i like the it

lets just take a moment to observe her

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.

If you're someone who wants to be able to find (or avoid) ships while reading on AO3, odds are good that a fan coder out there has created a user script that could help you out.

User scripts are similar to extensions. You add them to your browser to automatically adjust web pages for you. User scripts allow you the opportunity to personalize them, however, which is wonderful for things like AO3 filters.

Here are a few that might be worth a look:

AO3 multishipper saviour - if you want to read about a particular character in a relationship without specifying any other person. The relationships can be specified to be romantic or platonic or both.

AO3: Reorder Ship Tags - Automatically reorders relationship tags on work blurbs so romantic ships (/) always appear before platonic ships (&).

AO3 Relationship/Character Highlighter - highlights the ship/character you’re looking for if they appear in the first two relationship/character tags.

AO3 romantic relationship savior - hides all romantic relationships in sort & filter page that has "/"

AO3 First Relationship Tag Filter - toggle on the script if you're browsing a relationship tag and all the works that don't have that tag as their first tag will be hidden. Works on both romantic (/) and platonic (&) relationships.

AO3 relationship savior - hides works that have too many relationships in them.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing - will hide fics that don't have the designated pairing listed first in the tags.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing (Auto) - The difference between this and Neeve's script is that it automatically detects the primary pairing, little to no configuration needed.

AO3 Show every pairing except THAT one - Remove relationship tags from script which you do not want to read.

BOY DO I

okay so real talk, 90% of what i'm about to recommend is about the cold war, because that is the time period that i have done the most reading about. these sources are not always academic papers, but nonfiction investigations ranging from official biographies (which are useful for gauging what's left unsaid) to memoirs and autobiographies, to (leftie) journalistic investigations (REALLY necessary for more critical investigations, especially of western spy agencies). i recommend reading them in conjunction with each other, because that gives you a sense of what is being said and what is being left unsaid in each account and comparing these accounts allows you to arrive at something as close to "the truth" as one can get about the world of espionage. also, most of this is very british history oriented because er that is my personal obsession-nemesis-hatemance and that is what i've been reading on for the past 10 years now.

If you're interested in espionage in Early Modern Europe, read Spycraft by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, for a great look at the kind of spy techniques and craft that was emerging around the 16th and 17th centuries across Europe but primarily in London, as well as some references to the political intrigues of the time. The authors point to a lot of other historical sources and monographs as well especially in relation to Renaissance Italy (the progenitor for a lot of spycraft), many of which will also lead you down rabbit holes to the 18th and 19th century. Some titles that I picked up along the way that were cited in this: Venice’s Secret Service by Ioanna Iordanou*; Agents of Empire Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits, and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Noel Malcolm; Mapping the Great Game Explorers, Spies and Maps in 19th-century Asia by Riaz Dean. I've only glanced through these, but they seemed pretty interesting!

SPIES AT HOME IN THE COLD WAR

The classic cold war MomentTM is Kim Philby's autobiography, My Silent War, which is mostly a retrospective of Philby's time in MI5 & MI6, written after he defected to the Soviet Union. Pair with Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends, covering the specific history of the Cambridge Five. Other moments include the Profumo affair, covered in Richard Davenport Hines' An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo that examines the intersection specifically of British politics, class and power structures at the time. There's also Operation Clockwork Orange, the plot to get rid of Harold Wilson, covered in Paul Foot's Who Framed Colin Wallace? and lastly, the use of intelligence agencies to break the miners' strike during the Thatcher years with a range of counterinsurgency techniques, covered in Seumas Milne's The Enemy Within. Pair finally with Peter Wright's Spycatcher, covering the 30s - 70s in British intelligence, written by a former (disillusioned) British intelligence officer, with more of a whistleblower perspective than anything.

For a high-level survey of Soviet intelligence histories look at Jonathan Haslam's Our Near & Distant Neighbours, which covers a history of Soviet Intelligence across the Cold War period and Christopher Andrews' The Sword & The Shield. Keep in mind, though, that Christopher Andrews was appointed official historian for MI5 and produced their official history - so you will want to take everything in that history with a large amount of salt.

For a high-level survey of MI5 & MI6 intelligence surveys, you have the two official biographies: The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew and Keith Jeffery's Secret History of MI6 (1909 - 1949). Read against Gordon Thomas' Inside British Intelligence. Also see: Peter Hennessy's The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst and Stephen Dorril's MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations.

THE FORMERLY COLONIAL WORLD'S HOT WARS

This is a clunkily titled section, but that's because Northern Ireland was a significant theatre of operations for British intelligence agencies during The Troubles and there is significant continuity between counterinsurgency employed in, say, Malaysia and Kenya and Northern Ireland. Also, this is a lot more of a gruesome section than above, because it deals a lot with the history of colonial interventions that continued past "independence" for many countries.

For another bird's eye view, The World Was Going Our Way by Christopher Andrew is a pretty illuminating read about what MI6 and the CIA considered to be significant "threats" to "security" across various Third World countries. If you know anything about history in your own country, you will realise how much of this is completely ideological and unrelated to reality. For a slightly less hagiographic approach, but nevertheless still quite uncritical of British "interests", look at Confronting the Colonies by Rory Cormac, Disrupt & Deny: Spies, Special Forces and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by the same author, and The British Way in Counterinsurgency by David French (not that David French; a historian)

For more critical perspectives, look at Paul Dixon (eds.) The British Approach to Counterinsurgency, Hannah Gruman (eds.) Hearts & Minds: A people's history of counterinsurgency and Guy Arnold's Mercenaries: The Scourge of the Third World.

For Northern Ireland look at Stakeknife: Britain's secret agents in Ireland by Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin. This is part whistleblowing account and part investigative journalism, though many of the details and events described are somewhat public knowledge already. For Kenya: Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson. For Latin America: Hidden Terrors by A J Langguth. For Africa: Susan Williams' White Malice: The CIA & the Covert Recolonization of Africa (in general she has a lot of really great books about the CIA's activities in Africa, but a special standout to me is Who Killed Hammarskjold? about the death of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961 in Zambia (then Rhodesia) under dubious circumstances.)

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

The New Spymasters by Stephen Grey mostly looking at the post cold-war espionage scenario and especially informative on the ways drugs and "anti-terrorism" became a way of justifying continued budgets for the secret services.

Weaponizing Anthropology by David Price, which is an informative look at the ways in which domains like anthropology & area studies become enmeshed in intelligence, both in gathering/constructing intelligence and in counterinsurgency operations.

Britain's Secret Propaganda War by Paul Lashmar, concerning MI6's propaganda efforts during the Cold War. Pair with Eric Bennett's Workshops of Empire, The Aesthetic Cold War by Peter J. Kalliney and The CIA & the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War by Sarah Miller Harris.

Operation Lock & the War on Rhino Poaching by John Hanks, a fairly illuminating look at the overlaps between "counterinsurgency", ex-intelligence mercernaries from the SAS and some of the national parks' anti-poaching approaches under WWF in the 80s - and its intersections with race and class interests.

The Mayfair Set: Who Pays Wins, a documentary by Adam Curtis, on the foundations of the global arms trade post WWII, emerging from overlaps with British intelligence & the SAS' activities abroad (and some pretty illuminating looks into the ideologies of the founders of the SAS viz. race & the newly independent colonies).

They're not only beautiful green spaces but excellent public displays of history and art history, and if you care to look closely you can find out a lot just by studying stones.

For example- notice how few modern headstones are dedicated to young children versus the ones erected before vaccines were widespread.

The cemetery near here has the state's largest silver maple crowning its grounds. Many of the trees in older cemeteries are some of the largest and oldest trees in an area.

Cemeteries are for the living, not the dead. Enjoy them. Go birdwatching in them. Don't be stupid in them sure but don't be too afraid to touch them either.

The Freethinker & Her Gigolo - Simon Angel

With Rachel Sweeney

Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.

Infrastructure and citified heat islands also very much play a factor. And here the angle you’re at on earth also makes it worse. The sun being lower on the horizon can double the amount of solar energy affecting your house. The sun beating through your windows for 16+ hours a day when you have a house built for cold and no AC adds to the misery.

But what I’m talking about here is how hot you feel in your body when experiencing solar radiation from a lower angle. On the upside the sun’s rays have to pass through more atmosphere, weakening the UV strength, hence why populations that migrated north eons ago lost melanin (you still need SPF though). And in general the warming effect on the atmosphere is lessened. The warming effect on your body is magnified. To the tune of 10-20 degrees (yes Fahrenheit) above ambient. Winter gear prioritizes insulating your torso because that’s where all your vital organs are. It follows that the sun beating on your chest and back warms you up fast and with little relief except to get in the shade.

My eye doctor also told me living in Alaska made you more likely to get cataracts younger because the low-angle sun gets directly in your eyes in the summer (unless you’re big on sunglasses) and the snow and ice in winter reflect a lot of UV back up, doubling your exposure. Though the prevalence of cataracts in Alaska and other far-north locales is contributed to by other factors, notably poverty and the resulting lack of medical care. And is still not as likely as in people who live in equatorial climes or high altitudes and get the super-strength UV exposure all year round.