Tap your mind

David explains why the X-Files must end with romance. It involves Mulder as Homer’s Odysseus.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

My favorite is the Pasha Bulker though. Let me explain.

Imagine you're a fhjdnormous coal carrier off the coast of Australia. You wanna go to Newcastle to load coal, as you do. Unfortunately the queuing system at Newcastle is dogshit so boats are just anchoring all over the place. That's not great. But luckily, your crew has The Australian Pilot on board, which gives detailed information about this part of the world and how to navigate it.

A storm is coming in. But fear not! The anchors will hold in the predicted wind speeds. Unrelated, did you know that single gusts can be up to 40% stronger than average wind speed? This is also described in the Australian Pilot. Take a guess if anyone on the Pasha Bulker read this very helpful little book.

(And to be fair, it was a strong storm - there's reports of entire sofas being blown along a street.)

Alright, you're dragging your anchor and the coast authorities asked if the ship needs help. What do you respond?

> Yes, oh God idk what I'm doing here.

> Ugh, no I got this.

If you chose the latter option, you did the same thing as the Pasha Bulker's master (sorta like but not the same as a Captain).

He did this SEVERAL TIMES, while the continent of Australia was coming closer. And closer. And closer. At this point, people were gathering at the shore because they knew the ship was going to run aground and that's not something you see every day.

The master was in denial until the Pasha Bulker ran aground on a reef just in front of the shoreline. I saw the pictures first in high school and thought they were fake, it looks insane. (Ocean-going coal carriers are fuckin HUGE.)

So yeah, you're probably doing fine.

After Scully came out of surgery, Mulder was there waiting in her hospital room for her.

Mulder whispered her name to her, and Scully's eyes fluttered open at the sound. She smiled, a loopy, close-mouthed greeting, and clumsily waved a hand towards him. He caught it, and wrapped his fingers around hers. This was their secret handshake borne of heavy emotion and long hospital hours passed by the other’s bedside.

Here, Mulder and Scully's fingers claimed and held each other's, as if at the center of some sort of an interlocking spiral. Scully chuckled lowly, and then spoke indistinctly, murmuring to him. He leaned in to hear what she said.

"We're chiral, you'n'me."

"Chiral?" He asked. "As in the mathematical concept of two mirror images, whose objects are not superposable upon each other?

"Mhmph."

A flutter warmed Mulder's chest. Scully. Only she could describe what he felt in such a mathematical metaphor. His affection for her bloomed every day.

"Like hands, y'see." Scully shifted, unwrapped her fingers from around his until they met palm to palm. His hands, much larger than hers, dwarfed hers in size, and yet Scully looked at them as if there was a magic to the two of them. As if what had only been appendages were now a synchrony. "If our hands tried to occupy the same space in the same direction, they wouldn't be symmetrical. But when pressed together like this... the symmetry reveals itself. You're my reflection, Mulder."

Startlingly Mulder felt near to tears. He took her hand between both of his and pressed a slow kiss to her palm, and then her hand to his heart. He admitted, "I know."

She smiled up sleepily at him. He leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead, and settled at her bedside to sit her vigil.

Scully, as ever, recontextualizing his world with her presence and her science. Scully and Mulder, as if they were two molecules, expanding the known definitions of partner.

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon. The Apollo 8 mission was the first crewed spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.