I wish we could go back, Fix this mess, But I know we can't. Fact of the matter is we are entering the final pages in our time knowing eachother, And I been moving on to new things and experiences. I don't have BPD but my ex does, Been seperated for 6 months now, But I still love YOU like nothing ever happened. Which is why I have been trying to push away now. Why I've cut myself off from asking of you're okay, Or how you are doing. I want to know but I can't let myself know. I can't keep giving myself hope, You did that enough on your way out. Which is why it hurts to damn much to stay in contact after we sell our home. Our history is for sale, and for that I apologize. I think you are an amazing person, you really truely are more then enough in my eyes. But you stopped taking care of yourself and your mental health, You became everything you swore to not be, And I still stayed! Look, If you ever needed someone to talk to, I'd gladly be there for you, No question there. But just know I miss you so damn much, and just isn't a moment when I stop to think if you are okay.

PODCAST: https://ayearofwarandpeace.podbean.com/e/ep1513-hail-and-farewell-george-moore-ave-chapter-73/
PROMPTS: I wonder what is going on in Moore's head... Oh wait no I don't
Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:
And Edward is a beginner, and he isn't progressing, I said, and may remain a beginner. For he came into the world a sketch, une ébauche by a great master, and was left unfinished, whether by design or accident it is impossible to say. A delightful study he is! And in the embowered villa I sat, looking into his mind, interested in its unmapped spaces (Australia used to interest me in much the same manner when I was a child) until the young girl came upstairs to tell me it was time to go to the theatre. One knows a single word—Spielhaus. My eyes went to the clock, the hands pointed to four, and from four to five is the hottest hour of a summer's day. By four the sun, blazing forth from a cloudless sky, has sucked all the cool of the night away, and heated unendurably every brick and tile and stone it can strike with a ray. Even in the shady villa under the lindens one could not think of the tall gables in the town, the fierce sun beating on them, or of the cobble-stones in the streets, without congratulating oneself that Edward's inclinations had been resisted. Those low-ceilinged rooms above the kitchen would stifle on such a day, and I was able to look back on my courage with admiration. It had given me a splendid view of a corn-field with reapers working in it, the sun shining on their backs—that one straightening himself to wipe the sweat from his brow with a ragged sleeve.
And while walking through the corn-field I remembered a letter to Bülow in which the Master says: One thing is certain—I am not a musician, meaning thereby that music was only part of his message. He tells in these words that his art enjoined separation from the drone of daily life, and that is why he chose Bayreuth, a small Bavarian town difficult to get at, but not impossible to reach. It had a train service even in Wagner's time, and there was a sufficient number of dirty inns and lodgings in the town to house the pilgrims. Humanity was an open book to the Master, and the hardships he was inflicting on his pilgrims he knew to be for their good, for it would induce in them the disposition of mind suitable for the reception of the sacramental Ring. And while building his theatre on the brow of the hill in the shade of the pines, there can be no doubt that he foresaw the added charm it would be to the pilgrim to leave the town and plod through the glare up the long street past the railway-station into the avenue of chestnut trees. He foresaw them, pausing in their ascent, leaning upon their staves; and the restaurant which he allowed to be built next his theatre is a tribute to his perfect understanding of men, for however beautiful his music might be he knew that none could listen to it for five hours upon an empty belly. He liked, I am sure, the little green-painted restaurant higher up the hill in the orchard close, and must have gone there himself and sat under the trees, drinking Rhenish wine mixed with cool water from stone jars. The Master, who thought of everything, must have foreseen the great charm it would be to walk through the pine-wood, seeing beyond the red bark of the trees the purple ranges of hills that enclose the great plain, slope after slope rising at evening, and no one too far distant for the eye to follow the noble shapes and all the delicate sinuosities travelling down the skyline. Every shape and every outline is visible between the acts of The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and the Götterdämmerung. The village standing in the middle of the plain is often lighted by a last ray. Between the acts an extraordinary harmony gathers; art and Nature abandon their accustomed strife, and with ears filled with calm, exalted melodies, our eyes follow the beautiful landscape in which Bayreuth stands.
There are off-days at Bayreuth when there are no performances, and these are pleasant days of rest, that give us time to think of what we have heard, and what we are going to hear, and time to stroll about the town admiring its German life. The town is more interesting than Rothenburg—to me at least—for it is less archaic. One cannot imagine oneself living in the fifteenth century, whereas one can imagine oneself living at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth. Bayreuth is very yesteryear, suranné as the French say. A foreign word is a veiled face. The veil is often slight, but there is a veil always, wherefore we like foreign words—a weakness. The great gables which show themselves against the blue skies at Bayreuth mean more to me than the red-tiled roofs with the dormer windows in Rothenburg, for I can imagine myself born in Bayreuth, or growing up in it, and living there, seeing the Margrave and his court. It would be pleasant to live under the protection of a Margrave. One asks the name of the last, and wonders what he was like in his Schloss, a melancholy building full of tall official portraits and heavy German furniture, surrounded by gardens full of trees in which there is artificial water and swans. The year I am writing of the swans were followed by a brood of cygnets, and we used to watch these, not Edward and I, but myself and the daughter of a great painter, one who has inherited some of the intensity of her father's early pictures—a woman loving music dearly, and travelling with her husband in search of it.
It was pleasant to leave The Tale of a Town and visit her, and to walk about under the sunlit trees, or through the town, or to visit with her the old Court Theatre, perhaps picking up Edward on the way there and taking him along with us.
He will always go to see a building, and though we had both visited the Court Theatre many times before, it was pleasant to see it again, and she and he and I together admired its pillared front and its quaint interior, German rococo, clumsy, quaint, heavy, but representative of the German mind. And together we admired the gilded cupids, the garlands of flowers and the little boxes on either side of the stage, in which the Margrave's trumpeters used to appear to announce his arrival—a theatre not intended for the populace, but for the Court, containing only fifty or sixty stalls, beautifully designed and comfortable withal. The gilded balconies reminded us of drawing-rooms; we spoke of the courtly air of the theatre, now forbidden to the mime for many a day. A beautiful little theatre, we said—a theatre designed for the performance of Mozart or Gluck's operas, and I think Edward would have given up some performances of Parsifal to hear Gluck or Mozart in this out-of-date theatre.
In the afternoon my friends suggested to us that we should accompany them to a village some six or seven miles distant, and we went there in a carriage drawn by two long-tailed Bavarian horses, that drew us slowly but surely out of Bayreuth along smooth white roads, every one lined with apple trees and loaded with fruit. It was a wonder to us how these trees were not despoiled by thieves, so easy would it be to carry away the fruit by night. In England, in Ireland, or in Scotland a great deal of fruit would certainly have been robbed, and we asked ourselves if the Bavarian peasants are more naturally honest than the English, or if it were mere custom that prevented the waggonner from gathering as many apples as he pleased. The lady's husband, who is a politician, suggested that these wayside trees belonged to the community, and he is no doubt right; and we accepted his explanation that the honesty of the Bavarian is to be found in the fact that everybody shared in the fruit and, this being so, it was nobody's interest to strip the trees.
Behold the trees, and the long undivided plain stretching away to the foot of the hills, without wall or hedge, and we asking ourselves how do the peasants distinguish between the different farms, somebody telling how one of his farmers had called another to admire a fence he had put up between their lands. I'd like the fence, aye, twice as well, if thee 'ad not taken in some six or seven inches of my land. In our appreciation of the German landscape there is to be reckoned our disappointment at seeing nowhere beautiful English trees—ash, elm, beech, and oak—only the pine, and we, being tree-lovers, think the pine a tedious tree, if it can be called a tree; it isn't in our apprehension of one, only being intended by Nature for what the French call bois charpentier. No man would care to sit under a pine (and a woman still less), needles underfoot and needles overhead. To us English folk the beauty of a wood is as much in the underwoods as in the tall trees, and the pine allows no underwood. In a pine wood one meets few birds. A goshawk, startled from the branches, flees quickly down the long aisles. The pine is cultivated in Germany; the unfortunate pine, ugly by nature, is made still more ugly by cultivation. Pines cover the lower hills, forming black stains in the landscape and disfiguring their purple.
The long-tailed Bavarian horses walked up some steep ascent, trotted down a hill, at the bottom of which a pretty brook purls through an orchard, and the village was reached at last, built under the foot of a steep black hill, on which stand the ruins of a castle. There are paths through the woods, and one becomes conscious of the ceaseless change in human life as one follows the paths to the gateway of the robber-baron who lived there three centuries ago, defying Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, until his castle was battered with cannon. It was fortunate for Adolphus that he had cannon to batter it with, for without cannon he would not have captured it.
We came upon a ravine, and on each hillside a wooden platform had been built; the orchestra playing in the pit between, no doubt, as in the theatre at Bayreuth. We strolled up and down the steep paths, wondering if players were heard from hillside to hillside, inclining to the belief that human voices would not carry so far, and to put the natural acoustics of the wood to the test, some went to the other hillside and spoke to us. But what play had been acted in this wood? Somebody suggested a miracle play, and leaping at the suggestion, I spoke of the miracle plays in Oberammergau.
Some pious people of your sect, Edward, I said, taking his arm, who would set Asiatic Gods against native divinities.
My aphorism was not at first understood, and I explained it—how Bavaria comprises two spectacles: the Asiatic Gods in the South on the Tyrolean frontier, while the original Rhine Gods display themselves in the North at Bayreuth—Wotan, Loki, Donner, Froh, and the Goddesses Frika, Erda, and Freia. My remark had some success, and we walked on, wondering how it was that this division of the deities had not been remarked before. All were interested except Edward, who said he did not care to listen to blasphemy.
But, my dear Edward, it cannot be blasphemy to tell the truth, and surely the Gods that Oberammergau exhibits are Asiatic. And there can be no doubt that the Gods that Bayreuth exhibits are German and Scandinavian; and I pressed Edward to explain to me how a mere statement of fact, the truth of which could not be contested, could be called blasphemous, falsehood being implicit in every blasphemy. To escape from this quandary Edward began to argue that the Rhenish Gods had come from Asia, too, by way of Scandinavia, finding solace, apparently, in the belief in the Asiatic origin of all Gods. We laughed at this novel defence of divinity.
It is like China tea, I answered, only grown in Asia. Somebody else spoke of Havana cigars, and very soon all the life died out of the argument. We were but vaguely interested in it, for none amongst us, perhaps not even the youngest, was entirely free from the thought inspired by the empty platforms. We were all thinking how every generation is but a pageant, that all is but pageant here below. Part of our excursion was already behind us, and in later years how little of it would be remembered! Such philosophies are soon exhausted, and we sympathised with a lady who was anxious about her daughter and husband. They were walking in the woods, and she feared they might be overtaken by the coming darkness. But we assured her there would be light for many hours still, and whistled the motives of The Ring....
We returned through the hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening above us, and apple-trees lining the roads, all the apples now reddened and ready for gathering. We admired the purple crests illuminated by the sunset, as millions of men and women had done before us, and as millions of men and women shall do after us. Voices dropped and faces grew pensive. We asked if we should ever meet at Bayreuth again, and our thoughts turned towards the great Master lying in his grave, whose dreams had given us such sweet realities.
Too soon over, somebody said. In a few days Bayreuth would be deserted like the platforms we found in the wood. The long distance we had come was mentioned, and somebody asked if the pleasure we had received were worth the journey. The answer made to this—and it was a woman who made it—was that the journey would be more real in six months' time than it was today, and picking up the thought, I answered quickly:
So you think that we must live not so much for the moment as for the sake of the memory of it?
Somebody answered that memory was, perhaps, half of life and this was denied.
He who cannot enjoy things as they go by is but a poor companion.
A poor lover, I interjected. And soon after found myself arguing that the great gift Nature has bestowed upon woman is the power of enjoying things as they go by—a great gift truly it is, and sufficient compensation for lack of interest in religion and morals. It may be that that is why women have not written a great book, or painted a great picture. Or invented a religion, some one added.
Women are not idealists, Edward said, speaking out of his remembrance of his play The Heather Field.
In the evening we were all going to the house that Wagner had lived in, and in which he had written the last act of Siegfried, the Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal. Every one who goes to Bayreuth is asked there if he leaves a card upon Madame Wagner. Such, at least, used to be the custom. One presented an invitation card at the door and walked about the music-room and into Wagner's library. Edward was much moved to see the Master's books and his writing-table. Things interest him more than human beings, whereas Wagner's books and writing-table merely depressed me, and refusing to follow Edward to the grave, I sought for a friend who might introduce me to Madame Wagner.
A tall, thin woman, nearer sixty than seventy, very vital, with a high nose like her father's, came forward to meet me, full of cordiality, full of conversation and pleasant greeting. Liszt lives again in her, I said, the same inveigling manner; she casts her spells like her father, and—Well, there is no way of telling my impression except to tell the thought that passed through my mind: it was, But how is all this to end? Am I going to run away with her? And when we arrive somewhere, what am I to do with her? A woman nearly seventy years! And I thought what an extraordinary fascination she must have been when she heard Tristan for the first time, and felt she could no longer live with Bülow.
It is always pleasant, she said, to welcome to Bayreuth strangers who come to hear our art.
The arrogance of the expression amused me; but after all, music is the art of Germany just as poetry is the art of England; and feeling in the next five minutes that I must either take her hand or interrupt the conversation, I chose the latter course, and asked her to introduce me to her son. She hastened to comply with my wish, and put herself to some trouble to find him. He was found at last, and I was introduced to him.
My impression of Madame Wagner is compressed in the Am I going to run away with her? And the same words, with a change of preposition and pronoun, will describe the impression that Siegfried Wagner produced upon me. The son is the father in everything except his genius—the same large head, the same brow, the same chin and jaw. A sort of deserted shrine! I cried to myself and gasped for words.
Van Roy was singing at the time, and I succeeded at last in asking Siegfried Wagner who had composed the song.
I do not know, but it should be by Grandpapa Liszt.
I bowed, thanked him, and moved away, glad to escape from his repelling blankness. Shyness it may have been, or perhaps boredom. If we had met at Venice or in London—anywhere except in that crowd, we might have become friends. So I was glad to meet him on the bench in front of the theatre, and to find him slightly more forthcoming than he had shown himself to me in his mother's house. We spoke about his opera, and about Ellis, who had translated his libretto, and for a moment it looked as if we were going to know each other, to become acquainted, for in answer to my question whether he thought it was of advantage that the musician should write his own libretto, he answered that he thought it was, for while writing the libretto the musician sang his first ideas of the music.
Meeting me again on the same seat at the same hour, he asked me why I was not in the theatre, and it only occurred to me to tell the mere truth, that I came to Bayreuth to hear The Ring and not Parsifal. Perhaps if you knew the score of Parsifal.
I can never know a score, for I'm not a musician, but I've heard it many times, and it makes no personal appeal as do the other works.
The explanation was received in silence, and I thought how I might have better explained my position if I had said that, though I recognised Milton to be a great poet, he wrote in vain so far as I was concerned. But Siegfried's manner checks the words upon one's lips, and the people began to come out of the theatre soon after.
We parted, and all the way to the café where Edward and I went to have supper I turned Siegfried over in my mind and understood him to be a man of talent, for he is the son of a man of genius. One must be a man of talent to conduct The Ring as I had heard him conduct it, bearing the last scene of The Valkyrie along with him like a banner. A man of talent, the son of a man of genius, without sufficient vitality to be very much interested in anything; his life a sort of diffused sadness like a blank summer day when the clouds are low; and he must be conscious, too, that there is no place on earth where he can lay his head and call it his own.
If the physical resemblance were not so marked, I said to myself as we entered the café.
That little café! What enchanting hours Edward and I have spent in it between half past ten and in the morning, amid beer and cigars and endless discussions as to the values of certain scenes and acts, of singers and conductors! The year that I am now referring to, Parsifal was conducted in turn by Fischer, Mottl, and Seidl, Wagner's favourite pupil and disciple. He sat in the far end of the café by himself, and I often wondered why his society was not more sought after. Although he was an old man, and in declining health, it was a pleasure for me to sit with him and engage him in conversation, telling him that under his direction the first act of Parsifal played ten minutes quicker than it did under Mottl, and that Mottl was five minutes quicker than Fischer.
So much as that?
Yes, I took the time. And how much better I like your conducting of The Flower Maidens! Mottl gets a crescendo in the middle.
Whereas there is no necessity. It goes as well without, doesn't it?
A thin, spare man, quiet, speaking but little—a kindly man, as the reader has already guessed from the few phrases exchanged between him and me, and an unassuming man, apparently taking a pleasure even in such appreciations as Edward's and mine; a man between sixty and seventy, at the time I am speaking of, and as I write this line I can see his small, refined features and his iron-grey hair, which once must have been black. My thoughts pause, and I like to indulge myself in the regret that I did not walk home with him in the evenings to his lodgings. He might have asked me to come to see him in the morning, and over the piano, perhaps, would have told me many things regarding his relations with Wagner and his understanding of the music, and things about himself, for Seidl lived among great men, and was easily inveigled in the confessional.
He died a year or two later, and the café is no longer as attractive as it was when all the actors came down from the theatre to eat their supper there. Klafsky was my first Brünnhilde; when she died Gulbranson took her place, and the moment she came into the cafe all eyes went towards her, and I may say all hearts, for very soon a beautiful smile would light up a round, rosy, very ordinary face, suffusing it, transforming a plain woman into one to whom one's heart goes instinctively, convinced that all that is necessary to be happy is to be with her.

For the first time, the similarity of the names of geographical objects in Russia and India was discussed after the publication of the book by the Indian Sanskrit scholar Tilak "The Arctic Homeland in the Vedas". Based on ancient Indian treatises, most of all on the Mahabharata, Tilak proves that the events described in this epic took place several thousand years ago on the territory of the modern Russian North, or rather, in the interfluve of the Volga and Oka. In the Mahabharata there is a chapter "Forest", which describes in great detail the area on which the historical battle of the Pandavas and Kauravas took place. Interestingly, most of the rivers mentioned in this chapter do not occur in India. Quite the contrary is the case with the rivers of the Volga-Oka basin.
Arya is the name of two cities: in the Nizhny Novgorod region and in the Yekaterinburg region. And in the Krasnoyarsk Territory there is the city of Ariysk.
Omsk - a Siberian city on the Om River - according to the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, the city and the river are named after the transcendental mantra "Om". The city of Oma and the Oma River are also in the Arkhangelsk region. Tara is a river in the Omsk region, named after an Indian goddess.
Moksha - rivers in Mordovia and in the Ryazan region. The Vedic term "moksha" in Sanskrit means "liberation, departure to the Spiritual World".
Kryshneva and Khareva are tributaries of the Kama River. Kama itself is the name of a Sanskrit deity.
Soma is a river flowing through the land of the Vyatichi. Translated from Sanskrit - "divine drink", an analogue of the Russian "living water".
Ravan is a river south of Lake Ladoga. Possibly named after the powerful ten-headed demon Ravana.
Yama is a river in the Magadan region.
Maya is a city and a river near Yakutsk. It is noteworthy that the formidable goddess Maya, according to the Vedic scriptures, chose to live in the region of eternal cold, where all living things die.
Angara is a river in Siberia and the name of the planet Mars in Vedic cosmology.
Padma is the name of a river and lake in the Arkhangelsk region. Everything is simple here: in Sanskrit, “padma” means “lotus”, and indeed, there are a lot of water lilies in Padma Lake.
Today, there is a lot of ridicule regarding the supporters of the theory of the Aryan coming to India, even the term “Zadornovshchina” has become established after the name of the famous Russian satirist writer. Maybe Mikhail Nikolayevich went too far in something, proving that the Aryans brought their knowledge from the north of Russia to the north of India. But after all, such a number of facts in favor of this theory cannot be explained by a mere coincidence.
Interestingly, while Russian and Western lovers of history and philology argue with each other to the point of mutual insults, the Indians, as usual, do not worry. They are sure that their distant Ancestral Home is located somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle, where an immovable star burns to this day, the sky is decorated with bright flashes of heavenly chariots, and there is only one day and one night in a year. After all, it is written in the Vedas.

This is my first time posting about my MIL, please be gentle and I do not give permission for my story to be shared elsewhere.
To start, DH & I are in our early 40's and his older siblings are similarly aged. We will be referred to collectively as "the siblings". MIL comes from a large family has many siblings. They will be collectively referred to as "the family"
My MIL used to be normal for like the first 12 years of our marriage and was absolutely wonderful (or so we thought), we all adored her. She has a lot of siblings and a couple of them had been estranged from the family due to fallouts with MIL but nobody connected the dots as this is generally normal with large families. Then, DH and I noticed that DH's siblings all started distancing themselves from us. Then, the rest of MIL'S family distanced themselves from us too. Then, all of MIL's bothers & sisters (the family) distanced themselves from the siblings (us). Turns out, MIL is a secret master manipulator / attention whore. When she ran out of more distantly-related victims to lie about and isolate, she started lying about a couple of her siblings and eventually her very own kids, all for attention. Secretly spreading outright lies to anyone that would listen, she had her kids distanced from each other so they each wouldn't know they were being lied about to their siblings (triangulating kids from each other) and then lying to everyone in her family to make each of them also pull away from her kids. Eventually, we (siblings) figured it out and all went NC with her but the rest of her whole family believes MIL's lies and won't talk to any of us (siblings) anymore. Shes an absolutely sick individual (due to her behavior, she has been tested for early dimentia and stuff but is completely negative - she's not sick, just an asshole). It is 100% manipulation and lies for attention.
My favorite one: a couple of years after we siblings realized she had lied about & isolated her kids, she decided to move from her apartment to a regular senior apartment complex (cheaper) and she had the nerve to ask her kids if we'd all help her move. We all decided to help but turn it into a test tlrun to see if she could be trusted with a second chance (and everyone missed their old mom). 3/4 way through moving her (heavy) crap, she started bawling and throwing a fit/tantrum that we were making her do this, that we were forcing her to live in a "Nursing Home". We hastily brought the last of her stuff in, dumped it in a pile on her floor, and just left (had to empty truck to return it). Afterwards, she started telling anyone that would listen how terrible all of her children are because we "forced her into a nursing home". Uh, it's a regular apartment (Nothing whatsoever like a nursing home) and, also, none of us had anything to do with her decision to move at all (we weren't even in contact with her at the time). The only thing her kids were guilty of is renting a moving truck (on our dime) and physically moving all of her stuff for her when she asked for our help. That was a few years ago and we're all NC with her now. Unfortunately, the family still believes her BS and will continue to do so until she turns on them too, just like we all had to experience. I feel bad for DH though, his maternal family wants nothing to do with him because of his mom's lies and also his paternal family (out of state) all dropped him like a hot potato for being non-religious in a highly religious family. The only thing he did there was enter his religion as Athiest on his FB profile and one of these family members noticed. Then everyone just collectively unfriended him. Disgusting behavior on both sides of his fam! He's lost both sides of his blood family because of BS. At least he has me & my tiny fam and our friends that are our chosen family.

Buckle in, it's a long one.
This is not a work of fiction, this is my actual experiences and you can check Google Earth for the address if you so desire. But please read to the end before you do. If you recognize the address you will know who I am, so just message me a PM if you do.
When I was young my father secured a job working in the town of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia here in Canada. This was around 1988 if my memory serves me correctly. We moved from one end of the province (Cape Breton) to the other quite literally and for the first month or so we stayed in an apartment until my parents found this great old house for a decent price at the time.
The first time I saw it the house gave off a presence, not evil or sad, but it seemed happy that it's walls would be once again filled with people and that it was a proud old home. For reference the house was built in 3 parts. The oldest was basically a huge box, with very elegant but basic wood work. The next part was built on not too long afterwards and was more of a rectangle but with a Victorian styling that met the older style. And the newest part was build in the 1970s and tacked onto the back of the Victorian part so the house was shaped like an L with the top of it being the oldest.
I was told to wait at the house while the rest of my family (dad, mom, older brother and sister and a twin) drove to the realtor's office to get the keys because the moving truck was coming. While I sat outside I had my first experience.
In the room that was to become my bedroom on the second floor I could see the curtains pull aside and just a dark figure standing there. I thought it was a person because it took a minute for the curtains to droop back down to where they were. I told my dad but all he said was it was probably a draft since the house was a few hundred years old.
We finally got our stuff moved in and were pretty stoked to explore the house. It was huge and for a long time when solicitors came to one door on the main part of the house they'd end up going to the door on the newer part of the home as well thinking it was apartments.
Over time and with visits from neighbors we eventually learned that the house was built for a sea captains daughter and her new husband in the mid to late 1700's. After that it was a Civil War hospital (keep in mind that Nova Scotia was once almost part of the New England States), a home for the mentally challenged, a retirement home, a school house and had a few other hats I can't recall. The old school bell system was still in effect though, it was fun to piss off the neighbors with it because the outside bell was ridiculously loud. Also in the basement a stone was carved with a Civil War officers name which was really a cool find.
Anyways, over the next few years a lot of things happened in the home. The toilets would randomly flush, or you'd hear running feet upstairs and voices echoing through the house. This in itself drove my father nuts, he was an ex infantry officer and had no qualms about a fist fight or using a belt or whatever on us if it got pissed off. He was pretty abusive by todays standards, even by standards of years ago (that's another story though and it wasn't completely his fault between shift work and my poisonous mother).
One of the first clear experiences I ever had was in the summer of I think 1990. I was sitting in my bedroom playing Nintendo trying to use my brother's Arcade pad with my feet for one character and the controller in my hands for the other (may have been the SNES) when I heard voices clearly downstairs.
"Alright unpack the bags before anything else" "Are we going to start baking cookies soon?" "As soon as the bags are unpacked we can start them" "Yay"
I may have a few of the words mixed up but it was clear. Very very clear. And as a kid I waited for a bit until I thought they might be done and I wandered down stairs.
And my mother and sister were just getting into the house and had no intentions of making cookies at all when I asked where they were.
After this I had a friend come over and ask why nobody answered the door when he rang the bell. I had no idea what he was talking about but he said that he was a light in the house moving around and when he knocked on the door someone looked out at him but he didn't know who. I told him that would be impossible because we had gone to my grandfather's funeral for 3 days which was about 3.5 hours away.
To backtrack a bit I had mentioned my father, people running and toilets flushing. For about 3 years my father would sit at the supper table and have his weekly rant about "Stop f*cking running in the house, it wakes me up" and "If you are coming home from school and I catch you you're grounded for a week". He actually got into a fight with my older brother over it several times.
One night at supper time he said he had to get a plumber in, and he told us what happened.
He was sleeping during the day to prepare for his night shift (he worked for the Coast Guard at the time but as an on land radio operator) when he heard running up the stairs. He jumped up, bolted to the stairs and ran up them trying to catch whoever was home. He saw the bathroom door at the top of the stairs close and ran in to see the handle on the toilet pull down and flush.
For a while he wouldn't sleep during the day in the house. He slept in the truck, or went to a friends house so he wasn't alone. I still think there was more to the experience because my dad didn't believe in squat for the paranormal, unlike my mother who 100% did. After this there was a shift in his belief and not once did he ever mention the running or flushing until almost 20 years later.
But wait, there's more.
People would come from the neighborhood and ask about the place at random times, or other kids would hear the stories about the old haunted house we lived in. We had sleep overs a lot with random kids who wanted to check it out. Why? Because that's how things were back in the day. There was even a room where someone had died mysteriously (with records to back it up). I made some friends that way...kind of strange though.
Around 1992-3 my mother decided that they would have a séance in the kitchen. A few family friends popped by as well as a descendant of someone we knew who died there. My mom set out the candles, turned off the lights and made sure noise couldn't be heard from anywhere else. I believe about 8-10 people sat around the table and nothing at all happened for a while. Then someone had their legs grabbed and tugged under the table as if it were a joke, and that caused a stir. It went quiet again and I'm not sure how but someone heard the person beside them choking. The lights came on and the choking stopped, he got up and had his neck looked at then left.
To this day he will not step foot on that property. Not after having faint handprints left on his neck. He was also the family member of the person being called to.
At times when sleeping you'd also feel cats crawl on the bed, or someone sit on the edge like they were looking over you. It was comforting more than creepy and we all got used to it. The weirdest thing was the dreams. I can't even kid that I dreamt of places and things I had never even remotely though existed, people as well. It's odd that as a young adolescent I had a reoccurring dream of a small house by a small river, some willow trees by it and a blond wife. I tried drawing it as a kid and the thought still gives me a fond 'memory' which is messed up.
My family had experiences as well. My sister would say someone was watching her at night, my older brother said some guy in a black suit would tell him to get out of his room (which now that I think about it the room was pretty small so maybe a servants chambers). My twin had experiences as well.
The final experience I had in the home was when I was 15. At this point my parents had separated, older brother and sister moved out (foster homes, etc, I don't remember) and my brother and I had moved with my mother about an hour and a half away. A few months after moving out my dad came and picked us up and we went back there since he still lived there (he was on a career course that had him staying in a hotel for a bit in Halifax at the time).
After a bit of talking we pulled a few cots into the kitchen since the heat was turned off in the rest of the house. We used a space heater and the oven to warm it up and it was pretty nice. When it came time to sleep we did.
Until a few hours later (possibly midnight but that's pretty cliché).
Directly above us we heard a huge piece of furniture being scraped across the floor. We heard footsteps. We heard things being scraped even more and dropped. And we heard voices. Til today I can recall exactly what was said.
"Come on, we have to get this out of here. It's all gone tomorrow" "We have to get it out soon or we won't" "Lift that up"
Clear as a bell that night. It woke us all up and we asked my dad who was upstairs since he did have a border staying at one point (he was away travelling for a bit, was an artist). I recall him saying "Just ignore it, go back to sleep". And we did, not thinking about it much more.
In the morning he wouldn't even admit to hearing a thing. Absolute denial. My brother and I went to check upstairs to see what was moved around.
Now this house as I had said was old. Really old. In the Yarmouth County Museum it's one of the houses that is on a map from the 1700's and it showed. The main staircase to the second floor was about 5 feet wide and towards the top spiraled a bit to the left (90 degrees). When you got to the top you could go to the newer part of the house by turning a sharp right and walking through a door and if you looked before you went into the door you could look straight down the stairs.
The other way upstairs was through a servants entrance and steps. Do a search for this and you'll see that at my current size, 6' and 250 pounds and shaped like a wrestler, I probably couldn't get up those stairs easily nowadays. This was the route we went upstairs to check it out.
And when we got there the only thing to walk on was a few boards because my father had pulled them all up to upgrade the electrical. He didn't want to go through the ceiling in the kitchen because it was a sub-ceiling and he had only recently found that the original was a pounded copper tile ceiling 2 feet above that. And yes, over the years we found some really weird stuff that was hidden because it went out of style, or was undesirable, etc.
So that told us the voices, stomping, dropping stuff, and so on that we heard the night before wasn't people. At least not from today. It's probably one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life regarding the paranormal and sticks with me to this day as clearly as can be.
Yarmouth is an old town, once the richest in Americas, and I don't mean the US or Canada alone. I mean the richest in the Americas. If you go there today you'll see a lot of simply gorgeous architecture that's extremely old as well. And most of it has stories of hauntings. I'd almost say that the town, with its stories past and present chock full of murders, rum running, pirates, rich sea captains, Civil War hospitals and so on make it one of the top haunted towns in North America.
But this has to come to an end. After going back home my dad came to visit. He told us that the house had burned down; the fire department believed it was possibly arson or rodents in the electrical.
I dream about the house today like it still exists sometimes, and I ache to go back before my family was fractured. The house deserved better than to just burn down. Strange enough the house beside it, which was built by the same family, burnt a few years later. The old nunnery and the original sea captains homes still stand to this day though, and I'm waiting until some day they go on sale and I have the money.
Because I know from the past being told that the Cann House is also haunted.

My (39F) husband (38M) and I are buying our first home ever. We have worked for years on building our credit, after destroying it in our 20's, and are both working full time with decent jobs.
We've found a house we love, they accepted our offer, and things are moving forward. We've already had our home inspection done, and are now waiting on our septic tank inspection, except no one seems to know where the septic tank is. The previous owner has never had it inspected, or emptied, so he has no clue. The septic tank inspection company we hired keeps tacking on charges to find this septic tank, but haven't gone into the basement, where the clean out pipe is, to put cameras in and follow the line, which is what they originally said they'd do aftet not being abke to find it with the stick. Instead they want to go on our roof for an extra charge of $250, after trying to charge an extra $195 for using the cameras, which they didn't even do.
My husband is ready to walk away, but this is the last inspection before the sale is finalized. We've been looking at houses for months, and I'm just overwhelmed, and tired of everything. I want this house for our family, we have 3 small children, and 3 fur babies.
I just want the invisible septic tank found. 🥺

turncloaks asked in a thread a few weeks ago on why Dutch is opposed to civilization. I wanted to offer a more substantive reply to this than was really given in the other thread.
First off, we have to look at what RDR shows us of "Civilization"
"Okay, there she is...a real city...the future."
Civilization Triumphant
Notice how Saint-Denis is basically Mordor from Lord of the Rings. (or more like Isengard for hardcore LOTR nerds - an outpost of brutal industrialization in a still wild land) Imposing, ominous, a black stain upon pure wilderness. By RDR1, "the future" Dutch and Arthur so detested was here in force. John has to listen to rich hags brag about how they've "civilized" the Natives, either by genociding them or reducing them to living like animals, while a priest - a symbol of "civilized purity and goodness" - boasts about how savages don't get to go to Heaven.
We've set the scene, we've set the mood. The games are unambiguous in that "Progress" is disgusting, immoral, and inevitable.
Part of what drew me to the game in the first place was what I read of the character of Dutch van der Linde. This game ultimately might be the story of one man's (Arthur's) journey to redemption but as compelling as that is, it wasn't what drew me to play it for myself. I was far more intrigued by the overarching story of the gang as a whole - the story of these holdouts fighting the encroachment of civilization and capitalism. I had sympathies with al this long before I heard of this game, or even before it came out. I might not be a philosopher or even a philosophy student, but I have done my best to read and learn since about 2016 or so. I figured I could share at least some of that with other fans and help flesh out the game. A great piece of art has to say something in my view so what is Red Dead Redemption 2 saying?
Firstly....
Arthur: We're thieves, in a world that don't want us no more.
Dutch: We are dreamers, in an ever-duller world of facts, I'll give you that.
Dutch: It's the illlnes of romantics.
Arthur: What is?
Dutch: Hope
What is Romanticism?

Having posited a rejection of capitalist modernity as the foundation and first phase of Romanticism, we need to specify our concept further, since Romanticism represents just one modality, a particular tonality in which critiques of the modern world may be couched. The Romantic critique is bound up with an experience of loss. The Romantic vision is characterized by the painful and melancholic conviction that in modern reality something precious has been lost, at the level of both individuals and humanity at large; certain essential human values have been alienated. This alienation, keenly sensed, is often experienced as exile: in defining the Romantic sensibility, Friedrich Schlegel speaks of the soul “under the willows of exile” (unter den Trauerweiden der Verbannung);44 the soul, the seat of humanness, now lives far removed from its true hearth or homeland (Heimat); thus according to Arnold Hauser “the feeling of homelessness (Heimatslosigkeit) and loneliness became the fundamental experience” of the Romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century.45 And Walter Benjamin, himself deeply imbued with this worldview, sees in the German Romantics’ appeal to dream life an indication of the obstacles raised by real life on the “path of the soul’s homeward journey to the motherland” (der Heimweg der Seele ins Mutterland).46
The soul ardently desires to go home again, to return to its homeland, in the spiritual sense, and this nostalgia is at the heart of the Romantic attitude. What is lacking in the present existed once upon a time, in a more or less distant past. The defining characteristic of that past is its difference from the present: the past is the period in which the various modern alienations did not yet exist. Romantic nostalgia looks to a precapitalist past, or at least to a past in which the modern socioeconomic system was not yet fully developed. Thus nostalgia for the past is—to borrow a term from Marx and Engels, who noted this feature among the English capitalists—“closely linked” to the critique of the capitalist world.47
The past that is the object of nostalgia may be entirely mythological or legendary, as in the reference to Eden, to the Golden Age, or to the lost Atlantis. It may also constitute a personal myth, like the “mysterious City” in Nerval’s Aurélia.48 But even in the many instances in which a real historical past is invoked, the past is always idealized. The Romantic vision selects a moment from the actual past in which the harmful characteristics of modernity did not yet exist and in which the human values that have been since stifled by modernity were still operative; that moment is then transformed into a utopia, shaped as the embodiment of Romantic aspirations. This is one way to explain the seeming paradox according to which the Romantic orientation toward the past can also involve looking ahead; the image of a dreamed-of future beyond the contemporary world is inscribed within the evocation of a precapitalist era.
[…]
Primitive societies, the Hebrew people of the biblical era, Greek and Roman antiquity, the English Renaissance, the Old Regime in France—all these served as vehicles for the Romantic vision. The choice—and especially the interpretation—of a particular period in the past depended on the specific orientation of the form of Romanticism in question.
Nostalgia for a lost paradise is generally accompanied by a quest for what has been lost. An active principle at the heart of Romanticism has often been noted in various forms: anxiety, a state of perpetual becoming, interrogation, quest, struggle. In general, then, a third moment is constituted by an active response, an attempt to find or to re-create the ideal past state; there is such a thing, nevertheless, as a resigned Romanticism.

Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
I think this fits Dutch's overall philosophy to the letter. In fact, it might be an underlying philosophy of the game, too. The feeling of "loss," of being obsolete and unwanted, of "none of this really matters" is present from the start, even in the more joyful parts of the game. I remember Arthur having a talk with Mary-Beth all the way in Chapter 2 about how none of this matters because the world doesn't want people like them anymore. They fight and they fight and they fight, and none of it did any good, as Dutch says himself in RDR1. Arthur may have realized it sooner, or he may have simply accepted it sooner, owing more to his very different temperament from Dutch. But I don't think enough people really stress how very similar Dutch and Arthur are in their basic view of the world, the main difference is how they act on this worldview. John is the same. Our two heroes fundamentally agree with Dutch in their disdain for civilization.
That is how I understood the whole relationship Arthur had with both Hamish and especially Charlotte To continue quoting from the book:

A second tendency seeks to rediscover paradise in present reality. [...] But one may also choose to flee bourgeois society, leaving cities behind for the country, trading modern countries for exotic ones, abandoning the centers of capitalist development for some “elsewhere” that keeps a more primitive past alive in the present. The approach of exoticism is a search for a past in the present by a mere displacement in space. Nodier brings the fundamental principle of exoticism to light when he explains that his tales Smarra and Trilby are set in a wild Scottish landscape because it is only by leaving Europe behind that one can find remnants of humanity’s springtime, an idyllic period in which the sources of the imagination and sensitivity had not yet dried up.53

Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
This is Charlotte to the letter. In order to discover a more true, authentic, and noble life, she and her husband fled the city and the modern world. Hamish doesn't say he specifically did this but, as Arthur points out, it isn't like he gets much company where he lives. He lives off the land just like Charlotte does. To me, this feels like Arthur's ultimate "tendency" as the book calls it. There is no pushing back the modern world, the best you can do is retreat from it and save your soul by living in harmony with the natural world. Arthur bonds with Hamish over this simple way of life and he teaches Charlotte how to survive this way of life. These are two people living his dream, in essence.
Dutch, by contrast...

A third tendency holds the preceding solutions to be illusory, or in any event merely partial; it embarks on the path of authentic future realization. [...] From the standpoint that is oriented toward future accomplishments, that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Morris, or Walter Benjamin, for example, the recollection of the past serves as a weapon in the struggle for the future. A well-known poem by Blake gives remarkable expression to this view. In a short text that is part of the preface to Milton, the poet wonders whether the divine presence manifested itself in England “in ancient time,” before its hills were covered by “these dark Satanic mills.” In conclusion, he commits himself to a “spiritual struggle” that will end only when “we have built Jerusalem/in Englands green & pleasant land.”55 In this form of Romanticism, the quest aims at the creation of a new Jerusalem.

Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
Colm: Better world...pure world... How's that coming along?
Dutch: Just fine.
[...]
Dutch: We're trying to reform society to a kinder, truer, better way.
Dutch would never be content with the life of Charlotte. As said in the book, it's an illusion. The modern world and all its incomparable evils are still there, still growing, you're just turning a blind eye to them. You have to fight back, you have to try and build something real, to "improve things," like Hosea says Dutch taught him.
​
And to quote a description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from a different book....

To describe that influence in a somewhat different way, Rousseau may be said to have inaugurated the “radical tradition” of philosophical discontent with modernity which, since his time, has formed a permanent and integral part of modernity itself—culminating today in the declaration of a new, “post-modern” era. Standing at the threshold of the “modern age” inaugurated by the American, French, and Industrial revolutions, the threshold of that long journey toward technological, welfare-capitalist/socialist, liberal, mass, democratic society that today still goes by the name of “modernization”—Rousseau was the first to cry, “stop.” And in presenting his classic diagnosis of the ills of modern society—the loss of social and psychic unity—he defined the problem which succeeding generations of critical thinkers would try to solve.
Of course, Rousseau was not simply the first to cry stop to modernization, since many had done so before him in the name of the ancien regime and the old monarchic and Christian principles. But he was the first to do so as a more advanced adherent of the new modern ideas. The Enlightenment and the new Party of Reason had plenty of enemies; Rousseau was its first defector, its first “dialectical” opponent. His defection, moreover, turned out to be the founding event of a since unbroken tradition of modern self-hatred, of protest against modernity arising from within the modern camp, and the first clear indication of the theoretical instability and continuously self-devouring character of the modern revolution.
In other words, Rousseau became the prototype of the modern alienated intellectual: the thinker who agrees with the modern rejection of the principles that underlay the classical and Christian worlds, but who nevertheless loathes the new world that these modern ideas have created. Knowing the man-made character of this world, and blaming it for the unhealthy state of his own soul, he seeks the restoration of the world and his soul through a still more radical, progressive application of these modern ideas.

The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought
Dutch says at one point that, for as bad as the New World is, the Old World was even worse. While some things may be open to interpretation about his character, his hatred for the Old World - which arguably manifests in his hatred of the Old South given its close likeness to America's European ancestry - seems beyond doubt to me. He is not content with simply retreating from the modern world, nor is he happy to try and rebuild some ancient society. He wants something radically different from both the past and present. He wants to take those modern ideals of liberation and realize them, turn them from just a fiction on a piece of paper to a real utopia. Fight back against modernity tooth and nail, don't run from it is how I view him vs. Arthur. Could be the difference between an idealist (Dutch) and a realist (Arthur).
If there is any past he might valorize or deem noble, it is that of non-European peoples, like Native Americans. To quote yet another book on Rousseau:

The origins of what we call the romantic “enchanted garden” can be found among the early romantics, that is to say the writers and philosophers usually identified as romantic. Although for us the romantic worldview is not limited to the so-called Romantic period but is alive in modern culture up to the present, the early romantics were undoubtedly the ones who laid the first stepping-stones of the unfinished romantic narrative. Romanticism of course does not have a single birth date. But if we wanted to pick one moment as a symbolic starting point it might be 1755, the year in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. This astonishing document constitutes perhaps the first romantic manifesto, with its ferocious critique of modern civilization and celebration of the “noble savage.” The association between these two topoi is to be found among many later romantic writers and artists, from the eighteenth century up to our time, as will be evident throughout this book.
While Voltaire, the great proponent of Enlightenment and progress, pictures indigenous peoples as anthropophagic barbarians in his philosophical satire Candide (1759), the romantic Rousseau sees them as “the true youth of the world.” For him, all the subsequent steps of progress, which were supposed to lead towards the perfection of the individual, “were in effect steps towards the degradation (décrépitude) of the species.” The savage “breathes only rest and freedom,” while civilized man “works until he dies” and is “proud of his serfdom.”10 In fact, Rousseau emphasizes, the barbarian “refuses to bow his head to the yoke that the civilized person bears without grumbling,” and prefers the most dangerous freedom to the most peaceful submission. In a passage that seems almost to foresee anticolonial struggles, Rousseau argues that the love of freedom is so strong among “savages” that they “are willing to face hunger, fire, iron and death to keep their independence.”11 Although the philosopher’s “state of nature” may be a fiction, his portrayal of the life of primitive peoples is almost surely based on travelers reports. Rousseau in any case often explicitly refers in his essay to specific groups: Hottentots, Caribbeans, and “savages of the Americas.”12

Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature
Remember how Dutch shoots down Bill's racism on the way to kill Bronte. Note how he follows this up by talking about how he had tried to "teach" all of them something. What had he tried to teach? That America far away from European tyranny was "God's last creation." I suspect it's as close as anything to Dutch's ideal.
Now, a word that comes up a lot in RDR is "Civilization." Arthur says it right at the start and it's repeated all throughout the game. Well, what is civilization? It's another tricky word to define. I enjoy this distinction and definition:

Our word “culture” and the German term “Kultur” are both derived from the Latin colere, “to cultivate.” In the early modern period, it was used – rather rarely – as a metaphor to describe the social and political “cultivation” of civilization, the process of civilizing a person out of a barbaric state. In the late eighteenth century, however, the notion of culture underwent a significant change, transformed in the thought of J. G. Herder, Immanuel Kant, and J. G. Fichte.6 After this transformation, culture became a quite frequent – even everyday term – in the West.7
The main change these thinkers effected was to oppose culture and civilization. Along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, these philosophers challenged civilization and the civilized person.8 According to this critique, civilization satisfies our bodily needs and creates external order and peace, but it fails to attend to our spiritual needs and inner longings. Modern civilization possesses an artificial character – in its manners, its impersonal bureaucratic forms of rule, its obsession with economic development – that destroys the spiritual unity of the people. Moreover, the secular character of modern civilization – in particular, the decline of religious influence on individuals’ lives, summed up by Nietzsche as the “death of God” – frustrates our spiritual need for our life to have meaning or significance. In short, modern civilization reliably produces comfort, pleasure, wealth, and abundance, but it also undermines communal belonging, civic virtue and nobility, and spiritual self-development.
These thinkers did not want to turn back the clock to ancient politics or medieval religious societies, but rather developed another form of community alongside civilization, a distinctively modern form of spiritual community that could infuse meaning and purpose into modern civilization. They referred to this form of community as Kultur. 9 They drew on the received notion of culture as involving a process of education but decisively transformed the character of that education. Whereas civilization prepares individuals to be useful for the material aims of society, politics, and market, culture shapes individuals to participate in the common spiritual – especially moral, artistic, and philosophical – pursuit of the good life. For Kant, Fichte, and Herder, the purpose of culture is to realize human freedom, for the human spirit to elevate itself out of a condition of animal instinct and determine its own fate. Culture, then, is a replacement for the role of religion in political society and human life, but instead of serving the purpose of reflecting the will of God, culture serves to reflect and ennoble humanity’s freedom. In other words, according to these philosophers, culture is not opposed to freedom and equality but at its very origins was understood to be the proper realization of these goods.
For instance, consider this influential passage from Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent”:
We are cultivated [kultiviert] to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized [zivilisiert] to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and propensities. ... While the idea of morality is indeed present in culture [Kultur], an application of this idea which only extends to the semblances of morality, as in love of honor and outward propriety, amounts merely to civilization. But as long as states apply all their resources to their vain and violent schemes of expansion, thus incessantly obstructing the slow and laborious efforts of their citizens to cultivate their minds, and even deprive them of all support in these efforts, no progress in this direction can be expected. For a long internal process of careful work on the part of each commonwealth is necessary for the education [Bildung] of its citizens. (Idea 49)
For Kant, civilization undermines our project of moral progress, attaching us to the material goods of social status (through the “semblances of morality,” social manners) and political power (through state “expansion”). Culture, by contrast, promotes moral progress by attaching us to the ends of the arts and sciences and supplying us with the “idea of morality.” Finally, Kant suggests here that politics plays an important role in promoting culture in its people by supplying the right “education of its citizens.”10
While Kant speaks of the “splendid misery” of materialist civilization (Idea 49), Herder attacks the moral self-aggrandizement and chauvinism of modern Enlightenment civilization (LAH 380). For Herder, modern progressive civilization asks us to “over-extend” our “feelings,” which leads us to “blur them into mere words and generate nothing but misery for itself and everybody else,” whereas the “savage who loves himself, his wife and child, with quiet joy” is at peace with the world (Ideas 400).11 Like Kant, Herder opposes culture to civilization.12 He says that “culture” (Kultur) – derived from “the cultivation of the ground” – has as its purpose the “education” (Erziehung) and “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) of a people (Ideas 410). Culture consists in the “education of mankind” (Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts) (Ideas 407).

Nietzsche's Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period
Civilization is, in brief, the most superficial things humans have ever created. In the name of so-called progress or morality, It is the opening of RDR1. Enlightened Europeans and Americans destroyed "primitive" peoples and ways of life. Now people get to live in complacency and arrogance about how they're oh so much better than everyone who came before when in reality they're infinitely worse off in all the ways that truly matter. George Bernard Shaw framed it as:

If you had said to him, 'We may be in hell ; but we feel extremely comfortable ', Ruskin, being a genuinely religious man, would have replied, That simply shows that you are dammed to the uttermost depths of damnation, because not only are you in hell, but you like being in hell'.

Ruskin's Politics
In conclusion, let me answer the question I posted at the beginning. "What is Red Dead saying?" The American government and industrialists have perpetrated crimes that dwarf anything the gang ever could have done. They erased entire Peoples and cultures. Thousands, tens of thousands, dead, countless more ethnically cleansed. Dutch and Arthur and the gang lived in a time when the United States was a genocidal empire and they saw it first hand. They tried to fight it, they tried to maintain some freedom. That is why the gang is mostly composed of exploited people like various minorities or the women or even drug addicts. No matter how bad they were, they were better to their own than the state was to its own. The gang fought hard for Dutch's "savage utopia" but the war was over before it began, just like all groups who tried to fight "Civilization."

Up until now, I’ve only done one-shots on this sub. This, however, is the beginning chapter of a long space-opera sci-fi writing project I have been working on for several months now, an expansion of sorts of a one-shot story I posted in reply to a prompt from WritingPrompts.
I’m currently almost 60k words into it at the time of writing, and am planning on publishing it in full as a novel when I’m done, but I haven’t really shared it with anyone outside my immediate family, a couple friends, and the good people of HumansAreSpaceOrcs.
I don’t know how often I’ll be uploading these, especially given that I’m still not done with it, and have little free time to spend on writing these days; all the same, you can expect plenty of entries over the next few weeks.
And while yeah, the title doesn’t make much sense for the moment, trust me, it will. …Eventually. …After several chapters. Nervous smile
Anyway, feel free to leave your thoughts, any constructive criticisms, etc in the comments. And as always, I hope you enjoy :)
——

CHAPTER 1

Her arm hurt.
She was so, so tired...
Her arm hurt.
She was numb to the cold at this point, but kept shivering anyway.
Her arm hurt.
The only thing close to heat that she felt was the inflammation that was serving to add more throbbing pain to her arm.
…Which hurt, in case that wasn’t clear.
She turned her head to look at it, wincing from the pain the movement caused. It was ugly to behold, with a ragged stab wound in the muscles of her forearm near the elbow that was still slowly trickling blood, but that wasn’t even the worst part of it. She knew from experience that the needle-sharp pain she felt with every slight movement meant that some bone in there- probably the radius or ulna- was also either hairline-fractured or broken entirely.
…And just in case you weren’t aware, fun fact:
It hurt.
A lot.
The pain was only exacerbated by the swollen tissues and irritation around the stab wound that she knew meant it was definitely infected- with what, she could only guess. Whatever it was, she could feel the fever it was causing having a desperate tug-of-war with the cold autumn air to determine her body temperature.
When she couldn’t stand to look at it any longer, she leaned her head back, resting it against the dew-filled grass of the ditch she was lying in and looking up at the star-filled night sky that was slowly lightening to that hue of dark indigo that meant dawn was close, but not quite there.
She used to think the stars were beautiful. But as she lay there, the dreadful memories of what had led to this moment playing over and over in her head… Suffice to say, nothing in this world or outside of it seemed beautiful anymore.
She put the aesthetics of the sky aside and instead struggled to focus her thoughts through the haze of fatigue and pain.
Dawn approaching… That has to mean I’ve been laying here… Jeez, it must be almost an entire day at this point. …I think. It hasn’t been multiple days, surely… Or maybe it’s been-
…Oh, to hell with it. I don’t even care at this point…
She was too tired to sleep, but in too much pain to move. Her brain was fogged from fatigue, and even more so from the constant screaming coming from her nerve endings, desperately trying to let her know that yes, something was very wrong with her arm, she got it, thanks for the message, you can stop now-
…But mostly, the fog stemmed from that draining emotional and mental exhaustion that came with periods of grief. A single tear ran down her face from her already overworked tear ducts, nearly reaching the bruises on her neck before it was wiped away by the shaky fingers of her good arm.
The sky would be there for her to look at later. She needed to try (yet again) to rest, just one more time.
“You know what they say,” she murmured to herself. “76th time’s the charm.”
Delirious with exhaustion and the fever as she was, she couldn’t help herself from chuckling at the thought. Her eyes, bloodshot and burning from the strain she had endured, lazily looked around at what few constellations she could recognize for one last time, and spotted the pattern of Orion in the night sky.
Hey big O, close the door on your way out, eh? I’m gonna try and take a snooze.
She snorted, wincing as she did.
…Finding my own jokes funny. Jesus, I am delirious…
She turned her head to the side and closed her eyes, willing herself to please, please just go to sleep already, because sleep meant being unconscious, and being unconscious meant she could ignore the pain from her arm for a while. And to her surprise, she finally started drifting off. Her breath slowed, the fog visible in the cold air in front of her mouth coming less and less often as she drifted closer to the edge of unconsciousness.
As a result, she barely even heard the soft humming noise approaching, and almost didn’t feel herself being gently, almost imperceptibly lifted off the ground. When she noticed it, what parts of her mind that were still semi-conscious brushed it off as either a dream or hallucination, and slipped behind the wall of sleep…
…For all of two minutes. She wasn’t getting off that easy.
She was jolted awake by a sudden feeling of what could only be described as compression across her whole body, though “compression” hardly did it justice; It was as though she were being squeezed through a drinking straw. …Yet before she could react, the feeling was over.
Her eyelids fluttered open, revealing a dimly-lit room, alive with that same strange humming noise from before. She crinkled her nose at the smell that assailed her nostrils. It was strange, like a combination of various industrial cleaners, engine grease, and ozone. She rubbed her eyelids before she groggily looked around, confused. Where was she? She turned her head and saw a very strange-looking machine that was seemingly floating in midair. She craned her neck, looking past it, and her eyes widened at what she saw glowing through a small, circular viewing window in the nearby wall.
Was that- …Earth?
She slowly, gingerly sat up, wincing from the protests her arm gave at her daring to do such a thing. It took everything in her, but she slowly dragged herself closer to the window, peering out at the planet slowly circling in the void below her. There was no doubt about it, that was Earth. She recognized North and South America, Greenland, even a portion of the northern Arctic. She could even see all the wildfires burning as a result of-
…Well, everything collectively hitting the fan in the past week.
Tilting her head, she could see the exterior of the… building? Satellite? Space station? …Whatever it was she was apparently on, that was outside the window. Gun-metal gray and covered in strange symbols in a language she didn’t recognize, it was unlike anything she’d seen before- and it wasn’t alone.
She saw several other similar… things, floating nearby. They ranged in size from the relatively small, around the size of a house, to absolutely massive ones that she estimated must be miles across. She shook her head in disbelief and laid her head back down on the cold metal floor.
Ok, scratch that, she was obviously still asleep; after all, this had to be the weirdest dream she’d ever had…
Suddenly, a scraping, screeching noise rang through the room, startling her. She looked around and saw a tall, lanky, shadowy figure entering the room they were in as it finished sliding open the metal door that was the source of the noise. Without warning, the room was aglow with a bright light from overhead, causing her to wince and close her eyes. She rubbed her eyelids again, trying to ignore the irritation the action caused, and looked back at the figure, eyes widening as they adjusted to the light- and then even wider, as she froze in place with a gasp at what she saw.
The… creature standing over her was like some horrific combination of a reptile and insect. Its frame was slim and bipedal, with limbs proportioned far longer than any normal human. It towered over her, easily seven feet tall or more. Its head was like that of a praying mantis minus the antennae, with three chameleon-like eyes. The first eye was symmetrically centered in the forehead, the other the two mirrored on the sides of its head where the temples on a human head would be, and all three were very intently focused on her. On its face was a glowing, bioluminescent set of growths all down the front, forming a v-shaped, curving pattern that almost looked like a deranged smile, but its real mouth hid behind a pair of razor-sharp mandibles on its jawline that clicked together a few times as she watched.
Its hide was dark gray and shiny, almost metallic, somewhere between reptilian scales and an insectoid carapace, and generally looked like it would be at home in an H.R. Giger painting. The bioluminescent growths on its face continued down to its torso in three vertical, parallel lines, growing larger as they went further down. Each gangly arm ended in four chitin-covered fingers, tipped with razor-sharp claws.
The only thing even remotely resembling clothing it was wearing was something that looked like a long skirt or kilt, which would probably almost look funny if it weren’t for the fact that the material it was made of almost looked like human skin. From what she saw of the legs underneath it, they were digitrade and almost like those of a bird, with three toes in front and one facing backwards, all with very long claws on them, but no feathers could be seen- just more of that sickly-gray chitinous carapace.
It stood there for a second, silently watching her as she sat there trembling, now more from fear than cold or fever, before all its glowing growths suddenly began to gleam blood-red, and it reached out towards her with one of its clawed arms whilst making a terrifying noise- like the hiss of a cat mixed with the warning signal of a rattlesnake.
Her adrenaline spiked, and the various subdivisions of her brain responsible for survival instincts went into overdrive.
Each presented their findings for peer review: THING. BIG. DEADLY. SCARY.
They rapidly formed a committee and held a brief conference as to the good and proper response to this interesting new development. The vote was both swift and unanimous:
RUN.
The adrenaline surge gave her the endurance she needed to ignore the pain and scramble backwards before finally getting enough traction on the metal floor to get to her feet, turn, and run screaming through the opposite doorway, getting away from the monster as fast as she could.
——
Y’ggdrasog flinched at the sudden movement of the human scrambling awkwardly to her feet with the help of her unbroken arm before sprinting away from him whilst emitting a high-pitched noise he was unfamiliar with, presumably of distress.
For a moment, he just stood there, puzzled. What was she doing, and why? All he had done was say “Hello.” Then he remembered himself, and figured he should probably resolve the situation before she bumbled her way out of the airlock or something. He called after her:
<”Wait- please, stop! I mean you no harm! …Why in the name of the spirits above are you running away from-”>
His eyes widened, his bioluminescence rapidly shifting to a bright white as he realized.
<“Oh blast… I forgot to turn my auto-translator back on!”>
He tapped the side of his head to bring up his cranial implant’s heads-up-display interface and quickly went through a few drop-down menus. Finally finding the setting he was looking for, he turned the software back on and then started to run after her. He shook his head as he went, irritated at himself as his bioluminescence changed to an annoyed green to match.

He let out a frustrated sigh and just kept following the loud, high-pitched noises, wincing as he did so.
His ears hurt.

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I (20M) have been working at this company for almost 4 months now. And I really like the guy that is in charge of our whole division. It's a pretty big company, we're the largest manufacturers of dry ice in africa. The guy in charge of our division (let's call him Ted) has been really helpful whenever I asked for things I need to do my job (whereas everyone else just sends u from one person to the next because they only care about what they're doing) he's really smart and he explains engineering parts and mechanics to me and the science of things I ask about. He's high up and has accomplished a lot of things in his professional career yet he's very humble, the other day he helped me sweep the factory floors (even though he could literally get anyone else to help me or just let me do it alone). All in all I have a lot of respect for this guy and want to treat people the way he does. Today I found out that a certain part that we use on our machines is crazy expensive. It's a type of plastic plug and I thought there has to be a way to get it for cheaper. We import them from spain and I asked that if we weren't the only company using those plugs maby we can start having them manufactured here in South Africa and sell them a lot cheaper. (I even thought of speaking to people and see if I can have them manufactured and supply them to the company I worked for). Literally 2 hours after our discussion he comes to me and shows me a paper print out where he found that exact same plug for literally half the price. And proceeded to tell me how he got the idee to look for a cheaper option and that if only he had done this a week or 2 earlier he would have saved the company thousands on a recent order but that going forward this is going to save the company a lot of money. I was shocked, I felt this wave of disappointment over me as he told me of his idee that is going to save the company so much money, not even mentioning anything about me suggesting it to him or at the least if he did have this idea in the past, prompting/reminding him of it. I feel like I want to talk to our operations manager (he also seems like a really nice guy and even though he basically runs the whole company he's very humble and gives adice whever asked and I've had some really good talks with him and feel like he can really mentor me in a way) and just explain to him my disappointment that "Ted" didn't even acknowledge my contribution. Would that seem petty and like I was trying to take credit for someone else's accomplishments, after all I wasn't the one that found the cheaper part online (because I was busy repairing machinery in the work shop and don't have a computer at work. Would've had to use my own computer at home at my own time). Should I just leave this and go enjoy the shit out of my gym workout today or should I say something?

Foxy Shiba on DeFi innovation that creates benefits and value for $FShiba token holders
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Links :
Website : foxyshiba . net
Telegram : @ FOXYSHIB
Roadmap
Phase 1
Social Media and Community Integration
Smart Contract Creation
Website Deployment
Whitepaper Publish
SEO
Twitter Raids
Phase 2
Marketing Campaign
Foreign Communities Integration and Creation
Launch Marketing Campaign
Major Listings sites
CMS Post
Shilling Contest
Airdrop Campaign
Airdrop Partnership
Phase 3
PancakeSwap Launching
PR Famous Sites
Huge Influencers Calls
Mass Marketing On Social Media
CoinmarketCap Listing
Coin Gecko Listing
Reward Campaign
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From my travel report (2005/2006):
During our 1st Australia trip we already spent some time in PERTH and therefore knew the city and surroundings quite well. Towards the north we had already visited the Pinnacles and Monkey Mia with the dolphins in Shark Bay.
Therefore, we now wanted to look at the rather unknown southwest.And it was worth it!
From Perth we first drove south through the so-called Wheat Belt to get to HYDEN. This is a place where you really only go to see the WAVE ROCK. After we checked into our room at the Hyden Motel, we visited the Magic Lake about 1 km away - the water there is poison green.
Because of the heat we walked to Wave Rock and Hippo's Yawn in the late afternoon. Unfortunately we couldn't stay there too long, because even in December there were many flies. Hippo's Yawn was formed by erosion and actually looks like a hippo's mouth.Wave Rock, 15 meters high and 110 meters long, is an amazing rock formation, created by chemical erosion over thousands of years. Rainwater created pink and gray streaks on the huge granite wave.
To get to Kalgoorlie - our next destination - one normally drives via Mount Walker, Narrembin, Merredin and South Cross. But our landlord recommended us to drive the unpaved road - actually not allowed with rental cars - from Hyden to the Great Eastern Highway - because this route is much shorter. And since the road was completely dry, we did it that way. We drove through the beautiful bush landscape with many flowers to the Great Eastern Highway, and on the approx. 2 hours long drive we encountered "believe it or not" only 8 cars.
KALGOORLIE is an interesting old gold mining town. We spent the night at the Quality Inn Railway. It was so hot there that we didn't explore the town until late afternoon. There are many historic buildings, especially on Hannan Street.
We drove to the Mont Charlotte Lookout with a nice view of the city and the surrounding area. Mount Charlotte is the site of the O'Connor Water Reservoir. The pipeline brings water from about 560 km away near Perth to Kalgoorlie.
The heritage of the mining pioneers is still alive in the city, although nowadays, of course, only modern mining technology is used.
Australia's wealth depends on its mines. After mining, however, it unfortunately looks like a lunar landscape.... But it is interesting all the same!
The next morning we drove to the Super Pit Lookout to have a look into the depth, where giant machines look like toy cars. The Super Pit is 320 m deep, 3.2 km long and 1.3 km wide. In 1893 gold was found for the first time and until today there is the largest open pit mine in the world, where gold is mined and since the 1960s also nickel, uranium and lead. We also visited the Mining Hall of Fame, where extensive memorabilia from the old mining days was displayed in a large open-air area.
We also drove to BOULDER. This town was merged with Kalgoorlie in 1989. In Boulder only the railroad station is of interest, because the Indian Pacific stops here.
From Kalgoorlie we went on to ESPERANCE. We stayed overnight at the Best Western Hospitality Inn, located directly on the beautiful bay. Esperance took its development around 1895 because many people set out from there for the Gold Spring. Esperance has a mild climate and very beautiful surroundings with many small islands, great beaches and huge nature parks.
The next morning we first explored the Great Ocean Drive near Esperance with some very nice beaches. We made stops at Rotary Lookout with a view of Esperance, the bay and islands, at Twilight Beach and Blue Haven Beach and at Pink Lake.
Another excursion we made was of course to CAPE-LE-GRAND National Park. The national park is located about 50 km from Esperance in southern direction. It is one of the most spectacular parks of Australia with the wild coast, the heath landscape, the granite peaks and the rocks formed by erosion. The first stop we made was at Rossiter Bay.
Lucky Bay has been awarded several times as one of the top 10 beaches in the world. The beach is simply gorgeous, but unfortunately the crystal clear water is so cold that you can probably only swim there with a wetsuit. Each bay is uniquely enclosed with striking granite rocks - simply picturesque postcard motifs!
The imposing Whistling Rock can be seen from far away. It got its name because it seems to whisper depending on the strength of the wind. The sound is created when the wind whistles through the cracks and holes in the rock.
Hellfire Beach - my favorite beach - is located in a sheltered bay and framed by flat rocks. The whole area with the beautiful beaches was completely deserted. After all, we were there for a few hours and didn't see a single person there. The Grand Beach is really - as its name says - huge, also with almost white sand. Unfortunately it was so windy there that we didn't stay there for long.
We went on to ALBANY. Before the harbor in Fremantle was built, Albany was the most important harbor for the British Crown in Australia at that time. Albany has about 16,000 inhabitants and has an extensive natural harbor in the bay "King George Sound". It is the oldest settlement in Western Australia. We were able to rent a nice little house in Albany for a few days. During a walk through the town we saw some nice historic houses. The former whale station is a museum. From Albany you can still watch whales very well. St. John's Church from 1848 is the first Anglican church in Western Australia and reminds of an English country church. From Mount Clarence you have a nice view of the bay and the city.From there we drove to Emu Point beach, but unfortunately there were many annoying flies, so we did not stay long.
The next day we drove over the French Bay Road to the TORNDIRRUP National Park with the Natural Bridge and the Gap. Here you can see fantastic rock formations, formed 47 million years ago when Australia and Antarctica broke apart. Unfortunately the "Blow Holes" did not "blow", but instead there were many annoying flies. The park is 3900 ha large and offers cliffs, crevices and spout holes as well as beaches and lush vegetation between the headlands. A point of interest is the Natural Bridge made of granite. From the "Gap" you can look into a 30 m deep rock cut.
We also made a "side trip" to the 1913 founded STIRLING RANGES National Park. Of the 298 km there we drove 42 km on natural roads. The mountains in the national park are famous for their magnificent play of colors and are partly over 1000 m high and altogether more than 65 km long. There are well signposted but steep hiking trails and many picnic areas. Outside the park is a replica of a 16th century windmill that was still in full operation. A Dutch couple runs a small restaurant in the original 1924 railroad building next door. The highest peak is Bluff Knoll at 1063 meters. After a picnic at Bluff Knoll Lookout we drove the almost 300 km back to Albany.
We continued our trip on Beach Road via Denmark with good surfing possibilities to WALPOLE-NORNALUP National Park. This national park is about 18.000 ha big with rivers, over 400 years old up to 70m high Karri trees with a circumference up to 20 m, waterfalls and many wild flowers in spring. An attraction is the 600 m long Tree Top Walk up to 40 m above the ground, where you get a good impression of the huge trees. Maybe this walk is one of the reasons that the Valley of Giants is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Western Australia
We stayed overnight at the Best Western in Pemperton. From there we made a trip to GLOUCESTER National Park. This park is best known for the huge 62 m high Karri tree. Since 1947 there is one of the highest fire lookouts in the world on this tree. From up there you have of course a fantastic view, if you dare to go up there. My husband was brave enough and climbed up to the "Fire lookout".
AUGUSTA was founded in 1830 and is the third oldest town in Western Australia. We stayed there at the "Holiday Unit Cove". A beautiful beach near Augusta is located in Flinders Bay, and again many annoying flies. This bay is especially popular with surfers. We still ventured - despite heavy rain - to CAPRE LEEWIN, 9 km away. Unfortunately we couldn't get out of the car, it was too stormy to open the car doors. In addition, the rain then became a real downpour. The next day we got out of the car at the lighthouse, which was built more than 100 years ago. Cape Leeuwin is the geographical point where the Indian and the Southern Ocean meet and is also the most southwestern corner of Australia. We still admired the "Water Wheel" that the workers used to get fresh water when building the lighthouse.
MARGARET RIVER was settled by Europeans in 1850 and became a center for agriculture and logging. Now, however, it is dominated by vineyards, as the climate is ideal for growing grapes. The town is located about 10 km from the sea, on the coast there are beautiful beaches and also ideal surfing. It was Christmas Day and we spent the afternoon at Gnarup Beach. We had tried in vain to enjoy a nice Christmas dinner, but unfortunately most restaurants were closed. And those that were open were, of course, fully booked. Fortunately, we had an emergency supply with us, which we then more or less "enjoyed" on the terrace of our room at "Comfort Inn The Grange".... The 2nd Christmas Day then went better: we made a wine tour at various wineries with a gourmet lunch in the program. It went to the wineries "Windance" - had for me the best wines, but they were quite expensive- "Flying Fish" and "Knotting Hill Winery". And finally we visited the Colonial Brewery, a real "hangout" for the Australians.
We continued via Dunsbury at the beautiful Geographic Bay to BUSSELTON. In this area there are about 30 km of beaches to Cape Naturaliste, ideal for all water sports. On the road between Dunsbury and Busselton two kangaroos ran across the road in front of us, which is rarely seen. Because mostly they lie dead on the roadside. Well, these two had survived at least for the moment.
The 2 km long 140 year old "Jetty" in Busselton is a wooden construction, one of the longest jetties in Australia and reminds of the beginnings of the town as a timber handling port. The jetty is only secured on one side, so you have to be careful not to take an involuntary dip. There wasn't too much choice of recommendable accommodation in Busselton, so we only stayed for one night.
BUNBURY is the second largest city in Western Australia and is located on a peninsula. Since the 19th century, the city developed into a busy port and regional industrial center. We had no trouble finding accommodation here, at the "Lighthouse Beach Resort". Bunbury is a good place to watch dolphins. In a large supermarket in Bunbury we bought supplies, because we had rented a small townhouse (Ocean Villas) for a few weeks at our next destination - Scarborough.
SCARBOROUGH or SCARBORO is a small town with about 12,000 inhabitants, 15 minutes by car from Perth. Directly on the beach is the only higher house - a luxury hotel. Otherwise there are luxury villas as well as simple smaller houses - often for rent. At the esplanade you can find restaurants, cafes and small stores. There is a supermarket and of course the "bottle store", which is almost obligatory in Australia, selling alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. A few minutes by car further north you will find a bigger supermarket, and fruit and vegetables can be bought cheaper in Wannerou Market a bit east of Scarboro. There is a bus connection to Perth if you don't want to drive.
Scarboro is known for its beautiful white sand beaches, but the surf is usually very strong. At the beach of Scarboro is actually always "something going on". The kite surfers or bodysurfers can be found on the beach every day in the conditions. On the weekends there are mostly events on the beach, e.g. competitions of the Baywatch teams from different places.
To Trigg Beach, 1.4 km away, you can walk along the promenade and don't have to trudge through the deep sand. South of Scarboro there is Cottesloe Beach or closer to Perth City Beach and further north Sorrento Beach at Hillarys - so you are spoiled for choice with the beaches. It was of course very hot at this time of year, and sporting activities - except water sports - are best postponed to early morning or sometimes late afternoon. Because in the afternoon occasionally came the "Fremantle Doctor" - that is a refreshing wind that blows in the hot summer from Fremantle towards Perth.
On New Year's Eve, we ordered a table in time in a restaurant with first-class seafood, because we didn't want to experience the same disappointment as at Christmas in Margaret River. It was relatively quiet in Scarboro that evening. We drank the chilled champagne in "our" house, since drinking alcohol on the street or on the beach is prohibited. This was also controlled by the police - well, maybe one has made bad experiences.
From Scarboro we also made a trip to JOODALUP LAKE to see the black swans, which to my knowledge only exist in Western Australia.
PERTH with about 1.4 million inhabitants is the third largest city in Australia. It is very remote, because the next bigger city - Adelaide - is about 2700 km away. Perth was founded in 1929 and is today a modern metropolis with high-rise towers, pedestrian zones in the center, shopping centers, many parks and a lively cultural and art scene. In the Australian summer it is very hot and dry, so the already mentioned "Freemantle Doctor" is always welcome. In winter, however, the average temperature is "only" about 17°. Perth is one of the most beautiful cities in Australia and is located at the Swan River and not at the sea as some might assume. The center is easy to explore on foot. Otherwise there are free cat buses with three different routes where you can get a good overview of the city. Worth seeing is the bell tower at Barrack Square and the shopping street "London Court". Directly at Barrack Square there is a much frequented "Hangout". The district of Northbridge is known for many restaurants and entertainment in the evening. Interesting for shopping is the "Outlet Mall Harbour Town". In Perth, despite many modern buildings, there are still historic buildings: e.g. Government House from 1864, Town Hall from 1867 and His Majesty's Theatre from 1904.
The approx. 400 ha large Kings Park was founded at the end of the 19th century and is located above the city center. In former times it was a holy place for the Aborigines. Today the park is still mostly original bush land. It is worth coming here for the beautiful view of the Perth skyline and the Swan River alone. Of course you can also hike and picnic in this large park. The Perth Zoo is located on the south bank of the Swan River and is worth a visit. If you haven't seen kangaroos in the wild, at least you have that opportunity here.
A special for us unforgettable experience in Perth was Australia Day. We exceptionally went by bus from Scarboro to Perth, because on this day parking places in the city are scarce. This day is celebrated like a big folk festival, especially on the banks of the Swan River, which forms a lake here. The Australians organize a huge picnic with the whole family. There is music everywhere and countless events and displays on the water with boats and in the air with helicopters and aerobatic squadrons. As it got dark, 2 helis flew over the water. One with a huge Australian flag, the other illuminated this flag with a spotlight. In addition, the Australian national anthem sounded, which was eagerly sung along. A "goose bumps" experience that we will certainly never forget. Finally, there was a huge fireworks display.
The SWAN VALLEY is mainly known for wine growing. The main town is Guildford. Of course we did not miss the opportunity to visit some wineries, to taste and buy wine. In the Swan Valley you can drive along the Swan Valley Drive. There you will pass the oldest church in Western Australia "All Saints Church". At "Oggies Ice Creamery" you can eat delicious ice cream. And in the German beer garden "Duckstein Brewery" you can drink beer.
We also took a trip from Scarboro to AVON VALLEY. NORTHAM on the Avon with many historic buildings is the largest town in the interior of Western Australia and is located in the heart of the Avon Valley and originated as an agricultural center at the beginning of the colonial period. Around 1890 the town was also one of the gateways to the goldfields of Kalgoorlie. TOODYAY is also home to 19th century architecture. YORK originated in 1831 with many historic 19th century houses is the oldest town in the Avon Valley. In all three villages there are suspension bridges for pedestrians over the river, the longest is in Northam.
The 18 square kilometers large WALYNUGA National Park is located in the Avon Valley. Here was one of the largest Aboriginal settlements in the Perth region. In summer the Avon River has calm, water-filled pools for swimming, but in winter it becomes a raging river with numerous rapids.
YANCHEP National Park is located about an hour's drive north of Perth. The park, about 28 square kilometers in size, was established in 1957 and is rich in fauna and flora. Most people come here to admire koalas. We wanted to hike on the Wetland walk trail - passing Wagurdu Lake and Loch McNess. But unfortunately we had to turn back after 2/3 of the way. A bush fire had destroyed two bridges further ahead - was not indicated at the beginning of the trail...
On the 240 m long Koala Boardwalk you can observe the animals in a natural environment. They are busy either eating or lounging. The area for the koalas is a separate fenced part of the national park - so not quite "free range". But theoretically the animals could leave the area. The big gray kangaroos, which should also be in the park, we have unfortunately not seen - perhaps the wrong time of day.
In FREMANTLE directly at the sea south of Perth - which we already got to know well on a previous trip - there are free cat buses as well. A much visited "hangout" in this town is "Little Creative Brewery" with good pub food. You can also sit outside right on the water.

Tens of thousands of South Carolina mobile homeowners manufactured before 1976 & renting the land it sits upon, can be legally evicted without cause if the Appellate court upholds the verdict of my eviction based solely upon the wording of the 30-day notice of the end of the term of their expired lease agreement.
Many, if not most renters of land in a mobile home park, have leases for one year, which likely have never been renewed from year to year, as the law states.
If my case is not dismissed, it will become 'case law', which can then be used by any greedy, unscrupulous landowner who wants to own your home to evict you and take possession of your home, whether there exists no cause or reason for the eviction.
https://chng.it/kLW47xF2

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