Podcasts about Black Forest

What do 68 monitoring sites and over $1.3 million annual investment in data collection tell us about Fountain Creek? Colorado Springs Utilities water quality expert Annie Berlemann provides some answers. She is Fountain Creek Watershed Project Manager for the utility.Fountain Creek is one of Colorado's most closely monitored and ecologically diverse waterways—spanning urban neighborhoods, rural landscapes, and natural ecosystems from the top of Pikes Peak to Pueblo. The Fountain Creek Watershed tells a complex story of resilience, risk, and recovery. From the Waldo Canyon and Black Forest fires to the “Miracle May” floods – discover what it takes to track and improve water health for both people and wildlife, including the native Flathead chub, a species of special concern.LINKS:Presenter's Slides: https://studio809podcasts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Watershed-101-and-Water-Quality.pdfColorado Springs Utilities: https://www.csu.org/This episode was recorded at the Sustainability in Progress (SIP) virtual event on April 16, 2025. Sustainability in Progress is a monthly program of the Peak Alliance for a Sustainable Future. Join us (free) the third Wednesday of every month.The next event is:Home Grown – Built to Live, Love, Last - Jill Gaebler of Pikes Peak Housing NetworkMay 21, 2025, Noon to 1 p.m., VirtualRegister: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/QFVcv-2VRZGvEovtDnV9cQThe following environment/sustainability organizations in the Pikes Peak region collaborate to produce the Peak Environment podcast about environmental stewardship, sustainable living and enlightened public policy in the Pikes Peak Region.Peak Alliance for a Sustainable Future https://peakallianceco.org/Pikes Peak Permaculture https://www.pikespeakpermaculture.org/350 Colorado https://350colorado.org/GrowthBusters https://www.growthbusters.orgKeep up with all the organizations and events making our area a better place to live. Follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode.

Dr. Matt Morton, Pastor of Cross Fellowship Church in Black Forest sits down with your host, Pastor Brian, to talk about their recent youth outreach "One Big Wednesday" and other fun topics.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoTrent Poole, Vice President and General Manager of Hunter Mountain, New YorkRecorded onMarch 19, 2025About Hunter MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Hunter, New YorkYear founded: 1959Pass affiliations:* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass – unlimited access* Epic Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access with holiday blackouts* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited access with holiday and midweek blackouts* Epic Day Pass – All Resorts, 32 Resorts tiersClosest neighboring ski areas: Windham (:16), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:49)Base elevation: 1,600 feetSummit elevation: 3,200 feetVertical drop: 1,600 feetSkiable acres: 320Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 67 (25% beginner, 30% intermediate, 45% advanced)Lift count: 13 (3 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 platter, 3 carpets)Why I interviewed himSki areas are like political issues. We all feel as though we need to have an opinion on them. This tends to be less a considered position than an adjective. Tariffs are _______. Killington is _______. It's a bullet to shoot when needed. Most of us aren't very good shots.Hunter tends to draw a particularly colorful basket of adjectives: crowded, crazy, frantic, dangerous, icy, frozen, confusing, wild. Hunter, to the weekend visitor, appears to be teetering at all times on the brink of collapse. So many skiers on the lifts, so many skiers in the liftlines, so many skiers on the trails, so many skiers in the parking lots, so many skiers in the lodge pounding shots and pints. Whether Hunter is a ski area with a bar attached or a bar with a ski area attached is debatable. The lodge stretches on and on and up and down in disorienting and disconnected wings, a Winchester Mansion of the mountains, stapled together over eons to foil the alien hordes (New Yorkers). The trails run in a splintered, counterintuitive maze, an impossible puzzle for the uninitiated. Lifts fly all over, 13 total, of all makes and sizes and vintage, but often it feels as though there is only one lift and that lift is the Kaatskill Flyer, an overwhelmed top-to-bottom six-pack that replaced an overwhelmed top-to-bottom high-speed quad on a line that feels as though it would be overwhelmed with a high-speed 85-pack. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of ski area you would expect to find two hours north of a 20-million-person megacity world famous for its blunt, abrasive, and bare-knuckled residents.That description of Hunter is accurate enough, but incomplete. Yes, skiing there can feel like riding a swinging wrecking ball through a tenement building. And I would probably suggest that as a family activity before I would recommend Hunter on, say, MLK Saturday. But Hunter is also a glorious hunk of ski history, a last-man-standing of the once-skiing-flush Catskills, a nature-bending prototype of a ski mountain built in a place that lacks both consistent natural snow and fall lines to ski on. It may be a corporate cog now, but the Hunter hammered into the mountains over nearly six decades was the dream and domain of the Slutsky family, many of whom still work for the ski area. And Hunter, on a midweek, when all those fast lifts are 10 times more capacity than you need, can be a dream. Fast up, fast down. And once you learn the trail network, the place unfolds like a picnic blanket: easy, comfortable, versatile, filled with delicious options (if occasionally covered with ants).There's no one good way to describe Hunter Mountain. It's different every day. All ski areas are different every day, but Hunter is, arguably, more more different along the spectrum of its extremes than just about any other ski area anywhere. You won't get it on your first visit. You will show up on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong parking lot, and the whole thing will feel like playing lasertag with hyenas. Alien hyenas. Who will for some reason all be wearing Jets jerseys. But if you push through for that second visit, you'll start to get it. Maybe. I promise. And you'll understand why one-adjective Hunter Mountain descriptions are about as useful as the average citizen's take on NATO.What we talked aboutSixty-five years of Hunter; a nice cold winter at last; big snowmaking upgrades; snowmaking on Annapurna and Westway; the Otis and Broadway lift upgrades; Broadway ripple effects on the F and Kaatskill Flyer lifts; supervising the installation of seven new lifts at three Vail Resorts over a two-year period; better liftline management; moving away from lettered lift names; what Otis means for H lift; whether the Hunter East mountaintop Poma could ever spin again; how much of Otis is re-used from the old Broadway lift; ski Ohio; landing at Vail Resorts pre-Epic Pass and watching the pass materialize and grow; taking over for a GM who had worked at Hunter for 44 years; understanding and appreciating Hunter madness; Hunter locals mixed with Vail Resorts; Hunter North and the potential for an additional base area; disappearing trailmap glades; expansion potential; a better ski connection to Hunter East; and Epic Local as Hunter's season pass.Questions I wish I'd askedI'd wanted to ask Poole about the legacy of the Slutzky family, given their founding role at Hunter. We just didn't have time. New York Ski Blog has a nice historical overview.I actually did ask Poole about D lift, the onetime triple-now-double parallel to Kaatskill Flyer, but we cut that segment in edit. A summary: the lift didn't run at all this past season, and Poole told me that, “we're keeping our options open,” when I asked him if D lift was a good candidate to be removed at some near-future point.Why now was a good time for this interviewThe better question is probably why I waited five-and-a-half years to feature the leader of the most prominent ski area in New York City's orbit on the podcast. Hunter was, after all, the first mountain I hit after moving to the city in 2002. But who does and does not appear on the podcast is grounded in timing more than anything. Vail announced its acquisition of Hunter parent company Peak Resorts just a couple of months before I launched The Storm, in 2019. No one, including me, really likes doing podcast interviews during transitions, which can be filled with optimism and energy, but also uncertainty and instability. The Covid asteroid then transformed what should have been a one-year transition period into more like a three-year transition period, which was followed by a leadership change at Hunter.But we're finally here. And, as it turns out, this was a pretty good time to arrive. Part of the perpetual Hunter mess tied back to the problem I alluded to above: the six-pack-Kaatskill-Flyer-as-alpha-lift muted the impact of the lesser contraptions around it. By dropping a second superlift right next door, Vail appears to have finally solved the problem of the Flyer's ever-exploding liftline.That's one part of the story, and the most obvious. But the snowmaking upgrades on key trails signal Hunter's intent to reclaim its trophy as Snow God of the New York Thruway. And the shuffling of lifts on Hunter East reconfigured the ski area's novice terrain into a more logical progression (true green-circle skiers, however, will be better off at nearby Belleayre, where the Lightning Quad serves an incredible pod of long and winding beginner runs).These 2024 improvements build on considerable upgrades from the Peak and Slutzky eras, including the 2018 Hunter North expansion and the massive learning center at Hunter East. If Hunter is to remain a cheap and accessible Epic Pass fishing net to funnel New Yorkers north to Stowe and west to Park City, even as neighboring Windham tilts ever more restrictive and expensive, then Vail is going to have to be creative and aggressive in how the mountain manages all those skiers. These upgrades are a promising start.Why you should ski Hunter MountainThink of a thing that is a version of a familiar thing but hits you like a completely different thing altogether. Like pine trees and palm trees are both trees, but when I first encountered the latter at age 19, they didn't feel like trees at all, but like someone's dream of a tree who'd had one described to them but had never actually seen one. Or horses and dolphins: both animals, right? But one you can ride like a little vehicle, and the other supposedly breathes air but lives beneath the sea plotting our extinction in a secret indecipherable language. Or New York-style pizza versus Domino's, which, as Midwest stock, I prefer, but which my locally born wife can only describe as “not pizza.”This is something like the experience you will have at Hunter Mountain if you show up knowing a good lot about ski areas, but not much about this ski area. Because if I had to make a list of ski areas similar to Hunter, it would include “that Gwar concert I attended at Harpos in Detroit when I was 18” and “a high-tide rescue scene in a lifeguard movie.” And then I would run out of ideas. Because there is no ski area anywhere remotely like Hunter Mountain.I mean that as spectacle, as a way to witness New York City's id manifest into corporeal form. Your Hunter Mountain Bingo card will include “Guy straightlining Racer's Edge with unzipped Starter jacket and backward baseball cap” and “Dude rocking short-sleeves in 15-degree weather.” The vibe is atomic and combustible, slightly intimidating but also riotously fun, like some snowy Woodstock:And then there's the skiing. I have never skied terrain like Hunter's. The trails swoop and dive and wheel around endless curves, as though carved into the Tower of Babel, an amazing amount of terrain slammed into an area that looks and feels constrained, like a bound haybale that, twine cut, explodes across your yard. Trails crisscross and split and dig around blind corners. None of it feels logical, but it all comes together somehow. Before the advent of Google Maps, I could not plot an accurate mental picture of how Hunter East, West, North, and whatever the hell they call the front part sat in relation to one another and formed a coherent single entity.I don't always like being at Hunter. And yet I've skied there more than I've skied just about anywhere. And not just because it's close. It's certainly not cheap, and the road in from the Thruway is a real pain in the ass. But they reliably spin the lifts from November to April, and fast lifts on respectable vert can add up quick. And the upside of crazy? Everyone is welcome.Podcast NotesOn Hunter's lift upgradesHunter orchestrated a massive offseason lift upgrade last year, moving the old Broadway (B) lift over to Hunter East, where the mountain demolished a 1968 Hall Double named “E,” and planted its third six-pack on a longer Broadway line. Check the old lines versus the new ones:On six-packs in New York StateNew York is home to more ski areas than any other state, but only eight of them run high-speed lifts, and only three host six-packs: Holiday Valley has one, Windham, next door to Hunter, has another, and Hunter owns the other three.On five new lifts at Jack Frost Big BoulderPart of Vail Resorts' massive 2022 lift upgrades was to replace eight old chairlifts at Jack Frost and Big Boulder with five modern fixed-grip quads.At Jack Frost, Paradise replaced the E and F doubles; Tobyhanna replaced the B and C triples; and Pocono replaced the E and F doubles:Over at Big Boulder, the Merry Widow I and II double-doubles made way for the Harmony quad. Vail also demolished the parallel Black Forest double, which had not run in a number of years. Blue Heron replaced an area once served by the Little Boulder double and Edelweiss Triple – check the side-by-side with Big Boulder's 2008 trailmap:Standing up so many lifts in such a short time is rare, but we do have other examples:* In 1998, Intrawest tore down up to a dozen legacy lifts and replaced them with five new ones: two high-speed quads, two fixed-grip quads, and the Cabriolet bucket lift (basically a standing gondola). A full discussion on that here.* American Skiing Company installed at least four chairlifts at Sugarbush in the summer of 1995, including the Slide Brook Express, a two-mile-long lift connection between its two mountains. More here.* Powder Mountain installed four chairlifts last summer.* Deer Valley built five chairlifts last summer, including a bubble six-pack, and is constructing eight more lifts this year.On Mad River Mountain, OhioMad River is about as prototypical a Midwest ski area as you can imagine: 300 vertical feet, 144 acres, 36 inches of average annual snowfall, and an amazing (for that size) nine ski lifts shooting all over the place:On Vail Resorts' acquisition timelineHunter is one of 17 U.S. ski areas that Vail purchased as part of its 2019 acquisition of Peak Resorts.On Hunter's 2018 expansionWhen Peak opened the Hunter West expansion for the 2018-19 ski season, a number of new glades appeared on the map:Most of those glades disappeared from the map. Why? We discuss.On Epic Pass accessHunter sits on the same unlimited Epic Local Pass tier as Okemo, Mount Snow, Breckenridge, Keystone, Crested Butte, and Stevens Pass. Here's an Epic Pass overview:You can also ski Hunter on the uber-cheap 32 Resorts version of the Epic Day Pass:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Hear about travel to Germany's Black Forest in Baden-Württemberg as the Amateur Traveler talks to Matt Kepnes (Nomadic Matt) about his visit to the hills and woods of southwest Germany. Why should you go to the Black Forest? Matt says, "You'll find incredible hiking, lots of lakes, waterfalls, and cute little quintessential German towns with beautiful architecture. There are also a lot of hot springs around the Baden Baden area. Plus, there's just great food and I just really loved the welcoming vibe of the people." Matt's Suggested Black Forest Itinerary: Day 1–2: Heidelberg Why go: It is a historic university town with vibrant nightlife, a beautiful old town, castle ruins, and great food. Highlights: Heidelberg Castle (ruins) Perimeter hiking trails and viewpoints Heidelberg Student Jail (Mark Twain visited!) Contemporary art museum Nightlife: comedy shows and lively bars Tip: Hike up from the city center for great views; look for printed maps with trail info. ... https://amateurtraveler.com/travel-to-germanys-black-forest/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Board Boys are back with another span for ya, man, in Finspan from Stonemaier Games, a game about free range fish raising all the way down to the nightmare zone. 0:00 Intro, E.V.A. - Jean Jacques Perrey 18:00 Lowlands 20:30 Black Forest 26:00 Azul Duel 28:15 R-ECO+ 32:00 Potions of Azerland 35:45 Rebel Princesses 43:30 Finspan: Overview 46:15 Looking for Atlantis - Prefab Sprout 48:00 Finspan: Review 1:11:30 Finspan: Verdict 1:18:00 Board Boys Bump: Wyrmspan 1:26:00 Thank You, Patrons 1:27:00 Ocean Rain - Echo & The Bunnymen 

I talk with Addison Heath and Jaz from Black Forest Films about growing up in Melbourne, getting in to filmmaking and other interesting stuff

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes: Short stories about friendship, growth, and social misdemeanors by Andy Dietrich Amazon.com Andysbook.com Ever wonder what happens when you crash the wrong wedding or mistake a fraternity rush for a question about your heritage? How about fashioning a fake nightclub stamp empire in Vegas, or trying (and failing) to pull off a flawless heist for a Super Nintendo game? From laugh-out-loud anecdotes to surprisingly heartfelt reflections, this collection explores themes of friendship, growth, and the chaos that comes with simply trying to be human. Tackling everything from awkward cultural misunderstandings to the wild adventures of military life, this book offers readers a candid, hilarious, and sometimes poignant glimpse into a life lived fully—and occasionally just recklessly enough. Some highlights... “Are You Russian?”: The awkward misunderstanding that kicked off a college fraternity adventure. “That One Time I Witnessed a Divorce”: A Chipotle line, a hair tie, and a (potentially) marriage-ending discovery. “When You Mess It Up for Everyone Else”: How one man's shenanigans changed Vegas club re-entry policies forever. “Honey Bee Did What Honey Bees Do”: The miraculous conception story that starts with a bottle of Patrón. “The Night I Lost My Damn Mind”: An unforgettable encounter with medical-grade THC and pulled-pork sliders. Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes is perfect for fans of David Sedaris, Tucker Max, or anyone who has ever made a questionable decision and lived to laugh about it later. With a mix of humor, heart, and the occasional ridiculous life lesson, this book will leave you smiling, shaking your head, and maybe even feeling a little better about your own misadventures. “If you're gonna do something stupid, be smart about it.”About the author Andy Dietrich was born at an early age and lived a fairly uneventful life in the Black Forest of Germany. At age 14, he and his mom packed their things and moved to Alaska to experience the true meaning of "holy shit, it's cold!" At 19, while on a sugar high, he enlisted and became one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children. He was released early due to good behavior and moved to Las Vegas where he now spends his time harassing, errr...."welcoming" the tourists and exercising his second-favorite drinking arm. If you come across a wild Andy in his natural habitat, do not feed him attention; he will only come back for more.

00:02:00 Intro 00:15:30 Comic Hunters with the McRee's 00:17:30 General Orders Giveaway 00:19:00 Portal Games Ad 00:20:30 East India Companies 00:47:00 Emerald Skulls 00:53:00 Game Toppers Ad 00:57:00 Black Forest 01:15:30 Miniature Market Ad 01:17:00 Azul Duel 01:27:00 Outro We're back a hot new Rosenburg game, a new flavor of Azul, a dice betting game and surprise market game that no one is talking about. Plus we are giving away a copy of General Orders! To enter join our Discord channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tamar Yonah speaks with terror survivor Tal Hartuv, whose story is one of unimaginable horror—and extraordinary resilience. In 2010, while hiking in a Jerusalem forest, Tal and her friend Kristine Luken were ambushed by Arab terrorists. They were bound, gagged, and brutally attacked. Kristine was slaughtered. Tal was hacked and stabbed 18 times with a machete. Left for dead with over 30 broken bones and a collapsed lung, she defied all odds—stumbling barefoot, still bound and gagged, for over a mile until she found help. In her desperate struggle, Tal managed to wound one of her attackers—a tiny injury that would ultimately lead to their capture. Her courage was recognized by the Israeli Police and the Israeli Security Agency. Her harrowing ordeal became the subject of the acclaimed Israeli documentary Black Forest (2018), and a year later, she published her award-winning memoir, The Rage Less Traveled. Now, she speaks worldwide—including at the United Nations and European parliaments—demanding an end to foreign aid that bankrolls her would-be murderers, who could soon walk free under an “all for all” prisoner release deal. Tal Hartuv is living proof that even in the face of pure evil, the human spirit can prevail. But she warns, now is a time to hate, and to honor the purpose of righteous rage, to eliminate evil doers and thus protect the innocent. Listen to this riveting show with a strong message! Vist Tal's website at: www.TalHartuv.com The Tamar Yonah Show 02MAR2025 - PODCAST

Today we talked about cake, corruption, and homelessness. The Crazy Lady joined us. A good time was had by all. 

Lisa and Ben Nelson never imagined they'd open their own winery. When it comes down to it, Lisa is to blame. About 15 years ago, she bought Ben some beer and wine making kits. He picked up the hobby and loved making wine for Lisa to enjoy. Fast forward to 2020, and they were producing wine for commercial sale. Now with a local tasting room, Latigo Winery has truly become a hidden gem in the Black Forest neighborhood of North Colorado Springs. Learn about their journey that started in the hospitality industry and led to becoming winemakers. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode! Send any questions or inquiries to Media@VisitCOS.com.  Episode links:  @LatigoWinery LatigoWinery.com  

On this powerfully allied episode of the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast, Tom and Matt are negotiating poorly in Tonga Bonga, getting all sandy (again!) in Dune Imperium: Bloodlines, and meandering through a bucolic farm or two in Black Forest.Thanks for listening everyone! Have a great weekend!Timestamps:01:36 - Tonga Bonga12:17 - Dune Imperium: Bloodlines24:24 - Black Forest

Wolfgang Schorlau: Black Forest | Kiepenheuer & Witsch | Preis: 18 Euro

In Episode 235 we give our hot take review on The Guild of Merchant Explorers covering the mechanisms, the production, and our overall feelings of the game.We discuss a poll on how tariffs might impact board game buying habits and we discuss some games that have been on our table including Skyrise, Black Forest, Belaad, Oh No Volcano, and Slay the Spire.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction00:22 Poll: If the percentage of prices on board games increase by double digits due to tariffs how much would that change your buying habits?07:26 The Guild of Merchant Explorers Description09:15 Gameplay and Mechanisms21:15 Production and Theme27:32 Final Thoughts32:42 Skyrise and Black Forest revisited37:42 Belaad: The Land of Swords and Quills46:32 Oh no, Volcano!50:51 Slay The Spire: The Board gameIf you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us at https://www.patreon.com/boardgamehottakesFollow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/boardgamehottakes.bsky.socialJoin our Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/boardgamehottakesJoin our Board Game Arena Community: https://boardgamearena.com/group?id=11417205Join our Discord server at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/vMtAYQWURd

Thank you to the folks at Sustain (https://sustainoss.org/) for providing the hosting account for CHAOSSCast! CHAOSScast – Episode 103 In this episode of CHAOSScast, host Alice Sowerby welcomes guests Miguel Ángel Fernández, Ed Maste, and Moin Rahman to talk about FreeBSD's Project adoption of GrimoireLab as part of work commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (https://www.sovereign.tech/). They discuss the FreeBSD Foundation's need to understand their extensive bug backlog and how they leveraged GrimoireLab to gain insights and optimize bug management. The conversation also covers the challenges of deploying GrimoireLab on FreeBSD, resulting enhancements in the GrimoireLab metrics, and the overall benefits seen in managing the FreeBSD project. Press download to hear more! [00:00:45] The guests introduce themselves and share their backgrounds. [00:03:00] Alice explains the adoption of GrimoireLab by the FreeBSD project, facilitated by Bitergia who Miguel works for, to enhance project metrics and dashboarding capabilities. [00:04:02] Ed details FreeBSD's history, it integrated approach to software distribution, and its licensing benefits. [00:05:50] Miguel describes Bitergia's role in providing analytics for open source projects through GrimoireLab and how it integrates data from various development platforms. [00:07:38] Ed discusses the FreeBSD project's need for better tools to manage its large bug backlog, prompting the adoption of GrimoireLab. [00:10:57] Alice and Miguel discuss the translation of specific project needs into functional dashboards within GrimoireLab. [00:15:38] Ed highlights the utility of the Backlog Management Index (BMI) dashboard, which helps assess the effectiveness of efforts to manage and reduce the bug backlog. [00:18:20] Moin speaks on the practical use of GrimoireLab during bug busting sessions, which helped identify and close outdates or irrelevant bugs. [00:20:14] Moin explains the challenges and solutions of deploying GrimoireLab on FreeBSD, emphasizing the importance of utilizing FreeBSD's native capabilities over Linux-based solutions. [00:24:26] Miguel mentions new features added to GrimoireLab, inspired by their collaboration with the FreeBSD project, improving metrics for bug management. [00:28:05] Ed provides insights into the patterns of bug response times and highlights the need for proactive management of bugs that are unlikely to be addressed, and Miguel shares his positive thoughts on the community responding to the bugs. Value Adds (Picks) of the week: [00:32:10] Alice's pick is taking a walk in the Black Forest in Germany. [00:32:38] Ed's pick is going downhill skiing and taking a trip to a larger ski resort in Ontario. [00:33:21] Miguel's pick is starting to learn to play the piano a few months ago with an online course and how rewarding it's been. [00:34:17] Moin's pick is joining the FreeBSD Foundation and the strong sense of purpose it has given him. Panelist: Alice Sowerby Guests: Miguel Ángel Fernández Ed Maste Moin Rahman Links: CHAOSS (https://chaoss.community/) CHAOSS Project X (https://twitter.com/chaossproj) CHAOSScast Podcast (https://podcast.chaoss.community/) podcast@chaoss.community (mailto:podcast@chaoss.community) Alice Sowerby LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alice-sowerby-ba692a13/?originalSubdomain=uk) Miguel Ángel Fernández LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mafesan/) Ed Maste LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmaste/?originalSubdomain=ca) Moin Rahman LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmoinurrahman/) Sovereign Tech Agency (https://www.sovereign.tech/) Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686,400 in FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/sovereign-tech-fund-to-invest-e686400-in-freebsd-infrastructure-modernization/) FreeBSD's GrimoireLab instance (https://grimoire.freebsd.org/) Documentation for FreeBSD's GrimoireLab instance (https://github.com/freebsd/grimoire) FreeBSD Project (https://www.freebsd.org/) FreeBSD Foundation (https://freebsdfoundation.org/) Bitergia (https://bitergia.com/) Bitergia-GrimoireLab (https://bitergia.com/blog/opensource/grimoirelab-to-measure-organizations-private-development/) Black Forest-Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Forest) Special Guests: Ed Maste, Miguel Ángel Fernández Sánchez , and Moin Rahman.

After a loss during a midweek Champions League tilt vs. Feyenoord, Bayern Munich was desperate, reeling, and injured going into the Black Forest to face an equally-reeling SC Freiburg. Bayern Munich pulled out a 2-1 victory, but it was not overly impressive. In fact, SC Freiburg made a pretty valiant effort at the end, which could have been disastrous for the Bavarians. Let's talk about how it all went down and more on the Bavarian Podcast Works — Postgame Show. This is what we have on tap: A look at the starting XI and what was surprising. Michael Olise was a shocking omission. A rundown of the scoring and substitutions. Something is missing from this team at the moment and it is hard to pinpoint exactly what is preventing the squad from reaching its potential. Some final thoughts and takeaways on the match. Be sure to stay tuned to Bavarian Podcast Works for all of your up to date coverage on Bayern Munich and Germany. Check us out on Patreon and follow us on Twitter @BavarianFBWorks, @BavarianPodcast @TheBarrelBlog, @BFWCyler, @IredahlMarcus, @2012nonexistent, @TommyAdams71 and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a loss during a midweek Champions League tilt vs. Feyenoord, Bayern Munich was desperate, reeling, and injured going into the Black Forest to face an equally-reeling SC Freiburg. Bayern Munich pulled out a 2-1 victory, but it was not overly impressive. In fact, SC Freiburg made a pretty valiant effort at the end, which could have been disastrous for the Bavarians. Let's talk about how it all went down and more on the Bavarian Podcast Works — Postgame Show. This is what we have on tap: A look at the starting XI and what was surprising. Michael Olise was a shocking omission. A rundown of the scoring and substitutions. Something is missing from this team at the moment and it is hard to pinpoint exactly what is preventing the squad from reaching its potential. Some final thoughts and takeaways on the match. Be sure to stay tuned to Bavarian Podcast Works for all of your up to date coverage on Bayern Munich and Germany. Check us out on Patreon and follow us on Twitter @BavarianFBWorks, @BavarianPodcast @TheBarrelBlog, @BFWCyler, @IredahlMarcus, @2012nonexistent, @TommyAdams71 and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Archive 135 Bigfoot in the Black Forest of EuropeJoin my Supporters Club for $4.99 per month for exclusive stories:https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/what-if-it-s-true-podcast--5445587/support

Many years before clean beauty became a beacon of the beauty industry,  ANNEMARIE BÖRLIND was formulating sustainable skincare products in the heart of Germany's Black Forest. This pioneering, family-run brand dates back to 1959 and is revered for their sustainability, social responsibility and immensely effective formulations that are beloved around the world. Manufactured with plant-based raw ingredients and thoughtful earth-friendly packaging, this is the true essence of clean beauty.  Beautytap's Global Head of Content Strategy Elycia Rubin sits down with Alicia Lindner, third generation Co-CEO and Co-Founder of ANNEMARIE BÖRLIND to learn about the roots of this heritage skincare brand and how they continue to lead the way and make noise in the highly competitive beauty industry.  As the granddaughter of founder Annmarie Lindner, Alicia preserves her visionary grandmother's motto: “If I can't eat it I won't put it on my face.”

Applications for the 2025 AI Engineer Summit are up, and you can save the date for AIE Singapore in April and AIE World's Fair 2025 in June.Happy new year, and thanks for 100 great episodes! Please let us know what you want to see/hear for the next 100!Full YouTube Episode with Slides/ChartsLike and subscribe and hit that bell to get notifs!Timestamps* 00:00 Welcome to the 100th Episode!* 00:19 Reflecting on the Journey* 00:47 AI Engineering: The Rise and Impact* 03:15 Latent Space Live and AI Conferences* 09:44 The Competitive AI Landscape* 21:45 Synthetic Data and Future Trends* 35:53 Creative Writing with AI* 36:12 Legal and Ethical Issues in AI* 38:18 The Data War: GPU Poor vs. GPU Rich* 39:12 The Rise of GPU Ultra Rich* 40:47 Emerging Trends in AI Models* 45:31 The Multi-Modality War* 01:05:31 The Future of AI Benchmarks* 01:13:17 Pionote and Frontier Models* 01:13:47 Niche Models and Base Models* 01:14:30 State Space Models and RWKB* 01:15:48 Inference Race and Price Wars* 01:22:16 Major AI Themes of the Year* 01:22:48 AI Rewind: January to March* 01:26:42 AI Rewind: April to June* 01:33:12 AI Rewind: July to September* 01:34:59 AI Rewind: October to December* 01:39:53 Year-End Reflections and PredictionsTranscript[00:00:00] Welcome to the 100th Episode![00:00:00] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host Swyx for the 100th time today.[00:00:12] swyx: Yay, um, and we're so glad that, yeah, you know, everyone has, uh, followed us in this journey. How do you feel about it? 100 episodes.[00:00:19] Alessio: Yeah, I know.[00:00:19] Reflecting on the Journey[00:00:19] Alessio: Almost two years that we've been doing this. We've had four different studios. Uh, we've had a lot of changes. You know, we used to do this lightning round. When we first started that we didn't like, and we tried to change the question. The answer[00:00:32] swyx: was cursor and perplexity.[00:00:34] Alessio: Yeah, I love mid journey. It's like, do you really not like anything else?[00:00:38] Alessio: Like what's, what's the unique thing? And I think, yeah, we, we've also had a lot more research driven content. You know, we had like 3DAO, we had, you know. Jeremy Howard, we had more folks like that.[00:00:47] AI Engineering: The Rise and Impact[00:00:47] Alessio: I think we want to do more of that too in the new year, like having, uh, some of the Gemini folks, both on the research and the applied side.[00:00:54] Alessio: Yeah, but it's been a ton of fun. I think we both started, I wouldn't say as a joke, we were kind of like, Oh, we [00:01:00] should do a podcast. And I think we kind of caught the right wave, obviously. And I think your rise of the AI engineer posts just kind of get people. Sombra to congregate, and then the AI engineer summit.[00:01:11] Alessio: And that's why when I look at our growth chart, it's kind of like a proxy for like the AI engineering industry as a whole, which is almost like, like, even if we don't do that much, we keep growing just because there's so many more AI engineers. So did you expect that growth or did you expect that would take longer for like the AI engineer thing to kind of like become, you know, everybody talks about it today.[00:01:32] swyx: So, the sign of that, that we have won is that Gartner puts it at the top of the hype curve right now. So Gartner has called the peak in AI engineering. I did not expect, um, to what level. I knew that I was correct when I called it because I did like two months of work going into that. But I didn't know, You know, how quickly it could happen, and obviously there's a chance that I could be wrong.[00:01:52] swyx: But I think, like, most people have come around to that concept. Hacker News hates it, which is a good sign. But there's enough people that have defined it, you know, GitHub, when [00:02:00] they launched GitHub Models, which is the Hugging Face clone, they put AI engineers in the banner, like, above the fold, like, in big So I think it's like kind of arrived as a meaningful and useful definition.[00:02:12] swyx: I think people are trying to figure out where the boundaries are. I think that was a lot of the quote unquote drama that happens behind the scenes at the World's Fair in June. Because I think there's a lot of doubt or questions about where ML engineering stops and AI engineering starts. That's a useful debate to be had.[00:02:29] swyx: In some sense, I actually anticipated that as well. So I intentionally did not. Put a firm definition there because most of the successful definitions are necessarily underspecified and it's actually useful to have different perspectives and you don't have to specify everything from the outset.[00:02:45] Alessio: Yeah, I was at um, AWS reInvent and the line to get into like the AI engineering talk, so to speak, which is, you know, applied AI and whatnot was like, there are like hundreds of people just in line to go in.[00:02:56] Alessio: I think that's kind of what enabled me. People, right? Which is what [00:03:00] you kind of talked about. It's like, Hey, look, you don't actually need a PhD, just, yeah, just use the model. And then maybe we'll talk about some of the blind spots that you get as an engineer with the earlier posts that we also had on on the sub stack.[00:03:11] Alessio: But yeah, it's been a heck of a heck of a two years.[00:03:14] swyx: Yeah.[00:03:15] Latent Space Live and AI Conferences[00:03:15] swyx: You know, I was, I was trying to view the conference as like, so NeurIPS is I think like 16, 17, 000 people. And the Latent Space Live event that we held there was 950 signups. I think. The AI world, the ML world is still very much research heavy. And that's as it should be because ML is very much in a research phase.[00:03:34] swyx: But as we move this entire field into production, I think that ratio inverts into becoming more engineering heavy. So at least I think engineering should be on the same level, even if it's never as prestigious, like it'll always be low status because at the end of the day, you're manipulating APIs or whatever.[00:03:51] swyx: But Yeah, wrapping GPTs, but there's going to be an increasing stack and an art to doing these, these things well. And I, you know, I [00:04:00] think that's what we're focusing on for the podcast, the conference and basically everything I do seems to make sense. And I think we'll, we'll talk about the trends here that apply.[00:04:09] swyx: It's, it's just very strange. So, like, there's a mix of, like, keeping on top of research while not being a researcher and then putting that research into production. So, like, people always ask me, like, why are you covering Neuralibs? Like, this is a ML research conference and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, we're not going to, to like, understand everything Or reproduce every single paper, but the stuff that is being found here is going to make it through into production at some point, you hope.[00:04:32] swyx: And then actually like when I talk to the researchers, they actually get very excited because they're like, oh, you guys are actually caring about how this goes into production and that's what they really really want. The measure of success is previously just peer review, right? Getting 7s and 8s on their um, Academic review conferences and stuff like citations is one metric, but money is a better metric.[00:04:51] Alessio: Money is a better metric. Yeah, and there were about 2200 people on the live stream or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Hundred on the live stream. So [00:05:00] I try my best to moderate, but it was a lot spicier in person with Jonathan and, and Dylan. Yeah, that it was in the chat on YouTube.[00:05:06] swyx: I would say that I actually also created.[00:05:09] swyx: Layen Space Live in order to address flaws that are perceived in academic conferences. This is not NeurIPS specific, it's ICML, NeurIPS. Basically, it's very sort of oriented towards the PhD student, uh, market, job market, right? Like literally all, basically everyone's there to advertise their research and skills and get jobs.[00:05:28] swyx: And then obviously all the, the companies go there to hire them. And I think that's great for the individual researchers, but for people going there to get info is not great because you have to read between the lines, bring a ton of context in order to understand every single paper. So what is missing is effectively what I ended up doing, which is domain by domain, go through and recap the best of the year.[00:05:48] swyx: Survey the field. And there are, like NeurIPS had a, uh, I think ICML had a like a position paper track, NeurIPS added a benchmarks, uh, datasets track. These are ways in which to address that [00:06:00] issue. Uh, there's always workshops as well. Every, every conference has, you know, a last day of workshops and stuff that provide more of an overview.[00:06:06] swyx: But they're not specifically prompted to do so. And I think really, uh, Organizing a conference is just about getting good speakers and giving them the correct prompts. And then they will just go and do that thing and they do a very good job of it. So I think Sarah did a fantastic job with the startups prompt.[00:06:21] swyx: I can't list everybody, but we did best of 2024 in startups, vision, open models. Post transformers, synthetic data, small models, and agents. And then the last one was the, uh, and then we also did a quick one on reasoning with Nathan Lambert. And then the last one, obviously, was the debate that people were very hyped about.[00:06:39] swyx: It was very awkward. And I'm really, really thankful for John Franco, basically, who stepped up to challenge Dylan. Because Dylan was like, yeah, I'll do it. But He was pro scaling. And I think everyone who is like in AI is pro scaling, right? So you need somebody who's ready to publicly say, no, we've hit a wall.[00:06:57] swyx: So that means you're saying Sam Altman's wrong. [00:07:00] You're saying, um, you know, everyone else is wrong. It helps that this was the day before Ilya went on, went up on stage and then said pre training has hit a wall. And data has hit a wall. So actually Jonathan ended up winning, and then Ilya supported that statement, and then Noam Brown on the last day further supported that statement as well.[00:07:17] swyx: So it's kind of interesting that I think the consensus kind of going in was that we're not done scaling, like you should believe in a better lesson. And then, four straight days in a row, you had Sepp Hochreiter, who is the creator of the LSTM, along with everyone's favorite OG in AI, which is Juergen Schmidhuber.[00:07:34] swyx: He said that, um, we're pre trading inside a wall, or like, we've run into a different kind of wall. And then we have, you know John Frankel, Ilya, and then Noam Brown are all saying variations of the same thing, that we have hit some kind of wall in the status quo of what pre trained, scaling large pre trained models has looked like, and we need a new thing.[00:07:54] swyx: And obviously the new thing for people is some make, either people are calling it inference time compute or test time [00:08:00] compute. I think the collective terminology has been inference time, and I think that makes sense because test time, calling it test, meaning, has a very pre trained bias, meaning that the only reason for running inference at all is to test your model.[00:08:11] swyx: That is not true. Right. Yeah. So, so, I quite agree that. OpenAI seems to have adopted, or the community seems to have adopted this terminology of ITC instead of TTC. And that, that makes a lot of sense because like now we care about inference, even right down to compute optimality. Like I actually interviewed this author who recovered or reviewed the Chinchilla paper.[00:08:31] swyx: Chinchilla paper is compute optimal training, but what is not stated in there is it's pre trained compute optimal training. And once you start caring about inference, compute optimal training, you have a different scaling law. And in a way that we did not know last year.[00:08:45] Alessio: I wonder, because John is, he's also on the side of attention is all you need.[00:08:49] Alessio: Like he had the bet with Sasha. So I'm curious, like he doesn't believe in scaling, but he thinks the transformer, I wonder if he's still. So, so,[00:08:56] swyx: so he, obviously everything is nuanced and you know, I told him to play a character [00:09:00] for this debate, right? So he actually does. Yeah. He still, he still believes that we can scale more.[00:09:04] swyx: Uh, he just assumed the character to be very game for, for playing this debate. So even more kudos to him that he assumed a position that he didn't believe in and still won the debate.[00:09:16] Alessio: Get rekt, Dylan. Um, do you just want to quickly run through some of these things? Like, uh, Sarah's presentation, just the highlights.[00:09:24] swyx: Yeah, we can't go through everyone's slides, but I pulled out some things as a factor of, like, stuff that we were going to talk about. And we'll[00:09:30] Alessio: publish[00:09:31] swyx: the rest. Yeah, we'll publish on this feed the best of 2024 in those domains. And hopefully people can benefit from the work that our speakers have done.[00:09:39] swyx: But I think it's, uh, these are just good slides. And I've been, I've been looking for a sort of end of year recaps from, from people.[00:09:44] The Competitive AI Landscape[00:09:44] swyx: The field has progressed a lot. You know, I think the max ELO in 2023 on LMSys used to be 1200 for LMSys ELOs. And now everyone is at least at, uh, 1275 in their ELOs, and this is across Gemini, Chadjibuti, [00:10:00] Grok, O1.[00:10:01] swyx: ai, which with their E Large model, and Enthopic, of course. It's a very, very competitive race. There are multiple Frontier labs all racing, but there is a clear tier zero Frontier. And then there's like a tier one. It's like, I wish I had everything else. Tier zero is extremely competitive. It's effectively now three horse race between Gemini, uh, Anthropic and OpenAI.[00:10:21] swyx: I would say that people are still holding out a candle for XAI. XAI, I think, for some reason, because their API was very slow to roll out, is not included in these metrics. So it's actually quite hard to put on there. As someone who also does charts, XAI is continually snubbed because they don't work well with the benchmarking people.[00:10:42] swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little trivia for why XAI always gets ignored. The other thing is market share. So these are slides from Sarah. We have it up on the screen. It has gone from very heavily open AI. So we have some numbers and estimates. These are from RAMP. Estimates of open AI market share in [00:11:00] December 2023.[00:11:01] swyx: And this is basically, what is it, GPT being 95 percent of production traffic. And I think if you correlate that with stuff that we asked. Harrison Chase on the LangChain episode, it was true. And then CLAUD 3 launched mid middle of this year. I think CLAUD 3 launched in March, CLAUD 3. 5 Sonnet was in June ish.[00:11:23] swyx: And you can start seeing the market share shift towards opening, uh, towards that topic, uh, very, very aggressively. The more recent one is Gemini. So if I scroll down a little bit, this is an even more recent dataset. So RAM's dataset ends in September 2 2. 2024. Gemini has basically launched a price war at the low end, uh, with Gemini Flash, uh, being basically free for personal use.[00:11:44] swyx: Like, I think people don't understand the free tier. It's something like a billion tokens per day. Unless you're trying to abuse it, you cannot really exhaust your free tier on Gemini. They're really trying to get you to use it. They know they're in like third place, um, fourth place, depending how you, how you count.[00:11:58] swyx: And so they're going after [00:12:00] the Lower tier first, and then, you know, maybe the upper tier later, but yeah, Gemini Flash, according to OpenRouter, is now 50 percent of their OpenRouter requests. Obviously, these are the small requests. These are small, cheap requests that are mathematically going to be more.[00:12:15] swyx: The smart ones obviously are still going to OpenAI. But, you know, it's a very, very big shift in the market. Like basically 2023, 2022, To going into 2024 opening has gone from nine five market share to Yeah. Reasonably somewhere between 50 to 75 market share.[00:12:29] Alessio: Yeah. I'm really curious how ramped does the attribution to the model?[00:12:32] Alessio: If it's API, because I think it's all credit card spin. . Well, but it's all, the credit card doesn't say maybe. Maybe the, maybe when they do expenses, they upload the PDF, but yeah, the, the German I think makes sense. I think that was one of my main 2024 takeaways that like. The best small model companies are the large labs, which is not something I would have thought that the open source kind of like long tail would be like the small model.[00:12:53] swyx: Yeah, different sizes of small models we're talking about here, right? Like so small model here for Gemini is AB, [00:13:00] right? Uh, mini. We don't know what the small model size is, but yeah, it's probably in the double digits or maybe single digits, but probably double digits. The open source community has kind of focused on the one to three B size.[00:13:11] swyx: Mm-hmm . Yeah. Maybe[00:13:12] swyx: zero, maybe 0.5 B uh, that's moon dream and that is small for you then, then that's great. It makes sense that we, we have a range for small now, which is like, may, maybe one to five B. Yeah. I'll even put that at, at, at the high end. And so this includes Gemma from Gemini as well. But also includes the Apple Foundation models, which I think Apple Foundation is 3B.[00:13:32] Alessio: Yeah. No, that's great. I mean, I think in the start small just meant cheap. I think today small is actually a more nuanced discussion, you know, that people weren't really having before.[00:13:43] swyx: Yeah, we can keep going. This is a slide that I smiley disagree with Sarah. She's pointing to the scale SEAL leaderboard. I think the Researchers that I talked with at NeurIPS were kind of positive on this because basically you need private test [00:14:00] sets to prevent contamination.[00:14:02] swyx: And Scale is one of maybe three or four people this year that has really made an effort in doing a credible private test set leaderboard. Llama405B does well compared to Gemini and GPT 40. And I think that's good. I would say that. You know, it's good to have an open model that is that big, that does well on those metrics.[00:14:23] swyx: But anyone putting 405B in production will tell you, if you scroll down a little bit to the artificial analysis numbers, that it is very slow and very expensive to infer. Um, it doesn't even fit on like one node. of, uh, of H100s. Cerebras will be happy to tell you they can serve 4 or 5B on their super large chips.[00:14:42] swyx: But, um, you know, if you need to do anything custom to it, you're still kind of constrained. So, is 4 or 5B really that relevant? Like, I think most people are basically saying that they only use 4 or 5B as a teacher model to distill down to something. Even Meta is doing it. So with Lama 3. [00:15:00] 3 launched, they only launched the 70B because they use 4 or 5B to distill the 70B.[00:15:03] swyx: So I don't know if like open source is keeping up. I think they're the, the open source industrial complex is very invested in telling you that the, if the gap is narrowing, I kind of disagree. I think that the gap is widening with O1. I think there are very, very smart people trying to narrow that gap and they should.[00:15:22] swyx: I really wish them success, but you cannot use a chart that is nearing 100 in your saturation chart. And look, the distance between open source and closed source is narrowing. Of course it's going to narrow because you're near 100. This is stupid. But in metrics that matter, is open source narrowing?[00:15:38] swyx: Probably not for O1 for a while. And it's really up to the open source guys to figure out if they can match O1 or not.[00:15:46] Alessio: I think inference time compute is bad for open source just because, you know, Doc can donate the flops at training time, but he cannot donate the flops at inference time. So it's really hard to like actually keep up on that axis.[00:15:59] Alessio: Big, big business [00:16:00] model shift. So I don't know what that means for the GPU clouds. I don't know what that means for the hyperscalers, but obviously the big labs have a lot of advantage. Because, like, it's not a static artifact that you're putting the compute in. You're kind of doing that still, but then you're putting a lot of computed inference too.[00:16:17] swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, Llama4 will be reasoning oriented. We talked with Thomas Shalom. Um, kudos for getting that episode together. That was really nice. Good, well timed. Actually, I connected with the AI meta guy, uh, at NeurIPS, and, um, yeah, we're going to coordinate something for Llama4. Yeah, yeah,[00:16:32] Alessio: and our friend, yeah.[00:16:33] Alessio: Clara Shi just joined to lead the business agent side. So I'm sure we'll have her on in the new year.[00:16:39] swyx: Yeah. So, um, my comment on, on the business model shift, this is super interesting. Apparently it is wide knowledge that OpenAI wanted more than 6. 6 billion dollars for their fundraise. They wanted to raise, you know, higher, and they did not.[00:16:51] swyx: And what that means is basically like, it's very convenient that we're not getting GPT 5, which would have been a larger pre train. We should have a lot of upfront money. And [00:17:00] instead we're, we're converting fixed costs into variable costs, right. And passing it on effectively to the customer. And it's so much easier to take margin there because you can directly attribute it to like, Oh, you're using this more.[00:17:12] swyx: Therefore you, you pay more of the cost and I'll just slap a margin in there. So like that lets you control your growth margin and like tie your. Your spend, or your sort of inference spend, accordingly. And it's just really interesting to, that this change in the sort of inference paradigm has arrived exactly at the same time that the funding environment for pre training is effectively drying up, kind of.[00:17:36] swyx: I feel like maybe the VCs are very in tune with research anyway, so like, they would have noticed this, but, um, it's just interesting.[00:17:43] Alessio: Yeah, and I was looking back at our yearly recap of last year. Yeah. And the big thing was like the mixed trial price fights, you know, and I think now it's almost like there's nowhere to go, like, you know, Gemini Flash is like basically giving it away for free.[00:17:55] Alessio: So I think this is a good way for the labs to generate more revenue and pass down [00:18:00] some of the compute to the customer. I think they're going to[00:18:02] swyx: keep going. I think that 2, will come.[00:18:05] Alessio: Yeah, I know. Totally. I mean, next year, the first thing I'm doing is signing up for Devin. Signing up for the pro chat GBT.[00:18:12] Alessio: Just to try. I just want to see what does it look like to spend a thousand dollars a month on AI?[00:18:17] swyx: Yes. Yes. I think if your, if your, your job is a, at least AI content creator or VC or, you know, someone who, whose job it is to stay on, stay on top of things, you should already be spending like a thousand dollars a month on, on stuff.[00:18:28] swyx: And then obviously easy to spend, hard to use. You have to actually use. The good thing is that actually Google lets you do a lot of stuff for free now. So like deep research. That they just launched. Uses a ton of inference and it's, it's free while it's in preview.[00:18:45] Alessio: Yeah. They need to put that in Lindy.[00:18:47] Alessio: I've been using Lindy lately. I've been a built a bunch of things once we had flow because I liked the new thing. It's pretty good. I even did a phone call assistant. Um, yeah, they just launched Lindy voice. Yeah, I think once [00:19:00] they get advanced voice mode like capability today, still like speech to text, you can kind of tell.[00:19:06] Alessio: Um, but it's good for like reservations and things like that. So I have a meeting prepper thing. And so[00:19:13] swyx: it's good. Okay. I feel like we've, we've covered a lot of stuff. Uh, I, yeah, I, you know, I think We will go over the individual, uh, talks in a separate episode. Uh, I don't want to take too much time with, uh, this stuff, but that suffice to say that there is a lot of progress in each field.[00:19:28] swyx: Uh, we covered vision. Basically this is all like the audience voting for what they wanted. And then I just invited the best people I could find in each audience, especially agents. Um, Graham, who I talked to at ICML in Vienna, he is currently still number one. It's very hard to stay on top of SweetBench.[00:19:45] swyx: OpenHand is currently still number one. switchbench full, which is the hardest one. He had very good thoughts on agents, which I, which I'll highlight for people. Everyone is saying 2025 is the year of agents, just like they said last year. And, uh, but he had [00:20:00] thoughts on like eight parts of what are the frontier problems to solve in agents.[00:20:03] swyx: And so I'll highlight that talk as well.[00:20:05] Alessio: Yeah. The number six, which is the Hacken agents learn more about the environment, has been a Super interesting to us as well, just to think through, because, yeah, how do you put an agent in an enterprise where most things in an enterprise have never been public, you know, a lot of the tooling, like the code bases and things like that.[00:20:23] Alessio: So, yeah, there's not indexing and reg. Well, yeah, but it's more like. You can't really rag things that are not documented. But people know them based on how they've been doing it. You know, so I think there's almost this like, you know, Oh, institutional knowledge. Yeah, the boring word is kind of like a business process extraction.[00:20:38] Alessio: Yeah yeah, I see. It's like, how do you actually understand how these things are done? I see. Um, and I think today the, the problem is that, Yeah, the agents are, that most people are building are good at following instruction, but are not as good as like extracting them from you. Um, so I think that will be a big unlock just to touch quickly on the Jeff Dean thing.[00:20:55] Alessio: I thought it was pretty, I mean, we'll link it in the, in the things, but. I think the main [00:21:00] focus was like, how do you use ML to optimize the systems instead of just focusing on ML to do something else? Yeah, I think speculative decoding, we had, you know, Eugene from RWKB on the podcast before, like he's doing a lot of that with Fetterless AI.[00:21:12] swyx: Everyone is. I would say it's the norm. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with how much it costs, because it does use more of the GPU per call. But because everyone is so keen on fast inference, then yeah, makes sense.[00:21:24] Alessio: Exactly. Um, yeah, but we'll link that. Obviously Jeff is great.[00:21:30] swyx: Jeff is, Jeff's talk was more, it wasn't focused on Gemini.[00:21:33] swyx: I think people got the wrong impression from my tweet. It's more about how Google approaches ML and uses ML to design systems and then systems feedback into ML. And I think this ties in with Lubna's talk.[00:21:45] Synthetic Data and Future Trends[00:21:45] swyx: on synthetic data where it's basically the story of bootstrapping of humans and AI in AI research or AI in production.[00:21:53] swyx: So her talk was on synthetic data, where like how much synthetic data has grown in 2024 in the pre training side, the post training side, [00:22:00] and the eval side. And I think Jeff then also extended it basically to chips, uh, to chip design. So he'd spend a lot of time talking about alpha chip. And most of us in the audience are like, we're not working on hardware, man.[00:22:11] swyx: Like you guys are great. TPU is great. Okay. We'll buy TPUs.[00:22:14] Alessio: And then there was the earlier talk. Yeah. But, and then we have, uh, I don't know if we're calling them essays. What are we calling these? But[00:22:23] swyx: for me, it's just like bonus for late in space supporters, because I feel like they haven't been getting anything.[00:22:29] swyx: And then I wanted a more high frequency way to write stuff. Like that one I wrote in an afternoon. I think basically we now have an answer to what Ilya saw. It's one year since. The blip. And we know what he saw in 2014. We know what he saw in 2024. We think we know what he sees in 2024. He gave some hints and then we have vague indications of what he saw in 2023.[00:22:54] swyx: So that was the Oh, and then 2016 as well, because of this lawsuit with Elon, OpenAI [00:23:00] is publishing emails from Sam's, like, his personal text messages to Siobhan, Zelis, or whatever. So, like, we have emails from Ilya saying, this is what we're seeing in OpenAI, and this is why we need to scale up GPUs. And I think it's very prescient in 2016 to write that.[00:23:16] swyx: And so, like, it is exactly, like, basically his insights. It's him and Greg, basically just kind of driving the scaling up of OpenAI, while they're still playing Dota. They're like, no, like, we see the path here.[00:23:30] Alessio: Yeah, and it's funny, yeah, they even mention, you know, we can only train on 1v1 Dota. We need to train on 5v5, and that takes too many GPUs.[00:23:37] Alessio: Yeah,[00:23:37] swyx: and at least for me, I can speak for myself, like, I didn't see the path from Dota to where we are today. I think even, maybe if you ask them, like, they wouldn't necessarily draw a straight line. Yeah,[00:23:47] Alessio: no, definitely. But I think like that was like the whole idea of almost like the RL and we talked about this with Nathan on his podcast.[00:23:55] Alessio: It's like with RL, you can get very good at specific things, but then you can't really like generalize as much. And I [00:24:00] think the language models are like the opposite, which is like, you're going to throw all this data at them and scale them up, but then you really need to drive them home on a specific task later on.[00:24:08] Alessio: And we'll talk about the open AI reinforcement, fine tuning, um, announcement too, and all of that. But yeah, I think like scale is all you need. That's kind of what Elia will be remembered for. And I think just maybe to clarify on like the pre training is over thing that people love to tweet. I think the point of the talk was like everybody, we're scaling these chips, we're scaling the compute, but like the second ingredient which is data is not scaling at the same rate.[00:24:35] Alessio: So it's not necessarily pre training is over. It's kind of like What got us here won't get us there. In his email, he predicted like 10x growth every two years or something like that. And I think maybe now it's like, you know, you can 10x the chips again, but[00:24:49] swyx: I think it's 10x per year. Was it? I don't know.[00:24:52] Alessio: Exactly. And Moore's law is like 2x. So it's like, you know, much faster than that. And yeah, I like the fossil fuel of AI [00:25:00] analogy. It's kind of like, you know, the little background tokens thing. So the OpenAI reinforcement fine tuning is basically like, instead of fine tuning on data, you fine tune on a reward model.[00:25:09] Alessio: So it's basically like, instead of being data driven, it's like task driven. And I think people have tasks to do, they don't really have a lot of data. So I'm curious to see how that changes, how many people fine tune, because I think this is what people run into. It's like, Oh, you can fine tune llama. And it's like, okay, where do I get the data?[00:25:27] Alessio: To fine tune it on, you know, so it's great that we're moving the thing. And then I really like he had this chart where like, you know, the brain mass and the body mass thing is basically like mammals that scaled linearly by brain and body size, and then humans kind of like broke off the slope. So it's almost like maybe the mammal slope is like the pre training slope.[00:25:46] Alessio: And then the post training slope is like the, the human one.[00:25:49] swyx: Yeah. I wonder what the. I mean, we'll know in 10 years, but I wonder what the y axis is for, for Ilya's SSI. We'll try to get them on.[00:25:57] Alessio: Ilya, if you're listening, you're [00:26:00] welcome here. Yeah, and then he had, you know, what comes next, like agent, synthetic data, inference, compute, I thought all of that was like that.[00:26:05] Alessio: I don't[00:26:05] swyx: think he was dropping any alpha there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.[00:26:07] Alessio: Yeah. Any other new reps? Highlights?[00:26:10] swyx: I think that there was comparatively a lot more work. Oh, by the way, I need to plug that, uh, my friend Yi made this, like, little nice paper. Yeah, that was really[00:26:20] swyx: nice.[00:26:20] swyx: Uh, of, uh, of, like, all the, he's, she called it must read papers of 2024.[00:26:26] swyx: So I laid out some of these at NeurIPS, and it was just gone. Like, everyone just picked it up. Because people are dying for, like, little guidance and visualizations And so, uh, I thought it was really super nice that we got there.[00:26:38] Alessio: Should we do a late in space book for each year? Uh, I thought about it. For each year we should.[00:26:42] Alessio: Coffee table book. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Put it in the will. Hi, Will. By the way, we haven't introduced you. He's our new, you know, general organist, Jamie. You need to[00:26:52] swyx: pull up more things. One thing I saw that, uh, Okay, one fun one, and then one [00:27:00] more general one. So the fun one is this paper on agent collusion. This is a paper on steganography.[00:27:06] swyx: This is secret collusion among AI agents, multi agent deception via steganography. I tried to go to NeurIPS in order to find these kinds of papers because the real reason Like NeurIPS this year has a lottery system. A lot of people actually even go and don't buy tickets because they just go and attend the side events.[00:27:22] swyx: And then also the people who go and end up crowding around the most popular papers, which you already know and already read them before you showed up to NeurIPS. So the only reason you go there is to talk to the paper authors, but there's like something like 10, 000 other. All these papers out there that, you know, are just people's work that they, that they did on the air and they failed to get attention for one reason or another.[00:27:42] swyx: And this was one of them. Uh, it was like all the way at the back. And this is a deep mind paper that actually focuses on collusion between AI agents, uh, by hiding messages in the text that they generate. Uh, so that's what steganography is. So a very simple example would be the first letter of every word.[00:27:57] swyx: If you Pick that out, you know, and the code sends a [00:28:00] different message than that. But something I've always emphasized is to LLMs, we read left to right. LLMs can read up, down, sideways, you know, in random character order. And it's the same to them as it is to us. So if we were ever to get You know, self motivated, underlined LLMs that we're trying to collaborate to take over the planet.[00:28:19] swyx: This would be how they do it. They spread messages among us in the messages that we generate. And he developed a scaling law for that. So he marked, I'm showing it on screen right now, the emergence of this phenomenon. Basically, for example, for Cypher encoding, GPT 2, Lama 2, mixed trial, GPT 3. 5, zero capabilities, and sudden 4.[00:28:40] swyx: And this is the kind of Jason Wei type emergence properties that people kind of look for. I think what made this paper stand out as well, so he developed the benchmark for steganography collusion, and he also focused on shelling point collusion, which is very low coordination. For agreeing on a decoding encoding format, you kind of need to have some [00:29:00] agreement on that.[00:29:00] swyx: But, but shelling point means like very, very low or almost no coordination. So for example, if I, if I ask someone, if the only message I give you is meet me in New York and you're not aware. Or when you would probably meet me at Grand Central Station. That is the Grand Central Station is a shelling point.[00:29:16] swyx: And it's probably somewhere, somewhere during the day. That is the shelling point of New York is Grand Central. To that extent, shelling points for steganography are things like the, the, the common decoding methods that we talked about. It will be interesting at some point in the future when we are worried about alignment.[00:29:30] swyx: It is not interesting today, but it's interesting that DeepMind is already thinking about this.[00:29:36] Alessio: I think that's like one of the hardest things about NeurIPS. It's like the long tail. I[00:29:41] swyx: found a pricing guy. I'm going to feature him on the podcast. Basically, this guy from NVIDIA worked out the optimal pricing for language models.[00:29:51] swyx: It's basically an econometrics paper at NeurIPS, where everyone else is talking about GPUs. And the guy with the GPUs is[00:29:57] Alessio: talking[00:29:57] swyx: about economics instead. [00:30:00] That was the sort of fun one. So the focus I saw is that model papers at NeurIPS are kind of dead. No one really presents models anymore. It's just data sets.[00:30:12] swyx: This is all the grad students are working on. So like there was a data sets track and then I was looking around like, I was like, you don't need a data sets track because every paper is a data sets paper. And so data sets and benchmarks, they're kind of flip sides of the same thing. So Yeah. Cool. Yeah, if you're a grad student, you're a GPU boy, you kind of work on that.[00:30:30] swyx: And then the, the sort of big model that people walk around and pick the ones that they like, and then they use it in their models. And that's, that's kind of how it develops. I, I feel like, um, like, like you didn't last year, you had people like Hao Tian who worked on Lava, which is take Lama and add Vision.[00:30:47] swyx: And then obviously actually I hired him and he added Vision to Grok. Now he's the Vision Grok guy. This year, I don't think there was any of those.[00:30:55] Alessio: What were the most popular, like, orals? Last year it was like the [00:31:00] Mixed Monarch, I think, was like the most attended. Yeah, uh, I need to look it up. Yeah, I mean, if nothing comes to mind, that's also kind of like an answer in a way.[00:31:10] Alessio: But I think last year there was a lot of interest in, like, furthering models and, like, different architectures and all of that.[00:31:16] swyx: I will say that I felt the orals, oral picks this year were not very good. Either that or maybe it's just a So that's the highlight of how I have changed in terms of how I view papers.[00:31:29] swyx: So like, in my estimation, two of the best papers in this year for datasets or data comp and refined web or fine web. These are two actually industrially used papers, not highlighted for a while. I think DCLM got the spotlight, FineWeb didn't even get the spotlight. So like, it's just that the picks were different.[00:31:48] swyx: But one thing that does get a lot of play that a lot of people are debating is the role that's scheduled. This is the schedule free optimizer paper from Meta from Aaron DeFazio. And this [00:32:00] year in the ML community, there's been a lot of chat about shampoo, soap, all the bathroom amenities for optimizing your learning rates.[00:32:08] swyx: And, uh, most people at the big labs are. Who I asked about this, um, say that it's cute, but it's not something that matters. I don't know, but it's something that was discussed and very, very popular. 4Wars[00:32:19] Alessio: of AI recap maybe, just quickly. Um, where do you want to start? Data?[00:32:26] swyx: So to remind people, this is the 4Wars piece that we did as one of our earlier recaps of this year.[00:32:31] swyx: And the belligerents are on the left, journalists, writers, artists, anyone who owns IP basically, New York Times, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Getty, Sarah Silverman, George RR Martin. Yeah, and I think this year we can add Scarlett Johansson to that side of the fence. So anyone suing, open the eye, basically. I actually wanted to get a snapshot of all the lawsuits.[00:32:52] swyx: I'm sure some lawyer can do it. That's the data quality war. On the right hand side, we have the synthetic data people, and I think we talked about Lumna's talk, you know, [00:33:00] really showing how much synthetic data has come along this year. I think there was a bit of a fight between scale. ai and the synthetic data community, because scale.[00:33:09] swyx: ai published a paper saying that synthetic data doesn't work. Surprise, surprise, scale. ai is the leading vendor of non synthetic data. Only[00:33:17] Alessio: cage free annotated data is useful.[00:33:21] swyx: So I think there's some debate going on there, but I don't think it's much debate anymore that at least synthetic data, for the reasons that are blessed in Luna's talk, Makes sense.[00:33:32] swyx: I don't know if you have any perspectives there.[00:33:34] Alessio: I think, again, going back to the reinforcement fine tuning, I think that will change a little bit how people think about it. I think today people mostly use synthetic data, yeah, for distillation and kind of like fine tuning a smaller model from like a larger model.[00:33:46] Alessio: I'm not super aware of how the frontier labs use it outside of like the rephrase, the web thing that Apple also did. But yeah, I think it'll be. Useful. I think like whether or not that gets us the big [00:34:00] next step, I think that's maybe like TBD, you know, I think people love talking about data because it's like a GPU poor, you know, I think, uh, synthetic data is like something that people can do, you know, so they feel more opinionated about it compared to, yeah, the optimizers stuff, which is like,[00:34:17] swyx: they don't[00:34:17] Alessio: really work[00:34:18] swyx: on.[00:34:18] swyx: I think that there is an angle to the reasoning synthetic data. So this year, we covered in the paper club, the star series of papers. So that's star, Q star, V star. It basically helps you to synthesize reasoning steps, or at least distill reasoning steps from a verifier. And if you look at the OpenAI RFT, API that they released, or that they announced, basically they're asking you to submit graders, or they choose from a preset list of graders.[00:34:49] swyx: Basically It feels like a way to create valid synthetic data for them to fine tune their reasoning paths on. Um, so I think that is another angle where it starts to make sense. And [00:35:00] so like, it's very funny that basically all the data quality wars between Let's say the music industry or like the newspaper publishing industry or the textbooks industry on the big labs.[00:35:11] swyx: It's all of the pre training era. And then like the new era, like the reasoning era, like nobody has any problem with all the reasoning, especially because it's all like sort of math and science oriented with, with very reasonable graders. I think the more interesting next step is how does it generalize beyond STEM?[00:35:27] swyx: We've been using O1 for And I would say like for summarization and creative writing and instruction following, I think it's underrated. I started using O1 in our intro songs before we killed the intro songs, but it's very good at writing lyrics. You know, I can actually say like, I think one of the O1 pro demos.[00:35:46] swyx: All of these things that Noam was showing was that, you know, you can write an entire paragraph or three paragraphs without using the letter A, right?[00:35:53] Creative Writing with AI[00:35:53] swyx: So like, like literally just anything instead of token, like not even token level, character level manipulation and [00:36:00] counting and instruction following. It's, uh, it's very, very strong.[00:36:02] swyx: And so no surprises when I ask it to rhyme, uh, and to, to create song lyrics, it's going to do that very much better than in previous models. So I think it's underrated for creative writing.[00:36:11] Alessio: Yeah.[00:36:12] Legal and Ethical Issues in AI[00:36:12] Alessio: What do you think is the rationale that they're going to have in court when they don't show you the thinking traces of O1, but then they want us to, like, they're getting sued for using other publishers data, you know, but then on their end, they're like, well, you shouldn't be using my data to then train your model.[00:36:29] Alessio: So I'm curious to see how that kind of comes. Yeah, I mean, OPA has[00:36:32] swyx: many ways to publish, to punish people without bringing, taking them to court. Already banned ByteDance for distilling their, their info. And so anyone caught distilling the chain of thought will be just disallowed to continue on, on, on the API.[00:36:44] swyx: And it's fine. It's no big deal. Like, I don't even think that's an issue at all, just because the chain of thoughts are pretty well hidden. Like you have to work very, very hard to, to get it to leak. And then even when it leaks the chain of thought, you don't know if it's, if it's [00:37:00] The bigger concern is actually that there's not that much IP hiding behind it, that Cosign, which we talked about, we talked to him on Dev Day, can just fine tune 4.[00:37:13] swyx: 0 to beat 0. 1 Cloud SONET so far is beating O1 on coding tasks without, at least O1 preview, without being a reasoning model, same for Gemini Pro or Gemini 2. 0. So like, how much is reasoning important? How much of a moat is there in this, like, All of these are proprietary sort of training data that they've presumably accomplished.[00:37:34] swyx: Because even DeepSeek was able to do it. And they had, you know, two months notice to do this, to do R1. So, it's actually unclear how much moat there is. Obviously, you know, if you talk to the Strawberry team, they'll be like, yeah, I mean, we spent the last two years doing this. So, we don't know. And it's going to be Interesting because there'll be a lot of noise from people who say they have inference time compute and actually don't because they just have fancy chain of thought.[00:38:00][00:38:00] swyx: And then there's other people who actually do have very good chain of thought. And you will not see them on the same level as OpenAI because OpenAI has invested a lot in building up the mythology of their team. Um, which makes sense. Like the real answer is somewhere in between.[00:38:13] Alessio: Yeah, I think that's kind of like the main data war story developing.[00:38:18] The Data War: GPU Poor vs. GPU Rich[00:38:18] Alessio: GPU poor versus GPU rich. Yeah. Where do you think we are? I think there was, again, going back to like the small model thing, there was like a time in which the GPU poor were kind of like the rebel faction working on like these models that were like open and small and cheap. And I think today people don't really care as much about GPUs anymore.[00:38:37] Alessio: You also see it in the price of the GPUs. Like, you know, that market is kind of like plummeted because there's people don't want to be, they want to be GPU free. They don't even want to be poor. They just want to be, you know, completely without them. Yeah. How do you think about this war? You[00:38:52] swyx: can tell me about this, but like, I feel like the, the appetite for GPU rich startups, like the, you know, the, the funding plan is we will raise 60 million and [00:39:00] we'll give 50 of that to NVIDIA.[00:39:01] swyx: That is gone, right? Like, no one's, no one's pitching that. This was literally the plan, the exact plan of like, I can name like four or five startups, you know, this time last year. So yeah, GPU rich startups gone.[00:39:12] The Rise of GPU Ultra Rich[00:39:12] swyx: But I think like, The GPU ultra rich, the GPU ultra high net worth is still going. So, um, now we're, you know, we had Leopold's essay on the trillion dollar cluster.[00:39:23] swyx: We're not quite there yet. We have multiple labs, um, you know, XAI very famously, you know, Jensen Huang praising them for being. Best boy number one in spinning up 100, 000 GPU cluster in like 12 days or something. So likewise at Meta, likewise at OpenAI, likewise at the other labs as well. So like the GPU ultra rich are going to keep doing that because I think partially it's an article of faith now that you just need it.[00:39:46] swyx: Like you don't even know what it's going to, what you're going to use it for. You just, you just need it. And it makes sense that if, especially if we're going into. More researchy territory than we are. So let's say 2020 to 2023 was [00:40:00] let's scale big models territory because we had GPT 3 in 2020 and we were like, okay, we'll go from 1.[00:40:05] swyx: 75b to 1. 8b, 1. 8t. And that was GPT 3 to GPT 4. Okay, that's done. As far as everyone is concerned, Opus 3. 5 is not coming out, GPT 4. 5 is not coming out, and Gemini 2, we don't have Pro, whatever. We've hit that wall. Maybe I'll call it the 2 trillion perimeter wall. We're not going to 10 trillion. No one thinks it's a good idea, at least from training costs, from the amount of data, or at least the inference.[00:40:36] swyx: Would you pay 10x the price of GPT Probably not. Like, like you want something else that, that is at least more useful. So it makes sense that people are pivoting in terms of their inference paradigm.[00:40:47] Emerging Trends in AI Models[00:40:47] swyx: And so when it's more researchy, then you actually need more just general purpose compute to mess around with, uh, at the exact same time that production deployments of the old, the previous paradigm is still ramping up,[00:40:58] swyx: um,[00:40:58] swyx: uh, pretty aggressively.[00:40:59] swyx: So [00:41:00] it makes sense that the GPU rich are growing. We have now interviewed both together and fireworks and replicates. Uh, we haven't done any scale yet. But I think Amazon, maybe kind of a sleeper one, Amazon, in a sense of like they, at reInvent, I wasn't expecting them to do so well, but they are now a foundation model lab.[00:41:18] swyx: It's kind of interesting. Um, I think, uh, you know, David went over there and started just creating models.[00:41:25] Alessio: Yeah, I mean, that's the power of prepaid contracts. I think like a lot of AWS customers, you know, they do this big reserve instance contracts and now they got to use their money. That's why so many startups.[00:41:37] Alessio: Get bought through the AWS marketplace so they can kind of bundle them together and prefer pricing.[00:41:42] swyx: Okay, so maybe GPU super rich doing very well, GPU middle class dead, and then GPU[00:41:48] Alessio: poor. I mean, my thing is like, everybody should just be GPU rich. There shouldn't really be, even the GPU poorest, it's like, does it really make sense to be GPU poor?[00:41:57] Alessio: Like, if you're GPU poor, you should just use the [00:42:00] cloud. Yes, you know, and I think there might be a future once we kind of like figure out what the size and shape of these models is where like the tiny box and these things come to fruition where like you can be GPU poor at home. But I think today is like, why are you working so hard to like get these models to run on like very small clusters where it's like, It's so cheap to run them.[00:42:21] Alessio: Yeah, yeah,[00:42:22] swyx: yeah. I think mostly people think it's cool. People think it's a stepping stone to scaling up. So they aspire to be GPU rich one day and they're working on new methods. Like news research, like probably the most deep tech thing they've done this year is Distro or whatever the new name is.[00:42:38] swyx: There's a lot of interest in heterogeneous computing, distributed computing. I tend generally to de emphasize that historically, but it may be coming to a time where it is starting to be relevant. I don't know. You know, SF compute launched their compute marketplace this year, and like, who's really using that?[00:42:53] swyx: Like, it's a bunch of small clusters, disparate types of compute, and if you can make that [00:43:00] useful, then that will be very beneficial to the broader community, but maybe still not the source of frontier models. It's just going to be a second tier of compute that is unlocked for people, and that's fine. But yeah, I mean, I think this year, I would say a lot more on device, We are, I now have Apple intelligence on my phone.[00:43:19] swyx: Doesn't do anything apart from summarize my notifications. But still, not bad. Like, it's multi modal.[00:43:25] Alessio: Yeah, the notification summaries are so and so in my experience.[00:43:29] swyx: Yeah, but they add, they add juice to life. And then, um, Chrome Nano, uh, Gemini Nano is coming out in Chrome. Uh, they're still feature flagged, but you can, you can try it now if you, if you use the, uh, the alpha.[00:43:40] swyx: And so, like, I, I think, like, you know, We're getting the sort of GPU poor version of a lot of these things coming out, and I think it's like quite useful. Like Windows as well, rolling out RWKB in sort of every Windows department is super cool. And I think the last thing that I never put in this GPU poor war, that I think I should now, [00:44:00] is the number of startups that are GPU poor but still scaling very well, as sort of wrappers on top of either a foundation model lab, or GPU Cloud.[00:44:10] swyx: GPU Cloud, it would be Suno. Suno, Ramp has rated as one of the top ranked, fastest growing startups of the year. Um, I think the last public number is like zero to 20 million this year in ARR and Suno runs on Moto. So Suno itself is not GPU rich, but they're just doing the training on, on Moto, uh, who we've also talked to on, on the podcast.[00:44:31] swyx: The other one would be Bolt, straight cloud wrapper. And, and, um, Again, another, now they've announced 20 million ARR, which is another step up from our 8 million that we put on the title. So yeah, I mean, it's crazy that all these GPU pores are finding a way while the GPU riches are also finding a way. And then the only failures, I kind of call this the GPU smiling curve, where the edges do well, because you're either close to the machines, and you're like [00:45:00] number one on the machines, or you're like close to the customers, and you're number one on the customer side.[00:45:03] swyx: And the people who are in the middle. Inflection, um, character, didn't do that great. I think character did the best of all of them. Like, you have a note in here that we apparently said that character's price tag was[00:45:15] Alessio: 1B.[00:45:15] swyx: Did I say that?[00:45:16] Alessio: Yeah. You said Google should just buy them for 1B. I thought it was a crazy number.[00:45:20] Alessio: Then they paid 2. 7 billion. I mean, for like,[00:45:22] swyx: yeah.[00:45:22] Alessio: What do you pay for node? Like, I don't know what the game world was like. Maybe the starting price was 1B. I mean, whatever it was, it worked out for everybody involved.[00:45:31] The Multi-Modality War[00:45:31] Alessio: Multimodality war. And this one, we never had text to video in the first version, which now is the hottest.[00:45:37] swyx: Yeah, I would say it's a subset of image, but yes.[00:45:40] Alessio: Yeah, well, but I think at the time it wasn't really something people were doing, and now we had VO2 just came out yesterday. Uh, Sora was released last month, last week. I've not tried Sora, because the day that I tried, it wasn't, yeah. I[00:45:54] swyx: think it's generally available now, you can go to Sora.[00:45:56] swyx: com and try it. Yeah, they had[00:45:58] Alessio: the outage. Which I [00:46:00] think also played a part into it. Small things. Yeah. What's the other model that you posted today that was on Replicate? Video or OneLive?[00:46:08] swyx: Yeah. Very, very nondescript name, but it is from Minimax, which I think is a Chinese lab. The Chinese labs do surprisingly well at the video models.[00:46:20] swyx: I'm not sure it's actually Chinese. I don't know. Hold me up to that. Yep. China. It's good. Yeah, the Chinese love video. What can I say? They have a lot of training data for video. Or a more relaxed regulatory environment.[00:46:37] Alessio: Uh, well, sure, in some way. Yeah, I don't think there's much else there. I think like, you know, on the image side, I think it's still open.[00:46:45] Alessio: Yeah, I mean,[00:46:46] swyx: 11labs is now a unicorn. So basically, what is multi modality war? Multi modality war is, do you specialize in a single modality, right? Or do you have GodModel that does all the modalities? So this is [00:47:00] definitely still going, in a sense of 11 labs, you know, now Unicorn, PicoLabs doing well, they launched Pico 2.[00:47:06] swyx: 0 recently, HeyGen, I think has reached 100 million ARR, Assembly, I don't know, but they have billboards all over the place, so I assume they're doing very, very well. So these are all specialist models, specialist models and specialist startups. And then there's the big labs who are doing the sort of all in one play.[00:47:24] swyx: And then here I would highlight Gemini 2 for having native image output. Have you seen the demos? Um, yeah, it's, it's hard to keep up. Literally they launched this last week and a shout out to Paige Bailey, who came to the Latent Space event to demo on the day of launch. And she wasn't prepared. She was just like, I'm just going to show you.[00:47:43] swyx: So they have voice. They have, you know, obviously image input, and then they obviously can code gen and all that. But the new one that OpenAI and Meta both have but they haven't launched yet is image output. So you can literally, um, I think their demo video was that you put in an image of a [00:48:00] car, and you ask for minor modifications to that car.[00:48:02] swyx: They can generate you that modification exactly as you asked. So there's no need for the stable diffusion or comfy UI workflow of like mask here and then like infill there in paint there and all that, all that stuff. This is small model nonsense. Big model people are like, huh, we got you in as everything in the transformer.[00:48:21] swyx: This is the multimodality war, which is, do you, do you bet on the God model or do you string together a whole bunch of, uh, Small models like a, like a chump. Yeah,[00:48:29] Alessio: I don't know, man. Yeah, that would be interesting. I mean, obviously I use Midjourney for all of our thumbnails. Um, they've been doing a ton on the product, I would say.[00:48:38] Alessio: They launched a new Midjourney editor thing. They've been doing a ton. Because I think, yeah, the motto is kind of like, Maybe, you know, people say black forest, the black forest models are better than mid journey on a pixel by pixel basis. But I think when you put it, put it together, have you tried[00:48:53] swyx: the same problems on black forest?[00:48:55] Alessio: Yes. But the problem is just like, you know, on black forest, it generates one image. And then it's like, you got to [00:49:00] regenerate. You don't have all these like UI things. Like what I do, no, but it's like time issue, you know, it's like a mid[00:49:06] swyx: journey. Call the API four times.[00:49:08] Alessio: No, but then there's no like variate.[00:49:10] Alessio: Like the good thing about mid journey is like, you just go in there and you're cooking. There's a lot of stuff that just makes it really easy. And I think people underestimate that. Like, it's not really a skill issue, because I'm paying mid journey, so it's a Black Forest skill issue, because I'm not paying them, you know?[00:49:24] Alessio: Yeah,[00:49:25] swyx: so, okay, so, uh, this is a UX thing, right? Like, you, you, you understand that, at least, we think that Black Forest should be able to do all that stuff. I will also shout out, ReCraft has come out, uh, on top of the image arena that, uh, artificial analysis has done, has apparently, uh, Flux's place. Is this still true?[00:49:41] swyx: So, Artificial Analysis is now a company. I highlighted them I think in one of the early AI Newses of the year. And they have launched a whole bunch of arenas. So, they're trying to take on LM Arena, Anastasios and crew. And they have an image arena. Oh yeah, Recraft v3 is now beating Flux 1. 1. Which is very surprising [00:50:00] because Flux And Black Forest Labs are the old stable diffusion crew who left stability after, um, the management issues.[00:50:06] swyx: So Recurve has come from nowhere to be the top image model. Uh, very, very strange. I would also highlight that Grok has now launched Aurora, which is, it's very interesting dynamics between Grok and Black Forest Labs because Grok's images were originally launched, uh, in partnership with Black Forest Labs as a, as a thin wrapper.[00:50:24] swyx: And then Grok was like, no, we'll make our own. And so they've made their own. I don't know, there are no APIs or benchmarks about it. They just announced it. So yeah, that's the multi modality war. I would say that so far, the small model, the dedicated model people are winning, because they are just focused on their tasks.[00:50:42] swyx: But the big model, People are always catching up. And the moment I saw the Gemini 2 demo of image editing, where I can put in an image and just request it and it does, that's how AI should work. Not like a whole bunch of complicated steps. So it really is something. And I think one frontier that we haven't [00:51:00] seen this year, like obviously video has done very well, and it will continue to grow.[00:51:03] swyx: You know, we only have Sora Turbo today, but at some point we'll get full Sora. Oh, at least the Hollywood Labs will get Fulsora. We haven't seen video to audio, or video synced to audio. And so the researchers that I talked to are already starting to talk about that as the next frontier. But there's still maybe like five more years of video left to actually be Soda.[00:51:23] swyx: I would say that Gemini's approach Compared to OpenAI, Gemini seems, or DeepMind's approach to video seems a lot more fully fledged than OpenAI. Because if you look at the ICML recap that I published that so far nobody has listened to, um, that people have listened to it. It's just a different, definitely different audience.[00:51:43] swyx: It's only seven hours long. Why are people not listening? It's like everything in Uh, so, so DeepMind has, is working on Genie. They also launched Genie 2 and VideoPoet. So, like, they have maybe four years advantage on world modeling that OpenAI does not have. Because OpenAI basically only started [00:52:00] Diffusion Transformers last year, you know, when they hired, uh, Bill Peebles.[00:52:03] swyx: So, DeepMind has, has a bit of advantage here, I would say, in, in, in showing, like, the reason that VO2, while one, They cherry pick their videos. So obviously it looks better than Sora, but the reason I would believe that VO2, uh, when it's fully launched will do very well is because they have all this background work in video that they've done for years.[00:52:22] swyx: Like, like last year's NeurIPS, I already was interviewing some of their video people. I forget their model name, but for, for people who are dedicated fans, they can go to NeurIPS 2023 and see, see that paper.[00:52:32] Alessio: And then last but not least, the LLMOS. We renamed it to Ragops, formerly known as[00:52:39] swyx: Ragops War. I put the latest chart on the Braintrust episode.[00:52:43] swyx: I think I'm going to separate these essays from the episode notes. So the reason I used to do that, by the way, is because I wanted to show up on Hacker News. I wanted the podcast to show up on Hacker News. So I always put an essay inside of there because Hacker News people like to read and not listen.[00:52:58] Alessio: So episode essays,[00:52:59] swyx: I remember [00:53:00] purchasing them separately. You say Lanchain Llama Index is still growing.[00:53:03] Alessio: Yeah, so I looked at the PyPy stats, you know. I don't care about stars. On PyPy you see Do you want to share your screen? Yes. I prefer to look at actual downloads, not at stars on GitHub. So if you look at, you know, Lanchain still growing.[00:53:20] Alessio: These are the last six months. Llama Index still growing. What I've basically seen is like things that, One, obviously these things have A commercial product. So there's like people buying this and sticking with it versus kind of hopping in between things versus, you know, for example, crew AI, not really growing as much.[00:53:38] Alessio: The stars are growing. If you look on GitHub, like the stars are growing, but kind of like the usage is kind of like flat. In the last six months, have they done some[00:53:4

This is a Vintage Selection from 2006The BanterThe Guys discuss a New York Times Review from their newly opened Catherine Lombardi restaurant. They are pleased because they met their expectations, if not their aspirations. The ConversationThe Restaurant Guys welcome author Robert Tinnell to talk about his graphic novel The Feast of the Seven Fishes. It's a tale of an Italian-American hosting Christmas Eve and bringing a newcomer to the spectacular dinner. Robert shares the impetus for writing this book and his dream (that came to fruition in 2018).The Inside TrackThe Guys have attended many Italian-American Christmas eves. Mark has experienced them his entire life and Francis joined in once he saw the magic. Robert and Mark compare notes on their varied experiences with big Italian-American families and the feast of the seven fishes.“There's a growing disconnect when you get three, four, five generations,  removed from the original immigrants, who themselves were just gung ho about becoming Americans. I'm happy to be a good American, but there's just a lot of wonderful things about my Italian heritage I'd like not to lose,” Robert Tinnell on The Restaurant Guys Podcast 2011BioRobert Tinnell is a director, producer, and graphic novelist. Robert directed such films as Feast of the Seven Fishes (2019), Frankenstein and Me (1996), and Kids of the Round Table (1995). His producer credits include Back Fork (2019), The Hunted (2013) and Surf Nazis Must Die (1987).His graphic novel writing includes Flesh and Blood, The Living and The Dead, The Black Forest, The Wicked West, and the Eisner Award Nominee Feast of the Seven Fishes.InfoGraphic NovelFeast of the Seven FishesMovieFeast of the Seven Fishes (2018)Our Sponsors The Heldrich Hotel & Conference Centerhttps://www.theheldrich.com/ Magyar Bankhttps://www.magbank.com/ Withum Accountinghttps://www.withum.com/ Our Places Stage Left Steakhttps://www.stageleft.com/ Catherine Lombardi Restauranthttps://www.catherinelombardi.com/ Stage Left Wineshophttps://www.stageleftwineshop.com/ To hear more about food, wine and the finer things in life:https://www.instagram.com/restaurantguyspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/restaurantguysReach Out to The Guys!TheGuys@restaurantguyspodcast.com**Become a Restaurant Guys Regular and get two bonus episodes per month, bonus content and Regulars Only events.**Click Below! https://www.buzzsprout.com/2401692/subscribe

  Please hit Subscribe/Follow and leave a 5-star positive review. Click here to go to our Patreon Page. https://www.patreon.com/c/222ParanormalPodcast Click here to go to Jens Poashmark Closet. https://poshmark.com/closet/happie22 Click here to go to Our website. https://www.222paranormal.com/   In this episode of the 222 Paranormal Podcast, hosts Joe and Jennifer delve deep into the chilling and eerie history of the Black Forest of Colorado. Known for its dense woods and ominous atmosphere, the Black Forest has long been a site of unsettling occurrences and unexplained phenomena. The hosts take listeners on a journey through the forest's dark past, exploring stories of paranormal sightings, ghostly apparitions, and strange happenings that have baffled locals for decades. OE and Jennifer discuss numerous accounts of encounters with shadowy figures, unexplained voices, and the sense of being watched that many visitors have reported while hiking or camping in the area. As they investigate the forest's eerie reputation, they touch on the region's historical significance, including Native American legends and early settler tales that suggest the forest has been a hotspot for the supernatural for centuries. The hosts also explore the idea that the energy of the land might be connected to the area's tumultuous history, with conflicts between indigenous tribes and settlers leaving behind a lingering spiritual presence. Throughout the episode, OE and Jennifer engage with listeners by inviting them to consider the Black Forest's mysterious aura, while also encouraging them to share their own experiences with paranormal activity. They delve into the psychology behind why places like the Black Forest have such a magnetic pull on the curious and adventurous, drawing people in despite the unsettling stories that surround it. By the end of the episode, listeners are left with an eerie sense of wonder, pondering whether the Black Forest is truly haunted, or if its reputation is the product of a centuries-old mystery that refuses to be solved. The Legend of the flying dog, know as Aralez. The aralez are most prominently associated with the story of the legendary Armenian king Ara the Handsome. According to this legend, the Assyrian queen Semiramis (Shamiram) called on the aralez to lick the wounds of and revive Ara the Handsome after he was killed in battle. By popular interpretation, this was the origin of the word aralez, from the name "Ara" and lez, the root of the word lizel 'to lick'. According to the Armenian history attributed to Faustus of Byzantium, after Mushegh Mamikonian was killed, his relatives placed his corpse on a tower, hoping that the aralezes would revive him.This indicates that belief in the aralez was still current in fourth- and fifth-century Armenia, following the Christianization of the country. Welcome to the 222 Paranormal Podcast, your gateway to the captivating world of the supernatural. Immerse yourself in our expertly crafted episodes, where we delve deep into a wide range of paranormal phenomena, including ghostly hauntings, cryptid sightings, and unexplained mysteries that defy logic. Each episode is meticulously researched and features engaging discussions with leading experts, seasoned ghost hunters, and renowned paranormal investigators. We cover the latest advancements in ghost hunting technology, offer practical tips for both amateur and experienced investigators, and review essential equipment for your paranormal adventures. Our podcast also explores the rich history of haunted locations, sharing true stories and firsthand accounts that will send chills down your spine. Whether you're a die-hard fan of the paranormal or just curious about the unknown, our content is designed to entertain, inform, and ignite your imagination. Stay tuned as we uncover secrets from the most haunted places around the world and analyze the most intriguing supernatural events. We also provide in-depth interviews with notable figures in the field and explore theories that challenge conventional understanding of reality. By subscribing to our Paranormal Podcast, you'll stay updated with the latest episodes, allowing you to join a community of like-minded individuals who share your fascination with the unexplained. Don't miss out on our exclusive content and special features, which bring you closer to the mysteries that lie beyond our everyday experiences. Dive into the world of the unknown with our Paranormal Podcast and experience the thrill of discovering what lies just beyond the veil of reality.  

Wecome back to Tinfoil Tales! On this episode I am joined by Alan and Kim Bishop, host of If You Have ghost, You Have everything podcast and local Indiana distillars. They discuss some of the lore and strange things that have happened to them over the yeras, one instance which they believe to be an old trickster god entity that was trying to intimidate them. Alan also discusses firing a shot at a strange creature.Make sure to check out their show wherever you listen to Tinfoil Tales at!Tinfoil Tales Podcast - Show Notes 

Narrator: Chloe De Burgh

In our two hundred and forty-second episode, Aaron is joined by Scott. We talk about Black Forest, Stephens, Sky Team, and Pulsar 2849 in the BA Banter. Then we discuss the best and worst games of 2014 in Aaron Asks Anything. This episode is sponsored by Board Game Bliss and listeners like you on our Patreon

Ho ho ho, all you rad dudes and dudettes! Christmas is here on 90s Disney! Join AJ, Mike, and Chris Minotti as they unwrap the often-overlooked holiday treasure, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. From festive fun to Forte's chilling villainy, we dive into the magic, the music, and the madness of this direct-to-video Disney sequel. Whether you're nostalgic for your VHS collection or curious about forgotten Disney Christmas lore, this is the episode for you! In This Episode:

Forests are naturally known as fantastical places, but none hold a candle to Germany's Black Forest. Walk into the supernatural history of the Black Forest, get acquainted with some of its more spooky inhabitants, and learn about what exactly inspired the Brothers Grimm to change the world of folktales forever.

An interesting 70's theme inspires the girls to speak about their experiences in the decade they were born into. A signature choux challenge was Lisa repeating the episodes puns, and remarking on Dylan's handshake from Hollywood. Once again Allison disparages the banoffee pie as a technical, and once again, Lisa disagrees.  Lisa shares that she has made the Paul Hollywood banoffee, and gives it a chef's kiss. With minimal discussion of the episode's showstoppers, the girls slip down multiple side streets of memories from raising themselves in the 1970's.Connect with us:https://soggybottomgirls.com Follow us on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soggybottomgirlsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/soggybottomgirls/

Hey now amazing Cabalists! It's Wednesday again and it's time for some more wild, crazy, and bombastic Cabal nonsense! Some of the games we talked about today include Nucleum, Wizards and Co, Harmonies, Deep Shelf, Aliens Another Glorious Day in the Corps and a feature review of Black Forest by the great Uwe Rosenberg. Then after Tony T feeds us all the news we need to hear the gang discusses what puts them in their happy place. What gets them to "Peak Froth". Black Forest 01:03:07, News with Tony T 01:33:49, Peak Froth 02:22:25

Hey guys, here is the DEEP WOODS radio show with your favourite tracks! If you like it give it a "heart

If you cannot compromise; Challenge! In 25 parts, edited from the works of FinalStand. Listen and subscribe to the ► Podcast at Connected.. “Every person is alone. That is the definition of Free-will.” The gift from Grandpa that keeps on giving. I almost miss not killing him myself." "That man was an eternal foe of the Amazons, Cáel. His death was necessary for peace with the Illuminati, thus peace with all the other factions," Pamela related. I began laughing. "So my misogynistic family heritage comes from my Mother and my misandristic lineage comes from my Father," I clued Pamela in. She found it to be hilariously ironic too. "We still have to be careful," Pamela nudged me. "After all, your Grandfather had plans for your body. Whether we choose to believe it was to be a vessel for your Grandfather's essence; or, if you prefer, he put something in your Mother's DNA that, when combined with the machinery he used to store his memories, would bring him back to life; Cáel O'Shea always was thinking three steps ahead." "Why didn't you kill me when you figured this out?" I stared at her. "You hold the fate of House Ishara inside of you," Pamela smiled warmly. "Besides, I like you. No one really understands me like you do. Everyone else thinks I have a sick sense of humor." "I wish you had been my Grandmother," I nodded. "Wait; wait," Pamela held me back from continuing. "Because if I had been your Grandmother, you would have known to avoid a nut-ranch like Havenstone." "Are you like my psychic twin?" I teased her. She was right, of course. "I had a twin brother," Pamela turned sad. "I have always wondered what path his spirit traveled once they took him to the cliffs." "The fact that you still recall him with empathy speaks volumes for you, Pamela," I hugged her. "I felt the same way, you know," Pamela drew comfort from my warmth. I was uncertain of her meaning. "When they told me what happened to boys; I couldn't accept it. Their reasoning rang hollow and I saw their denial of their own blood to be self-defeating." "I have always wanted to believe my brother waits for me in the Hall of Ancestors so I can finally see his face and tell him I'm sorry that I was the one that was spared," she confessed. "You weren't spared, Pamela," I comforted her. "You had children and grandchildren so that way your brother will have grand-nephews and great grand-nephews whose actions are recorded in the deeds of your house and their names inscribed in the roster of the Host." "That's my hope anyway," I added. "Let it be so," she whispered.  (A Step back in time: that Weekend, between Oneida and Nicole) The weekend;  I'd had plenty of relaxing sex over the weekend, bonded with Oneida somewhat while we biked Saturday morning, had sex with Gael, junior of House Bendis (the woman who let me borrow her phone so I could invite Buffy, Helena and Desiree to my little induction ceremony), then had a late afternoon date with Nikita. Escorting Yasmin and her son to the airport for the start of her Havenstone training after dinner was unsettling. The boy, Braulio, seemed worried, Yasmin was glad to see me, really glad to see me then finished if off by commenting that she could tell 'something had changed'. I affirmed her hunch without going into the details. As Yasmin's mood improved, so did her son's. I wished her luck. She told me I'd need it more. Late Saturday night I was invited to a party by Libra. Brooke showed up date-less (she wasn't jumping into a new relationship) so she glommed onto me; us. Marla and Libra had a huge phone fight about her (Marla) not being 21 yet, thus not invited to the party. Felix was there having reconnected with Gina because he had both a glib tongue and an awe-inspiring sexual arsenal. Felix's attempts to recoup any ground with Brook failed miserably. She had her own bitterness toward Trent, her memory of me handing her panties under an outdoor cafe's table as a trophy Felix had taken the night before and displayed openly in my office, and my own masculine support to draw strength from. Felix and I did not verbally, or socially, spar. He accepted the verdict of our first contest and, for all his faults, he acknowledged that my victory had worth and obeyed his conscience on the matter. If anything, he was visually more respectful than ever before. I wasn't his equal; no man and definitely no woman was; yet I was now a competitor he would have to give his very best to defeat. Sunday morning had been just me and Odette. We'd cuddled on the sofa, watched some TV and then I took her to Havenstone for time in the pool. I kept the overly-aggressive Amazons at bay while getting Odette used to the idea of regular exercise; hanging out with Timothy and I required greater endurance than her sedentary youthful stamina provided. An early afternoon invite to a 'pick-up' basketball game at the community, two-court, outdoor lot with Jason, the bar-back from the Yuppie bar, brought me back in contact with Katy Lee Baker, aka Delivery Girl. Odette tagged along. It also brought me in contact with the local 'wild-life'. A Latin King clique was starting to operate in the area and Jason's crew were the native inhabitants who took exception to this. We played for about half an hour were everyone learned I was a big, fat liar. I was actually good at basketball, despite my earlier claims at ignorance. The Kings showed up, drove off the younger teens playing on the other court. A few more of those jokers showed up and it was now 'our turn' to make space. That went over like a shit brick. The Kings outnumbered us a good two-to-one, but Jason wasn't backing down. I was struggling to convince Jason that discretion was the better part of valor when some of the new Latin King arrivals tried to play with a few of the local ladies who had come down to watch their menfolk pull off their shirts and get sweaty. Poor Odette; she had been in the company of so many powerful, confident and lethal women she'd forgotten she wasn't one. A King grabbed Katy Lee's breast. Odette hit the asshole in the stomach, put a shin to his nuts and finished him off with grabbing his head and driving it into her upward moving knee, dropping him like the sack of shit he was. But wait, he had five buddies. Poo was being served up and the electric switch was about to be flipped. "I'll be back to help in a moment," I growled to Jason as the gang members jumped Odette. Katy Lee and a slightly older woman rushed to Odette's aid. The Kings didn't ignore my approach, peeling off two to 'deal with me'. They really shouldn't have hit Odette because now I was angry. The feces hit the rotary wind machine. With their last shows of bravado, I lay into the closest bastards. The sixteen year old was hesitantly pulling out his 32 caliber ACP while reconsidering his poor life choices as I hit his buddy so hard he went airborne, two teeth and a fountain of blood coming from the ruin I'd made of his face. Gun guy was next. I clamped my left hand on his right, gun-toting wrist then drove my knee into his elbow. The elbow snapped upward with a sound reminiscent of a car backfiring. His screams drowned out the thud of his gun dropping to the court surface. For the three remaining Latin Kings I was closing with, a terrible social reality came crashing in. Gangs rely on several tools to exert power; a propensity for violence, illegal finances, a fierce reputation, and superior numbers. By the look on my face, they discovered that their numbers didn't bother me in the least. I knew exactly who they were and didn't give a damn. My desire to destroy them was motivated by something far stronger than any currency, and I was clearly better at this whole violence thing than they seemed to be. They had their pride and the fidelity with their gang, plus their intimidation tactics were going wrong so fast, they couldn't process the disaster quickly enough to alter course. These guys were not professional warriors by any stretch of the imagination. 'Warriors'; perhaps. 'Professional'; definitely not. Their ability to rapidly adapt to a changing situation was woefully under-developed. In gang hand-to-hand combat, you bunch up your members, overrun a foe and beat him to the ground. Fighting a practitioner of Brazilian jujutsu, standing close to one another is the Last thing you want to do. I was a whirlwind of destruction, fed by the understanding that Jason's bunch needed me back real soon. The asshat who tried to use a knife on me got his hand pinned to the court for his audacity. I repeat, threatening Odette had infuriated me. At center court, Jason had his hands full and then some. The Latin Kings had the edges in both numbers and ferocity. The only other hometown boy holding his own was this thick, solid Puerto Rican guy named Bennie; the rest were in trouble. I started with the four-on-one stomp-down on one of Jason's friends; I'd missed the guy's beat down. My inner Amazon was leading the charge. Unlike all my previous encounters, I was intentionally causing pain. I wasn't trying to drive them off, or render them hors de combat. No, my desire was to strike terror in their hearts, inflicting suffering in order to eradicate my foes' resolve to fight. Knees snapped, bones broke, faces were stomped into the court and internal organs ruptured. Even my erstwhile allies were aghast at the wickedness with which I treated our enemy. "Ah; Cáel; are you okay?" Jason mumbled when the last King went down. He'd have a shiner on his left eye soon and his lip was split and bleeding. I hadn't come through unscathed either. Havenstone had seriously upped my pain threshold. Jason wasn't really asking about my physical well-being anyway. I had to get ahead of this; predicament. "Let's get this trash off the court," I commanded. The boys hesitated until Jason picked up one of my semi-conscious victims. "Come on 'Pendejo', leave and don't come back," Jason yanked the man up and began shoving him toward the gate he and his buddies had arrived by. The rest of Jason's friends joined in and we began cleaning up the place. One gangster decided he was too hurt to be moved. I'd rammed his shoulder into the goalpost, breaking his collarbone. He was crying about the pain he was in. I pulled him up. He was around 7 foot 2 inches tall and 275 pounds. I wrapped my hands around his thick bull neck and slowly raised him up off the ground. His face was reddening, his good hand was trying to break my hold and his legs were flailing about in the open air. [In Spanish] "Pain, Asshole? No, pain is me having to come back here and hunt you and your vermin buddies down," I seethed. "I don't live here. These men are not my friends. You touched my girl and I am God Almighty when it comes to defending those of my household. I am not in a gang. I am not a criminal. If you, or your gang, come within a block of this place, I will become Death. Today, there are too many witnesses. This is your reprieve; your moment of grace," I snarled. "Use it wisely. It will not happen again," I finished in a fury. I dropped him to his wobbly feet, catching his good hand before he fell over. That act of compassion after my dire threat confused the guy. "Go," I returned to English. The rest of the Latin Kings walked, stumbled, were dragged from the court. "Who are you again?" Bennie inquired. "Cáel Nyilas," I grinned. "I'm an Aerospace Engineer working on the feasibility of having hamsters running on their wheels being used to recharge batteries on manned flights to Mars." "Hamster wrangling has to be one tough profession," Katy Lee snickered as she and Odette came up. "Come on now," Jason winced as he licked his lip. "Brawling is about panic, anger and the management of those two forces," I told them. "I was the only one in this fight in control of himself, so my actions look out of proportions to what really happened." "They were kicking our asses," Bennie chuckled. "Not as bad as you guys think," I consoled them. "None of you guys ran, or curled up in a ball. That allowed me to pick my fights. I clearly have more hand-to-hand combat experience, but none of that would have mattered had you guys freaked out." There was some truth in what I said. Had they panicked, I would have grabbed Odette and Katy Lee then fled as well. Since they toughed it out, and the Latin Kings exerted virtually no command and control, I was able take on the gang members in small, bite-sized chunks. My training and experience took care of the rest. This also made the somewhat traumatized ballplayers feel proud about the cuts and bruises they'd received. Now they realized they had 'won' this scuffle, they'd played their parts courageously and had all been instrumental in a successful stratagem. The fact that none of them knew that when the blows were raining in it meant nothing. The women who'd come out to watch the game then witnessed the beat down knew their men had been brave, taken their licks and routed their enemies. Martial ardor, baby! 'Defending' a woman does not diminish her. It increases her odds of dealing with insults and threats in a positive manner. Women who look down on women who use their pussies to better themselves are being stupid. It is the equivalent of having a complete toolbox and only using the hammer. The women were going to give up some level of sex to reward the men. The men, in turn, had an example of the kind of behavior that would get them what they wanted; defending your ladies equated to feminine reward. That did not mean penetration; life was far more complex. It did mean she would hang around you, talk to you and trust you (most likely more than she should). Guys still had to seal the deal, figure out what she wanted and deliver. That had been the working arrangement between men and women for most of the last 80,000 years. What I didn't know at the time was that I was being spied upon, that this spy called Buffy; my 'spear and shield'; and Buffy would gather up some Security Detail chicks. Why would SD help? Some morons had tried to murder the Head of House Ishara and that wasn't something the Amazons would tolerate. That Latin King clique was contemplating revenge. They were about to get schooled by the Grand Mistresses of that brutal and unforgiving Art form. I could never let Odette know. After all, to her they were someone's sons, brothers and husbands. My chilling rationalization was that, for whatever reason, the Latin Kings had redefined themselves as carnivores, preying on the rest of mankind. They should have studied what nature was really like. Predators had predators of their own. They'd been big, bad caimans, snatching all that came to the water's edge. In nature, the caiman was careful because jaguars hunted and ate caimans. In the urban jungle, there were things far more dangerous than gang-bangers living in the shadows that jealously guarded their spot as apex predator. Odette and I exited the field. I'd have to catch Katy Lee another time. I was to get the bad news from Ulyssa and her sister about the death in her family. Timothy, Odette and I worked out some more as Odette and I took turns relating the fight to Timothy. He reminded us that the Latin Kings were a powerhouse in the city as well as nationwide. Nicole called at the point I was ready for bed and the rest was family history. (Monday morning) I locked my bike up as normal. When I saw the security guards eyeing me funny, I grew cautious. "Is there a problem?" I asked the woman scanning my ID. She was fearfully hesitant. "Wait, are you worried that I'm pissed about Friday morning?" "We were only doing our jobs, Cáel of Ishara," she told me. "Oh," I chuckled. "So that is what is bothering you." I smiled at the group. "Of course you were doing your jobs. I would have been surprised if you hadn't and I'm certainly not angry about what went down. You acted in defense of Havenstone and I never saw it any other way." That gave them some relief. My next problem. "Has anyone from the Security Detail called about me?" I asked. "I don't see anyone here to pick me up this morning." "I'll call them," she offered. The answer was that they weren't expecting me, but I could come down if I desired. That was promising. My ID card worked for the lower levels now. Walking past the Armory was intriguing; in that they barely noticed me. In the prep room for the shooting range there was; nothing. No guns for me to try out, or even look at. I went to the firing range looking for one of my 'friendly' SD ladies. They were all giving me the cold shoulder. Naomi told me why; Constanza. The SD were very angry with my interference in justice for Constanza versus Pamela. Since Naomi had been there when the entire incident went down, I didn't laugh in her face. I got coldly furious instead. If I wanted a firearm, I could go to the Armory and check one out, so that's what I did. The guards there weren't helpful either. Inside was; well; everything. I called up SD and asked them to send an armorer to help me make some selections. Ten minutes later, the lady had still not arrived. That made me laugh. They were tit-for-tatting the wrong guy. Glasses and ear protection came first. I left the Armory with my weapon of choice for the day, a full bandolier and a crate of ammo. I could see the SD chick's guarding the Armory eyes bug-out. I grinned and headed for the shooting range. They surreptitiously called somebody. Knowing that, I hurried myself along, passing straight through prep room for the firing line. I was a man on a mission. See, I could be a raging prick when I wanted to be. Those SD babes should have talked with any number of the Amazons who already knew me. I had made it clear; make my life difficult if you wished, but accept whatever payback I could imagine. Respecting House Ishara wasn't even a question. For pummeling me over Constanza, they were about to get a whole new kind of Righteous Pricking, courtesy of the house they refused to treat with equality. An Amazon finished firing off a clip for her personal defense weapon and was checking her pistol's slide action. "Excuse me," I said as I stepped up. She was about to scream something. Most likely 'stop!' Since I had no intention of complying, I didn't wait; or stop. For me, I was suddenly wondering what the precise blast radius of a 40 mm grenade was. I pulled the trigger anyway. I swear by Ishara-turned-Ishtar, I hit that target right in the 10 ring. The explosion the grenade caused when it hit the back wall rendered my claims moot. Even with eye and ear protection, I could barely hear anything because of the ringing echo, or see anything because of the dust. The flashing yellow lights and klaxons going off indicated something bad had happened. Bad wasn't done yet. I walked to the next stand where the Amazon had ducked down while she oriented herself to the threat. "Good morning," I yelled at her. Then I aimed and prepared to squeeze off my second round. With all the dust in the air, I could barely make out the outline of the target I was shooting at. Accuracy at this point was unnecessary. This bitching toy seemed to kill everything. Third station; third shot and the Amazons were starting to figure out what was going on. Some moron was firing a grenade launcher within an indoor firing range. Before the fourth shot they figured out it was me. Now those bitches had a problem. The lead Amazon tried to get my attention despite my constant attempts to ignore her. I resolved the issue by tapping my six-shot bang-bang and indicating I had two shots left; and I used them. Only when I stopped to reload did the ladies screw up the courage to exhibit some kind of physical resistance. Naomi pulled off my ear protection. "What are you doing?" she shouted at me. She wasn't being rude. All our ears were ringing. "I'm being left to my own devices, you 'failures' to every concept of loyalty, respect and faith," I replied to the entire group. "Constanza called House Ishara an abomination, insane and diseased," I spat out my hate. "I spared her life when I should have had her stricken from the roles of her house and butchered her like some beast. I showed mercy and this is how the Security Detail responds? Congratulations, you have earned my contempt." "But why are you using a grenade launcher; indoors?" Naomi struggled to understand. "Oh," I smirked. "Because I can. I'm superior to all of you here so I can do what I want and you have to suck it up. I am the Head of a First House so none of you have a choice. Every one of you chose to show me no respect and, out of respect for your lack of respect, you get no respect." They were trying to figure how to work around that when I upped the ante. "I'm also going to direct the other members of House Ishara to come down here at random times and fire off grenades, use flamethrowers, or; how about tear gas; tear gas sounds good." "That would degrade the readiness of the Security Detail," the first Amazon protested. "Not my problem. Take your complaints to Elsa or Saint Marie. Make sure to start your complaint with exactly how you behaved toward me; but use the names Beyoncé, Ursula, Katrina, or Messina instead of mine," I glared. "Now excuse me. I have a box full of high explosives to work through." And off I went. There were 25 shooting lanes. I had fired off my 22nd grenade when Elsa showed up. "Cáel of Ishara, why are you destroying this training area?" she inquired calmly. "Working through a crate of grenades. I thought that would be obvious," I joked. "Is there something wrong we should talk about?" Elsa was keeping her anger in check. "Your underlings were chronically disrespectful. Since positive reinforcement failed; being nice to any of your weakling-bullies was counter-productive; I decided to employ the stick treatment," I met her gaze. "Stop destroying the firing line; please," Elsa ground out through clenched teeth. "You are right," I nodded. "I need to take a few of these upstairs to the pure-blood gym. There is a lot more damage I could do there. This place is already a mess." Desiree's voice broke the silence. She must have come in with Elsa. "Cáel," Desiree yawned. "How do you want to resolve this crisis? That doesn't involve setting off seismic sensors all over New York City, that is?" "Hmmm; fine, every member of the Security Detail is to write a romantic poem then read it aloud to a 'Runner' while at that 'Runners' workstation," I invented a punishment. "Ishara is the Goddess of Love as well as Oaths. It is a fitting tribute to her that romantic verses from the heart be created and spoken aloud." "It is also fitting that the recipients be 'Runners', since it will unite them in both their appreciation of love and their anger with me for throwing my weight around like every other Full-Blood who thinks they are better because of some quirk of birth," I concluded. "It will be done," Elsa intoned. That part of the matter was settled. Elsa looked at my grenade launcher. An unhappy sigh escaped my lips as I handed it over. "Elsa, I'm coming for weapon's practice again tomorrow," I informed her. Now I was going to burn off some time in the pool then get to work, or so I hoped. I hadn't gotten away with this because I was Cáel Nyilas, or the Head of House Ishara. I got away with it because Elsa didn't want to see the faces of the Council when she explained what her people had done. The Council members treating me like offal was their business. Other Amazons deciding that they could treat ANY member of the Council that poorly wouldn't fly; reference to the fate of Leona. Why had SD treated me poorly? Constanza. If they repeated my conversation with Constanza that cost her an eye, the outcome was known by all. Constanza would cease being an Amazon right before she died. I made it to Katrina's office four minutes before seven only to find Katrina absent while Daphne, Brielle and Pamela were hanging around. Dora and Fabiola followed me in. Everyone made it before the deadline, Katrina last of all. As Katrina began the meeting, Brielle left. Pamela and Katrina ignored one another. My work review was far better than normal. I'd sold Anthrax to a terrorist cell, but it had turned out to be a mislabeled Anthrax antidote instead, so all was good. Daphne was trying to figure out how her glowing report over my efforts had been so misconstrued. My assigned boss for the day was Rosette, one of the senior members of Executive Services. "Katrina, I need a moment of your time; in private," I requested as the meeting broke up. "As Cáel, or the Head of House Ishara?" she asked. "Neither," I replied. She waved the others away with Tigger shutting the door. Pamela remained seated. Katrina shot me a look concerning Pamela's presence. "I don't control her," I shrugged. "She hangs around me for her own reasons." Katrina nodded. I walked to the edge of Katrina's desk, put my palms on its cool surface. "Katrina, I am the Grandson of Cáel O'Shea, I met Brianna O'Shea earlier this morning, she knows who I am and was brought to town because some genetic research done on me." "Brianna knows where I work and who I work for, as in you. Pamela said the word 'Protocols' and Brianna backed off, but I'm sure she wants to see me again. I've warned my Dad about what happened and to destroy everything associated with my Mom. By the way, Brianna looks exactly like my Mother did when I was first born; exactly," I emphasized. Had the situation not been so completely screwed up, I would have treasured the steamrollered look on Katrina's face. "She is with something called the Illuminati. She doesn't know about me and House Ishara. When Brianna tried to figure how this Protocol/Truce thing involved me, Pamela stonewalled her," I added. "Pamela, I can understand Cáel not immediately bringing this to my attention," Katrina's cool exterior reasserted itself. "He doesn't know what's going on. You do." "I didn't feel inclined to do your job for you, Katrina," Pamela gave a rapier-thin smile. "Besides, you are part of the brain trust that sent him home Friday night cloaked in ignorance, not I." "Cáel," Katrina turned back to me. "How did you meet Brianna O'Shea?" "I met a lawyer, screwed her to multiple orgasms in the Women's room of some bar, met her again plus her lawyer buddies and Sunday night she called me to her downtown office to screw her into enlightenment; which I did," I sighed. "She was working on a case involving DNA ownership, which is oddly germane to my current predicament," I grinned. "Cáel, we need you to report to medical for more testing," Katrina ordered. "I apologize, but House Ishara does not believe that would be in its best interest so Cáel must decline," I nodded. "Will there be anything else?" Will battled Will to no outcome. She nodded and I left. Pamela ghosted along behind me. Rosetta intersected my path and off we went. I was given no clue as to my assignment; no surprise. I texted Buffy: 'Nothing new happening. Pick me up at 5:30 Wed. morning.' That meant there was no new development on the committee to help House Ishara pick 'Runners'. I had played nice. Katrina and Hayden had dodged me on Friday afternoon. This morning, she owed it to me to show some kind of progress. That wasn't what she offered. I had made a concession, they refused to reciprocate, so now I was free of any obligation to consider their wishes. I wanted more 'Runners' and come Wednesday morning, I was adding twenty. Working with Rosette (and Pamela) was a triple-barreled experience. Errands were the largest bulk of our time, but the rest was other mundane tasks of the most basic sort. Within the workload were instructions in the craft of being unseen. Executive Services was more than laundry and daycare; it was about not disrupting the lives of clients. A side benefit of that was learning how to move through any group and not be memorable; to not give off the subtle clues that you were an outsider. Not only could a group of executives hold a conversation without an ES person disrupting their trains of thought, people trained to look for threats wouldn't be tipped off to your presence either. It was peon-craft for beginners. Executive Services personnel weren't ninja; they were inconsequential. As I had bubbled to Katrina on day one, Executive Services got to go everywhere and learn how everything worked. What I didn't appreciate was that was how Counter-Intelligence worked too. From what I wedged out of Rosette, Counter-Intelligence had never uncovered a successful internal conspiracy. They had ferreted out multiple peripheral programs meant to gather information on Havenstone, but no Amazon had been critically compromised; which meant several Amazons had been blackmailed yet gone to ES before doing any damage. Rosette appreciated that fanatic devotion, but she'd never hold complete faith in it. Her job was vigilance. (What is really going on?) The third barrel was the real unhappy news. For all their illegal activities, Havenstone was not the Sinaloa Cartel. There were not a global criminal organization that invited international law enforcement scrutiny. So why did they devote so much time and energy to security? They weren't alone in the shadows of world-wide civilization. At the top of the pile was the Illuminati. They were a hydra controlled by a ruthless, cutthroat conclave; membership uncertain. They were a Darwinian meritocracy until the top tier of leadership, where a group of smaller secret societies and families monopolized the real influence. Their biggest strength, and weakness, was that most of the people in the organization didn't even know they were part of the Illuminati. After that was a mishmash of groups with different abilities that made rating them difficult. The Condottieri were rather simple; they sold mercenaries and weapons to anyone with the coin with the sideline of promoting conflict by any means necessary. The Nine Clans; that sounded familiar; were assassins in the truest sense of the word. Hashshashin, Ninja, Thuggee, Black Lotus, Coils of the Serpent, Brotherhood of the Wolf, the Black Hand, Cult of the Jaguar and the Ghost Tigers. They were not just murder for hire, but murder to advance their cause. Harmonious existence was bad for business, so they stirred up rivalries and conflict in every corner of the globe. The Egyptian Rite Masons sounded sublime. They weren't. They may have been a secret order older than the Amazons, claiming descent to the days of Imhotep. The Egyptians were the oldest enemy of the Illuminati. The Egyptian Rite's goal was a global autocratic government, were the Illuminati wanted a capitalist oligarchy in charge of global commerce; with the Illuminati pulling all the strings. The Egyptian Rite were not restricted to Egypt anymore; membership was open to all races and genders. The Earth and Sky Society were not New Agers. They were the descendants of Genghis Khan and were devoted to the reincarnation of the Greatest World Conqueror of all time. Before tossing them into the rubbish bin of bad ideas, know that Genghis was the largest single genetic contributor (via rape) to the human gene pool since the mystical Eve. To be a member you had to have a genetic link to ole Genghis. The Seven Pillars of Heaven were an ancient Chinese Secret Society out for; you guessed it; World Domination. To be a true member of this group you had to be Pure Han Chinese and a man, or bound to one. Needless to say, Havenstone and the Seven Pillars did not get along. The final bit of information; these groups were what was left of the Great Secret Societies; the survivors. Havenstone's place in all of this chaos was complicated. By mid-5th century BCE, the Egyptians were aware of the Amazons. The Amazons were not causing problems for the Egyptians, so they parted on decent terms and that was that. By the first century ADE, the political landscape had changed. Amazons had penetrated Roman society and brought Latin houses into their structure. Amazingly, the Egyptians contacted the Amazons again, figured out the Amazons only wanted co-existence so co-existence they got. In the late 4th century, the Amazons returned the favor. The Amazons told the Egyptians something horribly bad was coming across the Eurasian steppes and the Egyptians better batten down the hatches. A few decades later, the Huns were pressing on the Roman Empire's frontier. What is not generally know is that in the ranks of Hunnish horde were the Sarmatians, successors to the Scythians, who had allied Amazons in their ranks. This gave the Amazons, thus the Egyptians, contacts on both sides of the Roman-Attila conflict. By the mid-5th century the two secret societies parted ways once more. Their relationship had been useful, but not close. From the Amazons viewpoint, it was the equivalent of getting good gossip at the fish market. The Egyptians appreciated the intelligence, but wanted, and didn't get, military assistance in propping up the Roman Empire. For the Amazons, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the trigger for a massive Diaspora. A few houses decided to tough it out in Western Europe and its packs of warring Germanic tribes. Others travelled to Egypt and from there, down the Nile to Ethiopia and Central Africa. A third group travelled farther East than ever before, eventually settling in Southern India. Of course, the World never stands still. In the late 8th century, the Illuminati was founded as a mercantile society trying to restructure the shattered Western and Central European economies. It turned out that there was a major pass over the Alps between eastern Italy and southern Germany that was a safe transit region. The Illuminati decided to seize it. The Egyptians popped up, revealed to the infant Illuminati that they didn't want them to do that, but were ignored. The Egyptians were out to rebuild European civilization, which meant, in their eyes, you didn't go around butchering those who were restoring law and order. The Egyptians went to the mountain pass and warned the Amazons there what was coming their way. The Illuminati convinced a local Lombard warlord that the pass would be a nice addition to his territory and off he went. Two months later, their bully boy hadn't returned. Neither had any of his men. Never ones to retreat from failure, the Illuminati sent another force and those guys were never seen again as well. This time the Egyptians showed back up to warn the Illuminati that those people whose land they'd been trying to steal were sick of their meddling and were coming to settle matters. Would the Egyptians help the Illuminati deal with this threat, now that it was out of the mountains? The Egyptians politely declined stating 'better the sitting stone you know than the rolling one that sets things around it on fire'. The Illuminati fled from their first base and that is the reason why they hate the Amazons and Egyptians to this day. Mind you, the Illuminati had no idea who lived in that mountain pass at that time. A few decades after the incident, the Amazons relocated northward. Being good stewards over their lands had given up unwelcome rewards; namely people came to them seeking sanctuary. Amazons can be rather cold-hearted. That does not mean they kill you for knocking on their door. When the number of refugees became too great, the houses voted for migration over slaughter. The Amazons travelled to the Black Forest, dispersing from there, and left the people behind to become known as the Swiss. Everywhere, Europe was tough for the Amazons in the Middle Ages. Heavily male-dominated Germanic cultures in the North, Islamic culture in the South, piracy in between and an epidemic of warfare all around. It was in Sub-Saharan Africa where the Amazons prospered the most. There, migrating populations worked in their favor, as did the style of warfare generally practiced. Perversely, the increase in the East African Arabic slave trade worked in the Amazon's favor. Not only could they 'liberate' captured populations; males for breeding and women for recruits; it encouraged local tribes to temporarily ally with the Amazons to fight off the slavers. The Subcontinent turned out to be a mixed bag. In the South, Amazons prospered and grew in numbers and houses. The problem was that they became too strong. Normally they would have spread out, but Eastern India proved more hostile than acceptable and further East looked like a crap-shoot. China didn't look welcoming at all. So, the Indian Amazons were caught up in a series of wars when Northern powers tried to move South and the Southern lords were in some serious need of aid. The issue was there were multiple players in the shadows pulling the strings. One day, the Egyptians came knocking. The Egyptians knew the Amazons well enough to not try to draft them into their cause. They simply told the Amazons who the key players were and what they were trying to do. Why would they do this? It was obvious. Amazons existed for two reasons; live free and make baby Amazons. Those other asshole Secret Societies were threatening both of those goals. Warfare is doubly hard on a female population and women spending years in combat aren't making babies. Take into account that during this time period a massive amount of the world's population lived in India. Add to that the Amazon numbers were respectively tiny (invisible) and Every Secret Society they were fighting didn't think much of women. A few thousand gurgling last breathes later and two of India's oldest Secret Societies were gone, or eviscerated. Why had they left the other, Islamic, secret society alone? The Islamic society operated in the populous North, not the jungle-covered South. Why did they leave the Amazons alone? The Amazons exhibited a shocking capacity for violence. The Muslim group was a 'secret' Secret Society. The Amazons were a 'hidden/don't screw with us' Secret Society. A side effect of the war in India was the creation of another Secret Society; the 9 Clans. They weren't nine back then, but thanks to the Amazons and Egyptians, this East Asian group picked up the Thuggee and, within a century, the Hashshashin. Things were about to get even more interesting. For the Amazons in India, life existed off the beaten path so it took a year for the Amazons to realize those 'dirty little men' who had shown up in some western Indian ports were, in fact, Europeans; in a European-built ship. They didn't know Portuguese, but they knew Latin and with a little bit off effort, they got an updated history of Europe. Amazons had been meeting regularly every thirty years, or so, to choose the next High Priestess and exchange notes. These meeting did not include studies of technological, political, or social improvements. Stealing the twenty-first ship to show up, the Amazons sailed home; Europe, that is. They stopped off in East Africa to spread the good news then, upon landing, went to tell their European sisters that their pilgrimages were no longer a matter of torturous overland travel. They could use nifty ships like these instead. With that came even better news; some Genoese, nut-job, failure of a mathematician had discovered a brand new land and they were going to check it out. The decision was made. The Indians were going back home. Their Europeans sisters were going to 'acquire' some instructions on how to sail a ship then 'obtain' some ships and divide them up among the three strongholds. Europe would be heading to the west, Africa would sail around the Cape of Good Hope (not yet named that), back toward Europe to link up their communication network (and in time, bump into Brazil), and India would head east to the South-east Asian archipelago, sailing around the hostile Asian kingdoms. Hopefully, the fleet sailing west and the one heading east would meet one day. Unfortunately, North and South America stood in the way of that dream. The 'little' hitch in this plan was who those ships belonged to. Nearly half the commerce of Europe at the time was either controlled, or influenced by, the Illuminati. The Amazons were running off with their equipment and profits; whoops. A cherry on top to that 'whoops' was that the Illuminati were only starting to come out of a bloody war with the Condottieri. The Condottieri had started out as a business venture/strong arm of the Illuminati. In classic Illuminati fashion, the leaders of the Condottieri didn't know precisely who they were working for. In fact, they thought they were independent. When the Illuminati yanked that leash, it snapped and the blood-letting began. The Illuminati had more money than the Pope and the subtle ability to call upon the kingdoms of the Mediterranean World. What did the Condottieri have? A small cadre of loyal, professional fighting men and the best strategic and tactical minds in the West; the ones the Illuminati had recruited into the Condottieri in the first place. Whoops yet again. The Illuminati had every resource under the Sun. The Condottieri knew they were screwed, but they'd been in screwed up situations before and battled through. They needed to stay alive until the path to victory presented itself. Re-enter the Egyptians and the 9 Clans (still not 9 yet). The Egyptians? The Egyptians made a butt-load of money on the silk and spice trade's overland routes. The Western Europeans/Illuminati were about to cut them out of that. The Egyptians needed time to reposition themselves. The revolt of the Condottieri was a gift from the Divine and suddenly the mercenaries had funds and ships. The 9 Clans? The Illuminati was a 'Does it All' organization. If the Illuminati won, who would need assassins? This was class warfare, pure and simple. Even with three-on-one, the Illuminati fought back and fought well. The Amazon predations were not the deciding factor in the war. It wasn't even their war. Soon enough, the Amazons were buying their own boats and going elsewhere. The Illuminati doesn't forgive, or forget. For some reason, they took the Amazon thefts personally, despite its negligible impact. Maybe it was that all the other players were regionally invested while the Amazons seemed to be dog-piling them. The fact that Amazons had existed in Europe for nearly 2500 years either didn't occur to them, or they didn't care. Flash forward to the start of the 20th century. Through the discrete use of marriage-assassination, land grabs and the basic lawlessness in the Western United States, rural South America, Australia and the islands of Southeast Asia, the Amazons had grown vastly in numbers and economic influence. The Egyptians come knocking once more. Unlike past encounters, they were bringing an offer of alliance. The Illuminati controlled key assets in the British Empire and were using those chokeholds to eliminate their rivals. This was not news to the Amazons. Their holdings in India and the Dutch East Indies had been under pressure of the Illuminati for a century. Ever since the Illuminati nearly ground out the Thuggee (one of the 9 Clans), the Egyptians and Amazons have been constantly harassed. This was not the first warning the Egyptians had brought. The Amazons hadn't want a war with the Illuminati and they certainly didn't trust the Egyptians. This time they agreed to go to war though. Why? Two things; totally unrelated. First, the Illuminati and the Seven Pillars of Heaven had agreed to carve up Asia. Amazons lived in Asia and they were no man's chattel. Secondly, the Women's Rights movement was in full swing. The Amazons had nothing to do with it. Those were outsider females. What interested the Amazons were the legal ramifications of Women's Equality. The Amazons were poised for a massive increase in their financial footprint. With the Illuminati out of the way, or at least, preoccupied, they could seize assets and have time to fortify before they could be attacked. Women's Equality would allow this to take place. Basically, the Amazons were going to exploit the blood, sweat and tears of women to advance their agenda. From all accounts, the only groups that recalled the Amazons last foray into Secret Society politics were the Amazons and Egyptians. Certainly no one had enlightened the Condottieri. They started smacking around some Amazon bases in Europe and unleashed 'Hell on Earth'. With the help of the Egyptians, they got to it in Amazon fashion. A General of the Condottieri and his family were eating at a Naples eatery when five women dresses like nuns walked in and shot up him, his entire family plus some bodyguards. When the response team showed up, they killed them too. A few police were added to the obituary column as the Amazons escaped. Welcome to Amazon warfare. The Condottieri were furious over such a public breach, as well as the losses. They swore a vendetta. The 9 Clans happily informed the Condottieri that a 'War of Extermination' was the Amazon default setting. The Condottieri were not afraid; not yet. See, there was another secret society called La Solidaridad. Working on intelligence from the Illuminati, La Solidaridad overran an Amazon compound in Argentina. They thought it would be funny to take the survivors as sex slaves. Maybe the Illuminati was experimenting to see just how pissed-off Amazons could get. Maybe La Solidaridad hadn't read their Homer, especially those parts concerning Ancient World vengeance. It took the Host six months to start things rolling then the carnage began. They made damn sure the men knew they were being hunted by women. They weren't there to out-macho the men, or make a point. Every night, they attacked the men and their families in the cities and towns. For safeties sake, La Solidaridad retreated to their country estates. Huge mistake. A good number of them had to have hunted at some point in their lives. How they missed being 'flushed out into the open' was beyond me. Out in the countryside, there was nowhere to hide. Walls meant little because Amazons were incredibly fit and trained to fight at night. Most of the families the Amazons killed. They were the lucky ones. The survivors? By using a new Edison device, they took some home movies of the fates of those men. The Amazon's favorite tactic was to shove lit sticks of dynamite in the men's asses then steer them toward the closest river. One guy actually made it. His relief didn't last long. The Amazons had done something to turn the normally safe caiman population into rabidly aggressive swarmers. Bitches; insanely, sadistic bitches. In eighteen months, La Solidaridad had ceased to exist as an organization and never recovered. The Illuminati used that time wisely to beat down the Egyptians, Earth and Sky, and the 9 Clans, aided by the Seven Pillars. Having concluded their first order of business, the Amazons sent their home movie to the Condottieri. It wasn't mercy toward the Condottieri. I was psychological warfare. The Amazons needed the Condottieri off-balance so they could go after their real enemy. It seemed the Illuminati had instructed La Solidaridad on how to 'intimidate' the Amazons; through rape, torture and enslavement. Specifically, it was Cáel O'Shea who set the tragedy in motion; Granddad. Beyond Granddad being impossibly fucking old, he had possessed some seriously out of control animosity where Amazons were concerned. Before the Amazon's could implement their hunt, the 9 Clans intervened. The Illuminati had been giving them real problems and they saw a way to gain some breathing space. Had the Amazons and 9 Clans been in communication, the World might be a very different place today. Instead, the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne was wacked by the Black Hand, some Serbian numbskulls took the fall and the rest of us got World War I. Oddly enough, this one murder accomplished the goals of the 9 Clans, Amazons, Egyptians and Earth and Sky Society. The British Empire still stood, but was wrecked. China was much worse off than that. Before the Amazons could gain their vengeance, the Egyptians negotiated a cease-fire between groups. The Amazon Council was furious yet unwilling to fight the Illuminati alone. They kept down their bile; and waited. In the post-War period, the Amazon/Illuminati feud ate much of their resources (probably the Egyptian's intentions all along). A truly dark side of this struggle was the Amazon support for the Nazis. Did the Amazons switch course? Yes, but not for the reasons most people would think. Jews, gypsies, communists and homosexuals going into camps didn't worry them one bit. What did? Let's go back in time to those women in the Swiss Alps who headed north. A great many of them went North then East; to places like Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It wasn't so much a matter of whimsy as one of terrain and population. All the best farmland was in western Germany, the Low Countries and France. That's where the Germanic peoples settled. Behind them, to the East, were the Slavs. The Slavs had three things the Amazons liked; low population density, weak social hierarchies and crappy land. That meant they could live in relative isolation, not be subject to an all-powerful king and not be inundated with migrating hordes wanting to steal their dank swamps, deep forests and isolate meadows. Sometime in early 1939, right after the Third Reich snatched up Bohemia, some Amazon augur decided to open up Hitler's Mein Kampf to see what was going on i.e. to see when Hitler would get around to jumping on England; the whole reason the Amazon were supporting him. What she found out was bad, bad, bad! The genocide of a bunch of people they could care less about? Not a problem. Invading the Slavic lands? What? Russia/Soviet Union hadn't been the big foe in WWI and they certainly were not Germany's greatest enemy at the moment; Britain was! Drang Nach Osten? That was an undefined migration of Germans back into Slavic lands that ended over 600 years ago? Their Eastern European sisters were in grave danger from a lunatic. The common sense response (for Amazons) was to kill the Hitler. They couldn't get close, so they took their problem to their old allies, the Egyptians and 9 Clans. Those two saw nothing wrong with the way things were developing. The Amazons swallowed their pride and went to the Illuminati who seemed rather enchanted with the idea of the fascists and communists annihilating one another. They had no way to safely approach the Soviets. Pulling their sister houses out of Eastern Europe was no longer an option; the other Secret Societies would be looking for that and try to figure out where the Amazon home bases were. The Amazons decided to make a fight of it. They were not going to charge panzers with spears. No, they started setting up caches of supplies and weapons in the most inaccessible places imaginable. The hope was that as Nazi Germany was grinding Communist Russia to dust, they could smuggle out their people in the chaos to Sweden then points west. The problem was WW II didn't work out that way. Great Britain got spanked at Dunkirk and Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and Norway all surrendered to the Nazi blitzkrieg. Then the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia went under, but the Soviet Union didn't fall. Much to the Amazon Council's horror, resistance units began to interact with the local Amazons in an effort to improve their mutual survivability. Tales of mysterious female fighter, appearing to slay their enemies then disappearing into the wilderness filtered to both the Stavka (Russians) and SOE (British). The SOE discovered an answer to the mystery in mid-1942, by way of the fledgling US OSS. The Americans 'found' three female Army recruits who volunteered for such a mission. A month later, the partisan bands with those agents found the 'Forest Women' and all the lights came on. Unknown to the public World, the Amazon Council decided that the best hope for their kinswomen was to bring down the Nazis and ride out the Allied conquest. All of that might have been a happily little footnote except for what happened next. Hundreds of Amazons fought; no surprise; yet they didn't fight alone this time. Men and women of the local populace fought side by side with these lethal warriors. They shared battle plans, food, fire and medical care. That huge cultural barrier created over two and a half millennia began to erode. They bled together and were forced from time to time to place their lives in each other's hands. They witnessed one another's courage and sacrifice. They watched them bury their dead, nurture their young and weep at their pain. Whenever things looked darkest, the Amazon would turn to their partisan partners and say with utmost confidence 'we have survived worse; so can you'. The seminal event happened on the night of February 17th, 1944. For two years, the fractured, wounded women that are ever-present wherever there is war began to attach themselves to the Amazon bands. At first they were little more than annoyances. In time, the Amazons tried to turn these women into something 'useful'. Later, a few earned the right to follow the Amazons into battle. On that February night, two ladies were inducted into House Živa. This was hardly the first time outsider women were brought into the Host, but this circumstance was unique; induction in the middle of a war, having proven themselves in battle before their now-sisters. From that action; not the last in that conflict; was born the concept of the 'Runners'. With the end of WWII, the Amazons emerged more powerful than ever. The three strongest groups in the United States were the Egyptians, Illuminati and the Amazons. The Amazons profited the most; having started with the lowest profile and having infiltrated both the government and business sectors during the war effort. Using the Freemasons, the Egyptians reaped great benefit from the US war effort too. Always forward-looking, the Egyptians helped the Amazons as well. Still, not everything was rosy. For the Public World, World War II ended in September of 1945. That was barely a blip in the Secret Societies' radar. The calamity came on the 10th of December 1949. Using their pawns in the Chinese Communist Party, the Seven Pillars had re-unified China and were back on the world stage. Earth and Sky and the 9 Clans were dealt a setback. A fourth secret society involved in the Chinese struggle was absorbed by the 7 Pillars. The problem was that all the societies were locked in a bitter struggle yet devastated and over-extended. The 9 Clans, fearing the ratcheting up of Cold War intelligence-gathering services by multiple national governments asked for a global truce. The Amazons were dangerously exposed and over-extended. The Illuminati decided this was their time to strike and nothing could deter them. Into this backdrop, came the news to the Amazons that they had serious genetic issues. That led to the First Directive; the recruitment of 'Runners' as an established program as well as the explosion of what I knew as Executive Services. In a truly bizarre twist, U.S. and Soviet agents found themselves engaged in cat-and-mouse games with European NATO agents. Amazons had penetrated the proto-CIA during the war in an effort to reach their European sisters. In Eastern Europe, many of those partisans went over to the Communists when the Soviets overran their countries and looked favorably upon their erstwhile allies from the War. They couldn't match the influence that the many of the other secret societies possessed. Instead they pulled upon existing, personal relationships. I worked with a negative result of those days; Desiree, or more accurately, Desiree's parents. I was also walking with the final resolution of that crisis. The Secret Societies proved they could work just as fast as the UN. In three decades they had resolved nothing and were spending more and more time on damage control. Three events converged. The Illuminati had figured out the full-blooded Amazons were dying out so they knew they could win a game of attrition. The rest of the groups were coming to the conclusion that wiping out the Amazons was the easier course of action. The Amazons had, without a doubt, located the leader of the Illuminati, Cáel O'Shea. O'Shea was in sight of his goal; the extermination of the Amazons; when a lone Amazon got to him first. O'Shea's death sent titanic shockwaves through the Illuminati. There was a scramble for the top spot, fear over how much the Amazons knew about their inner workings, and how the other secret orders would take this bit of news. The Illuminati recoiled from the event, agreed to a truce and that led to the protocols that kept Brianna from dragging me off; gunshot wounds and all. That had been the state of affairs for the last thirty years. Again, the World had not stood still. China was an economic powerhouse, the EU grew stronger, and wars of political ideology had been replaced by religious-based terrorism. The Amazons were at a critical juncture in their history. The 'New' Directive was their best chance at staving off extinction and the Houses were fighting it kicking and screaming. The First Directive wasn't being implemented properly. If nothing changed, the Amazons would be dragged under by the weight of their own bigotry. But wait! There was this idiot with no conception of history getting in the way of Amazon extinction; the decline toward oblivion that six murderous factions were waiting for. In this epic there were no 'friends', only 'allies of convenience'. The Egyptians weren't buddies. They simply preferred others to fight their battles for them. The Amazons fit that bill nicely, but if they were dying out, the Egyptians would be more concerned in filling the Amazon void than mourning over the Host's grave. The Illuminati and Seven Pillars were enemies. Though there was little animosity between the Earth  and  Sky and the Amazons, the E and S were based on perpetuating the legacy of the World's greatest rapist. The 9 Clans were the 9 Clans and their business was all about the precise application of death. They had no friends and if they pretended to be your friend, it was only so they could position themselves to kill you. It was only business. They rarely played with debts, obligations and vendettas. Still, if a member of the 9 Clans said they owed you, it was worth the assassin's weight in Iridium. As a bonus, the 9 Clans were gender-neutral. Outside of the Amazons, they had been using females in their numbers the longest. Because of this, the 9 Clans tried to interact with the Amazon using women from their own ranks, minimizing the sexual tension between the groups. The Condottieri had also began recruiting women into their ranks over the past twenty years. Their leadership was still all-male with the added complications of the unresolved Naples killings and the brutal destruction of La Solidaridad. Also, while the Amazons were not business competitors, they didn't employ the Condottieri either. All these micro-wars had been very good for the Condottieri, allowing them to build up quite a stable of talent and a huge war chest. If the Amazons recovered, the global map would change. How so? Madi and Rhada weren't from Cleveland, but from India where unresolved crimes against women were too common. Palli Chandra, the VP of International Finance and Ngozi from my sparring match were from Central Africa and I'd gathered from

If you cannot compromise; Challenge! In 25 parts, edited from the works of FinalStand. Listen and subscribe to the ► Podcast at Connected.. “Every person is alone. That is the definition of Free-will.” The gift from Grandpa that keeps on giving. I almost miss not killing him myself." "That man was an eternal foe of the Amazons, Cáel. His death was necessary for peace with the Illuminati, thus peace with all the other factions," Pamela related. I began laughing. "So my misogynistic family heritage comes from my Mother and my misandristic lineage comes from my Father," I clued Pamela in. She found it to be hilariously ironic too. "We still have to be careful," Pamela nudged me. "After all, your Grandfather had plans for your body. Whether we choose to believe it was to be a vessel for your Grandfather's essence; or, if you prefer, he put something in your Mother's DNA that, when combined with the machinery he used to store his memories, would bring him back to life; Cáel O'Shea always was thinking three steps ahead." "Why didn't you kill me when you figured this out?" I stared at her. "You hold the fate of House Ishara inside of you," Pamela smiled warmly. "Besides, I like you. No one really understands me like you do. Everyone else thinks I have a sick sense of humor." "I wish you had been my Grandmother," I nodded. "Wait; wait," Pamela held me back from continuing. "Because if I had been your Grandmother, you would have known to avoid a nut-ranch like Havenstone." "Are you like my psychic twin?" I teased her. She was right, of course. "I had a twin brother," Pamela turned sad. "I have always wondered what path his spirit traveled once they took him to the cliffs." "The fact that you still recall him with empathy speaks volumes for you, Pamela," I hugged her. "I felt the same way, you know," Pamela drew comfort from my warmth. I was uncertain of her meaning. "When they told me what happened to boys; I couldn't accept it. Their reasoning rang hollow and I saw their denial of their own blood to be self-defeating." "I have always wanted to believe my brother waits for me in the Hall of Ancestors so I can finally see his face and tell him I'm sorry that I was the one that was spared," she confessed. "You weren't spared, Pamela," I comforted her. "You had children and grandchildren so that way your brother will have grand-nephews and great grand-nephews whose actions are recorded in the deeds of your house and their names inscribed in the roster of the Host." "That's my hope anyway," I added. "Let it be so," she whispered.  (A Step back in time: that Weekend, between Oneida and Nicole) The weekend;  I'd had plenty of relaxing sex over the weekend, bonded with Oneida somewhat while we biked Saturday morning, had sex with Gael, junior of House Bendis (the woman who let me borrow her phone so I could invite Buffy, Helena and Desiree to my little induction ceremony), then had a late afternoon date with Nikita. Escorting Yasmin and her son to the airport for the start of her Havenstone training after dinner was unsettling. The boy, Braulio, seemed worried, Yasmin was glad to see me, really glad to see me then finished if off by commenting that she could tell 'something had changed'. I affirmed her hunch without going into the details. As Yasmin's mood improved, so did her son's. I wished her luck. She told me I'd need it more. Late Saturday night I was invited to a party by Libra. Brooke showed up date-less (she wasn't jumping into a new relationship) so she glommed onto me; us. Marla and Libra had a huge phone fight about her (Marla) not being 21 yet, thus not invited to the party. Felix was there having reconnected with Gina because he had both a glib tongue and an awe-inspiring sexual arsenal. Felix's attempts to recoup any ground with Brook failed miserably. She had her own bitterness toward Trent, her memory of me handing her panties under an outdoor cafe's table as a trophy Felix had taken the night before and displayed openly in my office, and my own masculine support to draw strength from. Felix and I did not verbally, or socially, spar. He accepted the verdict of our first contest and, for all his faults, he acknowledged that my victory had worth and obeyed his conscience on the matter. If anything, he was visually more respectful than ever before. I wasn't his equal; no man and definitely no woman was; yet I was now a competitor he would have to give his very best to defeat. Sunday morning had been just me and Odette. We'd cuddled on the sofa, watched some TV and then I took her to Havenstone for time in the pool. I kept the overly-aggressive Amazons at bay while getting Odette used to the idea of regular exercise; hanging out with Timothy and I required greater endurance than her sedentary youthful stamina provided. An early afternoon invite to a 'pick-up' basketball game at the community, two-court, outdoor lot with Jason, the bar-back from the Yuppie bar, brought me back in contact with Katy Lee Baker, aka Delivery Girl. Odette tagged along. It also brought me in contact with the local 'wild-life'. A Latin King clique was starting to operate in the area and Jason's crew were the native inhabitants who took exception to this. We played for about half an hour were everyone learned I was a big, fat liar. I was actually good at basketball, despite my earlier claims at ignorance. The Kings showed up, drove off the younger teens playing on the other court. A few more of those jokers showed up and it was now 'our turn' to make space. That went over like a shit brick. The Kings outnumbered us a good two-to-one, but Jason wasn't backing down. I was struggling to convince Jason that discretion was the better part of valor when some of the new Latin King arrivals tried to play with a few of the local ladies who had come down to watch their menfolk pull off their shirts and get sweaty. Poor Odette; she had been in the company of so many powerful, confident and lethal women she'd forgotten she wasn't one. A King grabbed Katy Lee's breast. Odette hit the asshole in the stomach, put a shin to his nuts and finished him off with grabbing his head and driving it into her upward moving knee, dropping him like the sack of shit he was. But wait, he had five buddies. Poo was being served up and the electric switch was about to be flipped. "I'll be back to help in a moment," I growled to Jason as the gang members jumped Odette. Katy Lee and a slightly older woman rushed to Odette's aid. The Kings didn't ignore my approach, peeling off two to 'deal with me'. They really shouldn't have hit Odette because now I was angry. The feces hit the rotary wind machine. With their last shows of bravado, I lay into the closest bastards. The sixteen year old was hesitantly pulling out his 32 caliber ACP while reconsidering his poor life choices as I hit his buddy so hard he went airborne, two teeth and a fountain of blood coming from the ruin I'd made of his face. Gun guy was next. I clamped my left hand on his right, gun-toting wrist then drove my knee into his elbow. The elbow snapped upward with a sound reminiscent of a car backfiring. His screams drowned out the thud of his gun dropping to the court surface. For the three remaining Latin Kings I was closing with, a terrible social reality came crashing in. Gangs rely on several tools to exert power; a propensity for violence, illegal finances, a fierce reputation, and superior numbers. By the look on my face, they discovered that their numbers didn't bother me in the least. I knew exactly who they were and didn't give a damn. My desire to destroy them was motivated by something far stronger than any currency, and I was clearly better at this whole violence thing than they seemed to be. They had their pride and the fidelity with their gang, plus their intimidation tactics were going wrong so fast, they couldn't process the disaster quickly enough to alter course. These guys were not professional warriors by any stretch of the imagination. 'Warriors'; perhaps. 'Professional'; definitely not. Their ability to rapidly adapt to a changing situation was woefully under-developed. In gang hand-to-hand combat, you bunch up your members, overrun a foe and beat him to the ground. Fighting a practitioner of Brazilian jujutsu, standing close to one another is the Last thing you want to do. I was a whirlwind of destruction, fed by the understanding that Jason's bunch needed me back real soon. The asshat who tried to use a knife on me got his hand pinned to the court for his audacity. I repeat, threatening Odette had infuriated me. At center court, Jason had his hands full and then some. The Latin Kings had the edges in both numbers and ferocity. The only other hometown boy holding his own was this thick, solid Puerto Rican guy named Bennie; the rest were in trouble. I started with the four-on-one stomp-down on one of Jason's friends; I'd missed the guy's beat down. My inner Amazon was leading the charge. Unlike all my previous encounters, I was intentionally causing pain. I wasn't trying to drive them off, or render them hors de combat. No, my desire was to strike terror in their hearts, inflicting suffering in order to eradicate my foes' resolve to fight. Knees snapped, bones broke, faces were stomped into the court and internal organs ruptured. Even my erstwhile allies were aghast at the wickedness with which I treated our enemy. "Ah; Cáel; are you okay?" Jason mumbled when the last King went down. He'd have a shiner on his left eye soon and his lip was split and bleeding. I hadn't come through unscathed either. Havenstone had seriously upped my pain threshold. Jason wasn't really asking about my physical well-being anyway. I had to get ahead of this; predicament. "Let's get this trash off the court," I commanded. The boys hesitated until Jason picked up one of my semi-conscious victims. "Come on 'Pendejo', leave and don't come back," Jason yanked the man up and began shoving him toward the gate he and his buddies had arrived by. The rest of Jason's friends joined in and we began cleaning up the place. One gangster decided he was too hurt to be moved. I'd rammed his shoulder into the goalpost, breaking his collarbone. He was crying about the pain he was in. I pulled him up. He was around 7 foot 2 inches tall and 275 pounds. I wrapped my hands around his thick bull neck and slowly raised him up off the ground. His face was reddening, his good hand was trying to break my hold and his legs were flailing about in the open air. [In Spanish] "Pain, Asshole? No, pain is me having to come back here and hunt you and your vermin buddies down," I seethed. "I don't live here. These men are not my friends. You touched my girl and I am God Almighty when it comes to defending those of my household. I am not in a gang. I am not a criminal. If you, or your gang, come within a block of this place, I will become Death. Today, there are too many witnesses. This is your reprieve; your moment of grace," I snarled. "Use it wisely. It will not happen again," I finished in a fury. I dropped him to his wobbly feet, catching his good hand before he fell over. That act of compassion after my dire threat confused the guy. "Go," I returned to English. The rest of the Latin Kings walked, stumbled, were dragged from the court. "Who are you again?" Bennie inquired. "Cáel Nyilas," I grinned. "I'm an Aerospace Engineer working on the feasibility of having hamsters running on their wheels being used to recharge batteries on manned flights to Mars." "Hamster wrangling has to be one tough profession," Katy Lee snickered as she and Odette came up. "Come on now," Jason winced as he licked his lip. "Brawling is about panic, anger and the management of those two forces," I told them. "I was the only one in this fight in control of himself, so my actions look out of proportions to what really happened." "They were kicking our asses," Bennie chuckled. "Not as bad as you guys think," I consoled them. "None of you guys ran, or curled up in a ball. That allowed me to pick my fights. I clearly have more hand-to-hand combat experience, but none of that would have mattered had you guys freaked out." There was some truth in what I said. Had they panicked, I would have grabbed Odette and Katy Lee then fled as well. Since they toughed it out, and the Latin Kings exerted virtually no command and control, I was able take on the gang members in small, bite-sized chunks. My training and experience took care of the rest. This also made the somewhat traumatized ballplayers feel proud about the cuts and bruises they'd received. Now they realized they had 'won' this scuffle, they'd played their parts courageously and had all been instrumental in a successful stratagem. The fact that none of them knew that when the blows were raining in it meant nothing. The women who'd come out to watch the game then witnessed the beat down knew their men had been brave, taken their licks and routed their enemies. Martial ardor, baby! 'Defending' a woman does not diminish her. It increases her odds of dealing with insults and threats in a positive manner. Women who look down on women who use their pussies to better themselves are being stupid. It is the equivalent of having a complete toolbox and only using the hammer. The women were going to give up some level of sex to reward the men. The men, in turn, had an example of the kind of behavior that would get them what they wanted; defending your ladies equated to feminine reward. That did not mean penetration; life was far more complex. It did mean she would hang around you, talk to you and trust you (most likely more than she should). Guys still had to seal the deal, figure out what she wanted and deliver. That had been the working arrangement between men and women for most of the last 80,000 years. What I didn't know at the time was that I was being spied upon, that this spy called Buffy; my 'spear and shield'; and Buffy would gather up some Security Detail chicks. Why would SD help? Some morons had tried to murder the Head of House Ishara and that wasn't something the Amazons would tolerate. That Latin King clique was contemplating revenge. They were about to get schooled by the Grand Mistresses of that brutal and unforgiving Art form. I could never let Odette know. After all, to her they were someone's sons, brothers and husbands. My chilling rationalization was that, for whatever reason, the Latin Kings had redefined themselves as carnivores, preying on the rest of mankind. They should have studied what nature was really like. Predators had predators of their own. They'd been big, bad caimans, snatching all that came to the water's edge. In nature, the caiman was careful because jaguars hunted and ate caimans. In the urban jungle, there were things far more dangerous than gang-bangers living in the shadows that jealously guarded their spot as apex predator. Odette and I exited the field. I'd have to catch Katy Lee another time. I was to get the bad news from Ulyssa and her sister about the death in her family. Timothy, Odette and I worked out some more as Odette and I took turns relating the fight to Timothy. He reminded us that the Latin Kings were a powerhouse in the city as well as nationwide. Nicole called at the point I was ready for bed and the rest was family history. (Monday morning) I locked my bike up as normal. When I saw the security guards eyeing me funny, I grew cautious. "Is there a problem?" I asked the woman scanning my ID. She was fearfully hesitant. "Wait, are you worried that I'm pissed about Friday morning?" "We were only doing our jobs, Cáel of Ishara," she told me. "Oh," I chuckled. "So that is what is bothering you." I smiled at the group. "Of course you were doing your jobs. I would have been surprised if you hadn't and I'm certainly not angry about what went down. You acted in defense of Havenstone and I never saw it any other way." That gave them some relief. My next problem. "Has anyone from the Security Detail called about me?" I asked. "I don't see anyone here to pick me up this morning." "I'll call them," she offered. The answer was that they weren't expecting me, but I could come down if I desired. That was promising. My ID card worked for the lower levels now. Walking past the Armory was intriguing; in that they barely noticed me. In the prep room for the shooting range there was; nothing. No guns for me to try out, or even look at. I went to the firing range looking for one of my 'friendly' SD ladies. They were all giving me the cold shoulder. Naomi told me why; Constanza. The SD were very angry with my interference in justice for Constanza versus Pamela. Since Naomi had been there when the entire incident went down, I didn't laugh in her face. I got coldly furious instead. If I wanted a firearm, I could go to the Armory and check one out, so that's what I did. The guards there weren't helpful either. Inside was; well; everything. I called up SD and asked them to send an armorer to help me make some selections. Ten minutes later, the lady had still not arrived. That made me laugh. They were tit-for-tatting the wrong guy. Glasses and ear protection came first. I left the Armory with my weapon of choice for the day, a full bandolier and a crate of ammo. I could see the SD chick's guarding the Armory eyes bug-out. I grinned and headed for the shooting range. They surreptitiously called somebody. Knowing that, I hurried myself along, passing straight through prep room for the firing line. I was a man on a mission. See, I could be a raging prick when I wanted to be. Those SD babes should have talked with any number of the Amazons who already knew me. I had made it clear; make my life difficult if you wished, but accept whatever payback I could imagine. Respecting House Ishara wasn't even a question. For pummeling me over Constanza, they were about to get a whole new kind of Righteous Pricking, courtesy of the house they refused to treat with equality. An Amazon finished firing off a clip for her personal defense weapon and was checking her pistol's slide action. "Excuse me," I said as I stepped up. She was about to scream something. Most likely 'stop!' Since I had no intention of complying, I didn't wait; or stop. For me, I was suddenly wondering what the precise blast radius of a 40 mm grenade was. I pulled the trigger anyway. I swear by Ishara-turned-Ishtar, I hit that target right in the 10 ring. The explosion the grenade caused when it hit the back wall rendered my claims moot. Even with eye and ear protection, I could barely hear anything because of the ringing echo, or see anything because of the dust. The flashing yellow lights and klaxons going off indicated something bad had happened. Bad wasn't done yet. I walked to the next stand where the Amazon had ducked down while she oriented herself to the threat. "Good morning," I yelled at her. Then I aimed and prepared to squeeze off my second round. With all the dust in the air, I could barely make out the outline of the target I was shooting at. Accuracy at this point was unnecessary. This bitching toy seemed to kill everything. Third station; third shot and the Amazons were starting to figure out what was going on. Some moron was firing a grenade launcher within an indoor firing range. Before the fourth shot they figured out it was me. Now those bitches had a problem. The lead Amazon tried to get my attention despite my constant attempts to ignore her. I resolved the issue by tapping my six-shot bang-bang and indicating I had two shots left; and I used them. Only when I stopped to reload did the ladies screw up the courage to exhibit some kind of physical resistance. Naomi pulled off my ear protection. "What are you doing?" she shouted at me. She wasn't being rude. All our ears were ringing. "I'm being left to my own devices, you 'failures' to every concept of loyalty, respect and faith," I replied to the entire group. "Constanza called House Ishara an abomination, insane and diseased," I spat out my hate. "I spared her life when I should have had her stricken from the roles of her house and butchered her like some beast. I showed mercy and this is how the Security Detail responds? Congratulations, you have earned my contempt." "But why are you using a grenade launcher; indoors?" Naomi struggled to understand. "Oh," I smirked. "Because I can. I'm superior to all of you here so I can do what I want and you have to suck it up. I am the Head of a First House so none of you have a choice. Every one of you chose to show me no respect and, out of respect for your lack of respect, you get no respect." They were trying to figure how to work around that when I upped the ante. "I'm also going to direct the other members of House Ishara to come down here at random times and fire off grenades, use flamethrowers, or; how about tear gas; tear gas sounds good." "That would degrade the readiness of the Security Detail," the first Amazon protested. "Not my problem. Take your complaints to Elsa or Saint Marie. Make sure to start your complaint with exactly how you behaved toward me; but use the names Beyoncé, Ursula, Katrina, or Messina instead of mine," I glared. "Now excuse me. I have a box full of high explosives to work through." And off I went. There were 25 shooting lanes. I had fired off my 22nd grenade when Elsa showed up. "Cáel of Ishara, why are you destroying this training area?" she inquired calmly. "Working through a crate of grenades. I thought that would be obvious," I joked. "Is there something wrong we should talk about?" Elsa was keeping her anger in check. "Your underlings were chronically disrespectful. Since positive reinforcement failed; being nice to any of your weakling-bullies was counter-productive; I decided to employ the stick treatment," I met her gaze. "Stop destroying the firing line; please," Elsa ground out through clenched teeth. "You are right," I nodded. "I need to take a few of these upstairs to the pure-blood gym. There is a lot more damage I could do there. This place is already a mess." Desiree's voice broke the silence. She must have come in with Elsa. "Cáel," Desiree yawned. "How do you want to resolve this crisis? That doesn't involve setting off seismic sensors all over New York City, that is?" "Hmmm; fine, every member of the Security Detail is to write a romantic poem then read it aloud to a 'Runner' while at that 'Runners' workstation," I invented a punishment. "Ishara is the Goddess of Love as well as Oaths. It is a fitting tribute to her that romantic verses from the heart be created and spoken aloud." "It is also fitting that the recipients be 'Runners', since it will unite them in both their appreciation of love and their anger with me for throwing my weight around like every other Full-Blood who thinks they are better because of some quirk of birth," I concluded. "It will be done," Elsa intoned. That part of the matter was settled. Elsa looked at my grenade launcher. An unhappy sigh escaped my lips as I handed it over. "Elsa, I'm coming for weapon's practice again tomorrow," I informed her. Now I was going to burn off some time in the pool then get to work, or so I hoped. I hadn't gotten away with this because I was Cáel Nyilas, or the Head of House Ishara. I got away with it because Elsa didn't want to see the faces of the Council when she explained what her people had done. The Council members treating me like offal was their business. Other Amazons deciding that they could treat ANY member of the Council that poorly wouldn't fly; reference to the fate of Leona. Why had SD treated me poorly? Constanza. If they repeated my conversation with Constanza that cost her an eye, the outcome was known by all. Constanza would cease being an Amazon right before she died. I made it to Katrina's office four minutes before seven only to find Katrina absent while Daphne, Brielle and Pamela were hanging around. Dora and Fabiola followed me in. Everyone made it before the deadline, Katrina last of all. As Katrina began the meeting, Brielle left. Pamela and Katrina ignored one another. My work review was far better than normal. I'd sold Anthrax to a terrorist cell, but it had turned out to be a mislabeled Anthrax antidote instead, so all was good. Daphne was trying to figure out how her glowing report over my efforts had been so misconstrued. My assigned boss for the day was Rosette, one of the senior members of Executive Services. "Katrina, I need a moment of your time; in private," I requested as the meeting broke up. "As Cáel, or the Head of House Ishara?" she asked. "Neither," I replied. She waved the others away with Tigger shutting the door. Pamela remained seated. Katrina shot me a look concerning Pamela's presence. "I don't control her," I shrugged. "She hangs around me for her own reasons." Katrina nodded. I walked to the edge of Katrina's desk, put my palms on its cool surface. "Katrina, I am the Grandson of Cáel O'Shea, I met Brianna O'Shea earlier this morning, she knows who I am and was brought to town because some genetic research done on me." "Brianna knows where I work and who I work for, as in you. Pamela said the word 'Protocols' and Brianna backed off, but I'm sure she wants to see me again. I've warned my Dad about what happened and to destroy everything associated with my Mom. By the way, Brianna looks exactly like my Mother did when I was first born; exactly," I emphasized. Had the situation not been so completely screwed up, I would have treasured the steamrollered look on Katrina's face. "She is with something called the Illuminati. She doesn't know about me and House Ishara. When Brianna tried to figure how this Protocol/Truce thing involved me, Pamela stonewalled her," I added. "Pamela, I can understand Cáel not immediately bringing this to my attention," Katrina's cool exterior reasserted itself. "He doesn't know what's going on. You do." "I didn't feel inclined to do your job for you, Katrina," Pamela gave a rapier-thin smile. "Besides, you are part of the brain trust that sent him home Friday night cloaked in ignorance, not I." "Cáel," Katrina turned back to me. "How did you meet Brianna O'Shea?" "I met a lawyer, screwed her to multiple orgasms in the Women's room of some bar, met her again plus her lawyer buddies and Sunday night she called me to her downtown office to screw her into enlightenment; which I did," I sighed. "She was working on a case involving DNA ownership, which is oddly germane to my current predicament," I grinned. "Cáel, we need you to report to medical for more testing," Katrina ordered. "I apologize, but House Ishara does not believe that would be in its best interest so Cáel must decline," I nodded. "Will there be anything else?" Will battled Will to no outcome. She nodded and I left. Pamela ghosted along behind me. Rosetta intersected my path and off we went. I was given no clue as to my assignment; no surprise. I texted Buffy: 'Nothing new happening. Pick me up at 5:30 Wed. morning.' That meant there was no new development on the committee to help House Ishara pick 'Runners'. I had played nice. Katrina and Hayden had dodged me on Friday afternoon. This morning, she owed it to me to show some kind of progress. That wasn't what she offered. I had made a concession, they refused to reciprocate, so now I was free of any obligation to consider their wishes. I wanted more 'Runners' and come Wednesday morning, I was adding twenty. Working with Rosette (and Pamela) was a triple-barreled experience. Errands were the largest bulk of our time, but the rest was other mundane tasks of the most basic sort. Within the workload were instructions in the craft of being unseen. Executive Services was more than laundry and daycare; it was about not disrupting the lives of clients. A side benefit of that was learning how to move through any group and not be memorable; to not give off the subtle clues that you were an outsider. Not only could a group of executives hold a conversation without an ES person disrupting their trains of thought, people trained to look for threats wouldn't be tipped off to your presence either. It was peon-craft for beginners. Executive Services personnel weren't ninja; they were inconsequential. As I had bubbled to Katrina on day one, Executive Services got to go everywhere and learn how everything worked. What I didn't appreciate was that was how Counter-Intelligence worked too. From what I wedged out of Rosette, Counter-Intelligence had never uncovered a successful internal conspiracy. They had ferreted out multiple peripheral programs meant to gather information on Havenstone, but no Amazon had been critically compromised; which meant several Amazons had been blackmailed yet gone to ES before doing any damage. Rosette appreciated that fanatic devotion, but she'd never hold complete faith in it. Her job was vigilance. (What is really going on?) The third barrel was the real unhappy news. For all their illegal activities, Havenstone was not the Sinaloa Cartel. There were not a global criminal organization that invited international law enforcement scrutiny. So why did they devote so much time and energy to security? They weren't alone in the shadows of world-wide civilization. At the top of the pile was the Illuminati. They were a hydra controlled by a ruthless, cutthroat conclave; membership uncertain. They were a Darwinian meritocracy until the top tier of leadership, where a group of smaller secret societies and families monopolized the real influence. Their biggest strength, and weakness, was that most of the people in the organization didn't even know they were part of the Illuminati. After that was a mishmash of groups with different abilities that made rating them difficult. The Condottieri were rather simple; they sold mercenaries and weapons to anyone with the coin with the sideline of promoting conflict by any means necessary. The Nine Clans; that sounded familiar; were assassins in the truest sense of the word. Hashshashin, Ninja, Thuggee, Black Lotus, Coils of the Serpent, Brotherhood of the Wolf, the Black Hand, Cult of the Jaguar and the Ghost Tigers. They were not just murder for hire, but murder to advance their cause. Harmonious existence was bad for business, so they stirred up rivalries and conflict in every corner of the globe. The Egyptian Rite Masons sounded sublime. They weren't. They may have been a secret order older than the Amazons, claiming descent to the days of Imhotep. The Egyptians were the oldest enemy of the Illuminati. The Egyptian Rite's goal was a global autocratic government, were the Illuminati wanted a capitalist oligarchy in charge of global commerce; with the Illuminati pulling all the strings. The Egyptian Rite were not restricted to Egypt anymore; membership was open to all races and genders. The Earth and Sky Society were not New Agers. They were the descendants of Genghis Khan and were devoted to the reincarnation of the Greatest World Conqueror of all time. Before tossing them into the rubbish bin of bad ideas, know that Genghis was the largest single genetic contributor (via rape) to the human gene pool since the mystical Eve. To be a member you had to have a genetic link to ole Genghis. The Seven Pillars of Heaven were an ancient Chinese Secret Society out for; you guessed it; World Domination. To be a true member of this group you had to be Pure Han Chinese and a man, or bound to one. Needless to say, Havenstone and the Seven Pillars did not get along. The final bit of information; these groups were what was left of the Great Secret Societies; the survivors. Havenstone's place in all of this chaos was complicated. By mid-5th century BCE, the Egyptians were aware of the Amazons. The Amazons were not causing problems for the Egyptians, so they parted on decent terms and that was that. By the first century ADE, the political landscape had changed. Amazons had penetrated Roman society and brought Latin houses into their structure. Amazingly, the Egyptians contacted the Amazons again, figured out the Amazons only wanted co-existence so co-existence they got. In the late 4th century, the Amazons returned the favor. The Amazons told the Egyptians something horribly bad was coming across the Eurasian steppes and the Egyptians better batten down the hatches. A few decades later, the Huns were pressing on the Roman Empire's frontier. What is not generally know is that in the ranks of Hunnish horde were the Sarmatians, successors to the Scythians, who had allied Amazons in their ranks. This gave the Amazons, thus the Egyptians, contacts on both sides of the Roman-Attila conflict. By the mid-5th century the two secret societies parted ways once more. Their relationship had been useful, but not close. From the Amazons viewpoint, it was the equivalent of getting good gossip at the fish market. The Egyptians appreciated the intelligence, but wanted, and didn't get, military assistance in propping up the Roman Empire. For the Amazons, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the trigger for a massive Diaspora. A few houses decided to tough it out in Western Europe and its packs of warring Germanic tribes. Others travelled to Egypt and from there, down the Nile to Ethiopia and Central Africa. A third group travelled farther East than ever before, eventually settling in Southern India. Of course, the World never stands still. In the late 8th century, the Illuminati was founded as a mercantile society trying to restructure the shattered Western and Central European economies. It turned out that there was a major pass over the Alps between eastern Italy and southern Germany that was a safe transit region. The Illuminati decided to seize it. The Egyptians popped up, revealed to the infant Illuminati that they didn't want them to do that, but were ignored. The Egyptians were out to rebuild European civilization, which meant, in their eyes, you didn't go around butchering those who were restoring law and order. The Egyptians went to the mountain pass and warned the Amazons there what was coming their way. The Illuminati convinced a local Lombard warlord that the pass would be a nice addition to his territory and off he went. Two months later, their bully boy hadn't returned. Neither had any of his men. Never ones to retreat from failure, the Illuminati sent another force and those guys were never seen again as well. This time the Egyptians showed back up to warn the Illuminati that those people whose land they'd been trying to steal were sick of their meddling and were coming to settle matters. Would the Egyptians help the Illuminati deal with this threat, now that it was out of the mountains? The Egyptians politely declined stating 'better the sitting stone you know than the rolling one that sets things around it on fire'. The Illuminati fled from their first base and that is the reason why they hate the Amazons and Egyptians to this day. Mind you, the Illuminati had no idea who lived in that mountain pass at that time. A few decades after the incident, the Amazons relocated northward. Being good stewards over their lands had given up unwelcome rewards; namely people came to them seeking sanctuary. Amazons can be rather cold-hearted. That does not mean they kill you for knocking on their door. When the number of refugees became too great, the houses voted for migration over slaughter. The Amazons travelled to the Black Forest, dispersing from there, and left the people behind to become known as the Swiss. Everywhere, Europe was tough for the Amazons in the Middle Ages. Heavily male-dominated Germanic cultures in the North, Islamic culture in the South, piracy in between and an epidemic of warfare all around. It was in Sub-Saharan Africa where the Amazons prospered the most. There, migrating populations worked in their favor, as did the style of warfare generally practiced. Perversely, the increase in the East African Arabic slave trade worked in the Amazon's favor. Not only could they 'liberate' captured populations; males for breeding and women for recruits; it encouraged local tribes to temporarily ally with the Amazons to fight off the slavers. The Subcontinent turned out to be a mixed bag. In the South, Amazons prospered and grew in numbers and houses. The problem was that they became too strong. Normally they would have spread out, but Eastern India proved more hostile than acceptable and further East looked like a crap-shoot. China didn't look welcoming at all. So, the Indian Amazons were caught up in a series of wars when Northern powers tried to move South and the Southern lords were in some serious need of aid. The issue was there were multiple players in the shadows pulling the strings. One day, the Egyptians came knocking. The Egyptians knew the Amazons well enough to not try to draft them into their cause. They simply told the Amazons who the key players were and what they were trying to do. Why would they do this? It was obvious. Amazons existed for two reasons; live free and make baby Amazons. Those other asshole Secret Societies were threatening both of those goals. Warfare is doubly hard on a female population and women spending years in combat aren't making babies. Take into account that during this time period a massive amount of the world's population lived in India. Add to that the Amazon numbers were respectively tiny (invisible) and Every Secret Society they were fighting didn't think much of women. A few thousand gurgling last breathes later and two of India's oldest Secret Societies were gone, or eviscerated. Why had they left the other, Islamic, secret society alone? The Islamic society operated in the populous North, not the jungle-covered South. Why did they leave the Amazons alone? The Amazons exhibited a shocking capacity for violence. The Muslim group was a 'secret' Secret Society. The Amazons were a 'hidden/don't screw with us' Secret Society. A side effect of the war in India was the creation of another Secret Society; the 9 Clans. They weren't nine back then, but thanks to the Amazons and Egyptians, this East Asian group picked up the Thuggee and, within a century, the Hashshashin. Things were about to get even more interesting. For the Amazons in India, life existed off the beaten path so it took a year for the Amazons to realize those 'dirty little men' who had shown up in some western Indian ports were, in fact, Europeans; in a European-built ship. They didn't know Portuguese, but they knew Latin and with a little bit off effort, they got an updated history of Europe. Amazons had been meeting regularly every thirty years, or so, to choose the next High Priestess and exchange notes. These meeting did not include studies of technological, political, or social improvements. Stealing the twenty-first ship to show up, the Amazons sailed home; Europe, that is. They stopped off in East Africa to spread the good news then, upon landing, went to tell their European sisters that their pilgrimages were no longer a matter of torturous overland travel. They could use nifty ships like these instead. With that came even better news; some Genoese, nut-job, failure of a mathematician had discovered a brand new land and they were going to check it out. The decision was made. The Indians were going back home. Their Europeans sisters were going to 'acquire' some instructions on how to sail a ship then 'obtain' some ships and divide them up among the three strongholds. Europe would be heading to the west, Africa would sail around the Cape of Good Hope (not yet named that), back toward Europe to link up their communication network (and in time, bump into Brazil), and India would head east to the South-east Asian archipelago, sailing around the hostile Asian kingdoms. Hopefully, the fleet sailing west and the one heading east would meet one day. Unfortunately, North and South America stood in the way of that dream. The 'little' hitch in this plan was who those ships belonged to. Nearly half the commerce of Europe at the time was either controlled, or influenced by, the Illuminati. The Amazons were running off with their equipment and profits; whoops. A cherry on top to that 'whoops' was that the Illuminati were only starting to come out of a bloody war with the Condottieri. The Condottieri had started out as a business venture/strong arm of the Illuminati. In classic Illuminati fashion, the leaders of the Condottieri didn't know precisely who they were working for. In fact, they thought they were independent. When the Illuminati yanked that leash, it snapped and the blood-letting began. The Illuminati had more money than the Pope and the subtle ability to call upon the kingdoms of the Mediterranean World. What did the Condottieri have? A small cadre of loyal, professional fighting men and the best strategic and tactical minds in the West; the ones the Illuminati had recruited into the Condottieri in the first place. Whoops yet again. The Illuminati had every resource under the Sun. The Condottieri knew they were screwed, but they'd been in screwed up situations before and battled through. They needed to stay alive until the path to victory presented itself. Re-enter the Egyptians and the 9 Clans (still not 9 yet). The Egyptians? The Egyptians made a butt-load of money on the silk and spice trade's overland routes. The Western Europeans/Illuminati were about to cut them out of that. The Egyptians needed time to reposition themselves. The revolt of the Condottieri was a gift from the Divine and suddenly the mercenaries had funds and ships. The 9 Clans? The Illuminati was a 'Does it All' organization. If the Illuminati won, who would need assassins? This was class warfare, pure and simple. Even with three-on-one, the Illuminati fought back and fought well. The Amazon predations were not the deciding factor in the war. It wasn't even their war. Soon enough, the Amazons were buying their own boats and going elsewhere. The Illuminati doesn't forgive, or forget. For some reason, they took the Amazon thefts personally, despite its negligible impact. Maybe it was that all the other players were regionally invested while the Amazons seemed to be dog-piling them. The fact that Amazons had existed in Europe for nearly 2500 years either didn't occur to them, or they didn't care. Flash forward to the start of the 20th century. Through the discrete use of marriage-assassination, land grabs and the basic lawlessness in the Western United States, rural South America, Australia and the islands of Southeast Asia, the Amazons had grown vastly in numbers and economic influence. The Egyptians come knocking once more. Unlike past encounters, they were bringing an offer of alliance. The Illuminati controlled key assets in the British Empire and were using those chokeholds to eliminate their rivals. This was not news to the Amazons. Their holdings in India and the Dutch East Indies had been under pressure of the Illuminati for a century. Ever since the Illuminati nearly ground out the Thuggee (one of the 9 Clans), the Egyptians and Amazons have been constantly harassed. This was not the first warning the Egyptians had brought. The Amazons hadn't want a war with the Illuminati and they certainly didn't trust the Egyptians. This time they agreed to go to war though. Why? Two things; totally unrelated. First, the Illuminati and the Seven Pillars of Heaven had agreed to carve up Asia. Amazons lived in Asia and they were no man's chattel. Secondly, the Women's Rights movement was in full swing. The Amazons had nothing to do with it. Those were outsider females. What interested the Amazons were the legal ramifications of Women's Equality. The Amazons were poised for a massive increase in their financial footprint. With the Illuminati out of the way, or at least, preoccupied, they could seize assets and have time to fortify before they could be attacked. Women's Equality would allow this to take place. Basically, the Amazons were going to exploit the blood, sweat and tears of women to advance their agenda. From all accounts, the only groups that recalled the Amazons last foray into Secret Society politics were the Amazons and Egyptians. Certainly no one had enlightened the Condottieri. They started smacking around some Amazon bases in Europe and unleashed 'Hell on Earth'. With the help of the Egyptians, they got to it in Amazon fashion. A General of the Condottieri and his family were eating at a Naples eatery when five women dresses like nuns walked in and shot up him, his entire family plus some bodyguards. When the response team showed up, they killed them too. A few police were added to the obituary column as the Amazons escaped. Welcome to Amazon warfare. The Condottieri were furious over such a public breach, as well as the losses. They swore a vendetta. The 9 Clans happily informed the Condottieri that a 'War of Extermination' was the Amazon default setting. The Condottieri were not afraid; not yet. See, there was another secret society called La Solidaridad. Working on intelligence from the Illuminati, La Solidaridad overran an Amazon compound in Argentina. They thought it would be funny to take the survivors as sex slaves. Maybe the Illuminati was experimenting to see just how pissed-off Amazons could get. Maybe La Solidaridad hadn't read their Homer, especially those parts concerning Ancient World vengeance. It took the Host six months to start things rolling then the carnage began. They made damn sure the men knew they were being hunted by women. They weren't there to out-macho the men, or make a point. Every night, they attacked the men and their families in the cities and towns. For safeties sake, La Solidaridad retreated to their country estates. Huge mistake. A good number of them had to have hunted at some point in their lives. How they missed being 'flushed out into the open' was beyond me. Out in the countryside, there was nowhere to hide. Walls meant little because Amazons were incredibly fit and trained to fight at night. Most of the families the Amazons killed. They were the lucky ones. The survivors? By using a new Edison device, they took some home movies of the fates of those men. The Amazon's favorite tactic was to shove lit sticks of dynamite in the men's asses then steer them toward the closest river. One guy actually made it. His relief didn't last long. The Amazons had done something to turn the normally safe caiman population into rabidly aggressive swarmers. Bitches; insanely, sadistic bitches. In eighteen months, La Solidaridad had ceased to exist as an organization and never recovered. The Illuminati used that time wisely to beat down the Egyptians, Earth and Sky, and the 9 Clans, aided by the Seven Pillars. Having concluded their first order of business, the Amazons sent their home movie to the Condottieri. It wasn't mercy toward the Condottieri. I was psychological warfare. The Amazons needed the Condottieri off-balance so they could go after their real enemy. It seemed the Illuminati had instructed La Solidaridad on how to 'intimidate' the Amazons; through rape, torture and enslavement. Specifically, it was Cáel O'Shea who set the tragedy in motion; Granddad. Beyond Granddad being impossibly fucking old, he had possessed some seriously out of control animosity where Amazons were concerned. Before the Amazon's could implement their hunt, the 9 Clans intervened. The Illuminati had been giving them real problems and they saw a way to gain some breathing space. Had the Amazons and 9 Clans been in communication, the World might be a very different place today. Instead, the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne was wacked by the Black Hand, some Serbian numbskulls took the fall and the rest of us got World War I. Oddly enough, this one murder accomplished the goals of the 9 Clans, Amazons, Egyptians and Earth and Sky Society. The British Empire still stood, but was wrecked. China was much worse off than that. Before the Amazons could gain their vengeance, the Egyptians negotiated a cease-fire between groups. The Amazon Council was furious yet unwilling to fight the Illuminati alone. They kept down their bile; and waited. In the post-War period, the Amazon/Illuminati feud ate much of their resources (probably the Egyptian's intentions all along). A truly dark side of this struggle was the Amazon support for the Nazis. Did the Amazons switch course? Yes, but not for the reasons most people would think. Jews, gypsies, communists and homosexuals going into camps didn't worry them one bit. What did? Let's go back in time to those women in the Swiss Alps who headed north. A great many of them went North then East; to places like Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It wasn't so much a matter of whimsy as one of terrain and population. All the best farmland was in western Germany, the Low Countries and France. That's where the Germanic peoples settled. Behind them, to the East, were the Slavs. The Slavs had three things the Amazons liked; low population density, weak social hierarchies and crappy land. That meant they could live in relative isolation, not be subject to an all-powerful king and not be inundated with migrating hordes wanting to steal their dank swamps, deep forests and isolate meadows. Sometime in early 1939, right after the Third Reich snatched up Bohemia, some Amazon augur decided to open up Hitler's Mein Kampf to see what was going on i.e. to see when Hitler would get around to jumping on England; the whole reason the Amazon were supporting him. What she found out was bad, bad, bad! The genocide of a bunch of people they could care less about? Not a problem. Invading the Slavic lands? What? Russia/Soviet Union hadn't been the big foe in WWI and they certainly were not Germany's greatest enemy at the moment; Britain was! Drang Nach Osten? That was an undefined migration of Germans back into Slavic lands that ended over 600 years ago? Their Eastern European sisters were in grave danger from a lunatic. The common sense response (for Amazons) was to kill the Hitler. They couldn't get close, so they took their problem to their old allies, the Egyptians and 9 Clans. Those two saw nothing wrong with the way things were developing. The Amazons swallowed their pride and went to the Illuminati who seemed rather enchanted with the idea of the fascists and communists annihilating one another. They had no way to safely approach the Soviets. Pulling their sister houses out of Eastern Europe was no longer an option; the other Secret Societies would be looking for that and try to figure out where the Amazon home bases were. The Amazons decided to make a fight of it. They were not going to charge panzers with spears. No, they started setting up caches of supplies and weapons in the most inaccessible places imaginable. The hope was that as Nazi Germany was grinding Communist Russia to dust, they could smuggle out their people in the chaos to Sweden then points west. The problem was WW II didn't work out that way. Great Britain got spanked at Dunkirk and Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and Norway all surrendered to the Nazi blitzkrieg. Then the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia went under, but the Soviet Union didn't fall. Much to the Amazon Council's horror, resistance units began to interact with the local Amazons in an effort to improve their mutual survivability. Tales of mysterious female fighter, appearing to slay their enemies then disappearing into the wilderness filtered to both the Stavka (Russians) and SOE (British). The SOE discovered an answer to the mystery in mid-1942, by way of the fledgling US OSS. The Americans 'found' three female Army recruits who volunteered for such a mission. A month later, the partisan bands with those agents found the 'Forest Women' and all the lights came on. Unknown to the public World, the Amazon Council decided that the best hope for their kinswomen was to bring down the Nazis and ride out the Allied conquest. All of that might have been a happily little footnote except for what happened next. Hundreds of Amazons fought; no surprise; yet they didn't fight alone this time. Men and women of the local populace fought side by side with these lethal warriors. They shared battle plans, food, fire and medical care. That huge cultural barrier created over two and a half millennia began to erode. They bled together and were forced from time to time to place their lives in each other's hands. They witnessed one another's courage and sacrifice. They watched them bury their dead, nurture their young and weep at their pain. Whenever things looked darkest, the Amazon would turn to their partisan partners and say with utmost confidence 'we have survived worse; so can you'. The seminal event happened on the night of February 17th, 1944. For two years, the fractured, wounded women that are ever-present wherever there is war began to attach themselves to the Amazon bands. At first they were little more than annoyances. In time, the Amazons tried to turn these women into something 'useful'. Later, a few earned the right to follow the Amazons into battle. On that February night, two ladies were inducted into House Živa. This was hardly the first time outsider women were brought into the Host, but this circumstance was unique; induction in the middle of a war, having proven themselves in battle before their now-sisters. From that action; not the last in that conflict; was born the concept of the 'Runners'. With the end of WWII, the Amazons emerged more powerful than ever. The three strongest groups in the United States were the Egyptians, Illuminati and the Amazons. The Amazons profited the most; having started with the lowest profile and having infiltrated both the government and business sectors during the war effort. Using the Freemasons, the Egyptians reaped great benefit from the US war effort too. Always forward-looking, the Egyptians helped the Amazons as well. Still, not everything was rosy. For the Public World, World War II ended in September of 1945. That was barely a blip in the Secret Societies' radar. The calamity came on the 10th of December 1949. Using their pawns in the Chinese Communist Party, the Seven Pillars had re-unified China and were back on the world stage. Earth and Sky and the 9 Clans were dealt a setback. A fourth secret society involved in the Chinese struggle was absorbed by the 7 Pillars. The problem was that all the societies were locked in a bitter struggle yet devastated and over-extended. The 9 Clans, fearing the ratcheting up of Cold War intelligence-gathering services by multiple national governments asked for a global truce. The Amazons were dangerously exposed and over-extended. The Illuminati decided this was their time to strike and nothing could deter them. Into this backdrop, came the news to the Amazons that they had serious genetic issues. That led to the First Directive; the recruitment of 'Runners' as an established program as well as the explosion of what I knew as Executive Services. In a truly bizarre twist, U.S. and Soviet agents found themselves engaged in cat-and-mouse games with European NATO agents. Amazons had penetrated the proto-CIA during the war in an effort to reach their European sisters. In Eastern Europe, many of those partisans went over to the Communists when the Soviets overran their countries and looked favorably upon their erstwhile allies from the War. They couldn't match the influence that the many of the other secret societies possessed. Instead they pulled upon existing, personal relationships. I worked with a negative result of those days; Desiree, or more accurately, Desiree's parents. I was also walking with the final resolution of that crisis. The Secret Societies proved they could work just as fast as the UN. In three decades they had resolved nothing and were spending more and more time on damage control. Three events converged. The Illuminati had figured out the full-blooded Amazons were dying out so they knew they could win a game of attrition. The rest of the groups were coming to the conclusion that wiping out the Amazons was the easier course of action. The Amazons had, without a doubt, located the leader of the Illuminati, Cáel O'Shea. O'Shea was in sight of his goal; the extermination of the Amazons; when a lone Amazon got to him first. O'Shea's death sent titanic shockwaves through the Illuminati. There was a scramble for the top spot, fear over how much the Amazons knew about their inner workings, and how the other secret orders would take this bit of news. The Illuminati recoiled from the event, agreed to a truce and that led to the protocols that kept Brianna from dragging me off; gunshot wounds and all. That had been the state of affairs for the last thirty years. Again, the World had not stood still. China was an economic powerhouse, the EU grew stronger, and wars of political ideology had been replaced by religious-based terrorism. The Amazons were at a critical juncture in their history. The 'New' Directive was their best chance at staving off extinction and the Houses were fighting it kicking and screaming. The First Directive wasn't being implemented properly. If nothing changed, the Amazons would be dragged under by the weight of their own bigotry. But wait! There was this idiot with no conception of history getting in the way of Amazon extinction; the decline toward oblivion that six murderous factions were waiting for. In this epic there were no 'friends', only 'allies of convenience'. The Egyptians weren't buddies. They simply preferred others to fight their battles for them. The Amazons fit that bill nicely, but if they were dying out, the Egyptians would be more concerned in filling the Amazon void than mourning over the Host's grave. The Illuminati and Seven Pillars were enemies. Though there was little animosity between the Earth  and  Sky and the Amazons, the E and S were based on perpetuating the legacy of the World's greatest rapist. The 9 Clans were the 9 Clans and their business was all about the precise application of death. They had no friends and if they pretended to be your friend, it was only so they could position themselves to kill you. It was only business. They rarely played with debts, obligations and vendettas. Still, if a member of the 9 Clans said they owed you, it was worth the assassin's weight in Iridium. As a bonus, the 9 Clans were gender-neutral. Outside of the Amazons, they had been using females in their numbers the longest. Because of this, the 9 Clans tried to interact with the Amazon using women from their own ranks, minimizing the sexual tension between the groups. The Condottieri had also began recruiting women into their ranks over the past twenty years. Their leadership was still all-male with the added complications of the unresolved Naples killings and the brutal destruction of La Solidaridad. Also, while the Amazons were not business competitors, they didn't employ the Condottieri either. All these micro-wars had been very good for the Condottieri, allowing them to build up quite a stable of talent and a huge war chest. If the Amazons recovered, the global map would change. How so? Madi and Rhada weren't from Cleveland, but from India where unresolved crimes against women were too common. Palli Chandra, the VP of International Finance and Ngozi from my sparring match were from Central Africa and I'd gathered from

Cáel's tombstone: For the love of women, women put him here.In 25 parts, edited from the works of FinalStand.Listen and subscribe to the ► Podcast at Connected..