a paper I wrote on this topic, whacked down by about 20% to fit within the size limit for reddit posts. I think most of the formatting comes through OK in this translation to markdown, although some of it is still a little garbled. There is also probably some garbling where I didn't spend enough time on carefully reducing it to within the necessary length constraint. They suggested that I pose it more as a question than an assertion, which would have been fine except that the whole thing was already written in a style where I made definite assertions :-) I actually do think some parts of the argument are stronger than others. The whole topic of dating the gospels is a very difficult one because of the sparsity of the historical record.

Introduction

The geological stratum lying after Paul and before Justin Martyr is scrambled and hard to read. It would be much easier if we had in the early Christian writings even a single absolutely dated line from this period: As I write this, we have just learned that Simon bar Kokhba is dead. And even if we had such a journalistic date-line for a gospel or epistle, we might not know the whole story. Its now-canonical form may have come to us only as the result of a process of evolution, which Justin describes as stretching out over generations.^1
That this was not a linear march of progress is attested by the preface of Luke, which situates itself as one among a number of competing gospels, by the "many"^2 "to have rehearsed/rearranged" (ἀνατάξασθαι) the eyewitness accounts. If Papias's Mark is some version of what we now call the Gospel of Mark, then this order-from-chaos scenario applies to Mark as well, and seems to continue well into the second century.^3 This long-lasting fluid state of the gospels reflected that of the Jesus movement itself.^4 In reaction to Marcion, the gospels' bushy evolutionary tree underwent a mass extinction --- a purposeful one which gradually erased from the geological strata as many as possible of the non-approved gospels and versions of gospels.
In this paper, I try out a technique for recovering limited and approximate data about time and place from the muddled stratum of 60-160 C.E., in three special cases. By way of explaining the technique, imagine coming across a narrative that begins like this: "During the Reagan administration, at the height of Beatlemania..." For someone with the relevant knowledge of time and place, the error is obvious. It doesn't matter whether the narrative is presented as a memoir, as historical fiction, or as factual history that has been dramatized with invented scenes and dialog. Regardless of genre or authorial intention, the author has lost the confidence and interest of these potential readers, and the work will not be successful with them. If future historians come across a document containing a line like this, they can conclude that it was written after collective memory had had time to fade. It may date to 2050 or 2100 C.E., but it cannot be from an American author as early as 2000.
For the same reasons, a gospel containing significant historically counterfactual features would not have succeeded or spread widely in the Mediterranean world unless those features were not in contradiction with the historical consciousness of the intended audience.
The hardest part of the technique is to find a reliable method for identifying features of these narratives that we can know would have been perceived as counterfactual by many people in a certain time and place.

Josephus's omens

In The Jewish War 6.5, Josephus gives a supernatural prolog to the end of Second Temple Judaism. He says that Jerusalemites paid attention to false prophets when they should have heeded a series of spectacular supernatural omens, and that they also misinterpreted the omens at the time. A Jesus, son of Ananias, wanders around obscurely proclaiming bad omens, and he is arrested and tortured. The overtly supernatural omens are a comet; a bright light inside the Temple; a cow that gives birth to a lamb inside the Temple; a massive bolted gate that opens by itself in the middle of the night; chariots and battalions in the sky; and mysterious voices and noises. As a preface to the sky visions, he says, "I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals."^5 His interpretation is that these omens show God's care for the people and his attempt to warn them. They were meant to show that Vespasian was sovereign over Judea. Tacitus (Histories 5.13) describes the omens at less length but with the same propagandistic moral.
The Jewish War is known to have been written ca. 75 C.E., not long after these events. On naturalistic assumptions, the omens cannot have existed, and the ones in the sky are described as so obvious and spectacular that no Jerusalemite of the period could have credited Josephus's account. Thus Josephus's audience must have been far from Jerusalem. This is in accord with the previous consensus based on other sources of information such as his autobiography.[@kaden2015herodian] He is likely to have initially circulated his work in written and oral form to a Flavian political elite in Rome.[@mason2005audience] Since there is nothing surprising about any of this, the case of Josephus works mainly as a control for our experiment.

The massacre of the innocents

Our second example is the massacre of the innocents. Matthew 2 and Luke 2 relate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem of Judea, described further in Luke as πόλιν Δαυίδ (indicating a walled city or palace), although modern archaeological evidence makes David's palace more likely to have been at a different site. Matthew continues with supernatural events that result in Herod's massacre of all boys under the age of two in the area around Bethlehem. Bethlehem is only about 9 km from the center of Jerusalem, so any potential audience of Jerusalemites would have been familiar with the area, which according to archaeological evidence was either uninhabited in 1 C.E.[@oshri2005jesus] or else was a small village. Assuming the site to have been inhabited, Matthew's wholesale slaughter of infants would have been a memorable and infamous piece of local lore, which would have been well preserved for the duration of living memory and almost certainly for multiple generations afterward. Since the massacre could not have happened in a naturalistic world, it would have beenb peceived as counterfactual by people living in a naturalistic world. The absence of an event is less vividly memorable than its presence, but as a rough figure it seems likely that as late as 50 C.E., in a naturalistic world, there would be Jerusalemites of about age 65 who could refute the Matthean account, ensuring that others would perceive it as counterfactual.
We can therefore conclude that A-implies-B, where A is naturalism and B states that either Matthew's audience did not include Jerusalemites, or that any version of Matthew that included this part of the birth narrative did not circulate until at least the second half of the first century. The conclusion is not particularly surprising, since by consensus Matthew was writing for diaspora Jews toward the end of the century. Indeed, we have evidence that the birth narratives were still active construction sites as late as the time of Justin, who, for example, describes Jesus as being born in a cave,^6 a detail not found in Luke 2:7. Thus the results of the method presented here are in good agreement with scholarly consensus on the authorship history of the birth narrative.
As a later data-point on the rate of decay of local knowledge in connection with the birth narrative, we have chapter 34 of Justin's first Apology. I discuss this in the full-length version of the paper.
Although the conclusions I reach here are not in tension with consensus dates for Matthew, it is worth noting a caveat. In sociological observations of modern Near Eastern village culture, Bailey[@bailey1995informal] describes an "informal, controlled" mode of oral transmission that is normally very conservative, but observes that "Tragedies and atrocity stories naturally slip into [the category of informal and uncontrolled transmission] and when tragedy or civil strife occur, rumour transmission quickly takes over."

The rending of the Temple veil

We obtain more intriguing conclusions from our final example, the rending of the Temple veil in Mark 15:37-38, at the moment when Jesus gave his last breath. Josephus describes the veil^7 both in detail in the intact Temple^8 and also as it was used for propaganda purposes in the Flavian Triumph after the fall of Jerusalem.^9 His description (1) establishes the veil's existence as a real historical thing, not just a hypothetical object prescribed by God in Exodus 26; (2) clearly implies that it was intact until the Roman-Jewish war; and (3) shows that its existence and purpose were widely known and considered politically and symbolically important. We will see below that these facts are supported in detail by other historical data.
Because people have been spilling ink about this topic since at least as early as Jerome, and without producing any consensus about what the rending of the veil "really means," it is important to note that for the present purposes, it makes no difference whether there is a true meaning to be found. What matters is what the audience knew and when they knew it, and whether they would hear this feature as a claim of an actual event (as opposed to a purely allegorical or visionary interpretation, sec. 5{reference-type="ref" reference="sec:nonliteral"}).

Popular knowledge of the veil and its intact state before 70 C.E.

The iconic significance of the veil is demonstrated by the existence of multiple competing accounts of its fate. In Mark we have its rending as part of the passion. In the mishnah, Gittin 56 describes a lurid scene in which Titus brings a prostitute into the Temple, has sex with her on a Torah scroll laid out on the floor, and then cuts the veil with a sword, causing blood to spurt out. There is a tradition that the veil was displayed in Rome, presumably as part of the Flavian triumph, and that it had drops of blood on it.[@gurtner2006veil] Regardless of the truth or falsity of these narratives (and they cannot all be simultaneously true), their proliferation and preservation show a great level of general cultural knowledge and interest concerning the veil. For Jews in the Roman Empire, this artifact seems to have been a culturally symbolic artifact analogous to the American liberty bell.
We even have some evidence that the liberty bell-like symbolism of the veil was known to gentiles. The author or authors of Mark often take great pains to make the gospel intelligible to gentiles. They sometimes explain the most basic of Jewish customs, such as hand-washing (Mark 7:3); Aramaic vocabulary at the baby-talk level like "abba" (14:36); concepts that would be known to small children, including the day of preparation (15:42); and elementary Jewish religious concepts, including Gehenna (9:43). A number of words are explained using Latinisms. Some Jewish or Jesus-movement terms are not explained explicitly, but almost always enough context is given so that the meaning can be inferred by gentile listeners (baptism, 1:4; Passover, 14:1).
It is striking, then, that gentile listeners are assumed to require no explanation whatsoever for the veil. We have simply: Καὶ τὸ καταπέτασμα τοῦ ναοῦ ἐσχίσθη εἰς δύο ἀπ' ἄνωθεν ἕως κάτω. ("And the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom.") There is no hint from context to help the listener: the verse before this one is Jesus's last breath, and the one that follows is the confession of the astonished centurion. The positioning of the rending of the veil at this climactic moment makes it a crucial matter for the audience to understand what this object is, and yet no explanation is given at all. An uninformed listener might imagine that the Temple just has a window with some curtains, and the curtains spontaneously split. This would be the most unimpressive miracle of all time! The author of this line clearly expects that gentiles will have no problem at all recognizing this object and its significance. No such assumption is made for other features of the Temple, which are described with enough context so that any listener can understand the action. We have contextual clarification for the fact that there is commerce inside the Temple (11:15-16), and that there is a Temple treasury (12:41), as well as explicit descriptions of the Mount of Olives (13:3) and Gethsemane (14:32).
It seems, then, that the veil and its significance were well known among the entire generation that lived in the first half of the first century, and that this extended even to gentiles and to people living as far away as Rome. (Regardless of where Mark was composed, its Latinisms show that its audience included Romans.)
The veil's shielding of the Holy of Holies from the wrong eyes was so important that Josephus says of an earlier incident in 63 B.C.E.: "But there was nothing that affected the nation so much, in the calamities they were then under, as that their holy place, which had been hitherto seen by none, should be laid open to strangers; for Pompey, and those that were about him, went into the Temple itself whither it was not lawful for any to enter but the high priest, and saw what was reposited therein..."^10 After this violation, the Temple had to be cleansed of the impurity.
It seems certain, then, based on the historical record, that not only Jerusalemites but Hellenized Jews elsewhere were conscious of and had no doubts about the status of the Temple veil during the years from 63 B.C.E. to 70 C.E. Not only could they be sure that it was physically intact during that time, they knew that it had never been so much as swiped past without authorization. The total desecration and destruction of the Temple, when it finally did come, was seen as a monumental event even outside of Judaism. Vespasian and Titus celebrated their victory with a massive triumph in Rome, in which parade floats reenacted the Roman victory using actual Jewish captives to play the roles of the defeated army. For many ordinary pagan residents of Rome, the Flavian Triumph must have registered a first consciousness of the existence of Judaism, the Judean client state, and the rich furnishings of the Temple, which would help to explain the assumption in Mark that gentile listeners would know of the veil's importance.

Knowledge about the veil after 70 C.E.

The Diatessaronic witnesses are helpful in clarifying how well and for how long the veil was remembered. The many texts relevant to this passage in the canonical synoptics happen to have been collated and thoroughly analyzed by Petersen,[@petersen1985diatessaron] whose purpose was to show that certain features of the Matthean account, involving the raising of the dead from the tombs, are more primitive in the Diatessaron than in canonical Matthew, the latter having been awkwardly Paulinized. The consistency of the eastern and western Diatessaronic traditions on the raising of the dead is the main factor leading him to this conclusion, but at the same time the multiple inconsistent descriptions of the veil give us a window into the state of popular knowledge of the veil in the generations after Tatian. We see that, unlike the original audiences of Tatian and the pre-canonical synoptics, the later audiences do require some explanation of what the veil is, and the people producing these later texts sometimes disagree.
In the geographically closest region, the Syriac sources show that their authors have clear knowledge of the veil and its symbolism for many centuries after the crucifixion, but they sometimes give their audiences some help in understanding these things. Romanos the Melodist, a Syrian living during the sixth century, wrote the following in a hymn: "And at the moment when they crucified in the flesh / the One who made the vault of heaven and the earth, nailing Him to the wood, / The sun, seeing it, was darkened, and the heaven hid its eyes, / The air appeared the same as night; A cutting by fear immediately rent the rocks; And the mysterious veil in the midst of the Temple was rent."^11 Romanos thinks he has a clear idea of the veil and its function: it is not a window curtain or a curtain covering an external entrance, it is the veil that hides the Holy of Holies from human eyes. It is the καταπέτασμα ... μυστικόν, i.e., its function is to hide these mysteries.
On the other hand, some Eastern witnesses to the actual text of the Diatessaron use Syriac or Arabic phrases meaning "the veil of the door of the Temple." Here "veil" is "ˀpyn" in the construct state, literally "face-of" or "surface-of," but idiomatically used to mean a veil, as also in the translations of Hebrews 6:19. These writers (or their common source) seem to feel that their audiences may need a little explanation: this is not just the curtain of some window. But they also seem to be diverging in their imagination of the veil from those, like Romanos, who see it as an inner veil.
Western witnesses, while conservatively reproducing the non-Vulgatized account of the raising of the dead, know that their audiences will need considerably more explanation. For example, the Pepysian Harmony, a Middle English Diatessaronic gospel, has at some point been clarified for an audience that requires both a detailed aside explaining what a centurion is and a brief contextualization of what the veil is: "þe veil þat henge in þe temple tofore þe heiȝe auter"[@goates1922pepysian] ("the veil that hung in the temple before the high altar").
Jerome (Letter to Hedibia, question 8) says, in response to a question about the meaning of Matthew 27:50-51, "In Evangelio autem quod Hebraicis litteris scriptum est, legimus, non velum Templi scissum; sed superliminare Templi mirae magnitudinis corruisse." ("We read in a gospel written in Hebrew letters, not of the veil of the Temple having been rent, but rather the top of the Temple's door, of marvelous size, to have collapsed.") As first noted by Abbott,[@abbott2021fourfold pp. 622-623] this sounds as though Jerome has seen an Aramaic version and failed to recognize the idiom being employed in what reads literally as "face-of door temple."^12

Summary of popular knowledge

Summarizing the evidence above, we find that among Jews, there was long-term, geographically widespread understanding of the veil as a cultural, religious, and political symbol, and that its intact status before 70 C.E. could not have been in doubt. Among gentiles, great numbers of those as far away as Rome saw the veil during the Flavian Triumph; the authors of the earliest recorded Greek version of the rending of the veil, in canonical Mark, thought the veil was so well known among the gentile part of their audience that no explanation whatsoever was required as to what it was. The later decay and garbling of memory about the veil can also be tracked in our sources. Near Eastern Christians and proto-Christians seem to have preserved a clear and fairly accurate concept of what the veil was for centuries after the Roman-Jewish War, while gentile audiences in the west lost their memory more quickly or had spottier knowledge to start with.
Thus there is more than ample justification for applying our standard clock of forgetting, which "ticks" about once per half-century. (If anything, the decay of memory among Jews in the Near East seems to have been slower than that.) We have an if-A-then-B where A is naturalism and B is the proposition that no version of the Gospel of Mark that included 15:38 could have circulated anywhere in the Jewish diaspora until about a half-century after the Flavian Triumph, or --- very approximately --- about 120 C.E. This is much later than the dates usually given for canonical Mark as a whole, but consistent with estimates by other workers who have used textual methodologies to infer the length of time needed for the Markan gospel to become substantially fixed. In section 5{reference-type="ref" reference="sec:nonliteral"}, I consider the possibility that the present estimate is wrong because the audience of Mark would have read the veil story nonliterally. This does not turn out to be plausible, so in section 6{reference-type="ref" reference="sec:extended"} I compare with previous work supporting a picture in which the Gospel of Mark remained highly fluid until well into the second century --- fluid enough to allow the interpolation of a narrative feature as significant as that of the Temple veil and the centurion.

Nonliteral interpretations

The gospels contain many types of discourse that are unambiguously nonliteral, such as poetic language and events framed inside of Jesus's parables. There are many other features that, although they could be taken literally or nonliterally, are incidental, for example connective material like Mark 12:28: "A scribe, having heard the discussion, walked up ... and asked ..."
What would affect the argument of this paper would be nonliteral understandings of more consequential features of the narratives, such as Herod's mass murder of children. In principle this could greatly complicate the methodology, but actually our situation here is relatively straightforward, for several reasons. (1) We do not need precise information such as could today be gathered by polling Americans on whether they believe literally that Jonah was swallowed by a whale or Jesus rose from the dead.^13 We only need to infer the predominant point of view among the people with whom the narrative had to succeed. (2) Even if some people heard these narratives as instructive fictions, the author of instructive fiction is still responsible for getting basic facts right. (3) The cases with which we are concerned do not turn out to be borderline cases.
I've given a more detailed discussion in the full-length version of this paper, but a summary is as follows. Across cultures and at various times, ancient Mediterranean elites tell us that they and their peers are more skeptical, while they believe that the common people are more likely to have a naively literal interpretation of materials such as the Greek myths. In the exegetical literatures of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, a common notion is that there can be multiple layers of meaning. The literal interpretation is jettisoned only in certain clearly circumscribed cases, which do not apply here. In addition to the generic considerations that would lead to literalistic or nonliteralistic interpretations in the ancient world, we have some special considerations that apply to the Jesus movement. Their writings, unlike pagan myths and the Tanakh, depicted fairly recent events that took place under recognizable social and political circumstances, giving them the air of what we today would call journalism or current events. Because so many teachings of the Jesus movement and Paulinism contradicted, modified, circumvented, or claimed to supersede those of Judaism, there was a tendency to severely allegorize the Tanakh, treating it as little more than an encrypted message for which Jesus supplied the allegorical decryption key. For these reasons, nonliteral interpretations were emphasized for the Tanakh, while literal ones were emphasized for the movement's own "journalism." This is an additional factor making it extremely unlikely that much of the audience of the gospels would have heard the gospel accounts described here as intentionally lacking any literal plane. In summary, it is overwhelmingly likely that for the counterfactual features of the gospels discussed here, by far the majority of listeners would have perceived them to be factual claims, not pure allegories or instructive fictions.

Sense-making, circumstantial evidence, and comparison with previous work

Previous work on the dating of Mark

One could simply assign to Mark as a whole a date of composition ca. 120 C.E., but this seems unlikely on a number of grounds. Mark does not seem to possess the Pauline epistles,[@goodspeed1939introduction; @white2011read] which would be very difficult to explain for a work that was not even commenced until decades after the consensus dating of Luke-Acts. A convincing argument for an even earlier bound on the date of Mark, or here a "Mark 1.0," is provided by Sturdy.[See @sturdy p. 35] Mark 8:38-9:1 prepares Jesus's followers for the coming of the Son of Man "in the glory of his father surrounded by the holy messengers/angels,"^14 during the lifetimes of his listeners. Although the kingdom of God was a sufficiently elastic concept for this to be explained away in later apologetics, one would never have composed this passage in this way if the need for such awkward explanations could be anticipated. Even if 8:38 and 9:1 were well-known sayings of Jesus that had to be included, an evangelist living as late as 120 would have surely availed himself of easy methods for making them sound less like a failed prophecy. He could, for example, have avoided juxtaposing them so closely, or provided explanatory material. Thus the original architecture and character of Mark were put in place very early --- certainly before ca. 80 C.E.
Long-term fluidity for the Gospel of Mark, as the product of a "Markan community," has been previously asserted by Koester,[@koester1983secret] based on intertextual evidence from canonical Mark, Matthew, Luke, and secret Mark. Although Koester discusses only written transmission, Luke, Papias, and Paul all describe such a community as using a mixture of oral and written transmission, including travel, and incorporating processes of control, feedback, and revision. Writing as a practitioner of the same type of intertextual technique, Petersen has this:^15

The sum of this evidence indicates that the gospel tradition was still evolving in the first half of the second century. A large number of traditions, both written and oral, were in circulation. And while the documents were known under the names now attached to the canonical gospels, one cannot assume that these gospels had attained the form found in the great fourth century uncials ... or even the most ancient papyri ...

An objection is naturally to be raised, which is why, if gospels were such highly mutable "open source" projects, an obsolescing version like Mark retained a separate identity at all, rather than just evolving incrementally into something like Matthew, which Davies[@davies1966sermon p. 191] calls "the second edition of Mark." I discuss this further in the full-length version of this paper.

Textual evidence regarding the veil

Passing from the general discussion of the dating of Mark to the passion-resurrection sections of the gospels, we find a great deal of evidence that they were slow in reaching their canonical forms. In the passion, we have the veil-centurion-earthquake-tombs section, which exists in at least four substantially different versions: (1) the canonical Markan version;^16 (2) the version in the Gospel of Peter, with an earthquake but no raising of the dead; (3) the Diatessaronic version, in which dead people rise from their graves simultaneously with Jesus's death; and (4) the Paulinized Matthean version, in which only the "saints who had fallen asleep" are raised, and this occurs after a three-day delay. For the resurrection, Mark's account exists in several different versions. Without pretending to make any detailed judgment about the sequence, dependence, or dating of the various versions, which is controversial, one can simply observe that the passion-resurrection portions of the gospels remained unsettled for a long time. This makes it very plausible that the veil-centurion pericope was a late addition to Mark.
We have textual evidence that the veil-centurion pericope is a literary composition rather than an independently transmitted oral fragment. Mark 1:10 describes the heavens "parting" (σχιζομένους) at the moment of Jesus's baptism, which forms a large-scale architectural frame with the rending of the Temple veil (ἐσχίσθη).[@ulansey1991heavenly] The case for this connection is strengthened by the facts that both passages use forms of the verb σχίζω;^17 that Josephus describes the veil as "woven with celestial designs;" by the persistence of such a symbolic veil-sky connection in Romanos (sec. 4.2{reference-type="ref" reference="subsec:veil-late-knowledge"}); and from the fact that narrative "sandwiches" on smaller scales are a characteristic of the Markan author or school. Further support for the view of 15:34-39 as a late literary composition comes from the fact that Jesus's last words are a quote from Psalm 22 (connections with the Tanakh being a favorite second-century activity); and from the systematic, sophisticated, and multi-layered use of irony ("Behold, he calls upon Elijah."), which is another characteristic Markan literary technique.[@fowler2001 pp. 156-159]

Historically plausibile purpose

The dating technique presented here is independent of any speculation as to what the rending of the veil is "really supposed to mean," and indeed part of what makes this verse such a master-stroke of storytelling genius is its ambiguity.^18 However, one of the many purposes that canonical Mark's 15:37-39 would certainly have served would be to combat Docetism, which is believed to be a second-century phenomenon. Further discussion is given in the full-length version of this paper.
Tyson[@tyson2006marcion] proposes that Luke-Acts was written rather late, with anti-Marcionism as its primary purpose. Its composition would then be around the same time as the revision of Mark inferred in this work, perhaps with both serving similar anti-heretical purposes.

Conclusion

The period of 60-160 C.E. is a calendrical desert in which we have no date-stamps for the early texts of the Jesus movement. Previous work on the development of the gospels during this period has either used an intertextual cladistic approach^19 or sifted the evidence from patristic writings.^20 Evidence of a lengthy process of revision for the Gospel of Mark has been adduced from the cladistic technique, but it does not provide a connection to the calendar. The method presented here complements those methods by being inherently connected to time and place. However, it can only be applied in a few cases, and in order to pick out such cases I have had to impose an assumption of naturalism.
Commentators have described the Gospel of Mark as "a curious blend" that displays many wildly heterogeneous characteristics;^21 have tried to place its origins either in Rome^22 or in Syria;[@marcus1992jewish] and have evaluated it either as the work of a literary master^23 or as one that shows signs of garbling or being a jumble. The most natural resolution of these apparent dichotomies comes from the result arrived at by multiple methods, that Mark is the product of a long period of evolution. This process was likely multiregional and multicultural, and started from a "Mark 1.0" that defined a narrative vision, a style, and a characteristic set of sophisticated literary techniques.

References

1. Ἐν γὰρ τοῖς Ἀπομνημονεύμασιν, ἅ φημι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀποστόλων αὐτοῦ καὶ τῶν ἐκείνοις παρακολουθησάτων συντετάχθαι, γέγραπται... ("For in the Memoirs, which," I said, "were arranged by his apostles and those who followed, it is written ...") Trypho, 103:8. Justin does not state whether the successive generations of writers are creating new texts or modifying old ones.
2. By "many" he seems to mean assemblers of narratives, which does not imply either exclusively oral or exclusively written methods of transmission.
3. Eusebius quotes Papias as saying that accounts of Jesus's sayings were originally recorderd without any narrative framework, οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων, and also that he carefully curated the accounts that came to him. He rejected wordy accounts containing extraneous/foreign/unfamiliar commands (ἀλλοτρίας ἐντολάς) and interrogated his informants closely for context and understanding. Fialová parses Justin Martyr's term ἀπομνημονεύματα τῶν ἀποστόλων ("memoirs of the apostles") in the context of literary and philosophical tradition, as implying some sort of similar process, in which the apostles are the collectors and journalists, not the ones whose memories are being recorded., @fialova]
4. "Christians at first were few in number, and held the same opinions; but when they grew to be a great multitude, they were divided and separated, each wishing to have his own individual party." (Origen 3.10, \Roberts and Donaldson])
5. trans. Whiston
6. Trypho 78:5
7. He may describe either one or two veils, which has occasioned much effort at determining whether there were really one or two, and in the latter case which is being referred to in Mark. This is not likely to be fruitful, since Josephus's own physical descriptions of the Temple are often inconsistent when compared between Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War. We will see below that Diatessaronic witnesses sometimes take the gospel to reference a veil deep inside the Temple and sometimes an exterior one.
8. Jewish War 5.5.4
9. Jewish War 6.5.7
10. Wars of the Jews, 7.6 \Whiston]
11. Fourth Hymn on the Resurrection, 43.10 \Petersen, Diatessaron, p. 92]
12. In his answer to question 4 in the same letter, he also discusses the difficulties involved in Hebrew-Latin translation, and modestly expresses some uncertainty: "Mihique videtur" ("It seems to me also...").
13. We do know that there was variation among ordinary Jesus followers in the degree of their literalism. The author of the Ignatian epistles tells us to "Stop your ears when anyone speaks to you at variance with the Jesus Christ who ... really was born and ate and drank; ... who really was crucified ... ; who really was raised from the dead." (Trallians 9 \Roberts and Donaldson]) He would not have had to inveigh this way unless there were indeed many people who did not believe in the gospels as 100% literal truth.
14. ἐν τῇ δόξῃ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ μετὰ τῶν ἀγγέλων τῶν ἁγίων
15. Petersen, Diatessaron, p. 25
16. Luke reverses the order of Jesus's last words and the rending of the veil.
17. Matthew spoils Mark's verbal correspondence by changing the word in the baptism scene to ἠνεῴχθησαν, probably in an attempt to create a different correspondence, with Isaiah 64:1, "Oh that you would tear the heavens" (Septuagint: ανοίξης τον ουρανόν).
18. For a discussion of this ambiguity from the perspective of reader-response criticism, see Fowler, pp. 202-205.
19. Koester, History; Petersen, Diatessaron
20. Sturdy, Redrawing
21. "Mark's Gospel is a curious blend of contact with pre-70 Palestinian Judaism, yet distanced from geographical Galilee. A Gospel with a significant number of Aramaic expressions yet also a startling number of Latinisms. A Gospel reflecting an overwhelming apocalyptic crisis yet not the crisis of the destruction of the Temple." Senior, characterizing Hengel's views. @senior1987swords]
22. Senior, With Swords
23. Fowler, passim

This year I marked a significant shift in my journey of knowledge and discovery. While I have always been an avid consumer of podcasts, 2023 became the year I transitioned to the rich and immersive world of audiobooks. This change coincided with an eye-opening experience: creating our book with Kevin Owocki, set to be published in September 2024.
Crafting a book was enlightening, revealing the stark contrasts between producing short-form content and weaving together a compelling long-form narrative. We spent over a year meticulously assembling the best possible material, refining each chapter, and stripping away the superfluous to deliver an exciting, engaging experience spanning over 200 pages. This journey deepened my appreciation for the immense knowledge, effort, and time authors invest in their books. I realized that books are indeed one of the most profound sources of information available.
In a world inundated with newsletters and podcasts, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. While these mediums are fantastic for staying current, books offer a depth and richness unmatched in other formats. Each book takes me on a tremendous journey, allowing me to dive deeper into subjects I'm passionate about. As I immerse myself in audiobooks, I savor every moment of this new way of learning and exploring.
As you explore my curated reading list from 2023, I invite you to join me in this transition. Discover the profound insights and transformative experiences these books offer, and perhaps, like me, you'll find a newfound love for the depth and journey that only a good book can provide.
Merry Christmass and happy reading!

MUST READ: "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Description: Thiel discusses what it takes to build a successful startup and how to innovate to create something entirely new and valuable.
Recommendation: This is a must-read for startup enthusiasts, though it's worth noting that the landscape is shifting towards more networked rather than isolated companies.

Leadership Pick: "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek

Description: Sinek explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust, and change in organizations by discovering and communicating why they do what they do.
Recommendation: This is a very inspirational read for anyone pursuing entrepreneurship with purpose.

Political Science Pick: "The Accidental Superpower" by Peter Zeihan

Description: Zeihan examines the geopolitical landscape and argues that geography and demographics will shape the future, focusing on the United States' accidental rise to power.
Recommendation: I recommend this book for those who want to understand how geographical advantages still matter in the digital age.

History Pick: "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

Description: Harari provides a sweeping narrative of human history, from the emergence of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age to the present.
Recommendation: It’s funny how short a history we have as a human species and how we evolved. It offers a different view than what is taught in history classes, so you should check it out.

Startup Founder Pick: "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz

Description: Horowitz shares wisdom and insights from his experiences as a startup founder and venture capitalist, addressing the challenging problems that business leaders face.
Recommendation: It's an essential read for aspiring startup founders and a reminder that family should always come first.

Networking Pick: "Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated" by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz

Description: This book offers strategies for networking and building meaningful relationships in both professional and personal life. Ferrazzi emphasizes the importance of generosity and connecting to others authentically.
Recommendation: If you enjoyed 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' this book is a must-read, as it nicely builds upon similar principles.

Organizational Design Pick: "Team of Teams" by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman

Description: This book redefines the age-old military hierarchy and introduces a more flexible, team-oriented approach to leadership and management that can be applied to all organizations.
Recommendation: An insightful book demonstrating how organizations have evolved in the internet-native era. It showcases the Army's adaptation towards a more decentralized, DAO-like structure.

Innovation Pick: "The Medici Effect" by Frans Johansson

Description: Johansson discusses the phenomenon of innovation that occurs at the intersection of diverse fields, disciplines, and cultures, drawing inspiration from the Medici family's support of creativity during the Renaissance.
Recommendation: Do you feel like you're all over the place? Multitasking doesn't always work, but this book shows that being at the intersection of many fields is critical to innovation.

All-Time Classic Pick: "The Art of War"

Description: This ancient Chinese military treatise offers strategic wisdom that has transcended its martial origins and is applied in various aspects of modern life.
Recommendation: It's timeless; I didn't believe it till I read it. Some things will stay the same, even if technology moves rapidly, which can be calming, and we can rely on some things to be stable.

Sci-fi Read Pick: "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline

Description: Cline's novel is a futuristic tale where players compete in a virtual reality game with real-world stakes, filled with 1980s pop culture references.
Recommendation: Both the book and the movie are engaging, offering a glimpse into the potential future of virtual reality.

Autobiography Pick: "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo

Description: Russo tells the history of Ethereum, one of the leading blockchain platforms, and its creator, Vitalik Buterin, offering insight into the revolutionary potential of decentralized applications.
Recommendation: The incredible story of Ethereum is very detailed, and even though I have been in space for six years, I learned many new exciting details about it. The book provides a well-rounded view of Ethereum, not just focusing on Vitalik.

Personal Development Pick: "Give and Take" by Adam Grant

Description: Grant categorizes people into givers, takers, and matchers and explores how these personality types can significantly affect success in the workplace.
Recommendation: I love books by Adam Grant, and reading about how giving is the way to go aligns with my personal views.

The rest of my reading list 2023

"Wild" by Cheryl Strayed
Description: This memoir recounts Cheryl Strayed's journey as she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail alone, dealing with personal grief and finding self-discovery along the way. Strayed's raw and honest prose captures her physical and emotional challenges.
Recommendation: It's a sad story but also inspiring. What happened in the past is behind us, and we can move forward.
"Dao De Jing" translated by Roger Ames and David L. Hall
Description: This translation offers a fresh perspective on the ancient Chinese text, focusing on the Daoist philosophy of living in harmony with the Dao, or the fundamental principle underlying the universe.
Recommendation: I found this translation complex and lengthy. I'd appreciate recommendations for a more accessible book on this topic.
"The Doomed City" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Description: A thought-provoking science fiction novel in an experimental city with an unknown purpose, inhabited by people from different times and places.
Recommendation: This book presents an interesting perspective on centralized planning, taken to extreme cases. It serves as a reminder of why we should decentralize power and empower individuals.
"The Real Work" by Adam Gopnik
Description: In this collection of essays, Gopnik reflects on diverse topics, from life in New York City to the nuances of friendship and parenthood.
Recommendation: Though not overly inspirational, this book affirms that anything can be learned with enough desire.
"Talk Like TED" by Carmine Gallo
Description: Gallo dissects the ingredients of the most successful TED talks and guides how to deliver persuasive and captivating presentations.
Recommendation: Many people underestimate the power of storytelling across all industries. Could you make sure to avoid the same mistake?
"Grit" by Angela Duckworth
Description: Duckworth explores the concept of grit—the combination of passion and perseverance—and its role in success, challenging the notion that talent is the primary determinant of achievement.
Recommendation: A must-read for entrepreneurs, highlighting the unparalleled dopamine rush from achievements, contrasting with the rewards in traditional employment.

Hello, I am currently taking a course in clinical psychology as a part of my BSc and have a book review assignment. The idea of the assignment is to read and write a “scholarly” review of a book in which “psychopathology is a - or even the - theme” from the perspective of a clinical psychologist. The novel should fulfill these criteria:
• it’s not an autobiography (can be a biography)
• it’s written by a living author
• it’s written in English or has an English translation
As for my personal preferences (optional):
• no longer than 400 pages (I have about a month and a half to read it and write the review + i’m a slow reader and don’t have a lot of free time)
• I love fantasy but I feel like the lines can get blurred between pathology and fantastical entities or curses and what not. so it’s probably not the best for this assignment
• I am interested in reading/writing about any psychopathology but I recently found out I am autistic and would love a story about a late diagnosed autistic person or just an autistic adult
Any suggestions are appreciated! Feel free to ignore my personal preferences if you have a good book that doesn’t fit them. Thank you!
edits: fixing the formatting

https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/halo-hippocratica
Header Image ^[Imgur]
"2560. Adam Andrews, CEO of an interstellar corporation, ruminates upon the Covenant invasion of Arcadia—facing certain death, until the timely arrival of the UNSC Spirit of Fire."
Halo: Hippocratica is available here on Halo Waypoint, as a free PDF, and in audiobook format on YouTube.
HISTORIAN’S NOTE: This account is primarily based on excerpts taken from "Not Far from the Tree: The Autobiography of Adam Andrews,” currently slated for eventual publication by Singer-Edwards Ink in late 2561.
[ < <>>]
I wish I could say it had been the first time I’d wandered off alone. Our family had been coming to Arcadia for as long as I could remember, so I’d come to view the central city as my own sort of playground. It was heaven for an eight-year-old, and I took every opportunity to sneak off and find some sort of adventure whenever I could. Sometimes I’d pop into a museum to gawk at fossils or chase drymanders through the local gardens, sometimes I’d sit at the edge of the port wall, legs dangling over the water and watching the luxury Banta s ferry waves of tourists in and out of orbit.
All that peace. All that innocence. All those memories.
Halo Wars concept art of gardens on Arcadia ^[Imgur]
Gone in an instant.
At first, I didn’t quite know what was going on—there were explosions and flashes of blues, greens, and purples, all light from unknown sources. I think my kid brain went straight to the assumption that it was one of the regular fireworks displays that rained over the central city courtyards... but that didn’t make sense for the time of day.
And then came the screaming and the scattering of people. Citizens scrambling en masse like schools of baitfish evading a predator. To this day it’s hard to even process it all—sometimes I struggle to recount it because I’m no longer sure what elements are actually valid recollections and what’s just fragments of news blips and docu-vid replays invading my thoughts and manifesting as memory.
I remember running into the transit station to find a train that would take me away from it all, but of course there were none to be found.
I remember wishing I had just stayed with my parents instead of adventuring alone.
I remember sudden blasts of heat and metal men.
I remember the magician.
[ < <>>]
To be fair, most of the other kids were pretty nice to me. For almost a year I heard basically nothing but kind words and condolences, was cooked hot meals and taken to theme parks. A well-meaning prescription of patience and pity. Of course, eventually it went away, and I can’t blame them. It had to have taken a toll on my aunt and uncle. They had never intended to have any kids of their own, but just the same found their nephew converted into a son when the wrong ferry came crashing back down on Arcadia’s surface, Covenant plasma still boiling away the spacecraft’s seething skin.
In an instant I’d inherited the Optican empire, but it couldn’t save the lives I wanted it to most.
Sometimes, I would wonder what those final moments were like for them. At first it was easy to just be angry—did they even try to look for me? Come back to get me? That frustration then always inevitably turned to guilt and self-loathing—it was my fault. I was the one who had wandered off, the one that created the sudden separation in search of frivolous recreation.
In the following years as I pieced together more about the attack itself, it became obvious that there was no “coming back to get me.” Colonists were herded like cattle onto any transport possible, and any attempt to swim upstream the sea of terrified people would have been its own death wish.
Despite the fact that my wandering off had ultimately led to my own survival, it would create a gravity well of guilt that remains almost inescapable to this day. Because of me, their last moments weren’t just full of dread—it was also full of loss.
[ < <>>]
…no really, I was obsessed. I didn’t necessarily have a favorite team to root for per se, at least not in the'41 season, but I still made sure to catch the broadcasts whenever they were on. It wasn’t just about the competition itself—it was the fact that these people leveraged that competition to make leaps in engineering, particularly within the realm of health and safety. They were pioneering advancements that went beyond the sport itself, and I quickly realized that maybe a sponsorship deal of some sort would make sense in the near future. But that, of course, would require a future to be there in the first place.
[ < <>>]
It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it before—I certainly had. But it really took me until the final years of my university program to understand how much that experience had shaped my own goals and focuses.
In the midst of wrapping up my degree certifications, I was also still trying to learn how to help run a massive company that serviced more colonies than I’d dared to count. Needless to say, there were members of the board that weren’t exactly over the moon about giving a twenty-two-year-old any sort of decision-making autonomy, but they also didn’t have a lot of say in the matter.
I was only in that position in the first place because of what the Covenant did—if we had found better ways to handle that problem years ago then we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. And hell, I was only alive because of the efforts of well-trained and well-equipped soldiers. I didn’t care if an increased military partnership was frowned upon at the time, I was going to find a way to save lives.
That’s what we did! Why my family founded Optican in the first place.
Of course, the loneliness would always inevitably return, even if it was partly the result of the relentless cadence of my schedule. There was always something, the next development meeting, the next qualifying exam, the next restaurant that ignored my pleas for minimal spice application.
Thank goodness for Dan. We’d become roommates in our second year, and it made a huge difference having someone around to help keep you grounded when everything else in your life refused to stop its seismic shifting. Plus, he knew how to cook.
[ < <>>]
…it wasn’t that we didn’t try, that’s for sure. Optican had continued to expand in the years after the Covenant War. There were countless worlds—countless people —who deserved a ray of hope after all of the darkness we’d been put through. I wanted to help make sure that hospitals were stocked, that technicians were trained, that budgets were approved.
It wasn’t enough to be reactive, we had to be prepared. And that takes an evolution in mindset to manifest as an evolution in practice.
Of course, it didn’t surprise me that those changes have certainly come with a new set of challenges, though fewer of those challenges were shooting at you. Well, to be more accurate, different challenges were shooting at you.
But the mission never changed.
I just wanted to make them proud.
Still do.
[ < <>>]
“Alright, all good?”
Adam tentatively waited for confirmation from the audio engineer on the other side of the screen that divided the recording booth from the rest of the room, but he was already slumping in his chair a little. This was about as much as he could put into the performance of revisiting some of the most traumatic memories of his life.
“We’re all good, Mr. Andrews,” confirmed the audio engineer, giving him two thumbs up. “I think that’s a wrap on this session. I’ll update the publisher’s rep on today’s progress.”
“Good.” Adam promptly rose from his chair, strode out of the booth, and marched quickly to the closest restroom.
Trapped. Alone. The transit station’s doors wouldn’t budge.
Noises outside. Shouting, screaming… a glimpse of what was happening though the window.
“This is Ground Control, Covenant are closing in! Prepare emergency launch protocols.”
It was a bright and beautiful day, and the end of the world had come…
Adam ran the tap and splashed cold water on his face, taking a series of deep breaths to calm himself and clear his head. He needed to lie down, to rest. Thirty-six hours running on nothing but Casbah coffee was well and truly taking its toll.
But there was no time. He had one last thing to see to.
Halo Wars screenshot of the Covenant attacking Arcadia City ^[Imgur]
“Hey kid,” a voice called. “What the hell are you doing in there?”
“Can’t get out, door won’t open,” Adam said.
“Wanna see a magic trick?”
“A… what?”
A few moments passed, and then the transit station’s doors slowly parted a few inches before jamming. His rescuer then ran up the stone steps to force them further apart, and Adam finally got a good look at him. He had never seen a magician in Marine Corps battle dress uniform before.
“Do you know any other tricks?” Adam asked as the magician grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the building. There was a vehicle waiting for them—a military car with two curved tusks at its front and a large rear-mounted cannon.
The magician remained quiet as he helped lift Adam into the passenger seat of the vehicle, the grin on his face fading into a look of focus and grim determination. With this elevated view, Adam could see the crowds of people streaming towards the city’s spaceport as aircraft flew overhead to carve a path through the skies while armored soldiers sprinted towards the sounds of panicked screams and gunfire.
The tusked car took off at an incredible speed that forced Adam back into his seat, the deep roll of thunder passing above as the soldier on the rear-mounted cannon fired on purple shapes that passed by in a blur.
“You wanted to see another trick?” asked the magician. “We’re gonna play one on the Covenant. When we get to that spaceport, we’re gonna make you and everyone else disappear. Just keep your eyes on me, alright?”
Adam nodded. He told himself that nothing else in the world existed, fixing his gaze upon the magician.
His promise was put to the test almost immediately as the car swerved sharply to the right. He redoubled his efforts, catching himself before he could properly see what they had collided with. It was then that he caught sight of a peculiar trinket strapped to the magician’s shoulder pad.
“What’s that?” Adam asked.
“The ace of spades,” the magician said, that confident grin returning once more. “That’s our ticket to get Lady Luck on our side, kid!”
The EV-44 Nightingale was a sight to behold as it awaited Adam’s arrival on the executive-level pad, its tiltrotor wings already running to make an immediate departure. His ride here from Optican’s office headquarters had certainly been smoother than the memory of his rescue that he had allowed himself to be pulled into as he gazed out at the glasslands of Arcadia.
This VTOL was one of the earliest partnerships Adam had secured with Misriah Armory in the aftermath of the Covenant War. He had originally envisioned the EV-44 solely as a medical support vessel, but a compromise that was later framed as a symbolic gesture of “the best of both worlds” saw the creation of a highly customizable airframe to suit a variety of purposes.
He had ordered two other EV-44s to follow him from a distance. Adam would travel alone, save for his pilot, while the other two were crewed with a complement of four private military specialists—just in case things went south.
To that point, now was Adam’s last chance to make one particular call.
He’d been putting it off all day.
“Hey Dan.”
Adam winced slightly at how awkwardly that had come out. After twelve years together, Dan would immediately know something was off.
“Running late at the office again today, you know how it is, but I think we’ve got leftovers from the other night so feel free to have them. I’ll probably grab something from World Cuisine on the way back. And yes, I know, I said I was going to give it up. Old habits…”
Adam trailed off for a moment, still weighing in his mind exactly what to reveal and how to say it as he fiddled with his seat’s arm rest.
“I know I’ve been… distant, lately. Wrapped up in work, away from home—from you—for long periods of time, and I know it’s wearing on you. I’m working on something. Something big. I’ve had to keep it quiet, but we’re turning a pretty huge corner today, and I’ll tell you everything about it when I get back. Tomorrow, when I’m back tomorrow. I promise.”
Letting out a heavy sigh, Adam searched for a sense of relief that did not come. He’d have questions to answer when he got back, and he hoped that Dan would understand why he had to do this.
Adam tried to distract himself by looking out at the landscape of Arcadia. Though the Covenant had been beaten back from the planet during their initial assault in 2531, the alien alliance returned eighteen years later to finish what they’d started with renewed, vengeful vigor. Since then, Arcadia’s surface had remained ashen gray—there were no pockets of color to be seen from orbit…
But glassed planets had become something of a hot commodity in recent years. These lifeless rocks were the perfect job-creators, with the likes of Liang-Dortmund, Aquarius, and other opportunistic corporations playing a long game of land ownership by investing in deglassing operations. Displaced refugees became captivated by the promise of reclaiming their homes, working in conditions where breathing in the wrong place could shred your lungs with tiny shards of glass in the atmosphere. They needed to be looked out for.
That—as Adam told himself, day after day—was where Optican came in.
After the Covenant War had ended, or at least slowed to the point where humanity was not in imminent danger of extinction, the task of rebuilding a healthcare plan on an interstellar scale had arisen. And there he had been, right at the center of it.
Advanced wheelchairs, artificial limbs, instant-application field-issue medigel, physical therapy, mental health, the study and treatment of bacteria and diseases from dozens of different worlds, all on top of general healthcare for the countless souls that had been displaced during the Covenant War, with refugees scattered across surviving colonies…
All of it relied on the Unified Earth Government’s infrastructure, which President Charet had sought to prioritize rebuilding upon her appointment. But despite all those pretty speeches about how humanity would never again be the victim of warring alien factions, it didn’t take long before new threats emerged. Covenant remnant groups, reawakened Forerunner constructs, an AI rebellion, the Banished… and who even knew what had become of the UNSC’s once-expansive reach over the last year.
The work of civilization simply could not keep up with the rate at which an increasing number of groups were trying to end it.
Lady Luck had not seemed to favor them of late.
For this feeling of existential malaise, Adam had no remedy—and he kicked himself for how unhelpful his attempt to distract his thoughts were.
Halo Wars concept art of Forerunner ruins on Arcadia ^[Imgur]
A jolt brought him back to the present, as the Nightingale landed in a swampy clearing. This was a rare area of Arcadia that the Covenant had actually avoided glassing directly, discovered after Adam had sent a scout team to this region a few years ago.
The impact of that trip, and all the plans it had spun up, had culminated in the journey he was making today.
Exiting the Nightingale, Adam’s boots hit soft ground and squelched in thick mud. The clearing was quite remarkable, as he found himself surrounded by tall, thick-trunked trees that were miraculously still growing leaves. He knew that the Covenant had once shrouded this area in a protective energy dome on their first visit to Arcadia… had it been restored? Was that how this place had been preserved?
The path ahead led him to the ruins of an old UNSC firebase surrounded by strange ancient ruins that looked as if they were made of weathered stone, but vein-like lines and patterns of hardlight told Adam that these structures were not as fragile as they appeared.
He wondered if Arcadia had been a resort world for the Forerunners as well…
But his thoughts were quickly turned to business as he found his quarry. The telltale whine of a Phantom dropship sounded above and three Kig-Yar quickly deployed next to the firebase’s entrance, outfitted in salvager gear with holstered plasma pistols. They had taken precautions too, it seemed.
“Held up our part of bargain,” the one in the middle squawked, gesturing towards an industrial-grade UNSC equipment crate that descended to the ground via the Phantom’s rear gravity lift. “Brought out to middle of nowhere for this. You have payment?”
“Let’s take a walk.”
The Kig-Yar narrowed its eyes. “Nor Fel not like unexpected surprises, human.”
“She and I have that much in common. But I do think she’ll be pleased with what you will be giving her.”
Leading them past the firebase and the Forerunner ruins, Adam led the Kig-Yar through the overgrown field beyond. He saw other, smaller temple structures with what appeared to be crude huts and metal shacks positioned near them, raising even more questions in his mind about what exactly had happened here upon the Covenant’s return in 2549.
“Almost thirty years ago, the Covenant came to this planet,” Adam started, filling the otherwise uncomfortable silence. “It was one of the few places that was apparently spared from their glassing beams because it was home to Forerunner technology they deemed valuable enough to warrant a very special protector.”
He could see the ruins of it up ahead. The alloyed corpse of an incomplete Scarab, a unique form of the excavator so large and powerful that it could not simply be deployed but had to be built on-site.
“It was, of course, no match for a team of Spartans and the UNSC forces that went up against it, but one part of it did survive…”
Adam savored the dramatic moment that had held the Kig-Yar in captivated silence as he found the part he was looking for. And Adam saw the light in the Kig-Yars' eyes appear to shine even brighter as they saw what he was pointing at.
A massive focus cannon—the head of the Scarab—was approximately eight meters long, powerful enough to disintegrate even some Forerunner alloys.
He had pored over every record, every report and intelligence file he could find of that time, to learn about those who had saved him, hoping that he could one day find the magician who had taken him to the spaceport. He had even sent scout teams to the nearby Fort Deen, which was what had led them to come across this site where the leftover wreckage of a battle still remained.
Through these efforts, he had learned of the UNSC Spirit of Fire. Missing in action. Later declared lost with all hands…
The magician’s final magic trick had been to make them disappear.
Adam believed that they were still out there, somewhere. A childish hope, perhaps, but the galaxy was a large place.
And with so many heroes missing, the infrastructure of their deliverance seemingly sundered, it fell to others to fill the gap their absence left. That work began today.
“Deal is acceptable, human,” the lead Kig-Yar nodded its avian head in acknowledgement of a respectable transaction. “Nor Fel will be satisfied.”
Without another word, the Kig-Yar signaled for their associates to prepare for departure and secure the focus cannon with their Phantom’s gravity lift.
Adam wandered back to the UNSC firebase, finding his own cargo being disassembled into smaller crates that were loaded onto each Nightingale. After helping to secure the crates, Adam relaxed in his seat and felt some of the weight that had been pressing down upon him finally lift. It had all gone off without a hitch.
With the end of this chapter, he was ready to begin the next. Briefly, he wondered how his next book might be written...
Halo Infinite screenshot of August-099 holding an M99 Stanchion ^[Imgur]
August-099 continued to observe through the scope of her M99 Stanchion as the three Nightingales departed. She knew that uncovering the details of Optican’s part in this deal would have to wait for another day, but the Kig-Yar salvagers and their Phantom had not yet departed—their window of opportunity was still open.
August noted Robert-025 and Leon-011 had winked their status lights green on her heads-up display. They were already in position.
She gave the signal with three quick bursts from her M99. The Kig-Yar didn’t have more than a nanosecond to react as the anti-matériel rifle’s tungsten rounds found their mark—it was as if the trio of salvagers had simply been wiped from existence as they flew to pieces.
Leon charged towards the Phantom, leaping into the rear gravity lift and igniting his energy sword to dispatch the pilot and any additional forces contained within. Robert was prepared to meet any escapees of the craft with his heavy machine gun turret, but it only took a few short seconds for Leon to confirm that the dropship had been neutralized.
“Good work, Omega Team,” August spoke over TEAMCOM now that they were alone.
“Obtaining the transport manifest now,” Leon said, feeding the data to their HUDs. Robert moved over to the Scarab’s focus cannon to begin preliminary scans.
Ever vigilant, August continued to perform overwatch for the team, ensuring that there weren’t any other surprise guests lying in wait or unexpected visitors who might be late to the party.
“Nor Fel’s getting a bit too confident now that she's sure the Created and ONI aren’t breathing down her neck,” Leon remarked as he updated the feed with the cargo manifest the Kig-Yar had traded. “Not seen these in a while...”
August glanced at the data and quickly understood Leon’s surprise.
She remembered.
Hellas, 2527...
Insurrectionist activity during the Covenant War had been uneven and inconsistent. Where some sectors saw declines, other groups had been keen to press a new advantage with a weapon they’d obtained that their leaders said could level the playing field against Spartans.
Stylized image of a rumbledrug depicted in Halo: Evolutions - Midnight in the Heart of Midlothian ^[Imgur]
They’d forced a retreat into an indefensible fox hole. Twenty of what had once been a full company, cornered, backs against the wall, low on ammo... but then, one of them pulled something and injected it into his arm, started pushing forwards. Whatever he’d taken had turned a soft target into something as resilient as an M808. He didn’t even stumble until he’d taken half a mag from an MA5B, but when his own allies moved up to cover him, he turned on them, shredding through them like they were nothing.
When several similar reports emerged from Fumirole and a handful of other colonies, Naval Intelligence got a good look at what they’d been using.
Formally, they called it a Waverly-class augmentor, but grunts on the ground simply called them “rumbledrugs.”
This chemical cocktail could temporarily suspend the normal limits of the human body, massively enhancing strength and pain tolerance by rapidly targeting the frontal lobe—though this came at the cost of immense and irreversible psychological damage. As soon as it became clear that the user was as likely to tear apart their own side as their enemies, it had fallen out of use and was officially declared illegal.
Naturally, this begged the question: What the hell did Optican want with these illegal and ineffective drugs?
For now, there were still some last staging details to finalize so that Nor Fel would believe that the transaction went smoothly and the item of interest she was expecting to acquire had been waylaid after her salvagers had departed.
“Focus cannon is secure,” Robert confirmed over TEAMCOM.
“Skies are clear,” Leon winked a green status light.
“Let’s wrap it up, Omega,” August said. “We’re gone.”
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