Hey all, so I’ve had an Indonesia trip planned for months now, starting off with Jogja in July, together with my partner.
I’ve heard only good things about Jogja - from the amazing views, rich culture and it’s safety, which made it one of my most anticipated cities to visit in Asia. However, I came across this video recently.
Hence, I am slightly worried - more for the safety of my partner rather than my own. Just wanted to know - Is the Kiltih as dangerous and rampant as the video makes it out to be, or is it just dramatisation on their part?
I do wish to go ahead with visiting Jogja because I’ve been looking forward to visiting this beautiful city so much, but if my worries are granted, I might reconsider. 🥲
Any feedback would be appreciated, and thanks in advance.

TL;DR I crushed on a beautiful girl for about a year. I did everything I could to get close to her and it didn't work. She ended up telling me that she didn't feel any attraction to me, and also she's been hanging out with another guy. Trying to figure out what I did wrong.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to get in a lot of details so I can get some answers on why I got rejected.
I (m19) met the most perfect girl this past year in one of my classes. She's sweet, kind, smart, and absolutely STUNNINGLY beautiful! She (20f) and I met when she sat next to me the first day off class. It was a big lecture hall class (about 200 people) and we did some get to know you games with the people around us. She was really smiley and friendly with me. Then on Fridays, we had our breakout classes, which were about 20-25 people. This girl, whom I'll call "Annie" was in my breakout class, and we got assigned to work together on a group project. I got to know her better and found out that she had just about everything I was looking for. Not only was she nice and gorgeous, but she was also not really a party girl, and I was pretty sure she was a virgin. That was important for me because I'm a virgin and I want to share my first time with a special girl who's also sharing her first time with me. I just can't imagine a girl I love giving herself to another guy; I'd be worried that I wouldn't be able to pleasure her as well as him being a virgin, and I would worry that she still has feelings for the guy who took her V-card, or if she had multiple guys before me that sex wouldn't be as special and intimate for her as it will be for me.
I started thinking about her all the time. The best time of my weeks were in that class because I got to talk to Annie. I tried to look her up on IG and Facebook and stuff, but none of the profiles with her name were her, and I was afraid to ask her at first because I didn't want to seem like a creep. But I also wanted to move things forward with her, so I didn't to limit my time to just talking to her in class, and I wanted to get to know her and hang out with her casually before I asked her on a date. I started becoming friends with one of her friends, and I started to hang out a bit more with them. I never really got the chance to talk to Annie one on one very much in the group, and sometimes we never really got to talk at all. When we did, sometimes she'd be really nice and laugh at my jokes and stuff and show interest in me, but then if I responded to her, she'd just give me short answers. To try and talk to her alone, sometimes I would make an excuse that I was going up to the bookstore on campus, which was near her dorm, so that I could walk with her. Sometimes she was really friendly with me, and other times she would just give me one word answers and if I asked if she was okay, she'd always say yeah, she was just thinking about work she had to do. I had her number since we needed it to communicate for our group project, and then we had another class together the next semester. I was always nervous about texting her, so usually I'd make up an excuse to ask something about class, and then go into a conversation. Sometimes she'd say a lot of stuff to me, and other times I would text her a lot and she'd just say "yeah," "no" "idk" and stuff like that. So overall, I was getting a bunch of mixed signals from her.
This went on for most of the year. Then I started getting bad news. First, I finally asked her if she had anything online and she said Facebook and Instagram, but she didn't use it. I asked anyway how to look her up and she told me and sure enough, both her FB and IG pages looked like they hadn't been updated in about five years. But then, on another friend's IG profile, I saw her tagged under another name, and it turned out she used that profile. So I requested to follow her, and she didn't respond, and then I asked her about it and she said she just rarely checks it. But then I saw her commenting on a lot of friends pictures, so I suppose I should have seen that as a bad sign, but I didn't.
Then, there's this other guy, "Mike" who started hanging around with us and spending a lot of time with Annie. I asked her about him, and she said he was just a friend, but they were a little flirty, but Annie could be like that, but she's not a hookup girl, so I wasn't too worried. Then right before the semester ended , I asked her what she was doing for the weekend and she said she and Mike were going to New York to see a comedy show and see the city for the weekend to celebrate the end of the year, which made me nervous. But it was a comedian I had gotten into lately as Annie liked them, so I said maybe I'd come. She said it was really just for them to hang out. I then went for it and said I really liked her and asked if she would like to meet me for dinner either the night before she left or when she came back, and she just said she knew I had a crush on her, but she was sorry, she didn't feel the same way. I said what was wrong with me, and she said it wasn't anything she hated about me, she just didn't like me romantically. I asked her if she would please just give me a chance and at least have a date with me, and she got annoyed and said I needed to accept that she didn't like her, and that frankly, I was getting a little "stalker-ish" with her lately, and that she needed me to give her some space. I don't know why she said that, because I was just hanging out with her like I had been from the beginning of the year, but I agreed even though it killed me.
I could barely eat all weekend, as I knew she was in the city with Mike. I don't know if they were hooking up, but I don't think they were because I don't think she's into FWBs and stuff. She seems like a relationship girl, but my mind went to worse case scenarios. They didn't act like a couple when I saw them again during finals week, so that's a good sign.
It's been a few weeks. I gave Annie some space, but I have texted her from time to time to see how she's doing. Usually she just leaves me on read. The thing is, I still can't stop thinking about her. She's so perfect for me, and I can't bare the thought of her being with somebody else. What went wrong here?? Also, is there anything I can do that might fix this? I'd like to try and have another chance with her.

Hello,
Background, I met my husband when I was still in college studying to be a school teacher, I was a single mom, having a child at 16. He worked in “banking” coming from a extremely small town in Arkansas I assumed he was a bank teller. He was actually an investment banker. We fell in love, got together, etc. Now after several years of long distance (5) and getting him through business school (2) we have finally been in the same place consistently for the last two years. When we moved in together he got us joint credit cards. That year my daughter started middle school so I cut back on flying (I am a flight attendant) to stay with her to navigate her first year of middle school. During that time I made about 15,000 that year. I used the joint credit card to purchase household goods and household expenses. Whether it was a gift for a neighbor who just had a baby or we needed a rental car for the weekend to visit his parents, etc. I used the joint credit card because it was not in my particular budget. Anyway, now a year later, he’s declared me a criminal…having stole money from him…I feel exhausted because I am the only one who takes care of our home, our pets, mowing and maintaining our yard etc. I flew maybe once a month at that point but felt like our home like was a full time job in of itself..now we do not share money, I am flying 12-18 days a month, subbing at my daughters school, keeping up with household chores (we are very southern, living in Philly now, but I am expected to do laundry, dishes, trash, etc) living paycheck to paycheck. He’s a VP at a private equity fund now, making over almost 400,000 a year. I feel like I’m hitting rock bottom. I live paycheck to paycheck, with no room for savings. What is going on? And am I being greedy? He says he pays for our mortgage and I should be grateful. But living in a one bedroom apartment with my daughter I feel like we were so much happier and now I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of a panic. I’m exhausted and scared and I just don’t know if this is normal? It doesn’t feel normal. Am I expected to do the indoor house work, outdoor house work, and work full time? And also, not to mention pack his bags, bring him water if he is thirsty, bring him his chargers or anything on demand, all while juggling my day to day responsibilities. I feel like I’m cracking at the seams, help, advice, anyone?

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My question is simply what are the options and where can I look for traveling I.T jobs? Recently I've been thinking of finding a job that would allow me to travel around the U.S. and jobs that would allow me to go to various places. since this is a relatively new idea I'm not exactly sure where to start looking or what kind of skills I would need (I assume they vary from position to position) and I'm not even sure if such a position exists. I just turned 20, I'm from Texas and I haven't traveled outside of my state much but the thought of it gets me excited. I don't have much going on in my personal life which is why I'm interested in such a job. My current job is a county job so it does require me to drive from various towns/cities but nothing more than 30 - 45 minutes apart which I do enjoy since I get to be in a different place almost every day. Any pointers on where to look, recommendations, or stories about your personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. I'm from South Texas and honestly, the opportunity here is not great, although I love my current job my position is highly underpaid and so are most other IT jobs here where I'm from (Networking, cybersec, etc). A traveling tech job may be something I see myself working in for a few years, maybe 5 or less till I decide on settling but that's something far into the future lol. I look forward to your feedback and input.

[←Chapter 47] [Cover Art] [My Links] [Index] [Discord] [Subreddit] [Chapter 49→]
The blade forging left Sorore exhausted, the failure left her frustrated, and the cold gave way to fear as the night drew closer. As day faded into dusk, she reflected on a morning that had been as full of ups and downs as the mountain paths they’d travelled. The very fact that she had been able to use magic, that it had crashed from the realm of fairy tales and church warnings into the very real everyday occurrence was already an earth shattering experience.
Then she’d moved water with a thought, seen monsters fall from the sky, and watched the paladins cleaving them in two. Her head spun with the strangeness of it all, the sheer onset of fanciful things blurring and mixing together with reality. She began to wonder what else might be true, of the fairy tales in the myth she had heard on the seas in her father’s ship. Of the old folk stories of Erratz, often dismissed as nothing more than old wive’s tales.
A new world had opened up before her, and she wasn't sure to be fascinated or terrified of it. Certainly the paladins didn't want any part of it, and they certainly didn't want her to be involved. And from everything she knew of the church scripture, they were absolutely right. She felt the danger, the power of the matter, and knew that it was only a small fraction of what it could do. She even felt a certain degree of fear towards the masked man in the black robes, as respectful as he had been as a tutor.
At least he didn't use a switch to reminder of when she had failed.
But even in the murk of her disquiet in that moment, she also felt a smouldering frustration underlying it. The knife had been hers, her project, her duty, and she had resolutely failed to craft it. Part of her shifted the blame elsewhere - it was a new technique she had picked up over the course of an afternoon. Efrain himself had said as much, even going as far to say that he hadn’t expected her to do it.
Now that was something she didn’t like at all. When people expected her to fail, despite all her efforts.
However, that resolution meant little now, given that she had been excused from the effort. At least now the mage had the basic shape to work on. She let her hand drift on the rough stone walls of the church. Thousands of individual perfections, many thousands of years old, the stone functioning despite it. Perhaps it would be enough, the basic, overall function, but she recalled all the pittances and channels carved in her vision of the knife.
She knew what was driving the doubt. It was curiosity, that sticking bug that clung to her, despite all her prayers to the contrary. She just couldn’t seem to shake it, despite the ‘assistance’ of church teachers when it reared its head particularly high. She had expected the snap across the palms from Efrain when he drew that piece of wood. It had been a relief when he’d tossed it over his shoulder.
The thought was an unworthy one, she immediately considered. She should’ve been grateful to the various priests and scholars who’d spent years teaching the twins. Some had even prepared their entire lives, just on the chance they’d meet the beloved Bequeathed. If they were strict, then so be it, it was for the sake of preparing her and Frare for their duties.
The church was once more a buzz of activity as people prepared for the night ahead. She and Lillian found their way to the altar, attracting only minor glances. The villagers clearly had gotten used to their presence, although some offered a respectful and perhaps wary gaze for Lillian. One of Frare’s eyes opened as they approached, but he quickly returned to his half-rest leaning on a pillar. Aya was still very much asleep, chest gently rising and falling under the furs where Sorore had left her.
Sorore sat on the wide steps, put her chins on her hands, and began to think. It was a rather dangerous proposition, considering her recent failure. She had a tendency to ruminate on them, and often her twin would find her staring plaintively before loudly disrupting it. This time was no different, as before anything but impotent frustration could boil over, he plopped down behind her back.
“Stop that,” he said, “I can hear your teeth beginning to grind.”
She leaned back to lie upon his lap, despite the admonishment she heard in her head about proper sitting position. His eyes were closed again, and she followed suit, letting the minutes wile away as night crept into the word. She was shaken out of this reverie by a loud pop and Aya’s yelp. The girl was both mid yawn and bright red as both the paladins and the twins turned to look at her. She insisted that she was fine, and took to straightening her clothes subconsciously.
It was a mere temporary distraction for Sorore, who was largely engrossed in considering the knife. Rather than merely wallowing in her problems, she was invested in its function. She could almost see the stone parting before her, revealing the source of that smothering cold behind the door. Maybe if she had tried one more time, maybe if she reduced the complexity of the form, then increased when she got the basic shape. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
It was all of very little use. She was inside her head once again, at a complete loss of what to do. Maybe, within the grand archives of Angorrah, the answer was contained in a dusty scroll. Some offhand fact or technique of forging, long forgotten in the darkness of the shelves. But these were several weeks of travel away, and she wasn’t sure that she’d see the next sunrise. So then, what could she do to get them to bridge that gap? Just one more day, that’s all they needed, to hold out until the next sunrise.
Nothing. That was the simple truth of it - she was a lost little girl in a small village surrounded by terrible things. The thought was not a comforting one, and she wriggled, trying to nestle deeper into the legs of her twin. Aya by that point had come to sit down beside them, looking greyer as the dark came on. No wonder, for she knew she all felt the chill roll forward as the fog waxed in the night.
Another meal of common fare came and went, though Sorore noted that many soldiers were taking care with it. Perhaps it was common practice, to relish what very well may be your last meal. For her part she found it rather difficult to keep it down, the coming dread of the hours ahead offsetting her appetite.
The faces of the paladins had settled into that implacable, stoney cast once more. They quietly rebandaged their injuries, readjusted their armour, and set to sharpening their great blades with long deliberate strokes. Sorore idly thought that their sleeping faces were significantly more pleasant, if rarer to see. Thus it was that they crossed over into the late afternoon, where the light was quickly fading.
“I would like to take one last little walk,” Aya spoke up, “before… you know.”
The paladins looked up, their eyes twisting with barely veiled misapprehension at the request.
“My lady…” Lillian began.
“We can’t,” Niche said, “Not now. Not so close to dark.”
“Just barely outside the door,” said Aya, “Just so I can see something other than the church. Just to stretch my legs.”
The paladins looked at each other, looked back, and set their faces.
“Well, I suppose it can be accommodated,” Lillian said, “only just outside the church, and only for a few minutes.”
Her tone warned of dire consequences if these conditions should not be strictly adhered to. The children all collectively nodded and the party of five set out past the doors. The barricades within the church had grown in size and strength, at least as far as Sorore could judge. The villagers, under the supervision of the soldiers, had proven diligent in the daylight hours. She could only hope that it would be enough for the onset of the creatures, should they breach the church.
She had a dread certainty that it would indeed be breached, sooner or later. Though she hadn’t heard of any specifics, whispers of just how many of the things lurked outside were passed around. It was a small stroke of fortune that the windows were narrow and ensconced in stone. The last thing they needed was one of the flying beasts to crash through the glass.
The faint red-pink cast to the grey outside was beginning to fade into blackness as the sun shrank. Occasionally, the banks of fog would strip away, revealing the abominable silhouettes standing still past the wall. They would close just as quickly, removing any clarity, and leaving only the icy fear in its place. The remaining soldiers and villagers watched them with anxiety and exhaustion.
The garden around the front of the church was almost non-existent. Most of the flowers had been trampled either in preparation for or during the course of the battle. The only things left relatively untouched were the central beds around the side of the church, which grew produce for its tenants. Some trees still stood, showing minimal damage from the fog and its creatures.
The five ducked under the boughs of the closest one to the doors. The additional chill brought by its shade was a trifling concern at the present. The green, muted as it was by the overcast sky beyond, was a lively anchor in the cold, dead mists. Such was the comfort of the place that Soroe let herself lean back onto the bark of the tree and eyes drift closed.
The trunk was solid, a comforting sensation that seemed to offset the malevolence of the fog.
Enough so that Sorore began to wander the netherworld of half-sounds and sights that characterised pre-sleep. They all wandered with her, some staying, some peeling off, guided by their own demented logic. Little and less was coherent, but it took her away from the horrible reality of what lurked a few hundred steps away all the same.
She fell deeper into this other-state, letting the visions wash over her as the real world slipped away. Time became a mercurial concept, which led her to question when exactly everything had settled. But settled it had, into a hazy blackness which the eye could not pierce. There, in the distance, a bright ribbon of twisting warm color glowed. A piece of fresh-forged metal perhaps, the day’s task going straight to her head. Or maybe it was the remnants of another dream that day, one that was already a blurry memory.
From a great distance, she heard a crash, unmistakable in its ringing clarity. A forge hammer singing out a song of its own, for now merely a rhythm. It shifted in tone as it rang out through the abyss once more, adding progression, then melody, all written in singing steel. Sorore’s fingers began to drum out the sequence on her thighs as she felt it reverberate through her. Then, with a sliding screech, she was left alone in the half-dream, with nothing but darkness remaining.
Still, the bright memory of the song remained, and in the darkness another voice took shape. It was a deep, rich, and handsome sound, that spoke of a confidence of such immensity that you were convinced its wielder could do anything. Sorore had never heard the likes of it before, either on the docks, or in cities, or on the open waves.
“Come now,” it said, “this little thing is giving you trouble?”
Sorore’s eyes slowly open, pulling her from the dreamscape back into the dreariness of the real. Aya had her knees pulled to her chest, leaning back into the trunk. The paladins, tired but alert, scanned the endlessly shifting banks of fog.
Sorore had a fleeting impression that the answers were just beyond the pale mists. Maybe something would come through, parting it like thin curtains, and impart the inspiration she needed. Or maybe a whole set of schematics will drop into my lap from the sky, she thought with dark irony.
The vision was quickly fading into the abyss of forgetfulness. Perhaps Aya had shared it once more with her, but she was in conversation with the paladins. Not wanting to interrupt, Sorore looked at her outstretched legs. Past them were a handful of leaves that had fallen despite the summer of the valley, with a couple long decomposed to nothing but their skeletons.
She reached out to grasp at the leaves, looking at the yellow-grey veins that raced across its surface. The large ones spread from the central stem and the hundreds of smaller capillaries that interconnected them. Holding up to the sky, she screwed her face, trying to discern the details of this piece of nature. After a few moments of tepid stillness, the clouds parted for just a moment, letting a ray of sunlight lance down to catch their hill in its beam.
For a second, the leaf seemed to glow, shimmering like metal catching glare.
And Sorore had her inspiration.
With that, she sprang to her feat so fast that one of the paladins almost jumped. Both looked around with questioning and slightly alarmed expressions. Sorore didn’t have much of an answer - in fact her mind was going so fast that she could hardly even articulate the solution that had been revealed to her.
“The- the- the-” she said, snapping her fingers, trying to put words to the idea, “I know what to do. I need to find him.”
“Find who? The mage?” asked Lillian.
The fiery certainty of the thought sent Sorore tramping out onto the grass, leading to calls from the paladins to slow down. She didn’t bother to wait for them, consumed by this need to find the mage, the knife, to try again.
The forge was more or less empty, save for the few labourers packing up the tools and ferrying them into the church proper. With a furious set of questions, she gleaned that he’d vacated the premises some time ago. The paladins called for her to stop as she doubled back, but she couldn’, not now.
The scenery seemed to blur as she rushed through the church doors, past the bustling barricades, and to the captain’s tables. A somewhat perturbed Damafelce told the young girl that Efrain had been seen entering the door at the end of the church. With that, Sorore broke out into a run, past the altar, through the door and down into the darkness of the Catacombs.
She stepped out onto the sand floor, the members of her party at her heels as she tried to seek out the path to the black wall. She stumbled more than once as she felt her way along in the darkness, fortunately with no skeletal interruptions this time. Down the stairs and into the long corridor she came, the smothering cold increasing as she pushed forward.
As she had surmised, Efrain was there, just about to start whatever process pried apart the stone. The tip of the blade was raised, pressed into the stone above his head. He turned at the approaching footsteps, cocking his head at the lack of isolation. Sorore didn’t even wait for him to say something, instead thrusting out her head for the crude metal knife.
“ I know- I can- I can do it now,” she said, breathless from the long run from the surface.
Delicately, Efrain removed the metal from the stone, and looked down at her. There seemed to be a questioning quality to the look, at least as far as she could read the emotionless mask. He looked at the cat, then back to the girl, and then to the rest of her party.
“How?” he said, “ If I let you undo this, we may not have enough time to recreate it before the attacks begin.”
“Leaves,” she said, putting a hand on the wall to steady herself as her lungs complained, “it- was the leaves.”
“The… leaves?” he said, “ All right. Stop, take a few breaths, and start from the beginning.”
And so she did, explaining how she sat under the bows of the trees, the half-awake dreaming, and the skeleton of the leaf.
“I got it. I was trying to build the whole thing out myself, all at once,” she said, stumbling over her words, “instead of letting nature do what it wants. The metal wants to come together - I don’t need to force it into its final shape. I just need to build a- a-”
She snapped her fingers at the air, trying to reach past this new blank as Efrain regarded the knife.
“You want to build a frame,” he said, “and let the metal fill in the rest of the empty space.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he turned over the knife, hilt first, to the girl.
“Well then,” he said, “let’s hope you know what you’re doing.”
She did, or at least she hoped she did this time. Within moments, the metal was flowing over her hands like a cold stream, but instead of trying to sculpt it, she began to spin filaments outwards. Like the skeleton of the leaf, little veins of metal stretched outwards, stopping abruptly, and folding back into themselves. If it had been hard before, it was now brutal, the smothering cold dragging at every attempt to shape the material.
Hands trembling, sweat beginning to bead on her forehead, she managed to split the metal into dark fingers. All she had to do was resist gravity and prevent it spilling over the imaginary bounds of the shape. From those dark fingers, snaking vines spread out and connected with each other. Slowly, slowly, branching and arcing, they filled in the skeleton she’d created and fused.
The final product wasn’t altogether too different from what they’d created during the afternoon. The shape, a heavy chisel tip, tapering out to twin furls like a plough, a longer tang. Sorore, half blind by stinging salt, didn’t fail to notice swirling furrows spreading across its surface. She had no idea how she’d managed to etch those designs, or perhaps the metal remembered, just as the stone did.
“Well,” said the mage at last, “suffice to say, I am impressed. Now, hold it up.”
She did so, despite the exhaustion of her arms, the tip wavering as his finger touched its point.
There was a rush of something, extending over the surface of the blade, stopping just short of her hand. It was like a coat of mail had been pulled taught, the links aligning at the same time, snapping together in a regular structure. From the tip of the chisel, down to the tang, the metal shuddered and settled. By the time it disappeared under her grip, it was rigid as any steel tool.
The mage gently took it from her, holding the blade up to that little flickering light above his head. Flicking it this way and that, he seemed to find whatever he was looking for, and pressed the tip to the wall. Sorore, despite her fatigue, was practically exploding with excitement. She’d done it, not only conquering the task, but she was about to see what was behind those dark walls.
Then, before he pressed the blade into the stone and drew it down, he paused.
“Paladins,” he said, voice quiet, “it would be best to take the children back into the church.”
Lillian frowned and put a hand onto her hilt as she stared at the door.
“What?” said Sorore, aghast, “ But I-”
“No buts,” said Efrain, “we don’t know what’s behind this door. It may be dangerous, it may not. But I strongly suspect it’s not something you would want to see. Very well done, little one, but this is something I should deal with on my own.”
The tone of academic authority was not an unfamiliar one to Sorore. But unlike in virtually all other occasions in her life, she attempted to object. Before she could speak more than a few words, Lillian took her by the shoulders, her mind apparently made up. All three of them were carted up the stairs as barely contained rage began to bubble up inside her.
“Do you think we should…?” said Niche, gesturing to the surrounding stone.
“No, not yet,” Lillian said, “putting aside everything else, we still might need him.”
Niche nodded and said no more.
They had made a steady pace, overtaking half the hallway as the scream of metal on stone echoed out. It was followed by a grating rumble as presumably the doors opened. If the temperature below the surface was cold when they came, the resulting drop was freezing. The mist that rose up behind them whispered things in long mournful sighs as the surroundings began to buzz with what must’ve been magic.
Then, from up the stairs there was a long, terrible wail.
[←Chapter 47] [Cover Art] [My Links] [Index] [Discord] [Subreddit] [Chapter 49→]

Hello, this is the story of how my grup of 4 friends turned into a group of 3 thanks to Bridezilla. The group consisted of 4 girls, me (Dana), Gabby, Lilly and Lucy, it al started when Lilly got engaged and Gabby and I were so excited for her and kind of over the moon making jokes and never stop talking about the subject, we kind of felt like Lucy was jelaous but we let it go, a few weeks after guess who ends up engaged as well, yes, LUCY! We were happy for her as well. Lucy immediately asked us 3 girls to be her bridesmaids along with other 7-8 girls (girls she just met through her fiancé, her sister and SIl). Lillys wedding was going to be different and there were no bridesmaids at all, so the whole wedding planning and leading to her wedding was very different.
When Lilly told us her wedding date Lucy couldn´t handle it so went ahead and set her wedding one week before Lillys... we didn´t think much of it atm but I did felt like she was competeing or something. To give you a little context Gabby and I were on our early 20s still in Uni. Gabby was starting a beauty business and all her expenses were put into that business and school, where in my case I was paying my University tuiton with a Scholarship and by working for the school as well, my career was very expensive in tuiton and supplies as well, (needing gamer computers, art supplies, etc, every week) so all of my money was spent on school and transportation to and from School, Lillys situation was very similar, she was also in her early 20s, had just moved in with her fiancé, was paying a new car and on top of that had a whole wedding to pay for.
So I think you know where this is going. Lucy was one of my best friends so I did everything I could to support her and be there for her wedding and planning of it. Soon she started showing her bridezilla true colours. First she asked all of us bridesmaids to wear the exact same dress from a very expensive store, at the time I did not have the money so I asked her if I could make an exact copy of the dress with the help of a seamstress (it is cheaper in our country) and she said NO because she did not want to risk it being slightly different so I had to borrow money from my parents.
On the fitting day a couple of us bridesmaids were complaining about the prices and how a certain style doesn´t always fit bodies, one specifically said that she felt very uncomfrotable and she would never wear a dress like that also pay so much money for it. Bridezila wasn´t there but one of her bridesmaidezilla made sure to tell her the rumours. So that bridesmaid was UNIVITED. We were also supposed to wear the same shoes, and do our hair and makeup with the same MUA because otherwise "we could be late to the wedding" her MUA was very expensive as well. All of us had to buy the same shoes but since you guessed it they were very expensive I bought a cheaper replica of them (the dress was floor lenght so you wouldn´t even see them).
We 3 bridesmaids were invited to the bachelorette party a day before. And we were told to get there lets say 5pm, so we arrived and no one was there. The other group of bridesmaids told us to go ahead and start decorating the place, that we could help that way. We went out to buy some decorations and told the other group to text us when they were heading to the place with Bridezilla. They never texted us so when we got there bridezilla had already been surprised and we were seen as "the ones that got there late". The expected us to pay for that nights meal and again it was very expensive, more than what I would pay for in a restaurant, keep in mind I am vegan and I dont drink alcohol, there were of course no vegan options for me, so I paid more than I would´ve paid for in a fancy restaurant for salad and water.
We were kind of upset at the bridesmaids for not letting us know when they were getting there and we decided to talk to bridezilla about it, to what she responded "I am very busy to deal with that right now" and kept asking us for money to pay for her bouquet and extra money to pay for a bouquet that all of ous bridesmaids were expecting to carry. At that point I wanted to quit being a bridesmaid but I knew that ment I was going to be uninvited and I wanted to be there for my friend, I asked how much it was in total and it was bananas, overall I had spent in HER wedding more than what a month of school tuition was worth, plus I had to still pay for the hair and makeup and bouquets? I kindly asked if it was really necessary for us to do all that, and I explained my situation, she was very angry about it and said that I was not being supportive. (keep in mind I have another wedding coming up a weekend after that).
The invites came in and turnes out I only have a pass and I have to pay for my boyfriend to be there... In a wedding where there were more than 300 guests and I was one of the best friends of the bride. I again talked to Bridezila about it and she said that Lillys fiancé was invited because it was a serious relationship while mine was not. So I paid insane money for his invite.
The night before the wedding we texted bridezilla wishing her the best and also asking her what type should we be there since she stopped texting in the bridesmaids group chat since weeks ago and we were supposed to do a photoshoot while getting ready, and then with the groom etc. She replied saying that the photoshoot was canceled and we should be there on time for the ceremony only.
We got ready and showed up at the ceremony on time. The moment when I flipped was when one of the groomsmaids (idk how to say that in english, sorry) that I was very close with, as soon as he saw me asked why I hadn´t been at the photoshoot!!!!! I was like.. "I thought it was canceled" and he said no. During the wedding Bridezilla never even looked or talked to us 3 bridesmaids.
A few days after the wedding we found out through one councious bridesmaid that Bridezilla had made a new grouchat called "The cool bridesmaids" and chat there talking bad about us, saying how unsopportive we were and purposly did a photoshoot where WE her closest and best friends would not appear in. We were fuming and confronted Bridezilla about it, but againg she said she was busy planing or going to her honeymoon that she didn´t have time for us. She decided loosing her 10+ year friendship over her wedding. Later we found out that she copied exactly Gabbys business and that made Gabby lose her shit and we stopped talking to her. She moved to another state where she thought she would make friends but didnt because she doesnt work at all so she never left the house and made friends, The wedding was paid by the groom. She moved back to the city and realized that "the cool bridesmaids" are busy women and not very close to her so she lost all her friends and she reached out again to apologize saying "I am sorry even though I dont know what I did wrong" we said it was better to not be friends and now she really has no friends.
This brought us Gabby, Lilly and I closer and very happy, supportive friends (: The end

Special thanks to u/SpacePaladin15 for allowing fanfiction and giving us Tilfish. The man gave us a canon art of the bugs, and they're rad!
I'm surprised I got this motivation in my to write this part so quickly. I think the fine comments I got motivated me pretty well. Now, I'd appreciate your thoughts and opinions on this. If its flow is smooth and feels right, let me know, I'm not usually good with dialogue.
Also, Feenstra, thank you for your kindness and support. I don't know how to respond to it, honestly, but you're a cool cat.
[First] [Prior] [Next]
.*~*.
Memory Transcription Subject: Marullo, Tilfish agricultural practitioner.
Date: December 2, 2136
.~*~.
I gripped the fabric over the side window and pushed it aside, spotting a Tilfish on the other side of the door instead of a cluster of predators. He appears rather calm, even though he's alone out in the open. My grip tightened on the blind before I tugged the door open.
"Visiting hours are closed." I stated curtly, my antennae twitching outside of my control. Formi I'm still riled up, and I want this man gone so I can dig a hole in peace. I eye the visitor sharply, not seeing any garment or air to him that would tip me off if this was a visiting politician. He's too soft to be a farmer, and I know for a fact there's no appointments he could be attending.
"Oh, uh, is this a business?" I don't even bother with a reply and give the stranger a long look, waiting for him to either acknowledge the massive emblem on the wall right above us or get on with it. He fidgets in awkward silence for a long few seconds. "Uhhh... okay, okay. Off on the wrong feeler here. I'm concerned, is all. I could hear you yelling for the past hour."
My antennae dropped slightly. "What?"
"You uh, your window was open." The stranger explained, mandibles clicking slightly in concern as I shut the door behind me and scuttled down the steps into the yard. I felt my chitin warm around my skull as I looked at the aforementioned window.
Don't tell me I broadcasted that entire conversation to the world.
Stupid sand spitters. Stupid sand spitters!
"I... am sorry for disturbing the peace." I hissed. "I had to wrangle some insubordinates into line. How much did you hear?"
"Not much. Just a lot of yelling. We could hear you from the apartments."
I dipped my head at the mention of the living block. The Regional Agriculture Advisory building was on the edge of the business and government district, and down the road was the start of a residential area. Towering buildings loomed over there, and on occasion they provided a nice view from my old office window with the setting sun reflecting off their many windows.
I was lucky that the masses were too nervous to be out and about in this sector. There was an infestation of predators in and around the capitol building, and even more outposts spread through the surrounding sectors. Being on the streets wasn't popular any more, so the normally lively road we were on was all but abandoned the past several days.
Oddly, I noticed that this stranger was very much alone. There was no swarm to keep him safe, and no vehicle in sight. On the far end of the road leading into the residential sector was a hastily erected barricade that still stood untouched by the predator's roving patrols, comprised mostly of furniture and scrap wood and metal. Looking towards the other end of the road leading towards the capitol building was a more firm barricade that surprisingly still stood, but the filthy tire tracks that cut over the sidewalk and through carefully maintained gardens and lawns told me how the predators got by. There was still nobody else in sight.
"It won't happen again. I had to enforce who's the new boss."
"The predators?"
My mandibles clacked and the stranger flinched at my snap, but stood his ground as I side eyed him intently. "No, me. I'm in charge of this operation."
"Did the predators tell you that yesterday?"
You tar sucking wretch.
The airy accusation made me clench my mandibles and feelers, and my antennae grew still. It must've encouraged the stranger to keep going.
"Because replacing our leaders with more traitorous Tilfish won't work. We're not the Venlil."
So that was what this was really about. Okay.
"You're mistaken," I began smoothly, ready to cut down this wretch with words alone. "My daughter got into trouble while I was working, and was returned to me. I've been terribly busy as you've heard in the old Advisor's place, with everything ongoing. Their visit yesterday did not pertain to my office, and any insinuation to the contrary will not be taken lightly."
"There was a boy as well. He seemed unnaturally comfortable with the beasts."
I will bury you underneath my garden.
"Your vision must be failing, because I assure you I saw no such thing under my roof."
"Good, good. We cannot have the diseased among us, no matter the times. I was wary of calling the exterminators prematurely, so I'm glad I checked in."
"The dead Exterminators?" I asked sharply, cocking my head. "Or the ones leashed to the predators?"
"..." The wretch stared at me for a long moment. "The dead ones, I suppose."
"What a shame about them, really." I drawled. "Anyways, did you have anything else on your mind you felt worth coming over this way to ask?"
"What happened to the old Advisor?"
"Dereliction of duty and cowardice. He's fled to a different system by now. For all the good that'll do him." The wretch's antennae flicked in irritation. "Now, the office is closed and I have work to do yet. Admittance is by appointment only. Good day."
The wretch didn't leave, apparently unsatisfied. We stared at each other a moment more.
"Is something else the matter?" I buzzed firmly.
"The swarm is more than capable of defending itself without the Exterminators. Don't think yourself above it's reach."
Something cold settled in my carapace. My claws itched. "Be very careful; threatening the Agricultural office is a high crime. I'm more than capable of protecting myself without the Exterminators."
A twitch from the wretch. "Is that so?"
"Don't come around my office again. Bounders are not welcome here, same as any predator."
His antennae lowered and he remained quiet, and I felt a faint trill in my chest. "Enjoy your day..."
"Eat sod." I responded sharply. I eyed the wretch as he retreated down the sidewalk, and something clicked in my mind.
Twenty paces. In twenty paces I could retrieve the gun in the lobby. You won't even see it coming.
A flicker of movement, and another Tilfish stepped out from some ornamental carvings in front of the filing office down the way, joining the wretch. I waited until the two were out of sight and long gone, arms crossed and feelers clenching my chitin as I waited even longer, before turning back to my abode and striding around to the garden.
.*~*.
"Marullo?" The voice above me is hesitant, and I bury my tool into the soil and look up. Tugal is above me at the lip of the hole, and I realize that I've dug way too far down. My arms hurt. My legs hurt. I don't feel like stopping, but I might hit a gas line if I keep going. I feel a flash of pity at my brother's distressed state.
"What... what happened while I was asleep? Holywood and Aegan are fighting over burning the last of our food- those Nectar Pods the predator touched. I thought we threw those out, but somehow they're back. Muttart climbed up the wall and left tracks everywhere, and he won't come down because he's still mad about last night. Cleo's locked herself in the bathroom and won't stop crying and vomiting. She searched the net for something and nobody can get through to her now. She mentioned the predator wanted something terrible from you, but that's all I could understand through the door. And you're out here destroying the gardens?"
"I was in my office all day. Food distribution is back on track for now, but who knows how long that'll last. It was stressful, and this is how I'm handling it." I began. I clacked my mandibles and ran my feelers over my antennae.
Formi, I'm filthy.
"Why destroy the gardens? And the hole?"
"The old boss's taste in décor was tacky. I'm sprucing it up. Oh! The Head of Agriculture is still with us. He approved my promotion, so I'm now the new Regional Agricultural Advisor." I rubbed at my face, my antennae twitching aggressively once more now that I'm not putting my entire focus onto tearing asunder this pathetic excuse of a garden.
"I'm making a burrow in case we need to hide the kids outside the building. I've already made two others in case we need to retreat through the back and into the next property."
"What did the predator do? Are you okay?"
I kicked at some loose soil before stretching my legs and scuttling out of the hole. I pulled myself up and fruitlessly wiped at the filth coating my carapace. "I'm not okay. Nobody is okay, or we wouldn't be here Tugal. We wouldn't need to worry about predators, or pests, or starving, or the humans, or each other if we were okay. For once, our predator didn't do anything wrong."
Tugal became alert, his mandibles clicking quietly as he waited for me to continue.
"There was a Tilfish that left the swarm. He went into one of the predator nests to talk. They didn't hurt him- the humans are too patient to eat the first ones that come to them, but after he left some witnesses told the swarm about it." How I really felt about the matter was slipping through with every single errant twitch I couldn't control. We were not supposed to be the monsters in this story. We were not supposed to be so susceptible to our wicked past. We were civilized!
I lowered my voice. "A group took him away from the city and tore him apart while he was still alive. They tried to feed him to Bark Saws, Tugal."
"Are you certain the story wasn't deception?" Tugal whispered back. "It's what they're known for."
I flicked my antennae in confirmation.
"Maybe... maybe they were defending themselves. Don't look at me like that, how they did it was sick. I hope they're screened and dealt with properly; we can't have people doing that in these times. It's no excuse. I'm just trying to understand it." Tugal stated, making my innards twist. "But these predators we're facing hunt through social deception. They're tricky, and the more of us they corrupt the more susceptible the swarm gets. That man, he could've done untellable damage. I just... I'm sorry you had to hear that. We have to stand strong against them, but we can't lose ourselves doing so."
Tugal watched me for a moment more, then gently prodded me: "...now, why the burrows? What else happened?"
I swallowed, my mandibles clicking repeatedly as I tried to reign in my thoughts. It was hard to speak suddenly, and I gripped my feelers until my claws started scraping into my chitin. "Where does that leave Muttart?"
Tugal flinched and his mandibles flexed. "No. Marullo, no."
"He's not afraid of them, Tugal!" I hissed quietly, feelers trembling. "He isn't! How do I help him? How long can I keep him here before he's too curious and sneaks out? What if someone sees him? What if Cleo finds out? He's not a threat: he's still a child!"
"Marullo, he'll be fine." My brother stated firmly, gripping my arms. "Nobody's going to touch him. We just need to talk to him- he doesn't understand what predators are capable of."
"And what about us?" I buzzed back. "What are we capable of? How can normal people do that?"
"It's fear, Marullo. Fear breaks us. You freeze when you're terrified. Others abandon the ones they love. Some... some fight back. Everyone goes crazy when threatened, and those people will pay for what they did."
Too many things flashed through my head at once. It felt like I was boiling.
"It's not just them, Tugal. Someone down in the residential area was watching the predators last night. He asked about him." My brother's feelers tightened on my arms, and he grew still. "They asked about me as well, and I think they believe I'm a threat. They're no different than the people that mutilated that poor man."
"How many? What did you say?"
"Two, at least. They didn't give their names. I didn't tell them anything about us. We can't trust anyone else to keep quiet. One word to the wrong person and we're all dead. Our chance at making this right dies. I told them off, but I don't think it'll be enough."
"They might come back because of that."
"What was I to say? Was I supposed to advertise that we're one of the last resistance networks left?"
My brother's grip loosened and he stepped away, antennae flicking with concern. "I can figure this out. We'll... I'll set up a watch throughout the day with the exterminators. If they're on hand if a mob shows up, one of them in their gear should dissuade any further action. They won't get to you or Muttart. You did good. Can you- please rest. Go clean up, you'll scare Holywood and Muttart."
I twitched my mandibles a few times, looking at the ruins of a once barely acceptable garden. "Let me tidy up back here. I have to order flowers and a few trees, and work on other gardens in the public view. I guess that part can wait." I tacked on quickly, trying not to flinch under Tugal's sharp gaze.
"I'll go out to the market and pick up food afterwards. We shouldn't need to worry about basic necessities."
"If you're up for it. Be watchful out there" Tugal warned softly. I appreciated his concern, and bobbed my head wordlessly. He paused a moment, and asked quietly: "How did the predator come across that crime?"
"I... I don't know."
Tugal sighed quietly. "How did it affect it?"
I paused, wondering why Tugal cared. Absently, I ducked my head in thought. "It's furious. I... I almost want to say bitter. We got into a fight over the Bark Saws, and it escalated. It's angry with me, and I need to figure out how to fix that before we lose it."
"We can try and-""
"No." I interrupt, surprising my brother. His antennae raise, and I continue. "Because I've been handing off the conversation to you and the others, we accidentally crossed it. If I had been the one to talk to it first instead of you, I could've avoided starting the argument with the Bark Saw. Cleo, Aegan, Zoil- they're hostile towards it and it believes I talk like that now. It feels threatened. I need to do this on my own and try and fix it. I can bring it back to us."
Tugal buzzed quietly, thinking. "Okay. Get yourself cleaned up first. Give it some time to calm down and go bring back some groceries. I'll talk with the others and get them back on track. I think our window to do this is closing, Marullo. If we can't get this human the risks we took will be for naught. Every other option will be riskier if this falls apart."
"I know. I won't let you down."

Hi everyone,
I (29) recently moved here from the Northeast, and also from quite a sheltered lifestyle / environment. A big part of why I moved was to get out of that stagnant situation and try to be a more outgoing person. Another bonus is that I think I should feel more welcomed here as a gay person rather than where I was. I pretty much grew up in the woods, so populous areas like cities still make me anxious to be alone in, even thought they're usually the most diverse and accepting places to be. Currently I live outside of the city proper, but I know there's a lot to discover inside that I probably shouldn't let myself miss out on just because cities make me nervous. A lot of my interests are things like reading / writing / gaming (things I can do by myself or with friends online), but I think I'm highly curious and would try most things once. I'm really great with people, just afflicted with an introvert's customary shyness at first.
Now that I'm moved in, got a car, and a job (in Natomas), I've run out of reasons to delay putting myself out there and getting comfortable with my new home. I've been to some stores so far, and it's still wild to me just how many people there are everywhere I go, but I'll get used to that in time I'm sure. Having everything be so lively is nice for a change, and I think it's really going to help me avoid becoming too reclusive.
Anyway, I've lurked in this forum for a while and see a lot of nice people, and that's encouraging, so I thought I'd ask for some advice on how I can ease into Sacramento and feel at home, rather than it just happening to be the place I live and work in. Maybe an idea about activities or events meant for people to meet or get acquainted with the area, or advice on how to navigate driving / parking in the city, must-go places or must-avoid places, anything like that. Even a Hello is fine, I think I'm also writing this just as a re-affirmation that I need to get myself out there.
Thanks for reading and for having me! (:

The Miami Heat and Florida Panthers have both advanced to their respective Finals series. The two Miami squads are the first duo from the same city to reach the NBA and NHL Finals in the same year since 2016, when the Golden State Warriors and San Jose Sharks represented the Bay Area.
Now here's to hoping Florida Man fares better than his Bay Area brethren.

Hi all, I have my visa appointment for B1/B2 soon.
The main purpose of my visit in Business Visit, to meet customers and for training. I have a letter from my company that says so and that they will cover flights, accommodations etc, and that I am not paid salary during this time.
There was an option in DS-160 form to apply for just B1 or just B2 or B1/B2 (for both business and pleasure). I know they generally just give B1/B2, but there are cases where they give just B1 in which you can't travel for pleasure, so I went with B1/B2 and also I would want to travel 3-4 days for tourism after work visit.

1. How do I say this when they ask about my purpose of visit? Do I say that my main purpose of visit is business and that I would travel for tourist purposes for 3-4 days after that? or just say Business? or say Business and Pleasure? or ... ? Will it raise any flags if I say I want to travel for both business and pleasure on the same trip?
2. The letter from my employer doesn’t have a specific date on it for the meeting. Will it be an issue? It was a meeting discussed on teams so no proper form of communication for it, although I know the dates.
3. Will it help my case that I have multiple UK visit visas, including long term, and a Schengen visa and good travel history on it?

Thanks in advance for any help, the whole interview process is stressing me out a bit as it is my first time applying for the US visa.

I’m 23/F and I moved to a new city. I downloaded Tinder like anyone else would in a new city. After a couple of dates gone wrong I finally met this guy… let’s call him Sam. Sam is a 35 year old widow with 2 kids. He is so handsome and just about the sweetest guy you’d ever meet. We started out with a video chat on tinder itself and then moved to texting to more hours of video chatting, until we met and and it felt like an instant connection. I’m not talking about butterflies but it was so calm and just felt right. Even in the talking stage, every notification on my phone never made me anxious to know if it was from him because I felt so comfortable and secure that I know whether it’s him or not, I was still going to hear his voice before the day ends. Things are going so well but I’m so worried about what my family will think when I tell them that he has 2 children. I’m afraid they’ll think I’m too young to be dating someone with that much I don’t even want to say “baggage”. But he’s successful, smart, takes very good care of his family and somehow manages to make me feel like a priority. Any advice? I come from a very traditional and sheltered home.

My spouse is depressed and sometimes resorts to name calling, accusations, questioning my integrity and love for our family in arguments. It absolutely sets me off and gives me mom rage especially questioning my love for my kids, saying things That Are False and not stopping with the tirade. I flip out and want to escape or lash out at my spouse. This often happens in the car where we both seem the most stressed, so I can't get out of the situation. Has anyone else experienced something like this and is there anything that helped you regulate? I think I am AuDHD and wondered if my freakouts were meltdowns but I think they're more ADHD angeimpulsivity. I have an ADHD diagnosis but not ASD yet. In these moments I have no logic or self awareness, only fight or flight and feel like I can't step back from hyperfixation on the conflict and yet also Needing It To Stop Right Now. The possible ASD/alexithymia does play a part though in that I'm really bad at sensing/describing my emotions, I just feel them extremely deeply and sometimes struggle to find words in these moments, I become totally illogical and just freak out. How can I overcome the lizard brain or whatever and be a better person? I am struggling so much 💔

Hello all, ever since I can first remember I have always been fond of aviation and one passion I have is reading about plane crashes and near crashes to know what happened, why it happened and what changes were made to make the aviation industry safer.
Many years ago I happened to read the Wikipedia page about the Kano air disaster in 1973. I never thought much of it but recently I read through it and wanted to read the accident report which would give information about the background of the flight, the pilots' experience, how many people were onboard, what happened, and any recommendations made. It turns out that despite this being the worst civilian plane crash at the time with 176 fatalities, Nigeria's worst plane crash, and probably investigators from the United States (NTSB) assisted in the investigation because it was an American made plane, if an accident report was issued, it has likely been lost. I asked for any references on the aircrashinvestigation subreddit and got some additional sources but not really useful.

What happened

For anyone unfamiliar with the story, this is what I do know about the flight, some parts are just educated guesses. Early morning on January 22nd 1973, an Alia Royal Jordanian Airlines Boeing 707 was chartered by Nigeria Airways to fly 193 Muslim pilgrims from Jeddah, Saudia Arabia back home to Lagos as part of the Hajj. The 707 was just two years old at the time. There were 9 crew members onboard for a total of 202 people onboard. As far as I know there doesn't appear to be any information on what the flight number was. The Captain of the flight was 53 year old John Waterman, an American with over 22,000 hours total air time. He lived in Beirut, Lebanon with his wife and children and had been flying in the Middle East for 20 years . The remaining 8 crew members probably were the co-pilot and the flight engineer with 6 flight attendants. The airplane likely departed for Lagos at dawn and at some point during the flight the pilots received information that there was bad weather at Lagos and they had to divert to Kano, Nigeria.
According to a source I found, hot winds from the Sahara, called harmattan, a cool dry wind that blows from the northeast or east in the western Sahara, were present at Kano that morning. Large amounts of dust and sand are collected that the sky becomes hazy and visibility drastically reduces. Harmattan is the strongest from late November to mid-March. Just after 0900 local time (the plane would have been in the air for probably 4 hours by now), the pilots began their approach to Kano. On final approach they encountered the harmattan and had to go around for another attempt. On their second approach at 0930 local time, the plane touched down nose wheel first, instead of its main wheels first. The nose wheel struck a depression on the runway and collapsed. Then the right main gear collapsed, followed by the left gear: both collapses ruptured the fuel tanks. The plane then spun 180 degrees and slid off the runway. A fire then broke out which completely destroyed the airplane and only 26 people (23 passengers and 3 crew members) out of the 202 people onboard survived (One source in 1975 says that 33 people survived). Among the survivors was Captain Waterman. Since he survived the crash, it's quite likely that the co-pilot and the flight engineer also survived.
A short video of the remains of the aircraft taken later: 1973 Kano air disaster Alia Royal Jordanian Airlines Boeing 707 [JY-ADO] crash Aftermath Footage - YouTube
Two weeks after the crash the Jordanian authorities insisted that a depression in the runway was to blame while the Nigerians insisted that pilot error was the cause as Waterman had ignored orders from the tower not to land due to the strong winds.
In 1975, the Nigerian government tribunal who investigated the crash recommended that Captain Waterman be prosecuted for culpable homicide and be banned from ever flying into Nigeria again as he piloted the airplane in a reckless manner. The Nigerian government agreed with the tribunals findings. I was not able to find any information on whether Waterman was prosecuted or what happened to him afterwards. However, I have found no information on whether a depression in the runway was to blame or the nose wheel broke off because he landed the plane too hard and nose wheel first.
Getting back to my question, it looks like an investigation was conducted, but their findings were never put into an accident report and if they were they were never submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
If anyone has more information about this crash or is able to find any additional sources I would love to read them.
Sources I found about the Kano Air disaster:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_air_disaster
2. https://www.baaa-acro.com/crash/crash-boeing-707-3d3c-kano-176-killed
3. https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19730122-0
4. https://content.time.com/time/subscribearticle/0,33009,906816,00.html
5. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/23/archives/pilgrims-jet-crashes-in-nigeria-180-are-feared-dead-a-record-180.html
6. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/18/archives/us-pilot-blamed-for-crash-that-killed-157-in-nigeria.html

Thank you

✨[HCMC] POWER ENGLISH is seeking part-time ESL teachers for public schools
👉👉👉Start date: 5th September 2023
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The story is located in a rural Germany's little town, it's about a young artisan who came from the city to restore an old statue, and discover is not an sculpture but a living creature, and there is this old woman who is training him in this secret and ancient kraft and retiring from this job of love and care to which she has given most of her life. Anybody have a clue?

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

Personally, I think it's an attractive concept for some stories but shouldn't go too far. I believe that both Batman and Bruce Wayne need each other and are two sides of the same coin, but there seems to be a popular concept that Batman is the only one who exists and is fueled by vengeance, anger, justice, etc, while Bruce Wayne is just a helpful falsehood.
There are several reasons I don't like this but one logical one is, if that's the point, why even maintain the Bruce Wayne persona at all. He could easily liquidate his assets, become a wealthy trader with a new identity, and have billions of dollars while not being in the limelight of Gotham City constantly, which threatens the ability for him to keep his secret (PIs, paparazzi, etc).
There are several stories that present how important Bruce Wayne as a character is. Batman: Ego is a conversation between Bruce Wayne and the Batman in his psyche, in which the Batman persona is rageful and vengeful against criminals. They eventually compromise and agree that the Batman persona can operate as long as he doesn't kill. I'm simplifying things but this is the gist. This shows that Bruce Wayne is still at least somewhat important in making his decisions and remaining human.
Speaking of remaining human, one of the stories from the 2000 JLA series touches in this when the heroes and their identities get split in two (I forgot the name of the story). Clark Kent is shown to be kind of a coward while Superman is a power tripping douche, Bruce Wayne has anger management issues that he can't resolve, and Batman literally becomes a faceless, mouth less vigilante. This dichotomy follows with everyone who was on the team. I think Batman becoming someone inhuman, how lacks the basic features of eyes, nose, etc, is indicative that Batman isn't human at all, and that Bruce Wayne is the compassionate tether to reality and humankind.
Ultimately I disagree with the idea that Bruce Wayne is meaningless and all that's left is Batman, though of course, there's probably more evidence in favor of that than against. Thematically and character wise though, I think it's a disservice to render him as someone solely driven by anger, fear, and vengeance, when he's supposed to represent something better than that.

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As a response to a comment on my last post, "Top 10 Most Important Roads in Indy," I have created this latest countdown of the Top 25 Busiest Intersections in Indy. Note that these are the BUSIEST intersections in Indy, whereas the last post looked at roads most IMPORTANT to the city.
​
25.) Kessler Blvd and Michigan Rd
24.) 38th St and Dr.MLK Jr St/Michigan Rd
23.) 96th St and Meridian St
22.) Pendleton Pike and Sunnyside Rd
21.) Southport Rd and Emerson Av
20.) 38th St and Lafayette Rd
19.) 86th St and Michigan Rd
18.) 21st St and Shadeland Av
17.) County Line Rd and Emerson Av
16.) County Line Rd and Meridian St
15.) Washington St and Post Rd
14.) Kentucky Av and Mooresville Rd
13.) Kentucky Av and High School Rd
12.) Washington St and High School Rd
11.) County Line Rd and US 31
10.) Edgewood Av and US 31
9.) 82nd St and Allisonville Rd
8.) 71st St and Binford Blvd
7.) 38th St and High School Rd
6.) Pendleton Pike and Franklin Rd
5.) 86th St and Keystone Av
4.) Rockville Rd and High School Rd
3.) Fall Creek Pkwy and Keystone Av
2.) 96th St and Keystone Av
​
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Washington St and West St; Fall Creek Rd. and Shadeland Av; 10th St and Dr.MLK Jr St/West St; 86th St and Meridian St
​
And the busiest intersection in Indianapolis is....
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1.) Rockville Rd and Country Club Rd
​
How Were These Entries Selected?
Unlike the last post, which was simply based on my experience living in the city for 25 years, this countdown was made using measurable data. The data comes from the INDOT Traffic Count Database System. The data was measured mostly in 2022 or later, with a few readings coming from as early as 2020.
Traffic Count Database System (TCDS) (ms2soft.com)
To make this list I searched for reading locations in Marion County and then sorted the list by highest AADT (Annual Average Daily Traffic).
As one might guess, nearly all of the top 100 were located on interstate highways (I-465, I-65, I-70, etc.). However, for this countdown I excluded all locations situated on interstate highways. This means I even excluded locations situated on the interchange of an interstate highway and a non-interstate (eg., Keystone and I-465 on the northside,, 82nd and I-69, etc.). I only included reading locations situated near interstate highways if there was a non-minor intersection nearby (eg., I included Rockville and High School since both roads are non-minor but excluded US 31 and Elbert St. since Elbert is a minor road).
Using this criteria, I compiled a list of 48 intersections in Marion County, each with an annual average of over 30,000 hits per day.
​
From this list of 48 intersections, to avoid redundancies I grouped entries together where all of the intersections occurred within 1 mile of a single intersection and kept the highest reading, then named the entry after the central/largest intersection (eg., I combined US 31/Stop 11, US 31/Stop 12, US 31/ Stop 13, US 31/Co. Line, Co.Line/Airport and called it US 31/Co. Line)
Below are the 28 entries I got after grouping, with the AADT in parentheses to the side.
​
Southside
Kentucky Av and Mooresville Rd (36,267)
Kentucky Av and High School Rd (36,348)
Meridian St and County Line Rd (35,231)
US 31 and County Line Rd (37,374)
US 31 and Edgewood Av (38,034)
Emerson Av and Southport Rd (34,201)
Emerson Av and County Line Rd (34,979)
​
Westside
Washington St and High School Rd (36,707)
Rockville Rd and High School (43,558)
Rockville Rd and Country Club Rd (46,971)
38th St and High School Rd (40,746)
​
Eastside
Washington St and Post Rd (36,090)
Pendleton Pike and Franklin Rd (42,892)
Pendleton Pike and Sunnyside Rd (33,867)
Shadeland Av and 21st St (34,809)
Shadeland Av and Fall Creek Rd. (30,101)
​
Northside
Allisonville Rd and 82nd St (39,468)
Michigan Rd and 86th St (34,386)
Keystone Av and 86th St (43,310)
Keystone Av and 96th St (46,929)
Meridian St and 86th St (31,421)
Meridian and 96th St (33,859)
​
​
Central
Lafayette Rd and 38th St (34,220)
West St./MLK St. and 10th (31,103)
MLK St./Michigan Rd and 38th St (31,819)
Michigan Rd and Kessler Blvd (31,736)
Fall Creek Pkwy and Keystone Av (45,904)
Binford Blvd and 71st St (40,146)
​
Surprised at anything in this list? Wondering how any intersections didn't make this list? Please feel free to comment below.
​
Thank you for reading!

I love float planes. And Kenmore's service is generally top notch, until it stops altogether for "weather."
I have now had two getaways impacted by this -- is last-minute cancellation a common thing with Kenmore? The first getaway was in December, and the weather was a bit dicey, so, OK. But my flight back from Victoria was cancelled today due to weather. Was the weather that bad today? Really?
And the thing is that when they cancel you are just SOL and have to make whatever arrangements you can -- I ended up paying a king's ransom for an Air Canada flight, and I was lucky to get that! There is no option to fly out of the airport or whatever -- you are just left high and dry.
I think I am crossing Kenmore Air off my list, as much as I love float planes. They just don't deliver.