"As if we popped Snow White's cherry, yeah blame that on us too” - a random dwarf.
In Witcher universe Cinderella got eaten whole by a zeugl only a slipper left behind.
In the fablesphere Little match girl had to "branch out" now she's dealing fisstech.
What are your fav that you remember?

Hi there, I need your helpful advice again 😅.
I'm gonna show you what I'm building and why I can't decide on a case, which I hope you will help me choose considering their specs and PRICE... hopefully.
This is the new PC:
- Motherboard: Gigabyte z690 Aorus Elite AX DDR5
- CPU: Intel Core-i5 12600k (bought)
- GPU: PowerColor Red Devil RX 6650 XT (bought)
- Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assasin 120 SE ARGB White (bought)
- Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB Series 32GB (2 x 16)
- Storage: 3 HDD (4TB, 1TB, 512GB*) and 1 SSD (128GB) (own)
*If possible I'll drop the 512 one and buy a 2TB M.2 later. (own)
- PSU: Corsair RM850x Shift*.
*I could probably buy the RM1000x Shift if its price drops a little, it would be $30 more than the 850W, what do you think?
- Peripherals: Keyboard Logitech G413, Mouse Razer Viper Mini, Headphones Hyperx Cloud Stinger S. (own, except the keyboard, gonna buy it soon)
- Others: x5 12mm Case Fans (better having some than none).
​
And well, I can buy the cases for:
- Corsair 5000D Airflow WHITE (not really into white cases) for $115 (+ $10-15 shipping fee)
- Lian Li Lancool 216 RGB BLACK Steel (with Fan controller) for $190 (includes international shipping)
- Corsair 7000D Airflow BLACK (Full tower) for $182 (+$10-15 shipping fee)
​
As you may have noticed, I can buy both Corsair in my country, Peru, just need to pay a shipping fee for another city. And about the Lian Li, I can order it through a web called "tiendamia" and that price includes everything.
My initial idea was to buy just the Corsair 4000D Airflow Black for $89 (same store as the other 2) but it ran out of stock before I could order one and there's no estimated date for restocking (if they ever do it).
A shame nobody in my country sells the Lancool 216 so I have to import it, thank god I found a way instead of just paying more than $100 on Amazon just for shipping.
So, thankful for all your advice (let me know about the PSU too if possible).

Hi guys, new build with following parts
CPU: i5-13600k Mobo: Asus TUF z690 plus wifi Memory: 32gb G skill Z5 6000 mhz DDR5 GPU: Sapphire Nitro + 7900 XTX and MSI 7900 XTX PSU: Maingear 850w 80+ gold
I was able to set everything up properly and download/updated drivers, chipset, firmware, etc.
After a bit, my computer would freeze, sometimes BSOD with the Stopcode mentioned.
I noticed that my mobo has a white light, indicating an issue with the “VGA”
I’ve tried the following: -Disable XMP -using only 1 RAM -reinstalling windows -reconnecting all wired connections -switching out GPUs (got the same problems happening)
Did some research and not sure if it would be an issue with the PSU. The 3 PCI-e connectors are pigtail connectors. I read mixed reviews on using pigtail connectors… so not sure if this might be the issue.
Thanks in advance

1. having a good support system (both financially and mentally) is a true privilege
   
2. being gay is not always harder so much as it is different (depending on where you live)
   
3. some friends may have different morals but their principles are more important
   
4. as someone with an ethnically ambiguous appearance (but still white passing) some will be interested but some will also tokenize or fetishize you. you may also not be not white enough to fit into some spaces and overanalyzing it won’t make you any “whiter”.
   
5. being gay in a straight world also applys to number 4
   
6. homophobia isn’t black and white. sometimes people may not understand or at best tolerate us. this doesn’t mean their evil, just uneducated.
   
7. you can not be someone’s type but still be attractive
   
8. there’s a big difference between being kind and nice
   
9. people who are less intelligent, less kind and more attractive will get ahead of you whether you like it or not
   
10. most people gay men do coke but stay far way from Tina gays
    
11. staying away from drugs is one of the best things you can do as a gay men
    
12. you can go to college and still be a dumbass
    
13. everyone gossips
    
14. anyone who is super political is super fucking annoying.
    
15. circuit music is shit
    
16. traveling to 25 countries I can say without a doubt that American is not the best but also not the worst country
    
17. getting muscular will give you attention from people who wouldn’t even say “hi” before your transformation
    
18. my favorite countries are France, Japan and Turkey. all of them had a unique gay scene.
    
19. American Airlines is worse than Spirit
    
20. your friends, family and significant other aren’t perfect and neither are you.
    
21. many people are insensitive.
    
22. there is no such thing as safe sex, only safer sex. I have always used a condom and contracted Type 1 Herpes (genitally).
    
23. avoid people with a “main character syndrome complex”
    
24. I have been out since I was 11 and for everyone who told me I was too young to know I can definitely say I’m still into men.
    

Previous Post about Andrew Jackson: https://www.reddit.com/democraticparty/comments/13l1wnb/weekly_discussion_democratic_presidents/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
​
Martin Van Buren (December 5, 1782 – July 24, 1862)
Was an American lawyer and statesman who served as the eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party, he served as New York's attorney general, U.S. senator, then briefly as the ninth governor of New York before joining Andrew Jackson's administration as the tenth United States secretary of state, minister to Great Britain, and ultimately the eighth vice president when named Jackson's running mate for the 1832 election. Van Buren won the presidency in 1836, lost re-election in 1840, and failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1844. Later in his life, Van Buren emerged as an elder statesman and an important anti-slavery leader who led the Free Soil Party ticket in the 1848 presidential election.
Cabinet
Panic of 1837
Indian Removal
Texas
Border violence with Canada
Caroline episode
Patriot War of 1837 - 1838
Northern Maine: the Aroostook "War"
Amistad case: victory for the ex-slaves
Judicial Appointments
White House Hostess
Presidential Election of 1840
Election of 1844
Election of 1848
Retirement
Death of Martin Van Buren (July 24, 1862)

4K and $5 each unless noted, I can do bundle discounts as well. Paypal G&S only
Django Unchained (Apple, Google, Vudu) (HD) $3
Dr. Strangelove (MA)
E.T (MA)
The Blues Brothers (MA) (Theatrical Cut Only)
Total Recall (Apple, Vudu)
I can also redeem these off Universal All Access Rewards - 4K and $5 unless listed otherwise , not sure where they redeem but probably MA. I have enough points to redeem 3 titles. The different cuts are separate purchases.
12 Monkeys
Assault on Precinct 13 (2005 remake, HD)
Being John Malkovich (HD)
Fifty Shades of Gray (Unrated or Theatrical)
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And (&) Larry (HD)
Larry Crowne (HD)
Snow White and the Huntsman (Extended or Theatrical)
The Black Dahlia (HD)
This Is 40 (HD, Unrated or Theatrical)
Welcome To Marwen

Before you read this I just want to say you absolutely should not revere what I did.
Please be careful and know your limits. Just because I did 20g doesn’t mean you should. If you want to start diving into the higher doses I highly recommend you watch some of Kalindi Iyis's videos first. If you are still Interested after that start meditating. Get comfortable being alone with your thoughts because that’s all you’re going to have when you dive into these realms. You need to be rock fucking solid mentally and physically.
I’m being fully transparent with what happened minus some of the stuff I was shown. I believe sharing trip reports will only help us understand the mush better and educate people on what you can experience during a “challenging” trip.
Also, my grammar is trash so don’t be mean lol
Please be careful friends.
This was all done at 2130 (9:30 pm) and after fasting all day. I think these two steps are crucial for maximizing the experience.
I took half of the dose as tea (10g) and the other half in a pb sandwich(10g)within a few minutes. That might’ve been the mistake. This was the first trip I did where I did half fruit half powder. I usually do it all as a tea.
First thing that started was my body switching back and forth between changing into some sort of lizard and a cat. Made me curious if we come from an ancient advanced race of lizards or cats?!? Any thought is valid in these states lol.
Next part I got to feel/have/witness the thoughts and actions of the most fucking evil people in the world (hitler types). It felt like they were trying to show me what humans are capable of and how that evil is in all of us. I don’t want to share too much about what they showed me but just for an idea I was essentially at the concentration camps. Not as a prisoner… Somewhere during this I got to feel the immense power that lies within us but we have no idea how to tap into it. (God Complex)
After that I remember trying to go to the bathroom cause I felt like I had to puke or was poisoned and I blacked out as I was crouching down to the toilet. Luckily I placed my hands down otherwise I would’ve bashed my face on the seat 😅😅
I woke up and was trying to tell if the trip was over or not. I started feeling my mouth cause my teeth felt weird and as I did that my hand literally started melting as I touched my face. Everything started melting, my teeth were falling on to the ground, and I basically just collapsed into a puddle of mush (not mushrooms lol). I was like “oh that’s great” (Trying to stay positive so the trip didn’t spiral more. Failed effort). After that death I woke up again and felt like I had to vomit but couldn’t so I basically suffocated and got to experience some sort of asphyxiation type of death. The third death was me being held underwater by what felt like a wave.
For the people that say they don’t see anything with their eyes open, my eyes were open this whole time. These 3 deaths were on repeat for what seemed like maybe 1.5 hours? Kind of hard to tell when you die like 40+ times.
I woke up again and this time I was just laying on my stomach having flashbacks (on repeat) to all the people that warned me to be careful. Also it would pause on each person i knew and tell/show me how I’ve been a piece of shit to them and neglected that friendship. It was pretty emotional realizing how much of an asshole I am and that they all warned me. Worst part was that I realized I was going to be be permanently stuck in this state. I got it in my head that I knew I took mushrooms but that I went too far and this was my reward. I pretty much bundled myself up into the corner of the bathroom and had a full on psychotic break. I was rocking in the corner of my bathroom squeezing myself as hard as I could since I was coming to terms with being stuck in this reality and this was my life now. While sitting there rocking back and forth the walls around me and every single person I knew and loved deteriorated into a white nothingness. It was as if they got digitized and permanently erased. I just fell over to my side and gave in to it all was like well this actually might be my death right now. As the walls/white nothingness got closer to me I could hear someone tell me to “get the fuck up”. I have no idea who it was but I really feel like it saved me from losing my mind. It snapped me somewhat out of the trip. It also said you need to recreate/rebuild your reality. I started with the bathroom and imagined what it looked like. It started to re appear out of the white nothingness. Then I pretended to go through my normal routine of getting ready in the morning. Putting close on etc. Next I had to think about every person I interact with on a daily basis and what my relationship is with them. This felt like several hours worth of work but after I finished I took off my normal clothes and got back in bed.
Last thing I remember them saying was “You fought the Tiger and won” after that I passed out.
I woke back up and it was about 4am. I was fully sober at this time and felt like a fucking king/god.
It was an incredibly humbling experience and the fucked up part is that I would do it again. For me it is fascinating that you can experience an infinite death loop(kept dying the same 3 ways over and over again), psychosis, and feel how strong we truly are all in one horrifically beautiful trip. Blows my mind that a simple fungus can give you an experience like that in a relatively safe way (not for everyone but for me).
It gave me a whole new respect for people that deal with stuff like that(schizophrenia) on a daily basis. I don’t blame them at all for trying whatever they can get to pull them out of that.
Again please be safe people and thank you for reading my trip report. I’ll be posting some of my 10-15g trips soon but I just wanted to get this one out there first since it as the most impactful trip I’ve had to date.
Mush love
🍄💚🤙🤙

Stats: 3.75 GPA, University at Buffalo (73rd ranked business school :/), white, male, and have extracurriculars.
I swapped some classes around and have 15 credits remaining left to graduate. Currently, I'm taking 6 credits in the fall and 9 in the spring (planning to 3-4 days a week in financial firm locally.) I'd like to get my masters from T20, preferably from Cornell since I'm in New York. However, I'm unsure if I should graduate in the fall and begin my working career. I understand that work experience is preferred but is it necessary to break into a T20?
Just really looking for advice on I should graduate this semester and my chances of getting into good programs.

Dear Professor,
​
In order to provide players with a better game experience, we will be performing server maintenance for Neural Cloud on May 30, 2023.
You will not be able to log into the game during the maintenance and the exact end time may be subject to change. Please take note of the update time and schedule your game time accordingly.
*A new client will be put into use after this maintenance. Please go to the application store to download it.
​
Maintenance Time: 2023/5/30 18:30 - 20:00 (UTC-8)
Maintenance Type: Server Shutdown Maintenance
​
[Contents]
- New Doll -
★3 Doll - Clukay
・ Class: Sniper
・ Company: Unknown
​
- For a Limited Time Only -
▼ Exclusive Search - Nighttide Predator
・The probability of obtaining the ★3 Doll Clukay will be increased.
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/20 18:29 (UTC-8)
[Special Notes]
・Doll duplicates can be turned into [Neural Kits] or [Neural Fragments] in [Exclusive Search - Nighttide Predator] by toggling between the 2 options available on the search screen.
・While both [Advanced Search Commands] and [Nighttide 10x Search Command] can be used in [Exclusive Search - Nighttide Predator], the latter will expire when the exclusive search ends. Please take note of the end date.
・The 60-search 3* guarantee for the exclusive search will be counted separately from other search modes. Furthermore, it will not be kept after the exclusive search ends, and for the next exclusive search.
・Since Clukay is exclusively available in the exclusive search, she won't be included into [Targeted Search], [Advanced Search], [Basic Search], [Designated Neural Acquisition] or [Special Search]. Moreover, she can't be obtained via accumulating Neural Fragments.
・Clukay won't be available in [Fragment Search].
・Clukay will be included in future exclusive searches. Please pay attention to further notice.
* Please check the in-game notice on the exclusive search screen for exact details.
▼ Targeted Search - Echo of the Earth's Core
・The probability of obtaining the ★3 Doll Hatsuchiri will be increased.
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/13 18:29 (UTC-8)
▼ Targeted Search - Temptation in White
・The probability of obtaining the ★3 Doll Florence will be increased.
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/13 18:29 (UTC-8)
▼ Limited-Time Event - [Divergent Shadows]
・During the event, you can play through event stages and complete event missions in [Operation Checklist] for rewards.
[Unlock Conditions] Clear Cyclopes Sector Standard Mode Stage 2-15
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/20 18:29 (UTC-8)
[Redemption Deadline] 6/27 18:29 (UTC-8)
▼ Neural Cloud Projection - [Iridescent Musicale] Series
・Clukay - Aflame Accent
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/27 18:29 (UTC-8)
▼ Furniture Set - [Fairground] Limited-Time Rerun
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/27 18:29 (UTC-8)
▼ 7-Day Sign-in Event - [Anniversary Limited-Time Login]
・Over this period, you can obtain Nighttide 10x Search Command, Groove's Projection [Sonic Flurry] and other generous rewards from [Anniversary Limited-Time Login] by signing in consecutively.
[Duration] 5/30 After Maint - 6/14 4:59 (UTC-8)
▼Magrasea Battle Pass - Season 8
・Complete Daily Missions for [Magrasea Battle Pass] Activity Points and level up the pass for generous item rewards.
[Duration] 6/12 05:00 - 7/10 03:59 (UTC-8)
​
- New Content -
▼ Neural Cloud Projection
・[Iridescent Musicale] Series: Clukay - [Aflame Accent] (Live2D & New Voice) will go on sale in the Neural Cloud Projection section of the Supplies Shop.
・[Awakening] series: Aki - [Unsheathed Edge] can be obtained by activating the [Multichannel Battle Pass] and raising it to a certain level.
・[Silhouettes Under Firework Blossoms] series: Groove - [Sonic Flurry] can be obtained from [Anniversary Limited-Time Login].
▼ Arma Inscripta
・Groove - Pulsating Soundwave
​
- Limited-Offer Packages -
▼ 5/30 After Maint - 6/14 04:59
・Welfare A-la-Carte Pack
・Special A-la-Carte Pack
・Exceptional A-la-Carte Pack
・Premium A-la-Carte Pack
*Can be purchased in Standard Battle -> Welfare A-la-Carte Packs
▼ 5/30 After Maint - 6/13 18:29 (UTC-8)
・Nighttide Shadow Supply Pack
・Combat Drill Supply Pack
・Bullet's Trail Supply Pack
▼ 5/30 After Maint - 6/7 04:59 (UTC-8)
・Cat's Claw Key Pack
・Cat's Ear Key Pack
・Cat's Maw Key Pack
*The three packs are purchasable in a sequential order.
▼ 5/30 After Maint - 6/7 04:59 (UTC-8)
・Quartz Surprise Pack
・Shadowy Furniture Pack
・A-la-carte Fragment Pack
・Arma Inscripta Pack
・Special Offer Search Pack
・Sniper Special Supply Pack
・Twilight Furniture Pack
▼ 6/7 05:00 - 6/14 04:59 (UTC-8)
・Early Summer Material Pack
・Early Summer Algorithm Pack
*All packs can be purchased through the Shop, which can be accessed by going from the Main Screen → Supplies → Packs.
​
-Improvements and Adjustments-

1. [Algorithm] Algorithm usage will be displayed in Algorithm Equip screen.
   
2. [Mailbox] Mails can now be starred. Nevertheless, attachments in mails are still subject to expiration. Therefore, please claim them before it's too late.
   
3. [Mailbox] Increased the storage limit from 100 to 500.
   
4. [Mailbox] Optimized the UI of mailbox.
   
5. [Sapience Expansion Program] Optimized the tasks in Sapience Expansion Program. For those who have not completed the program after maintenance, the tasks in their current phase will be reset for them.
   

​
- Fixes-

1. Fixed certain issues with the texts and UI.

​
- Known Issues -
[Magrasea Battle Pass] In BP Season 7, 100 Activity is all that it takes to level up beyond Lv. 50 instead of the usual 500. The issue will be fixed in Magrasea Battle Pass - Season 8.
​
Once the server maintenance is complete, we will send you a mail with Quartz Sand*150 attached. Please stay tuned to our official social media accounts for any updates, and thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
​
​
[Neural Cloud] Operation Team

I'm trying to do the suppressed 3 ALEPHs mission, and I have 4 ALEPH in my facility (NT, MoSB, BS and The Orchestra). I can suppressed NT and MoSB pretty easily but Blue Star is kinda a struggle. I want to do the mission early in the day because I would hate it if I failed when I almost finish the day so I can't EXE too much clerk. Everytime Blue Star breaches it just kinda wipe all the clerk and it always manage to spawn somewhere super far from my employees...
While the Silent Orchestra is kinda too complicated and I don't really have good White Armor so I don't think I can handle it.

Motivation — A Close Reading of Tea Time

"I'm six feet from the edge and I'm thinking: maybe six feet ain't so far down?"
Nimander Golit
Chapter V of Weathered
2002 BS
Click Here for the Introduction to the essay series.

Prelude to the Close Reading

Why, hello there, again. It’s been a few weeks but I promise that this endeavor is still moving forward. For those that don’t know, this essay is a part of a collection I’ll be putting together which investigates the Eleint, their blood, and sorcery within the Malazan shared secondary universe. We’re still laying down our foundations, and today we’ll be covering a sequence of scenes in Chapter 8 of Toll the Hounds.
My intentions were to cover all of the scenes in a single post, but that has proven itself to be difficult. As such, I’ll cover the first scene in this sequence in this post. There’ll be one or two follow-up posts.
There are ten scenes that are in this sequence:

1. Nimander 1
2. Desra 1
3. Desra 2
4. Skintick 1
5. Desra 3
6. Nimander 2
7. Desra 4
8. Kedeviss 1
9. Nimander 3
10. Kedeviss 2

I’ll be approaching these scenes (including the one discussed today) through a few lenses.

A ringing of bells.

In his musings on writing, Erikson discusses the notion of a bell. I’ll let him speak for himself.
In the scenes we’ll be looking at, some of the bells that I believe are used are (and not all of these are represented in this first particular scene):

• Past versus present — ancestors/parents vs. living/children
• How others see us, and how we see others
• The word ‘beast’ and its many meanings
• The words ‘child/children’ and their many meanings
• The relationships between gods and mortals
• Portals/thresholds

Existentialism.

Particularly the genealogy of continental philosophy that led to Sartre’s existentialism and the shared/adapted/bifurcated philosophies of his contemporaries (such as de Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty). This wasn’t my initial intention when I decided to use this sequence of scenes as a launch pad into my collection of essays. However, the beauty of close-reading is that you go into a text with a hypothesis seeking evidence and support, and then end up with new insights.
Some of the concepts that will be brought up are:

• Anxiety
• Facticity and transcendence; Authenticity and bad faith
• The Look/Gaze and being-for-others
• The Absurd and Revolution
• Perception

Genre conventions as grammar.

Particularly, we’ll look at Erikson’s use of genre conventions from the likes of Gothic literature and Weird Fiction — namely the Sublime, cosmic horror, and the Weird — as the subtle language used to convey tension that is congruent with some of the other subtexts. If these grammars are subverted, we’ll try to point that out too.
We will later delve more into Malazan’s literary genealogy in other essays, but I want this lens to be present during the reading to see how Erikson aligns or subverts these genre conventions.
We’ll be using Professor Michael Moir’s YouTube lectures on Weird Fiction as reference.

What the fuck is happening?

This is a question about plot that I will answer at the end of all of the scenes, but keep it in mind as we go through. It has less to do with existentialism and Gothic literature and more on what Gothos was trying to do during these scenes.

Pre-TtH Context

We first meet Nimander and his siblings (unnamed) in House of Chains on Drift Avalii. By Bonehunters, they had left Drift Avalii and ended up at Malaz City, where they then joined Tavore Paran’s fleet while fleeing Malaz City. In Reaper’s Gale, we find the siblings had been ‘adopted’ by Sandalath while they traveled to Lether with the Malazans. Phaed wanted to kill Sandalath. Nimander stopped Phaed from killing Sandalath. Withal (Sandalath’s husband) throws Phaed out a window. The murder is taken as a suicide. The siblings intern Phaed and then meet Clip, who offers to lead them to Anomander in Black Coral via Kurald Galain.
This gets us to Toll the Hounds, where Nimander is being haunted by Phaed. They’ve left Kurald Galain and are now on Genabackis (but not yet to Black Coral). Nimander fears the future meeting his father and the rest of the Tiste Andii. The siblings and Clip ‘stumble’ on Morsko, where Clip is curious about its cult of the Dying God. A ritual takes place there. Nimander and Skintick are nearly enthralled, but are saved by Aranatha (and thus Mother Dark herself). The group then find Clip, who is in a coma. They collect him, and set off in a wagon to follow the Dying God’s priests to Bastion. Along that journey, the siblings stumble upon the High King, Kallor, who reluctantly chooses to not kill them and instead travels with them.
The sequence of scenes in Chapter 8 that we’ll be discussing follows some time after Kallor joins the siblings.
Now that the administrative stuff is out of the way, let’s dive into the first scene.

Nimander 1

Rum-induced memories.

We start this sequence thrust into Nimander’s introspection on ‘rage’ as a breaking of a vessel, impossible to fix. He recalls Deadsmell’s musings that ‘rage in battle’ was a gift while the two drank rum. Rum that awakened memories once ignored by Nimander.
(Note: in Scene 2, we’ll see Desra’s view of Nimander, and we’ll see that Nimander’s ruminations on rage here are what inform Desra’s view of him, and not in the way that Nimander’s doubt imagines.)
In the previous post, we discussed memories and their decay. So much of this series and the lore surrounding it is driven by the memories of ancient beings. Nimander is younger with respect to ancient beings (but ancient nonetheless), and even he struggles with his memories. Perhaps this is a result of the traumas he’s experienced with respect to his being in diaspora and perceived abandonment by his father (a symmetry itself with Rake’s — and the Tiste Andii as a whole — relationship with Mother Dark).
He recalls the rum lighting “a fire in [his] brain, casting red light on a host of memories gathered ghostly round the unwelcoming heart.” He reminisces on the time after Kurald Galain (but before Drift Avalii) and his father’s emotional indifference. He recalls the pranks him and his kin would pull on Endest Silann; the arrival of Andarist and his arguments with Anomander. It is unclear what the arguments were — if you’ve read Forge of Darkness, you might be able to infer what’s likely, but I’m curious if the argument is Andarist asking to take the siblings and Anomander refusing, or Anomander asking Andarist to take the children and Andarist was reluctant? Was the argument about Anomander thrusting the Hust blade, T’an Aros/K’orladis (i.e., Vengeance / Grief), onto Andarist or did Andarist already possess the blade? We don’t know exactly to my knowledge, but it’s fun to speculate.
Regardless, Nimander recalls, like a certain inscribed hearthstone, there was peace. Andarist was to take them all through a threshold, a portal elsewhere (as mentioned, portals end up being a rung bell, so pay attention). Nimander remembers Endest’s weeping as the children were pulled through a “portalway into an unknown, mysterious new world where anything was possible.”
Andarist raised the Tiste Andii children on that portal’s other side, on Drift Avalii. We know (or can infer) that this was a task to protect the Throne of Shadow, but Nimander and his kin didn’t understand this as children. But Andarist led them with his pragmatism, he ensured they learned how the world was. With our knowledge of Kharkanas, this is so powerful. We know Anomander’s hubris was abused as a motivating factor for Hunn Raal’s despicable acts. We know that Andarist likely lacks children of his own in response to this, and so his taking on guardianship over the children of his brother — that very same brother that rejected Andarist’s grief in favour of vengeance (and materialised in the T’an Aros/K’orladis dichotomy) — is a stark, challenging, and ultimately selfless decision.
But this pragmatism created child soldiers. The collision of reality’s necessity to survive and carry out the duty of protecting the Throne of Shadow came at the expense of what little remaining childhood innocence Rake’s brood still had (even as a people on the run, exiled from their home due to a sociopolitical schism). Andarist became a stern teacher, juxtaposed to the echoes of Endest’s gentleness. “The games ended. The world turned suddenly serious.” Nonetheless, the Tiste Andii siblings grew to love Andarist.
Nimander continues his introspection:

See a bored child with a stick — and see how every beast nearby flees, understanding well what is now possible and, indeed, probable.

This reminds me of a general rule of advice: ‘never fuck around when a child has gun.’ Tiste Andii or not, children can be cruel especially when mixed with unknown doses of trauma and violence. Regardless, I want to call attention here that this notion of children and beasts are each bells rung. To Nimander, Andarist “unleash[ed] them, these children with avid eyes.” He “had made them good soldiers,” ones that know rage.
Vessels broken.
As such, from his own experience, Nimander suspects that the Dying God is a child. He speaks to the dialectic between gods and their worshippers (another bell rung):

The mad priests poured him full, knowing the vessel leaked, and then drank of that puerile seepage. Because he was a child, the Dying God’s thirst and need were without end, never satiated.

The group stumbles on desiccated bodies staked among fields: dried up, tapped of their libations. This speaks to a particular exploitation between mortal and god, symbolised literally as worshippers feeding a god to then become the harvested. This perpetuates the Dying God’s power to accumulate more worshippers via addictive kelyk. The language here shows that the Dying God has stumbled upon a sort of cheat code, an exploitation of the god-mortal dialectic that allows him and his priests to arbitrage power. Like a cancer that, via the law of large numbers, is equipped with the mechanisms to divert a body’s resources to it while it slowly destroys the body.
The scarecrows being in fields is such a perfect choice of this analogy: things to be harvested. A product, a commodity — a thing with both use-value and exchange-value, for our Marxians out there. I believe Erikson has said that he was thinking of oil here, and that is fine by itself, but I do like the mirroring to Eucharistic transubstantiation in Catholicism (due to my being a very-very-lapsed Catholic). Especially with wine, an extremely addictive substance, transcending into God’s blood to cleanse us as cannibalistic sacrament.

Dal Honese burial practices.

Nimander sees these fields as “bizarre cemeteries, where some local aberration of belief insisted that the dead be staked upright, that they ever stand ready for whatever may come." This makes him recall some shipwrecked Dal Honese on Drift Avalii. He thinks on the ancestor cult and burial practices of Dal Hon: literally constructing their homes with their dead in the walls as both material and essence, the building stretching out with additional rooms as time moved on and kin died.
This reminds me of the Neolithic proto-city, Çatalhöyük, found in Anatolia within modern-day Türkiye where ancestors have been found to be buried beneath platforms in living quarters. See: Chapter 6 of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow.
With or without intention, I like to view this ritual via an existentialist lens, particularly Sartre’s notion of the Look. To Sartre — in contrast to other phenomenologies — being is in flux, some path of a given chaotic double-pendulum switching to and from poles of being-in-itself***\**¹* and being-for-itself***\**²*. The Look, to Sartre, is a sort of symmetry breaking — a realisation by being-for-itselves that decentralises it, the sudden awareness of its being an object, an Other, to Other consciousnesses.
A heuristic often used to showcase Sartre’s notion of the Look (or Gaze) is that of a voyeur peeping through a keyhole into someone’s room that hears a noise down the hall. Regardless if that noise is from another person (another being-for-itself) or not (say, the house settling), the subjective voyeur suddenly objectifies themselves, collapsing the chaotic pendulum from being-for-itself (nothingness as "no thing-ness") to their facticity — their being-in-itself, their thing-ness — whose meaning to Other being-for-themselves is relative to a separate centre than the voyeur’s own.
To Sartre, the resulting anxiety experienced snapping from subject to object is a proof against any nihilistic approach to solipsism. The fact that we can Other our own being-for-itself means that we can also recognise being-for-itself external to us since those we Other too can Other us as we Other ourselves. The reflexivity as a result of the Look is evidence against solipsism to Sartre.
As a result, this Dal Honese practice is a cultural self-burdening via Sartre’s Look by literally having your ancestors clay-filled bodies decentralise your subjectivity and externalise you as an object that can be judged by its facticity. This results in a sort of collective Dal Honese being-for-others, Sartre would argue. This isn’t inherently good or bad to existentialists, but it does necessitate a calculus that discerns if the living descendants are authentically expressing their freedom with each moment they accept this practice, or if they are living in bad faith.
Regardless, though, this is a haunting of the Past. This haunting isn’t something that is only important to existentialism or other philosophical traditions (such as post-structuralism — see: Derrida’s hauntology), but to the genre conventions and tropes of Gothic horror and its descendants (such as cosmic horror, weird fiction, and their influences on sword and sorcery, etc.).
There are mappings (some more subtle than others) between the Sublime and the existential anxiety and dread experienced in phenomena similar to the Look. The experience of looking upon the vastness of the sea, of stumbling upon an ancient statue, of learning of the size of the universe — which are described as the Sublime, the Weird, or Eldritch in some literary traditions (e.g., Romantic, Gothic, Horror, the Weird, etc.) — are the same experiences that are often analysed in continental philosophies using words such as angst/anxiety/despaiabsurdity/alienation.
Nimander goes on to further expose the relationship between this Dal Honese ancestor cult and inter-tribal conflicts that lead to deaths and stolen bodies that leave physical voids in Dal Honese architecture. He muses how this physical representation of wounds begets a cycle of vengeance (a cultural tradition, a product of facticity and bad faith): “blood back and forth,” he says. He mentions that this cycle is what pushed the shipwrecked Dal Honese from their homes, an act of revolt and perhaps even authenticity to Sartre. Eventually the Dal Honese recovered and “paddled away — not back home, but to some unknown place, a place devoid of unblinking ghosts staring out from every wall.”
I love that Erikson has this whole little short story in this scene, especially in the contrast of its being some rum-induced reflection by Nimander on his own past’s haunting of him and his siblings. Moreover, these Tiste Andii are travelling with Kallor, the Undying Unascendant: a being-for-itself that literally manifests the past’s haunting on the present — a man cursed, jaded, who carries the past with him wherever he travels. All of these together show that one’s freedom can have one flee (even be redeemed — which balances with other plotlines in TtH), but that doesn’t necessarily — nor sufficiently so — annihilate the past.

Finding a tower.

After this, Nimander’s reminiscing is interrupted by his hearing Kallor nearby (like a footstep in a hallway). Kallor comments on the use of the corpses and notes that the flora “[is] not even native to this world, after all.” Nimander replies that the corpses are being used for saemankelyk. The mention of the plants not being native to this world should orient the reader back to the Weird, especially since it brings upon a sense of unease, an Othering — the house settling that again serves to reduce both Nimander and the readers to our thing-ness
‘The past’ versus ‘the present’ versus ‘the future’ (and their hauntings of one another) bubble up again with some banter between Skintick and Kallor about the state of things. Kallor states ‘nothing changes.’ Skintick counters ‘it keeps getting worse,’ to which Kallor claims is but an illusion.
I find this dialogue to be a comical little conflict between Kallor’s perceived-postmodern, nihilistic judgement of the state of things being inert versus Skintick’s pseudo-Rousseauian, inverted-Hegalian, modernist grand narrative of things getting worse.
Again, it alludes to a haunting of the past on the current generation. Interestingly, this is a trend within the Book of the Fallen in general: not as an espousing of the ‘old vs. young’, but Erikson’s decentering/challenging/deconstruction of that binary. Think of Raest in GotM; Menandore, Sukul and Sheltatha in RG; Karsa in HoC; the Witness trilogy. He does this via a sort of Ancient's Hubris colliding with its differences to the Present’s Ingenuity, and this being dual to the Present’s Naivety colliding with the Ancient Wisdom.
Kallor eventually hits a sore spot with the Tiste: he brings up Rake. Unlike the Dal Honese whose freedom had them flee the cultural practices of letting their ancestors haunt both literally and figuratively, Nimander and his siblings were pulled/pushed away from their father (and people) as children — by what very well could be their father’s request. The Tiste siblings are haunted by Anomander’s active absence. Their continued distance from their father isn’t an act of expressing their freedom against an Ancestor’s Gaze — it isn’t an act of revolution — it is their facticity and a source for their Othering of themselves. We often see this from Nimander’s POVs up to and including this sequence.
Kallor sniffs out this weakness and presses upon the wound. Nimander gets flustered and retorts. To which Kallor responds:

'Anomander Rake is a genius at beginning things. It’s finishing them he has trouble with.'

Damn, Kallor.
Also, I didn’t need my ADHD called out so harshly, dude. What the fuck.
Without diving into what Erikson was dealing with while writing this book, this hits hard for Nimander, and is an interesting commentary nonetheless. His father, Anomander, is the leader of a diasporic people who’ve been without home, without a centre, for 400,000 years. I think Kallor’s words hurt Nimander so much because the Tiste siblings don’t know Anomander’s current plans nor have they experienced the "settling-down" from the unveiling of Kurald Galain in what is now Black Coral. They are unaware of Rake’s teleology for his people, for himself even. Regardless, we see again and again that Kallor isn’t just a strong skirmisher, his words cut nearly as well as his blades.
Kallor goes on to confirm that he knows Rake before the group notices a ruined tower among the alien plants and scarecrows. Kallor says its Jaghut. Kallor trudges forth indifferently, pushing corpses out of his way as he bee-lines it to the ruined tower. I don’t think such a sequence of action has ever described Kallor’s whole raison d’être and modus operandi so well: just a man seemingly indifferent to the corpses in his path as his will pulls him forward.
We get a small interaction between Skintick and Nimander that reveals Skintick’s acuity in reading Kallor’s take on Rake. Kallor sees their father as an equal (it isn’t just the readers that need to be keen to subtext, characters do too).
Skintick offers the idea of sicking Kallor on the Dying God, hoping he “decid[es] to do something for his own reasons, but something that ends up solving our problem.” I like the use of “deciding to do something for his own reasons,” as this aligns so well with authenticity in existentialism (and the absence of some absolute morality for authenticity).
As Nimander approaches the tower behind Kallor, both Nimander and the readers get a great sense of horror, the weird, the uncanny, and the sublime with how Erikson describes the scenery:

Drawing closer to the ruin, they fell silent. Decrepit as it was, the tower was imposing. The air around it seemed grainy, somehow brittle, ominously cold despite the sun’s fierce heat.
The highest of the walls revealed a section of ceiling just below the uppermost set of stones, projecting without any other obvious support to cast a deep shadow upon the ground floor beneath it. The facing wall reached only high enough to encompass a narrow, steeply arched doorway. Just outside this entrance and to one side was a belly-shaped pot in which grew a few straggly plants with drooping flowers, so incongruous amid the air of abandonment that Nimander simply stared down at them, disbelieving.

Nimander notes an incongruity of this place — its aesthetic of abandonment juxtaposed with a curated garden. “The cold despite the sun’s fierce heat.” This evokes a certain unsettledness to Nimander (and thus, the reader). These genre conventions are sources of tension and anxiety, similar to non-diegetic violins building up to a real or false jump-scare in a slasher flick.
Arrogantly, Kallor chooses to go out of his way and insult the presumed Jaghut within the tower. Classic Kallor. The Jaghut replies “nothing changes,” resulting in Kallor shooting Skintick and Nimander a “pleased smirk.”

Tea time, but before falling into a rabbit-hole and not after.

Before Kallor can announce himself, the Jaghut lists off Kallor’s titles, his facticity. Kallor’s reputation precedes him and there’s an asymmetry here in which the Jaghut knows who Kallor is but Kallor doesn’t yet know who the Jaghut is. This is our first hint that this meeting isn’t serendipitous, and is instead an intentional interaction with regards to the plot. And if this Jaghut knows of Kallor, does he know those who Kallor travels with? Who is this Jaghut’s intended audience among those options?
I also like the play here with facticity: the Jaghut lists out things about Kallor, but is Kallor some sum of those thing-nesses? How many are true, how many are manufactured myths? It’s an act by this Jaghut to Gaze upon Kallor, to show to Kallor that he’s being seen. It’s a deliberate tactic to destabilise and decenter Kallor: an offensive.
We as readers are informed of Kallor’s limitations from the Azathanai curses via Draconus, K’rul and Nightchill, but these limitations on Kallor don’t necessarily restrict his freedom until Kallor allows them.
We get a flash of Jaghut humour and guest rites — this ancient dismisses Kallor while inviting everyone in for tea. Interestingly, Erikson has this Jaghut use the proper noun of ‘Others’ which lends me to think that an existentialist lens hasn’t been the worst pick (not that ‘Othering’ is strictly existentialist by any means).
So, we’ve had corpses drained dry for kelyk, alien plant-life, a ruined tower of an unknown age stumbled upon beyond the urban, a preternatural creature to Nimander and his kin (something they’ve maybe only witnessed a handful of times) and then we get this description:

The air of the two-walled chamber was frigid, the stones sheathed in amber-streaked hoarfrost. Where the other two walls should have been rose black, glimmering barriers of some unknown substance, and to look upon them too long was to feel vertiginous — Nimander almost pitched forward, drawn up only by Skintick’s sudden grip, and his friend whispered, ‘Never mind the ice, cousin.’
Ice, yes, it was just that. Astonishingly transparent ice–

I love this. First: “it was just that” screams “no it isn’t” to anyone paying attention to the words Erikson is using to make the reader uncomfortable. We know: Jaghut + Ice = Omtose Phellack. The atmospheric setting here is directly being called out in not just a sublime way, but his description has an added layer of horror to Omtose Phellack.
Erikson uses “vertiginous,” giving both Nimander and us a sense of vertigo, being decentred and unoriented. This isn’t too different from descriptions found in works like Vandermeer’s Annihilation or other New Weird authors. This ice wall calls to Nimander, draws from him feelings of unknown when he’s caught himself staring for too long — emphasis on staring.
For all intents and purposes, this ice wall is a thing, a being-in-itself, neither active nor passive. But its effect on Nimander is similar to the Dal Honese ancestors’ Gaze — this ice wall objectifies him, calls to him, evokes his being-for-others, and emotionally alienates him. The pull Nimander feels is his submitting his being-for-itself with the freedom of those that Gaze upon him. A justification of his facticity, his bad faith. This will be important later.
Eventually we get this awesome line from the Jaghut host:

’Once, long ago, a wolf god came before me. Tell me, Kallor, do you understand the nature of beast gods? Of course not. You are only a beast in the unfairly pejorative sense — unfair to beasts, that is. How is it, then, that the most ancient gods of this world were, one and all, beasts?’

There’s so much going on to unpack in this paragraph.

• He’s called Kallor a beast, but says his doing so is unfair to beasts (damn, this ice orc just roasted Kallor).
• It calls back to Nimander’s thoughts on children wielding sticks and beasts fleeing as a result. With or without knowing it, this Jaghut is calling Kallor a child, too, in the pejorative sense, unfair to children.
• He says the first gods were beasts, but does he mean these early gods were explicitly Beasts (in essence, not the pejorative sense) or that they were beast-like akin to the pejorative sense used on Kallor (or some combination of both)?
  • Interestingly, we know that this wolf god is possibly an Azathanai d’ivers from FoL — with this knowledge, would Fanderay and Togg count as a Beast-as-literal-beast beast-god?

Later, again, we get this Jaghut saying Others as a proper noun, and then the Others are called Tiste Andii.

‘Ah, and what of the Others with you? Might not they be interested?’
Clearing his throat, Skintick said, ‘Venerable one, we possess nothing of worth to one such as you.’
‘You are too modest, Tiste Andii.’
‘I am?’
'Each creature is born from one not its kind. This is a wonder, a miracle forged in the fires of chaos, for chaos indeed whispers in our blood, no matter its particular hue. If I but scrape your skin, so lightly as to leave but a momentary streak, that which I take from you beneath my nail contains every truth of you, your life, even your death, assuming violence does not claim you. A code, if you will, seemingly precise and so very ordered. Yet chaos churns. For all your similarities to your father, neither you nor the one named Nimander — nor any of your brothers and sisters — is identical to Anomander Dragnipurake. Do you refute this?’

Above, the Jaghut goes on to describe genetics, but also calls out the fact that they are children of Anomander — dude definitely knows more than he’s leading on, that’s for sure, and is winking directly to us readers, seemingly going over the heads of both Kallor and the Tiste. Also, the bit about chaos in blood will come up again and again in later scenes and later essays.
Moreover, we see that the Jaghut says that which he scrapes "contains every truth of you, your life, even your death" — our genetics are facticities, among our thing-nesses. "Yet chaos churns," the Jaghut rebuts. That chaos in our blood is a source of our "no thing-ness," from which we may express our freedom against the determinism of genetics — of facticities — and transcend.

For each kind of beast there is a first such beast, more different from its parents than the rest of its kin, from which a new breed in due course emerges. Is this firstborn then a god?’

I love this for two reasons. One, it speaks to a criticism of the assumption that a prime-mover is necessarily divine. But, through the existentialist lens, it’s a challenge and criticism of the presumed Authority of Genealogy. Jumping back to the early musings on ancestry: if ancestors haunt us and dictate our facticity as a result of suppressing our being-for-itself, then where does that chain of dictating/suppressing end? And is that terminus also an Authority above all generations below it just due to its being something new, something sufficiently different from its own genealogy, its ancestors ‘behind’ it?
I also like the subtext of trauma as hereditary here with the double entendre behind ‘beast’, we can think of this Jaghut as asking if the primordial source of generational trauma has authority over its descendants? What does this dialogue mean for Nimander and his siblings and their place with respect to their father and the rest of the Tiste Andii people? Does this inform an analysis of Nimander’s chaotic double-pendulum between being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and his being-for-others?
A huge thing I would like to point out here, too, is that neither Skintick, Nimander, nor Kallor have used the Tiste Andii’s names, yet this Jaghut knows them by name. Kallor could deduce they were Rake’s children, but he didn’t know their names. Even though Skintick showcased an acuity to subtext when considering Kallor’s opinions of Rake, he doesn’t catch onto this subtlety. This Jaghut not only knows of Kallor, he knows of Nimander and his siblings. The evidence that this meeting isn’t serendipity continues to build.

‘You spoke of a wolf god,’ Skintick said. ‘You began to tell us a story.’
‘So I did. But you must be made to understand. It is a question of essences. To see a wolf and know it as pure, one must possess an image in oneself of a pure wolf, a perfect wolf.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Kallor grunted. ‘See a strange beast and someone tells you it is a wolf — and from this one memory, and perhaps a few more to follow, you have fashioned your image of a wolf. In my empires, philosophers spewed such rubbish for centuries, until, of course, I grew tired of them and had them tortured and executed.’

This sequence of dialogue is fantastic and reminds me of arguments foagainst the strong/weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/es. We see the Jaghut musing on a seemingly prescriptive Platonic idealism that Kallor interrupts with a more descriptive, pragmatic, empirical framework in which he follows with a jest of torturing and executing philosophers (remind me to never live in the Kallorian Empire).
Kallor speaks as if his words contradict the Jaghut and show the assumed idealism to be wrong. But, by Kallor’s own argument, the Jaghut’s words of ‘pure’ and ‘perfect’ are just as empirically contingent to one’s memories as ‘wolf’ is. The combinations of signs and symbols language users use give flesh to those signs’ and symbols’ own meaning — but bury that meaning beneath the flesh by doing so. The concept of a ‘perfect wolf’ (i.e., ‘perfect’ + ‘wolf’) emerging from one’s own contingency with the notion of ‘perfect’ and ‘wolf’ is entirely possible without that imagined ‘perfect wolf’ being actually some idealisation, i.e., some Platonic Perfect Wolf.
The Jaghut responds with laughter to Kallor’s absurdity: both in his misinterpretation of the Jaghut’s musings as well as the nature of Kallor’s brutal reaction to those that question things he finds to be rubbish. This pairs well with Skintick’s future POV in this sequence, but the contrast between Kallor and this Jaghut is entertaining nonetheless. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish when Kallor is telling the truth about his brutality or if his mutterings are just words congruent to his reputation.
The two then have a pissing contest. We find out the Jaghut was in disguise — I don’t have the evidence or time here to say, but there are ideas that this particular Jaghut is a d'ivers and it is fucking awesome even if untrue. The discussion here points to some T’lan Imass’ Jaghut War. It being the Kron, I’m inclined to wonder if there is a relationship with the bones Karsa stumbles upon in HoC (where he and his war party find Calm).

Skintick squatted to pick up two of the cups, straightening to hand one to Nimander. The steam rising from the tea was heady, hinting of mint and cloves and something else. The taste numbed his tongue.

Don’t take candy from strangers tea from Jaghut, people.
We find out that Raest is this Jaghut’s child. We find out that this Jaghut took on 43 T’lan Imass and a Bonecaster, killing them all. This is a threat rallied back against Kallor’s assertion that he’s killed Jaghut.

Teeth bared, Kallor bent down to retrieve his cup.
The Jaghut’s left hand shot out, closing about Kallor’s wrist. ‘You wounded that wolf god,’ he said.

Oh shit. What follows is one of the first times I can recall that Kallor is scared. Contrast with his earlier treatment of Rake as equal.

'Oh, be quiet, Kallor. This tower was an Azath once. Shall I awaken it for you?’
Wondering, Nimander watched as Kallor backed towards the entrance, eyes wide in that weathered, pallid face, the look of raw recognition dawning. ‘Gothos, what are you doing here?’
‘Where else should I be? Now remain outside — these two Tiste Andii must go away for a while.’

The revelation: the Jaghut is none other than the Lord of Hate himself, Gothos. You can understand why Kallor, always so arrogant, submits to Gothos and listens to his instruction.
Immediately after the reveal, Skintick and Nimander succumb to the effects of whatever extra ingredient Gothos had slipped into their tea. We get this final sequence:

Nimander’s eyes were drawn once more to the walls of ice. Black depths, shapes moving within.
He staggered, reached out his hands–
‘Oh, don’t step in there–’
And then he was falling forward, his hands passing into the wall before him, no resistance at all.
‘Nimander, do not–’
Blackness.

Again, the readers eyes are drawn along with Nimander's to the icy, abyss-like, objectifying, Gazing threshold. Here's where the sublime and the weird really flavour the setting in this scene.
There's a bell’s echo here from the start of this scene: this sequence starts with Nimander discussing the uncertainty related to moving through a portal with Andarist away from the rest of his kin, a breaching. During these final lines of this first scene, we get a tension between us and the unknown, between what has happened and that-which-is-to-come, between what we’ve imagined about Malazan’s cosmos and some contorting of those assumptions. What’s beyond the veil decentres not only Nimander in its draw and pushing him to being-for-others, but it decentres the readers too. Hic sunt dracones, terra incognita, the sublime, the enigmatic, the terror. We’re made to feel small and inconsequential by this icy threshold.
It isn’t mysterious because it evades our Gaze like other fantastical things (e.g., many renditions of some archetypal tricksters found within various folklores), instead it invites our Gaze eventually since It Gazes back (almost Nietzschean).

Thoughts

Calling back to the genre conventions, this extended scene is one that definitely plays with the established conventions of Gothic literature and its descendants. Constantly, Erikson hits us with tension sewn into his choice of words in Nimander’s ruminations, his angst associated to diaspora, the notion of Dal Honese ancestors gazing upon their descendants from clay walls, absent ancestors that too haunt the same, the fields of scarecrows as desiccated (and harvested) bodies of worshippers, the alien plant-life, the ancient Jaghut tower, the ice threshold. Each of these (and those unmentioned) add onto to the dissociation (de-centering) of both Nimander and us, the readers. Each of us seem small and inconsequential to the dynamism of the cosmos: everything we know, including that of what we already know about the Malazan universe (and our own) can be challenged. We’re each just travellers who have stumbled upon a shattered visage in the desert that reads: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
This stands in contrast to — almost a revolution against — the modalities one can garnish from the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment that favour an almost religious rationalism and positivism. This is why I believe (and hope I have shown) that the existentialist (and those schools of thought peripheral to it) lens is apt. The genealogy of Gothic literature serves as a grammatical sandbox that gives way to exploring the things that existentialism tries to frame in its study, such as the dread and anxieties — the nothingness (no thing-ness) — of being.
Not only are the Dal Honese clay-filled ancestors present to alienate the reader by entertaining a certain ‘exoticism’ (by the readers’ juxtaposing such practices against what we consider ‘normal’ — here's where Sartre is applied to White or Male Gazes), but they are there as conduits for understanding how Nimander is affected by Others, by their Looks — his siblings, his absent father, his dead uncle, Kallor, Gothos, and the icy threshold — even if this ‘othering’ is one done only by Nimander onto himself (the house settling perceived as a footfall). This becomes more important in the scenes that follow.
So, how does this relate to the Eleint, dragonblood or sorcery? If you want to know now, please read ahead in the text — i.e., he future scenes in this sequence in Chapter 8 of TtH — you’ll find out. Otherwise, I’ll attempt to provide more clarity in the follow-up post(s). Until then, I just want put forth some questions:

• Are the Eleint actually dragons in the usual fantastical/conventional sense, or are they something different, something alien, something terrifying, something that evokes horror?
• If meaning-making (and, as such, essentializing) — according to my reading of existentialism — is a choice of ascribing/burying the Real with its facticity, what does this mean for K’rul’s warrenification and the birth of sorcery? What does this mean for aspecting, particularly for the Eleint and the Azathanai?

Beyond those questions (which align with my grander narrative shared in this collection of essays) — in regards to the plot, I think it is smart to continue asking, ‘why has Gothos ensured that Anomander’s children and Kallor would stumble upon his tower?’
¹ the facticity of what can be understood as objective states ascribed to things, including social constructions — thing-ness — e.g., how things are thrown into the world, a mode of existence that simply is, the contingent being of ordinary things, such the language(s) one speaks, one’s occupation, etc.
² the mode of existence of consciousness that stands in contrast to being-in-itself, “no thing-ness”, that which negates being-in-itself

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor	$309.99 @ Amazon
Thermal Compound	Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 1 g Thermal Paste	$8.36 @ Amazon
Motherboard	ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax Mini ITX LGA1700 Motherboard	$149.99 @ Newegg
Memory	Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory	-
Storage	SK Hynix Platinum P41 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	$156.00
Video Card	Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 GB Video Card	$449.00
Monitor	Gigabyte G27Q 27.0" 2560 x 1440 144 Hz Monitor	$239.99 @ Newegg
Monitor	Gigabyte G27Q 27.0" 2560 x 1440 144 Hz Monitor	$239.99 @ Newegg
Mouse	Logitech G305 (White) Wireless Optical Mouse	$38.98 @ Newegg
Headphones	Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO Headphones	$159.00 @ Amazon
Custom	NZXT H1 Version 2 - CS-H11BW-US - Small Form-Factor ITX Case - Dual Chamber Airflow - Tinted Tempered Glass Front Panel - 140mm Liquid Cooler - SFX 750W 80+ Gold PSU - PCIe Gen4 Riser - White	$200.00
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	$1951.30
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-05-29 23:32 EDT-0400

Here's an easy way to clean the microwave:

1. Fill a microwave-safe bowl with 1 cup of water and 1 tablespoon of white vinegar.
2. Microwave the bowl on high for 5 minutes, or until the water boils and the inside of the microwave is steamy.
3. Carefully remove the bowl from the microwave and use a damp cloth or sponge to wipe down the inside of the microwave.
4. For tough stains or baked-on food, dip a cloth or sponge in the hot water and vinegar solution and scrub the area until clean.
5. Use a dry cloth or paper towel to wipe the inside of the microwave dry.
6. For a fresh scent, you can add a few drops of essential oil to the water and vinegar solution before microwaving.

https://honesthoneyreviews.blogspot.com/?m=1