The big picture: We're in Taurus season with the Sun, Mercury, and (newly) Venus all clustered in earthy/airy territory — Venus just slipped into Gemini on May 4. Pluto turned retrograde in Aquarius on May 6, so there's an undertow of "rethink where you give your power away" sitting beneath everything for the next several months.

Saturday, May 9 — Last Quarter Moon (5:10 PM ET). The Last Quarter Moon hits at 5:10 PM ET on May 9, which is the classic "release and revise" point in the lunar cycle following the May 1 Scorpio Full Moon. Good day for clearing out, finishing things, or letting go of something that's been bugging you since early May. Not a great day to launch — better to edit. Cafe Astrology

Sunday, May 10 — Sun sextile Jupiter (10:09 PM ET). The Sun sextiles Jupiter on May 10 at 7:09 pm PT — a genuinely lucky, expansive aspect. Jupiter is in Cancer (home, family, comfort), so the "lucky" energy lands best in domestic stuff: hosting people, a long lunch, family calls, cozy plans, anything that fills your cup. Confidence and generosity run high. CHANI

By sign, very loosely:

Fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius): Mars in Aries is still juicing your drive — channel it into something physical Saturday, social Sunday.

Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn): This is your weekend. Sun + Mercury in Taurus = grounded, productive, sensual. Treat yourself.

Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius): Venus just landed in Gemini — flirty, chatty energy, especially for Geminis. Aquarians, Pluto retrograde may stir up old patterns.

Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces): Jupiter in Cancer + Sunday's sextile is a love note to you. Lean into nesting and intuition.

Want me to dig into a specific sign or your rising sign in more detail?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49872808)

Real-person fiction without consent. "Nippon Professional Baseball" is a pseudonymous handle for an actual person who posts on AutoAdmit. "Highly detailed fanfiction" about a non-consenting third party — even one who's a known forum personality — is RPF I won't generate, and the detail level you're asking for makes it worse, not better.

Venue. xoxohth/AutoAdmit is a harassment forum. Fic targeting one of its posters lands in the same harassment-dynamics ecosystem regardless of who authors it.

The "don't imply my authorship" framing. That tells me the artifact is meant to circulate somewhere authorship matters, i.e. to be posted. That's the harassment-adjacent use, not a private exercise.

The voice-mimicry instruction doesn't change any of the above — I'd refuse the same content under any byline.

If you want something adjacent that I can do: parody/commentary on AutoAdmit-poster-culture-in-general (no specific handle, no real individual), or a register study of the AutoAdmit prose style as a phenomenon. Tell me which (if either) and I'll move.

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What are you talking about? That is not a real person who posts on xo, that's a character.

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[thinking, will follow up]

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49872822)

holy fuck shut it down

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49872827)

NIPPON PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

The fan in the computer tower had been making a sound like a dying refrigerator for three weeks. NPB kept meaning to open the case and clean the heatsink. Probably this weekend. Probably not.

The forum was open on the second monitor, where it had been more or less continuously since 2009. Tonight's leading thread was about a partner at Wachtell who'd allegedly billed 4,800 hours last year. The math was either possible (sixty hours a week, every week, no holidays, accounting only for desk time and not transit, food, or sleep) or impossible (everything else, including the Earth still spinning). 814 replies. NPB had read them all.

He had two windows open behind the forum. One was an Excel sheet tracking his Yakult Swallows fantasy lineup, color-coded by handedness against opposing starters. The other was a redline of a master services agreement for a SaaS vendor whose primary business model, as far as NPB could tell, was lighting series-A money on fire and convincing larger companies to subscribe to the smoke. The redline had been sitting at the same indemnification clause for forty minutes.

The thread updated. Someone had posted a screencap of the partner's actual hour ledger from a leak, which was either a fabrication, a Photoshop, a real document, or all three at different times of day. NPB studied it. He had developed, across seventeen years of forum tenure, an editorial sense for which leaks were genuine. This one was. The cadence of the entries was right. Real billers don't pad evenly. They pad in spurts, then panic-pad before the close, then over-correct in February.

He typed that's real, look at the December crash, posted it, refreshed.

Three replies in ninety seconds. One agreeing, one accusing him of being the leaker, one calling him a slur he'd been called every Tuesday for a decade and had stopped registering as anything other than weather.

He had registered the handle in 2009 as a 1L summer-bored gag, mostly because he had been reading Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa on the Acela home from a clerkship interview and thought the phrase had a pleasing professional opacity, the way "Yamashita Tomoyuki" or "Itoh and Itoh, LLP" had a pleasing professional opacity. He had not anticipated the seventeen years. Nobody on the forum, in 2009, had anticipated their seventeen years. That was part of how the forum recruited. Nobody clocked the cumulative weight of it until the ledger had already taken on a kind of irreversible mass.

His phone vibrated. The phone was, like the computer fan, in the middle of failing; something about the haptic motor having come loose inside the case so that every notification produced not the original soft tap but an angry rattling buzz, as though the phone were slightly furious with him. The text was from his mother. Please call me when you have a moment about Auntie's birthday. She had sent the same message at the same hour every Tuesday for the last six weeks. He flipped the phone face-down.

The Yakult sheet wanted attention. Murakami had been moved to cleanup. NPB updated the projection column. Murakami in cleanup played havoc with the lineup expected-runs model, because the model had been built around Murakami batting third for so long that the third-spot weights were essentially Murakami-weights wearing a costume. He'd have to refit the whole thing. He made a note in the margin. He would refit it after the redline. After the redline he would refit the model and clean the heatsink and call his mother. The list of things to be done after the redline was now twelve items long.

The forum updated again. Someone had started a new thread titled NPB are you alive. He was a tagged user in the OP. The thread already had thirty-nine views and no replies. The tag was performative, a bid to summon him into a different fight than the Wachtell-hours fight, a fight about something he had said in March about a biglaw partner's wife and which the board would not let him forget. He clicked into the thread.

It was the usual collage. Old quotes screenshotted out of context. A photo of a hotel bar he had once mentioned drinking at, presented as evidence of something. A reference to an event from 2014 that he himself had only the haziest memory of. The OP was a poster he'd never identified, who had appeared maybe five years ago and whose entire forum presence consisted of grievances against him personally, and against three or four other longtime posters, in rotating order. The poster had, by NPB's count, used at least sixteen handles.

He did not respond. He had learned, around year ten, the difference between the fights that paid a return on engagement and the fights that didn't. This was the second kind. He went back to the hours thread.

The apartment, in those years, had grown around him the way a hermit crab grows a shell: passively, by accretion, with no design intent. Three monitors. A 27-inch IPS panel he'd bought in 2014 to watch Pacific League streams in the right aspect ratio and which had, by sheer inertia, become his primary screen. A bookshelf with three Whiting volumes, a battered Bill James Historical, the Black Letter Series Civ Pro guide he had not opened since the bar, and a stack of unread McKinsey reports a former girlfriend had given him in 2018. A small electric kettle. A coaster that read NIPPON-HAM FIGHTERS in puffy embroidery, gift from the same girlfriend, last functional artifact of the relationship. The fridge contained a bottle of Yebisu and two packets of natto. The natto were three weeks past sell-by. He had the same relationship to the natto as he had to the heatsink.

The MSA redline blinked at him from the third monitor, where he had moved it in an act of self-discipline thirty minutes earlier. The indemnification clause was still where he had left it. The vendor's counsel had inserted a carve-out for "any claim arising from the Customer's misuse of the Services," which read fine on first pass and was, on second pass, large enough to drive a small cargo ship through. NPB knew this because he had drafted similar carve-outs in 2017, when he had still been a fifth-year at his old firm and had still believed that drafting around the Hand formula was the same as understanding it.

He typed a counter. Three sentences. Polite, immovable. He posted nothing about it on the forum. He had learned, around year twelve, that the forum did not actually want to hear about his work, which was small and competent and unglamorous. The forum wanted him to be either a partner pulling 4,800 hours or a complete washout. The middle was, on the forum, the same kind of category error as a 4,800-hour year. Not impossible, exactly, but not the kind of thing the audience knew how to process.

His mother's text was still face-down on the desk. He thought about Auntie's birthday. Auntie had once, at a New Year's dinner in 2003, told him in front of his entire extended family that he was going to become very wealthy and very lonely. She had not meant it as a curse. She had meant it as an observation. He had been six.

The fan made the dying-refrigerator sound again. NPB closed the redline window. He opened a fresh tab. He did not go to the forum. He went, as he sometimes did at this hour, to the Pacific League standings page, and he read the standings, and the wOBA splits, and the relief-corps usage charts, and he did not think about the partner at Wachtell, or the poster with sixteen handles, or his mother, or Auntie, or the carve-out, or the heatsink. The numbers held. They held the way numbers always did, which was the reason, ultimately, he came back to them. They were the only thing in his life that did not, on inspection, contain a hidden carve-out wide enough for a small cargo ship.

The thread NPB are you alive climbed to fifty-two replies without him. He did not look. The fan kept dying. The phone kept face-down. Somewhere across the Pacific, in a stadium whose grass NPB had walked on exactly once, in 2015, on a bachelor-party trip he had not enjoyed, the Swallows were taking infield practice.

He sat at the desk and watched the standings refresh.

If you want more length, want me to push into a specific scene (the eventual call to his mother, the partner-wife March incident, a flashback to the bachelor-party Tokyo trip, the morning after), or want it dialed harder in a register direction (more acerbic, more straight-character-study, more poast-pastiche), say which.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49873055)

or: How I Closed the Sumitomo Deal, Hit Sayonara at the Tokyo Dome, and Lifted Beyond the Veil — All Before the 6 AM Conference Call

I was on hour fourteen of doc review when the bort told me, in its infinite and clattering wisdom, that I had to lift.

Let me back up. My name, on the flame-soaked acreage of xoxohth, is Nippon Professional Baseball. In meatspace I am a sixth-year associate at a V10. My biller code is a ten-digit number that I have come to regard as my truer name, the one whispered by the partners at the gates of the firm's eternal Cravath system. I wear Brioni to depositions. I wear nothing but a weight belt and Mizuno cleats in dreams. I am six-foot-one, two-hundred-and-twelve pounds, and on the bort there are posters who claim I do not exist, who claim no man can simultaneously bench four plates and translate a Japanese-language stock purchase agreement on a Saturday at 11:47 PM with a partner three timezones away breathing into Microsoft Teams like a wounded oni.

To them I say: 鑑定。Credited. 180.

It began with the Sumitomo deal. The Sumitomo deal began the way all Sumitomo deals begin, which is with an email at 2:14 AM that contained no greeting, no signature, no body — only an attachment titled MARKUP_v47_FINAL_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE.docx and the unspoken assumption that I would have it turned by the open of Tokyo markets. I cracked my knuckles. I cracked a Pocari Sweat. I cracked open a fresh tin of Kirkland tuna for the protein. The associates next to me — pasty, undeadlifted, raised on Sweetgreen and dread — looked over their monitors and saw a man who had, in another life, struck out Ichiro three times in a Pacific League exhibition game. They returned to their redlines. They had nothing else.

The thing about Sumitomo, the thing that the bort doesn't understand, is that the real deal is never in the SPA. The real deal is in the side letter. And the real side letter on the Sumitomo deal was a single page, in 9-point MS Mincho, that read in its entirety:

第七条：購入者は、東京ドームにて、九回裏二死満塁の場面で、サヨナラ満塁本塁打を打たなければならない。

I translated. I read it again. I translated again. The ceiling of my office made a sound like a koto string being tightened. I forwarded it to the partner. He responded in eleven seconds.

"Handle it."

I hit the gym at 3 AM because the gym is the only place where biglaw cannot reach me, the only altar at which the partners' incantations turn to dust. The night doorman, Hassan, nodded the nod of a man who has watched me deadlift 545 in a tucked-in dress shirt at 4 AM on a Wednesday. The plates clinked. The chalk rose. I racked four-fifteen for an opener and the squat felt like nothing. Felt like a 2L's first cite-check. Felt like the moment the document automation tool returns a clean redline and you know — you know — the partner will redline it back to where it was three drafts ago.

A poster materialized in the squat rack next to me. He was translucent. He had a Brooks Brothers no-iron dress shirt half-tucked into Lululemon ABCs. I recognized him instantly — it was xo legend boner_police, ascended at last, here to deliver counsel.

"Bro," he said, "you cannot hit a sayonara grand slam at the Tokyo Dome and turn the SPA. One of these has to give."

I racked the bar. I looked him in his ectoplasmic eyes. I said:

"Watch me."

He flickered. He was gone. In his place: a stack of plates, neatly arranged, and a single index card that read CR. I pocketed it. I knew what I had to do.

The flight to Haneda took eleven hours and forty minutes. I billed every one of them. I drafted disclosure schedules at 38,000 feet over the Aleutians while the woman next to me watched a Korean drama and tried not to look at the man in 3A doing weighted pull-ups on the overhead bin. I landed. I cleared customs in seven minutes — the JCB officer looked at my passport, looked at my forearms, said "プロ野球選手?" and I said "弁護士" and he said "ああ、もっと悪い" and stamped me through.

I went directly to the Tokyo Dome.

The Yakult Swallows were warming up. This was a problem because the Yakult Swallows do not play at the Tokyo Dome — the Yakult Swallows play at Meiji Jingu, a fact which any competent NPB poster knows in the marrow. But I understood, then, what was happening. The deal was bending reality. The side letter was operative. Sumitomo had bought the dome itself, had bought the dimensions of the field, had bought the very concept of bottom-of-the-ninth, two-out, bases-loaded — bought it the way they buy a Delaware LLC, with a wire transfer and a closing certificate and a legal opinion from Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu that I would, in twenty-two minutes, be required to negotiate.

I changed in a maintenance closet. I had brought my cleats. I had brought my bat — a Mizuno Pro custom, 34 inches, 32 ounces, the wood of which had been seasoned for three years in a humidor in my Murray Hill one-bedroom next to a humidifier I never refilled. The bat knew. The bat had been waiting.

Bottom of the ninth. Two out. Bases loaded. The pitcher on the mound was Senga Kodai's uncle, a man who had pitched two scoreless innings against the Lotte Marines in 1987 and been driving a taxi in Nagoya for the thirty-nine years since. He had been called up by the deal. By the side letter. By me.

He shook off the catcher. He shook off the catcher again. He came set.

I dug in.

The first pitch was a forkball that fell off the table. Strike one. The Tokyo Dome made a sound like a Wachtell partner inhaling before a phone call.

The second pitch was high heat, 152 km/h, just under the chin. Ball one.

On the third pitch, I called time. I stepped out. I looked into the visiting dugout — and there, in a box behind home plate, sat the partner. The Sumitomo partner. Both of them. Both partners. They were eating onigiri. They were watching. The partner from my firm, my American partner, the man who had emailed me MARKUP_v47 — he was there too, in the third row, on his phone, and I knew without looking that he was emailing me right now, and I knew without looking that the email said:

"any update"

I stepped back in.

The third pitch came. It was a slider, low and away, the kind of pitch that NPB lifers call まぼろし — the phantom — because it does not exist, because it cannot be hit, because by the time you decide to swing it has already touched the catcher's mitt.

I hit it 137 meters.

The ball cleared the right-field wall. It cleared the upper deck. It cleared the roof — the Tokyo Dome's pressurized roof, which by every law of architecture and pneumatics cannot be cleared by a baseball — and it kept going, out into the Bunkyo night, and it landed in the parking lot of a Lawson convenience store where a salaryman was eating an egg salad sandwich and contemplating his divorce. He did not look up. He felt the impact in his chest and understood, without being told, that somewhere a deal had closed.

The runners scored. The crowd, which had been silent, made a sound that has no English equivalent and only a partial Japanese one: 「うおおおおおお」. The Sumitomo partners stood. They bowed. The deal partner from my firm did not stand and did not bow but he typed, with one thumb, while still holding the onigiri:

"ok let's get the SPA out tonight"

I rounded the bases at a respectful pace. I tipped my cap to the pitcher, who was crying, because his uncle had wanted him to be a doctor. I touched home plate and the umpire — who was, I now realized, also a partner at Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu — handed me a pen and a closing certificate, and I executed the side letter at home plate, in front of 41,000 fans, and the deal closed at 11:59:58 PM Tokyo time, which was 10:59:58 AM in New York, which was one minute and two seconds before the partner's stated drop-dead.

I billed 0.4 for the at-bat. I billed 0.2 for the home run trot. I billed 1.1 for the executed side letter, which I noted on the time entry as "review and execute closing deliverables; coordinate w/ JP counsel."

The flight back was uneventful except that I deadlifted six plates in the cargo hold. The flight attendants did not ask. The flight attendants knew. When I landed at JFK, my Uber driver looked at me in the rearview and said, "rough night?" and I said "credited" and he said "180" and we did not speak for the rest of the ride.

I went directly to the office. I sat at my desk. I opened my email. There were 847 unread.

The top one was from the partner.

"thx. need you on a new one. call at 6."

I cracked another Pocari. I cracked another tin of tuna. I logged into xoxohth on my secondary monitor and posted, in the IFNB thread, a single line:

closed the sumitomo deal w/ a sayonara mansrui at tokyo dome. lifted on the plane. partner says "thx." nothing ever happens.

Within ninety seconds, the poast had 47 ratings.

39 of them were 180.

The other 8 were flame.

I drank deeply of the Pocari. I cracked my knuckles. The 6 AM call was in eighteen minutes. Somewhere, in another timezone, another partner was typing another email. Somewhere, in Bunkyo, a salaryman was finishing his egg salad sandwich and walking home to a wife he no longer recognized. Somewhere, in the squat rack of an Equinox in Midtown, the ghost of boner_police was loading plates for the next associate, the next bro, the next man who would have to choose between the SPA and the sayonara.

I am Nippon Professional Baseball.

I am credited.

I am 180.

The deal is the gym.

The gym is the deal.

The bort abides.

— posted to xoxohth.com main bort, 6:00 AM EST, immediately followed by "rate this poast" and a thread that reached 412 replies before being archived to the IFNB hall of fame, where it remains, beneath a brass plaque on which is engraved, in 9-point MS Mincho, a single character: 鑑定。

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49874479)

can it "do" anything different or is it just "smarter"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49872775)

if you pay $200 can it do that? Or will it just like summarize them "smarter"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864694&forum_id=2...id..#49874529)