Everyone loves a good ETH burn right? Oh yeah, it’s awesome to see the price go parabolic as the supply slowly goes deflationary. However, I think long term, burning ETH isn’t the best way to go.
Something to think about is this; while anyone can spin up an Ethereum node so long as they have 32 ETH but there is no real practical way to actually earn more ETH. Most people don’t have 32 ETH, nor the technical ability to sufficiently run an Ethereum validator. So unfortunately, this leads to a world where Coinbase, LIDO and a few others earn a majority of the newly minted ETH.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like too big of an issue, however, to me this mixed with deflationary burning of ETH seems to mean that the average Joe, using the network, is consistently burning a portion of their fees, while never earning any more back in any meaningful fashion without actively LPing (IL risk) or trading.
These types of economics and how validating works in practice, means that there are a few entities with the honor of earning new ETH, and the people using the network are simply burning ETH.
I believe better economic modeling exists. Rather than burning ETH fees, it would be great to implement a fee structure that rewards the actual smart contracts being used. Then a new use case could be that LP positions on Uniswap could earn UNI and the equivalent ETH usage fees that were directed back to the contract itself.
Do you prefer the ETH burn or would a model rewarding smart contract usage be a better way to distribute ETH back to the community? I prefer the latter, as it promotes decentralization of the network and promotes usage, much more than a burn mechanism.

Timestamp / Album: https://imgur.com/a/246au21
Late night Swappers Happy Memorial Day!
Quick little spending cash Blade Show sale. Great potential EDC pieces. All comes with their appropriate boxes.
Payments via PPFF or Venmo
USPS Priority included
Yolo > Chat
No Trades, Please and thank you.
Onto the show…

1. BM Bugout 535 CF & S90V - my fave all time bugout. You all know and love this variant. Carried several times to the office. One faint snail on blade. Factory sharp. Faint wear on clip. See pics. Otherwise great shape. These are almost $300 new now.

SV 190

1. Artisan Tylos - Blade 2022 Special #36. Gold Shred CF. S35 steel. 3.2” / 7.4” OAL. Light as a feather. Perfect edc. Spear point. Superb snappy detent. Crisp break on all deployment methods. Light usage. May have some faint marks on blade and clip. Great ergos. Paid $225.

SV 160

1. Finch Reciprocity - 154CM steel. Blue resin overlays. Snappy action. Pointy as hell wharnie. 3” / 7”. Another great little edc. Paid $155

SV 99

1. TwoSun 229 - so much going on here for the prive. Milled Ti. M390 compound blade. CF overlays. Front flipper. Fuller flicker. Has a cool swish when deployed. Coincidentally Resembles the Rassenti Snafu blade. Never carried. Minty. Paid 150.

SV 110

1. Para 3 S45VN + Black g10. Murdered out. We all know it. We all love it. Lightly carried. Broke down a few boxes. Great shape. Minor wear on clip. Paid 175 at Blade 2022.

SV 125
Thanks all for looking. Good luck!

Everyone loves a good ETH burn right? Oh yeah, it’s awesome to see the price go parabolic as the supply slowly goes deflationary. However, I think long term, burning ETH isn’t the best way to go.
Something to think about is this; while anyone can spin up an Ethereum node so long as they have 32 ETH but there is no real practical way to actually earn more ETH. Most people don’t have 32 ETH, nor the technical ability to sufficiently run an Ethereum validator. So unfortunately, this leads to a world where Coinbase, LIDO and a few others earn a majority of the newly minted ETH.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like too big of an issue, however, to me this mixed with deflationary burning of ETH seems to mean that the average Joe, using the network, is consistently burning a portion of their fees, while never earning any more back in any meaningful fashion without actively LPing (IL risk) or trading.
These types of economics and how validating works in practice, means that there are a few entities with the honor of earning new ETH, and the people using the network are simply burning ETH.
I believe better economic modeling exists. Rather than burning ETH fees, it would be great to implement a fee structure that rewards the actual smart contracts being used. Then a new use case could be that LP positions on Uniswap could earn UNI and the equivalent ETH usage fees that were directed back to the contract itself.
Do you prefer the ETH burn or would a model rewarding smart contract usage be a better way to distribute ETH back to the community? I prefer the latter, as it promotes decentralization of the network and usage, much more than a simple burn mechanism.

Was absolutely awesome. I thought that was so so needed and took the show and episode into another gear, because he was such a mysterious character to us all the whole show, we were unsure if he was five steps ahead of the siblings or not. When Tom called him and let him know their plan was in trouble, and Mattson went into the hotel room extremely panicked and started screaming at his people to get on phones, screaming for Ebba, screaming at his number 2 guy - we KNEW finally that it really was a game. The siblings really did have a shot, and Mattson did not have the control we thought he might behind the scenes.
Once I realized that he wasn't in complete control of the situation and he wasn't controlling the chess board like he thought he was, it made the finale go into overdrive with the audience now knowing that no one knew what the result was going to be, not the Roys not Mattson, not us. Shit was real, and we saw Mattson rattled for the very first time on screen.
Fantastic and necessary scene, great job by the writers to show that, and it made the tension so much higher for the last 30 minutes.
Here is the clip again - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFM1j-XjS-w&ab_channel=SK1PTICAL

flydouble COB Keychain Work... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMFNSPF9?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Great lights for camp and walking around. Super bright, lightweight, clip on, magnet, even comes with a tripod.

I've dabbled with mushrooms a number of times and always have had a great trip. I love to get visuals and see animated faces on any surface with patterns. When I don't get visuals I'm always disappointed.
Saturday night I decided to take a larger dose than I've taken before. Things were going great at first... lots of visuals and laughing fits. We tried watching "The Invention of Lying". All the faces looked like they were going to slide off the persons head, and everyone looked like cartoon animals. Didn't even get thru the credits and I started thinking maybe I should meditate or draw or really experience the trip.
So I got up and started watching the kitchen counter top dance and swirl and then I lost all sense of myself, I wasn't sure what was a hallucination, and at one point I thought I was the hallucination.
My stepson tried putting a youtube clip of the doors on and I got so confused with timelines and past, present, future. I was confused as to whether or not this was the first time I'd ever watched the doors, and then I thought we were in the movie.
Then I had the realization that I might be dead, or dying, then it got really really bad. I didn't know what the hell was going on. My Mom died before the pandemic and I thought I was convinced I'd see her again. I thought if there was a huge emergency or a huge party she would show up. I kept thinking that the trip was my entire existence and I was seeing my life flash before my eyes.
I was so freaked out the only way past it was to just call everyone up and have a massive party like in Project-X. I called my wife and my brother in-law and they talked me down. My wife came home as quickly as she could. It was probably only 5 minutes but it felt like hours.
I kept thinking people were going to show up at the house cause I wasn't sure who I had called. I'd hear sirens outside and that would reinforce the paranoia that I was dying, I was sure the ambulance was coming to the house.
At one point I thought I was Jim Morrison, then I thought maybe I was the Queen, then I thought I was my Mom, basically anything that went thru my mind I was that person or object.
I remember at one point I was saying I think this is what ego death is.
I've been confused about gender off and on and that topic came up, up until now the only person that knew was my wife. No one is judging me, everyone loves me and all is great. I'll be reflecting over this trip for months. Will I ever do mushrooms again? Probably. Heroic dose can be crossed off my bucket list.

Episode 5
Through the frosted glass of the oak door of Dr. D Chambers, Allan Ridgemont lay on the leather couch blabbing about ‘Melissa.’
Madame Tandoori had explicitly told him to use that name while talking to Dr. Chambers and any other court ordered type situations, lest they think both he and she are mutually insane.
“That’s great, Allan…do you think it’s a little soon to be moving in together?” Daphne asked.
“I knew you’d say that, doctor,” he started. “but no, I don’t think so. This feels just right,” he said.
“How does Julia like her?” she asked.
He stopped and burst out a hearty bout of laughter designed to hide the tears that came just thinking about how Madame Tandoori had killed her. “Just great…they’re just great together.”
She nodded in a sort of
“Oh,” Daphne started. “I have some great news for you. I have a job for you if you’re interested.”
“Really?” he said, trying to compose himself from mourning Julia.
“Yes, and you can start pretty much immediately.”
“That’s great! Where is it? What am I doing?” he asked.
“It’s a job with the state. You’ll be installing new road signs,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
“It’s something to get you back on your feet,” she told him.
On the ride back to his apartment, Ridgemont watched a new clip from a popular podcaster named Ron Rosen. He would talk about all types of subjects – usually covering current new events of the day. He also had a popular podcast segment where he would find some lunatic – be it off the street or referred to him or whatever and the audience would have a laugh.
This particular podcase segment was discussing how the space program believed they had just identified not only a distant, Earth-like planet, but also, may have figured out a way to get there. The technology was very secretive, but there was legitimacy in the sources saying these things.
The Earth-like planet of discussion was a planet of the star Alkaid – the tip of the tail star that makes up Ursa Major, The Big Dipper. It was dubbed ‘Kainos’ and it was believed to be similar to Earth, only it was believed to have rings like Saturn and 3 moons. There was newfound energy in the space exploration program building into this revelation.
Rosen was actual local to Cincinnati and Ridgemont had even seen him out around the city here and there.
When he walked in the apartment, Madame Tandoori met him at the door, grinning.
“I have a job,” he said.
“I know!” she said. “Let’s go out and celebrate!”
“With what?” he asked. “I used the rest of my money to get to Pueblo on the train and you used the rest of your money to pay for the motel and get us back here. The food stamps are gone.”
“Leave that up to me,” she said, giggling. “And you know, we’re going to need to start making some changes around here.”
She took out her giant emerald and walked over to the door entryway. She knelt down with it and smacked it against the steel framing of the doorway. A long blade of the stone about the size of a pencil chipped off and she picked it up.
She said, “The man you saw in the cave –“
“I didn’t actually see him,” he interrupted.
“You know who it was…don’t you?” she prodded.
“Yes,” he answered.
“And you’re good with that…right?” she said.
He looked at her sharply…”Definitely.”
“You…we…were given gifts…like Robert Johnson at the crossroads…do you know who Robert Johnson was?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“So…are you ready for the roller coaster to begin?” she asked.
He nodded and she took his right hand and took the emerald chard and drove it into his palm. Then she took it and drove it into her own palm and they clasped hands and then he sucked the blood from her hand and she the same to his.
It was dusk and the pair hopped the bus to a crowded bar. The sign above the entrance in neon lettering said “Taft’s.”
They walked into the bar where there were a number of holla-zones…room areas that were something like virtual reality that put you in the seat or any world position you wanted to be in at the live Cincinnati Wendigo game. The Wendigo were the local professional lacrosse team and were playing against the Colorado Mammoth.
They scoured the holla-zones and found a group making a ruckus in one of them. They looked at each other and walked over.
One of the gentlemen sat in his seat talking with a group of other guys watching the game – which was currently COL 2, CIN 6.
“C’mon, just make a bet…let’s make it interesting,” one of them was saying.
“Colorado doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell,” one said back.
“I’ll give you great odds – we’ll make a $200 bet, 8-1 odds. You win, that’s a cool $1600…you lose, it’s just $200,” he said.
“I’ll take that bet,” said Ridgemont said.
The group of guys looked over at Ridgemont and Madame Tandoori, who was dressing in her flamboyant attire.
“I’ll bet you Colorado wins,” he said.
“Well alright then…now it’s a game,” the man said.
“You’re buying the next round,” one of the guys said to the gambler.
A waitress walked by and asked them what they wanted.
Ridgemont said, “Bring a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, two chilled glasses and leave them.”
Madame Tandoori smacked him on the ass.
He spoke up to the gambler and his group, “You know…this bet is a bit tame really. Let’s really live a little. How about we go even odds, $10,000 straight bet…Colorado over Cincinnati.”
Just then Cincinnati scored again. COL 2, CIN 7.
The gambler looked at them and smiled…a pity, yet crafty smile. “I can’t take your money like that…let’s just keep it light, even odds,” he said.
“Maybe your buddies want to chip in or be part of the payout…if we lose,” Ridgemont said.
They looked at him nodding their heads.
“My buddies want in…but, friend…we’re in the 4th quarter of the game…nothin’s fallin’ for Colorado tonight…you’re down by 5…I’ll give you one more offramp and I’ll expect payment,” the gambler said.
The waitress showed back up with the bottle of Johnny Walker Red and the frosty glasses. Madame Tandoori poured each of them a drink and the toasted one another.
“$10,000,” Ridgemont said to the man.
The group of guys were now excited about their fortunate payday. The gambler – concerned.
Cincinnati scored again, COL 2, CIN 8.
A few drinks later, there were two minutes left in the game and the score was COL 3, CIN 12.
“Listen…better luck next time,” said the gambler. “How will you be paying?”
“Oh, no!” the commentator cried out.
One of the Cincinnati players, Brock Anderson, was on the ground, writhing in pain. Anderson was Cincinnati’s biggest All-Star. Several minutes later, he limped, supported by a couple of medics, his way off the field.
Play started back up and a few seconds into it, Colorado scored. And then again…and again.
The gambler was furious. His friends, furious.
There were 15 seconds left in the game – which was now tied, 13-13.
Madame Tandoori gave Ridgemont an assuring nod as play resumed. Cincinnati had the ball and were passing down the field when a Colorado player intercepted a pass and ran down past the line and threw a bounce shot and just as time was expiring, the ball passed through the goalie’s arm and into the net.
Reluctantly, the gambler and his buddies made good on their bet and produced the $10k for Ridgemont – via an under-the-table offline card.
There was a loud commotion over at another holla-zone. Another game was about halfway through. Madame Tandoori took a drink and said to the gambler, “Double of nothing?” motioning over to the other game.
He looked at the pair and said…”Nah…I ain’t got double.”
Around the bar, Madame Tandoori performed palm readings for patrons and took small bets for ‘guess the number’ type tricks with people. And then a man walked up with a sizeable entourage. He was familiar…it was Ron Rosen.
“I call bullshit,” he said to Madame Tandoori.
She looked up at him standing there, “Would you like me to read your palm?” she asked him.
“No…I think this is all bullshit, and I’ve watched you for about 20 minutes and I think you’re a con artist,” he said.
She pretended to be worried.
“I’ll tell you what – come on my show tomorrow night and you can prove to me and…44 million other people that you’re a real psychic,” he said.
“Ok,” she said.
“Actually, I’ve got an even better idea,” he said. “You’re sitting here doing “pick a number” bullshit…if you’re up for it, I’ll give you a real test…you up for it?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“Let’s walk across the street real quick,” he said.
As they walked, he said, “Alright, so tomorrow night is a lottery drawing. I want you to walk into this store right now, fill out a lottery ticket with the numbers you think will win tomorrow night and then hand it to me and I will put it in a safe and when you come by to do the show, we will watch the lottery call-out and compare it with your numbers…sound fair?” he said.
“Sure,” she said.
She walked into the little convenience store, took a lottery card and bubbled in 5 numbers. She walked back out and handed it to Rosen.
“Alright, thank you, miss?” he said.
“Tandoori…Madame Tandoori,” she said.

Come back next week for Episode 6

Just got back from 10 days in Japan and wanted to type up a trip report to hopefully help others that are trying to plan a trip!
Our trip was 5/16 - 5/28 including travel days. This was my 2nd time in Japan (first time was study abroad for 5 weeks in May/June 2016), but it was my mom & sister's first time, so the goal was to include as many must-see activities as we possibly could in the short time we were there. Our days were packed to the brim however all 3 of us are fairly active and healthy so despite being absolutely exhausted by the end of each day, in retrospect we wouldn't have changed a thing in our itinerary.
That being said, our itinerary would be much too busy for the average person's first trip to Japan so keep that in mind if you use this information to plan your own trip. For example, we usually only had time to sit down and eat for one meal per day and had to eat on the go for the other meals in order to have enough time to go to all the places we wanted to go to. There was very little downtime in our trip.

Tourist Tips

• Luggage
  • We each traveled with 2 checked luggage since they were included in our flight. I had one full sized suitcase and one slightly smaller suitcase which both only had one side filled when I left the US. The plan was to fill the other half of the suitcases with souvenirs to bring home. Last time I went to Japan, it cost me ~$200 to ship two large boxes of souvenirs back home, so despite having to bring a lot of luggage this saved me a significant amount of money and I will be doing this for future trips as well.
  • Within our luggage we also packed a duffel bag to hold all our purchases on heavy shopping days and a daily backpack to hold things like our trash bag, hand towel, hand sanitizewet wipes, body wipes, small purchases, etc. My carry-on was a 40L backpack that I took with us when we stayed overnight in Kyoto.
• Money
  • I brought $400 cash to exchange at the airport. I had gotten a Charles Schwab debit card before leaving which has no foreign transaction/ATM fees so I planned to use my card for whatever purchases I could then use cash for everything else. I ended up withdrawing another ¥20000 which was just enough cash to last me the rest of our trip.
• Walking
  • Last time I went to Japan I survived wearing flat gladiator sandals basically the whole trip, but this did NOT work this time around for whatever reason (I guess we walked a lot more this time?). BRING COMFORTABLE SHOES TO WALK IN. I ended up having to buy sneakers on day 2 because I stupidly didn't think I would need them. I was more concerned about looking cute for pictures (ha) but I quickly realized that all the girls in Japan wear sneakers with their cute skirts and dresses, so I blended right in. I would also recommend bringing a second pair of shoes with you each day (in your backpack) to swap into if the shoes you are wearing start giving you blisters.
• Masking
  • We saw a lot of people not wearing masks, but the majority of people still wear masks. I would say the ratio of people wearing masks to not wearing masks was about 80:20.
• Trash
  • As many have mentioned on this subreddit, due to the lack of public trash bins I would highly recommend bringing a reusable trash bag to store your trash while you're out and about until you can find a bin. We found these cool black fabric ones with a waterproof liner on the inside that you could rinse out when it got dirty and could clip to the outside of your backpack so it wasn’t with your other belongings.
• Restrooms
  • Due to the lack of hand dryers/paper towels in bathrooms we also brought hand towels as recommended, but found ourselves just air drying our hands way more often than using the hand towels as it was often more cumbersome to remove our backpacks and fish out our hand towels to use.

​

Accommodations

• Sakura Hotel Jimbocho in Tokyo
  • I stayed in this hostel when I studied abroad in college in 2016, so it holds a special place in my heart. You can get a single room here for cheap, and although the rooms are extremely small, I don’t travel to Japan to spend time in my hotel so when looking for accommodations price is my #1 factor, not comfort. Toilets and showers are shared in this hostel and the rooms are set up coming off of a square hallway with sinks/restroom facilities in the center. The facilities don’t appear to be very modern and pretty, but the water pressure of the showers is the BEST. They have other room types as well, like bunk-beds, double rooms, etc. They have a 24 hour cafe downstairs and breakfast is included in your stay. All their staff speak English & Japanese (and other languages as well). They host some cool events like language exchanges and walking/jogging groups if you are more of a social person. I really enjoy the location of this hostel. You are within walking distance from the Imperial Palace and it still feels like you are in the city without it being so loud and busy like if you were to stay in Shibuya, etc. They do have other locations if you’re looking for somewhere with more nightlife.
• The Millennials Hostel in Kyoto
  • This is a really modern looking hostel in Kyoto, 2 streets over from Pontocho. The facilities are gorgeous and look brand new. They are set up similar to a capsule style hotel with a bunch of rooms coming off a hallway. Your bed takes up your entire space, and you have about 18 inches at the foot of your bed to stand. You pull an opaque privacy screen down to make your room private - there is no door. You can control your bed’s incline and lights through an iPhone in your room. There is storage space under your bed and on a shelf above your bed. Restrooms are shared but the showers are in one room and toilets in another. There are a lot of shared common spaces including a full stocked kitchen you can cook your meals in, but we literally only stayed here to sleep so we didn’t explore those spaces. I was worried about other guests being noisy but that wasn’t the case - everyone was super respectful. The price and location was great so I would definitely come back here.

​

Daily Itinerary

Day 1 & 2: Travel

• We flew out of Chicago O'Hare International Airport. Our direct flight to Narita was around $1600 after taxes, fees, and flight insurance. I had one layover the last time I flew to Japan and in the future I will only be buying a direct flight as I found this to be way easier than having a layover.
• Once we arrived in Narita we turned on our e-sim. We chose Ubigi after reading many positive reviews on this subreddit and I highly recommend them. We had some issues getting iMessage to work despite following Ubigi's instructions to a T, so we ended up just using WhatsApp to message during the trip, however, iMessage did start working later on.
• We decided against picking up our JR passes & seat reservations at the airport because the line was long and we didn't need them for another 5 days.
• Going through customs/immigration and grabbing our luggage only took about 20-30 minutes. There were many staff to guide you and we found the whole process to be really smooth.
• We exchanged our currency and went downstairs to buy our tickets for Narita Express at a ticket vending machine. We got round trip tickets for ¥3460 (keep in mind that the return ticket needs to be used within 14 days). We had purchased our Suica before leaving and put them in our iPhone wallets and they came with a balance of ¥2000 so we didn't load money onto our cards until the following day.
• We took the Narita Express to Tokyo Station then took a cab to our hostel in Jimbocho. We each traveled with 2 checked luggage, so we found the short and inexpensive taxi ride to be a better option than lugging 6 giant suitcases on local trains to get to our hostel.
• We checked into our hostel. The total price per person for 11 nights was ¥49500 (about $380).

​
Day 3: Imperial Palace/Ueno

• We woke up and walked to the Imperial Palace/East Gardens. We got there right when they opened and spent about 90 minutes there. We walked back to Jimbocho to go to my favorite tempura place in Jimbocho. This place has gotten quite famous since I was last there in 2016. We were first in line at 10:45am and by the time they opened for lunch at 11:30, there was a line of 20+ people. Our lunch cost only ¥800.
• After lunch we took the train to Ueno and spent some time in the Tokyo National Museum and Ueno Park. We also visited Shinobazu No Ike Bentendo Temple which is a cool temple right inside Ueno Park. While at Ueno Station, we picked up our JR passes & seat reservation tickets and also put ¥5000 on our Suica. We really enjoyed the fact that you could charge your mobile suica at a convenience store using cash - we didn’t have to worry about finding the machines in train stations with the phone holders.
• After that we walked through Ameyoko and did some shopping - I bought a super cute used Coach purse for around $65. Ameyoko seemed to have a lot more products than when I was there in 2016… but I also had more money this time around so maybe I was just paying more attention!
• We took a train back to our hostel to drop off our shopping bags and change. We took a train to Shinjuku to go to New York Grill for our dinner reservation. New York Grill is on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt hotel in Shinjuku and the views were incredible. We got the Spring Harvest 5-course dinner which included wagyu and it was easily the best beef I have ever eaten in my life - so juicy and buttery. The cost was ¥23100 per person (~$175).
• 25,138 steps on this day.

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Day 4: Shibuya/Akihabara

• We woke up and took a train to Shibuya to see Hachiko, go to the Starbucks near Shibuya Crossing, and shop at Shibuya109 and Uniqlo. It was hard for me to find any clothing that would fit me at the stores in Shibuya109 (I am a US 8/10 which is basically considered plus size in Japan) however I was able to find a cute t-shirt at Punyu's in Shibuya109 and two dresses at Uniqlo. I also bought sneakers at the Skechers store.
• I also went to the Mega Don Quijote in Shibuya and spent about $102 on candy and snacks to bring home. Lots of fun KitKat flavors here but it was very crowded and hard to walk around with my extremely full baskets.
• We took a train back to our hostel to drop off our shopping bags and had a quick lunch via conbini.
• We took a train to Akihabara and bought some souvenirs and gachapon, and walked all the way back to Ameyoko where I spent another $90 on candy and snacks to bring home.
• We took a train back to our hostel to drop off our shopping bags and change. We took a train to Ginza to go to Tempura Kondo for dinner (a Michelin starred tempura restaurant). We got the Yomogi dinner which was ¥23100 per person (¥25410 after fees, ~$195). The staff were amazing - they noticed that my sister was left-handed and set up her plates/silverware as such which was really observant. We loved the dinner, however there was WAY too much food for us; the staff recognized we were starting to get full, and asked us if we would be able to eat the next course which was ten-don. I was really concerned about being disrespectful and wasting food, so I was really glad that they noticed and asked!
• 19,445 steps on this day.

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Day 5: Asakusa/Ginza/Omoide Yokocho

• We woke up and took a train to Asakusa to see Sanja Matsuri. We shopped at the small souvenir shops on Nakamise-dori and had street food at the festival for lunch. I bought an awesome goshuincho here with a wooden cover and foxes on it.
• After being completely overstimulated, we took a train to Rikugi-en Garden to escape the crowds. This garden is a little off the beaten path, just outside the big city, but it is completely gorgeous and so worth the trip.
• After the garden, we took a train to Ginza to window shop and go to our reservation at Higashiya Ginza for wagashi & tea pairing. We had 5 wagashi paired with 5 teas that were amazing. It cost ¥4500 per person.
• After this, we walked to Mitsukoshi Ginza to explore the basement food floor and grab dinner. They start to discount the food as the stores near closing time, so going for a late dinner can save you a couple yen! After eating on their rooftop terrace which was beautiful, we walked to Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki Paris Marunouichi to grab dessert then headed back to our hostel to drop off our shopping bags.
• After we ate, we took a train to Shinjuku to walk down Omoide Yokocho. We had a drink on the third floor of Bar Albatross - highly recommend! The alleyway is a lot shorter than I imagined, and very crowded as you would expect. I probably wouldn’t go back here in the future but I am glad we visited!
• 25,002 steps on this day.

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Day 6: Harajuku

• We woke up and took a train to Harajuku to visit Meiji Shrine and got our first goshuin.
• After visiting the shrine, we walked back to Takeshita-dori to get lunch at Afuri Ramen. They’re known for their ramen with yuzu in their broth and this was one of our favorite meals during our trip. We got there about 20 minutes before they opened and were ~8th in line. By the time they opened, the line was stretching around the building!
• We walked down Takeshita-dori and shopped, then went to our reservation at Mipig Cafe (mini pig cafe). This place was so cute! You can make reservations for 30 minutes or 1 hour where you sit on the floor and miniature pigs will come and sit on your lap. You weren’t allowed to pick the pigs up and the staff were super kind and handled the pigs well. A 30 minute reservation was ¥1800 per person.
• After the pigs, we walked down Omotesando and took the train to Shinjuku to get dinner on the food floor at Isetan.
• After we ate on the rooftop terrace (beautiful once again), we headed back to our hostel to drop off our shopping bags. We took the train to Shibuya to go to our reservation at Shibuya Sky. We got the package where you get an admission ticket including a 50 minute reservation for the sofa seats and a choice of a mini bottle of champagne or 2 beers per person, which cost ¥5900 per person. The views were unreal and I recommend reserving the sofa seats so you can get amazing pictures. This was a highlight of our trip.
• 21,719 steps on this day.

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Day 7: Kawaguchiko

• This was our first travel day. We woke up early to take the highway bus from Busta Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko. The bus was ¥4400 per person. We were able to get some super clear pictures of Mt. Fuji while we were on the bus and right when we arrived at the station.
• We bought the daily unlimited bus pass for ¥1500 which ended up not being worth it for us because we spent so little time seeing things on the bus route. First, we went to the Panoramic Ropeway. We got there about 15 minutes before they opened and there was already a really long line. By this time, Mt. Fuji was already completely covered in clouds but the ropeway was really cool and we still got some awesome panoramic pictures. They have a shop at the top where you can get ice cream and sit on some swings and take pictures.
• After the ropeway we took the bus back to Kawaguchiko Station to get on the train to go to Chureito Pagoda. The gnats here were INSANE. We climbed up the ~400 or so steps to the top and got some cool pictures as well as our goshuin.
• We walked back to the station and took the train to Fuji-san Station and walked ~30 minutes to Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Shrine. The wooded walk up to the shrine is absolutely gorgeous. We got goshuin here as well.
• After the shrine, we walked and took a train back to Kawaguchiko Station to eat a conbini dinner, do last minute shopping, and catch our bus back to Tokyo.
• 19,374 steps on this day.

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Day 8: Kanazawa

• We woke up early to catch our 6:16am shinkansen to Kanazawa. Once we arrived, we bought the daily unlimited bus pass and took the bus to Omicho Market where we bought some souvenirs and food.
• We walked from Omicho Market to visit Ozaki Shrine and Oyama Shrine and got goshuin at both places. My sister realized she lost her wallet at this point, but a kind soul had turned it in to the staff at Ozaki Shrine!
• We took the bus from Oyama Shrine to Kenroku-en Garden, where we walked around, took lots of pictures, and sat down for lunch at a local restaurant.
• After lunch, we took the bus to the Higashi Chaya district where we shopped and took pictures.
• After that, we took the bus back to Kanazawa Station to catch our 5:57pm shinkansen back to Tokyo.
• 20,192 steps on this day.

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Day 9: Kyoto Day 1

• We woke up early to pack our overnight bags and catch our 6:21am shinkansen to Kyoto, where we would be staying for one night. We decided to keep our reservation at our Tokyo hostel because 1) it was super cheap and 2) we would be able to leave all our suitcases and belongings in our rooms for when we returned to Tokyo.
• When we arrived in Kyoto, we headed straight to our hostel to have them hold our bags before we could check in later that day.
• After that, we took a local bus to the Arashiyama area. It was absolutely packed with school groups and tour buses. We walked up Saga-Toriimoto Preserved Street to Adashino Nenbutsu-ji Temple where it was much quieter. We got goshuin and visited the small and private bamboo grove behind the temple. We walked back down Saga-Toriimoto Preserved Street towards Togetsukyo Bridge where we stopped and sat down for lunch then continued shopping along the way. I got lots of uji-matcha here.
• We walked back to Arashiyama Station and took a train to Kiyomizu-dera where we got goshuin, then walked to a small rooftop bar overlooking the Hokan-ji temple and pagoda and got awesome pictures and had dinner.
• After eating, we walked back to our hostel and checked in, then slept for the night. Our 1 night stay cost ¥5000 per person.
• 21,545 steps on this day.

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Day 10: Kyoto/Nara Day 2

• We woke up super early to check out of our hostel and head to Fushimi Inari. Our hostel held our bags while we went sightseeing for the day. We arrived around 6:45am which was so worth it - it wasn’t crowded at all and we got lots of pictures of the shrine and torii gates without any people in them. We walked for about 30 minutes up the mountain then headed back to Inari Station to head to Nara.
• Once we arrived in Nara, we spent some time with the deer then visited Todai-ji and got goshuin.
• After that, we took a train back to Fushimi Inari to visit the souvenir shops which had not opened yet when we had gotten there earlier that day. We shopped and got goshuin, then headed to Sannenzaka/Ninenzaka to shop. We visited Ryozen Kannon to get pictures (they had closed by the time we got there) and walked down Ishibei-koji Lane and Hanamikoji Street.
• After that, we walked back to our hostel to pick up our bags. We took a taxi to Kyoto Station to catch our 7:36pm shinkansen back to Tokyo.
• 27,861 steps on this day.

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Day 11: Tattoo

• My mom and I went to a tattoo shop near Shibuya to get matching tattoos on our wrists, then my mom spent the rest of the day shopping in Shibuya with my sister while I got another large tattoo on my shoulder.
• After my tattoo was finished, we all met up in Ikebukuro to get gyudon for dinner.
• 9,879 steps on this day.

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Day 12: Yokohama/Kamakura

• We woke up and took a train to Yokohama where we walked the Minato Mirai 21 area and shopped and had lunch at World Porters.
• After lunch, we took a train to Kamakura. First, we visited Hase-dera and got goshuin. I got lots of pictures of the hydrangeas even though they weren’t in full bloom yet.
• After that we walked up the road to Daibutsu and got goshuin. We walked back to Hase Station and took a train to Kamakura Station and walked the pedestrian pathway in the center of the road to Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu. We got our goshuin and were able to observe a small part of a traditional Japanese wedding that was happening at the shrine, which was really cool.
• After that, we walked back to Kamakura Station and took a train back to Tokyo.
• We spent the night packing. I ended up completely filling my suitcases with my souvenirs and had to put even more in my carry-on bag.
• 21,131 steps on this day.

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Day 13: Travel

• We woke up and headed back to Senso-ji to grab our goshuin, since it was too busy when Sanja Matsuri was happening the week before.
• We took a train back to our hostel and checked out around 11am, then made our way to Tokyo Station to take the Narita Express back to the airport.
• We arrived at the airport with plenty of time before our flight so we could get last-minute souvenirs. I found a couple flavors of KitKat and Hi-Chew here that I could not find in Donki/Ameyoko - but I could not find Beni-Imo KitKat which is the flavor that I was looking for! :(
• We flew back to O’Hare and drove home from there.

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Trip Cost

• Total trip cost: ~$5462.73
  • Total spent before I left Japan (flight, JR pass, highway bus ticket, tattoo deposit, pay-ahead reservations, suica, car rental): $2562.73
  • Total I spent in Japan (souvenirs, snacks, accommodations, transportation, meals, activities/admission, reservations, tattoo): ~$2900

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Cost Breakdown

Airfare

• Total (USD): $1600

Accommodations

• Total: ¥54500
  • ¥49500 (Tokyo hostel/11 nights) + ¥5000 (Kyoto hostel/1 night)

Transportation

• Total: ~¥64470
  • ¥33610 (JR pass) + ¥4400 (highway bus) + ¥3460 (N’EX) + ¥18000 (local trains/bus) + ¥5000 (taxis - approximate)

Meals

• Total: ~¥88510
  • ¥40000 (breakfast/lunch/dinner) + ¥48510 (meal reservations)

Souvenirs

• Total: ~¥150000
  • Goshuin, charms, matcha powder, candy, jewelry, clothing, purses, shrine offerings, postcards, etc.

Activities/Admission

• Total: ~¥9800
  • Pig Cafe, tea/wagashi tasting, shrines/temples, etc.

Tattoo

• Total (USD): $604.66

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

I've been lurking in this community for a long time but haven't really posted. I believe I've been struggling with hairloss since 2020 (right when the pandemic started). Since I had a lot of density at my crown I was constantly dismissed my dermatologists and never taken seriously. Now I think my hair has gotten really bad (especially at the crown) my hair is so flat and feels thin at the crown. My part is not as wide, but it not great. In 2020 I started to get bad scalp issues, again derms never really diagnosed me and just say it's seb derm or psoriasis or possibly AGA but never gave me firm answers or solutions. Mayb the scalp issues are contributing to my hair shedding / loss at the crown. I’m 26f
l've been shedding SO much lately too. Lately it's been short hairs which is freaking me out and probably a sign of AGA. I'm not sure if it's because I had Covid Dec 2022 for the first time ever or going through a traumatic break up end of Jan causing me to barely eat in Feb and march but my hair isn't what it used to be even like 6 months ago. Top of my hair just feels so flat and thin.
Anyways I felt inclined to post because today I showered and lost about 116 hairs from shampoo and brushing after and it's been freaking me out. Granted last time I showered was 4 days ago and wore my hair up in claw clip the last two days. I used to never really shed before 2020 like maybe lose 5 hairs in shower tops. I'm seeing a new derm mid June and hoping they can give me some solutions or any insight.
Hair loss is really triggering and an extremely hard thing to come to terms with so sending everything love ❤️

Good evening swap!
Timestamp/Vid
Tonight i'm passing on a Vero Neuron. I wanted to check this little guy out before I decided to pull the trigger on an axon or synapse. This knife is in great shape. I have not used, just fidgeted with. I am not the original owner. Natural Micarta scales, Factory edge, m390 blade, one light scratch on the clip side of the blade. Other than that what else can you say about Vero, they are known for quality. This knife is no different.
SV:140 no trades
PPFF, Venmo
USPS CONUS only
Yolo is king
know your local knife laws
Stay Sharp!

The week and weekend leading up to Memorial Day was not as quiet as expected. Our clinic buzzed with last-minute occupational testing, worker's comp cases, and unexpected injuries so severe that I thought we might transfer the patients to the ER. Luckily, only one or two fit that category.
Patients are still waiting too long to seek treatment. We saw a patient with a dislocated shoulder that suffered for a week before seeking treatment. More cellulitis patients arrived. I caught an article about it written by - of all people - Melissa Gilbert (Little House on the Prairie). If you are ever in a position where a relative is refusing treatment for a severely red and inflamed limb, show them her article:
https://parade.com/news/little-house-on-the-prairie-melissa-gilbert-er-horrifying-bug-bite-instagram-photo
That article should be enough to convince them.
Eye infections, styes and chalazions were up. No bilateral (both eyes) infections showed up.
Sinus pain and pressure were common complaints, with just one or two reporting yellow or green "alien" mucus.
On the Covid front, I heard they had three Covid cases on Monday, but we had just one or two this week and weekend. This may be due to the fact that most patients are now refusing COVID testing. The vast majority of them ask for Strep testing, and only a few resulted positive for Strep A. The rest were put down to "unknown virus", or "viral syndrome" (in the very young). To say that I am disappointed that so few chose to Covid test is an understatement.
Of course, one of those positive cases was given to me to discharge, and to my great relief she was at least directed to wear a mask as she sat at my desk. The problem? She leaned into the window so closely that I nearly felt the need to back myself away. I resisted it, knowing that the cloud of viral aerosolized particles was not directed toward me; but I hastened her paperwork and excused myself from the scene as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's better to just let the air clear, so to speak.
None of my coworkers are wearing masks anymore, not even my fellow front office workers. I overheard a conversation between a supervisor and some unidentified person (I don't eavesdrop, but when my name is mentioned I tend to pay attention). It seems they were talking about how well the dropping of mask-wearing was going. I was mentioned as being "proactive" versus everyone else, and that things seemed to be running smoothly...but I am not entirely of that opinion. In fact, I was somewhat angry that I had been singled out as a representative of a class of people; it had a ring of political side-taking even though the words were carefully chosen.
Several patients who were obviously ill with respiratory ailments refused to mask. I insisted, prompting scowls and grumbling, but my coworkers gave up, and said nothing. This in turn caused other patients to insist upon waiting in their cars. The divide between patients who just don't care about spreading disease and those who don't want to catch any seems to be developing quietly. While some people won't wear masks, they are still interested in separating themselves from obviously sick people. I do wish they would understand that Covid can be carried by even "healthy" looking people. Three years in, and they still haven't received the message.
When I look out over the crowd of unmasked patients, I see vulnerable seniors, babies, pregnant women... I feel that our signs should say, "Enter at your own risk."
I had a conversation with one of our doctors about Paxlovid when a middle aged couple came in asking for it due to symptoms (feeling "Very sick, nauseous, with a fever,") and a positive COVID test. I prefaced my question to the doctor with, "As I am sure you have heard that the FDA formally declared Paxlovid a safe and effective treatment for COVID," and then followed up with, "Are you now of a mind to consider writing a prescription for it, if the situation warrants it?"
His reply was curt, to the point, and had a somewhat annoyed and confused tone: "I have never written a Paxlovid prescription because...I cannot be sure of the patient's liver function." And that was that. No mention of a survey for the patient, no request for a test for liver enzymes...nothing. He went back to his paperwork, and I promptly directed the patient to the local CVS Minute Clinic.
Once again, I felt defeated. My own clinic, my favorite practitioners, too worried that someone might sue them, and too worried that they might cause harm - to act to give comfort. It distracted me that day. Just in case you're in a position where your provider is on the fence, here is the announcement by the FDA:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-oral-antiviral-treatment-covid-19-adults#:~:text=Today%2C%20the%20U.S.%20Food%20and,19%2C%20including%20hospitalization%20or%20death.
For those seeking COVID stats, I spent a couple of days compiling areas showing a rise in wastewater and hospitalizations:
Marion County appeared to have a rise in hospitalizations earlier this week. Citrus was also shown. I am now convinced that areas with shared hospitals are being linked, and the counties are not separated by geographical area.
Comparative hospitalizations for COVID treatment between this and last week:
Citrus: 13 new patients, a 62.5% rise, 2.50 patients per 100,000 (above the US average of 2.49). Marion mirrored this.
Indian River: 35 new patients, a 59.1% rise, 4.6 patients per 100,000.
Santa Rosa: 35 patients, a 94.4% rise, 4.2 patients per 100,000. Escambia, Okaloosa, and Walton were linked.
As a control:
Pasco: 130 patients, down 19.8%, 4.1 patients per 100,000.
We do seem to have had more COVID in Pasco, but it is slowly relaxing. That may be short-lived though, considering the holiday.
I have not included any other counties due to the fact that their levels were the same or reduced by a very small level. If you're in any of those fortunate counties, smile! (But still wear your mask.)
Wastewater Levels per the CDC show:
Levi: Significant rise
Alachua: Significant rise
Orange: Tentative rise, just beginning
All other levels were decreasing slowly or unreported.
Memorial weekend and Day will result in people getting together for barbeques, solemn ceremonies, and family outings....and you know more gatherings means more spread. I'll report what I see, of course.
For everyone still masking, keep it up. I've had patients confront me: "Are you comfortable in that mask?" I simply reply that it is the best thing that I can do to guard myself at the clinic....and at the grocery store....and on public transportation. Don't ever apologize. It's your right to stay healthy and happy.
For those dealing with Memorial Day as I do, in remembering lived ones lost to the wars, or just simply lost to time, I am with you.
Be safe, be masked, and be well.

The purge continues! As stated before, I`m getting ready to retire and travel for several months so I'm drastically thinning the herd of safe queens and uncarried blades (round 3). I don't really have the room in the camper for as many knives as I have now. My downsizing can benefit you!
-Not looking for trades but all prices are OBO, all reasonable offers are considered.
-PP G&S, all prices are including shipping, US sales only, first YOLO/comment/message gets the blade.
-Up for sale this round is: https://imgur.com/gallery/luNP8Sc
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1.) Steve Karroll AEB-L Fixed Blade.
AEB-L Blade. Previous owner had Karbadize make some scales for it. Comes with kydex sheath. Sheath was cut down to fit the new scales, the cut isn’t the most even but holds super solid. Small bit of wear from the sheath. OAL is about 7 7/16". Never sharpened. Comes with COA. SV $180
https://imgur.com/gallery/GVQEt1z
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SOLD 2.) North Arms Skaha 1 in Carbon Fiber.
S35VN with Carbon Fiber Scales. Excellent condition. Very sharp and super light. Nicely centered and has that amazing Skaha action that still stands out. Drops shut too. Wonderful knife with beautiful milling. Comes with taco, North Arms letter, and business cards. SV $200. SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/uBH0Bzk
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3.) Olamic Wayfarer 247.
M390 blade with Olamic's acid dark wash finish. This knife has been carried, fiddled with, but never cut anything besides opening some Amazon packages. The only blemish is a small snail trail on the show side of the blade. The centering is dead-on, action is good. Solid lockup. The scales have a deep-sea finish/sculpting that reflects light beautifully and is even better in person. Bronzed hardware and backspacer, the latter of which is also sculpted to match scales and the clip. Comes with the original zippered pouch, the COA, and the pivot tool. S/N T495-H, DOB 10.30.2020. SV $425
https://imgur.com/gallery/Uj62VEo
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4.) Olamic Swish.
Elmax blade with satin finish. Titanium scales in Olamic’s blue seabed contouring. Titanium Clip with nugget backbar anodized bronze. A few very slight marks/scratches on the blade, but not much. Handles look good with no noticeable signs of wear. Detent is very good and the blade fires out nicely with the flipper tab or a Spydie flick. Drop shut and the lock up is solid. Comes with the Olamic case, the COA, and 2 business cards. SV $350
https://imgur.com/gallery/4SPPfO8
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SOLD 5.) Spyderco Paramilitary 2 (PM2) Blackout Lynch.
CPM S30VDLC blade. Easily the best PM2 I've ever owned. Snappy, super smooth, rock solid, drops shut, centered. Second owner. It saw some light use from the first owner but looks more or less new, slight wear near the lock on the spine. The edge bevel is a little jacked up but that's how it came from the factory. Comes with nice Lynch box, leftover Spyderco scales, clip, sticker, and key chain. SV $160 SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/iN5uIou
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6.) Fox Knives 40th Anniversary #005.
M390 striped blade and carbon fiber scales. You won’t find many of these on the internet. This one has a really cool blade. Appears to be a sharpened blade from the previous owner and general signs of carry. Really cool knife though. Perfect size, great ergos, that blade. My only complaint is the detent is a little soft so the action isn't super snappy. No original box but will come in a zippered pouch. SV $375
https://imgur.com/gallery/YTgzX0Q
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7.) APurvis Progeny V1.
M390 blade with a satin finish and purple anodized scales. Action is solid and the detent is on point. There are some marks from a previous owner’s sharpening on the choil and a couple of barely visible scratches on the pocket clip. Great knife with good ergos. No box but comes with a pouch. SV $225
https://imgur.com/gallery/6M1x0dr
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8.) Microtech UTX-70 SE - CUSTOM.
CTS 204P blade. Previous owner went overboard on this one, it seems like it was a fun little project. This one started life as a standard gray single edge. They then had this one blizzard washed and the hardware bronzed. The Microtech logo was replaced with what was supposed to be a Kraken, but it’s more like a cute little octopus... The blade was acid washed with satin flats, and finished on a wicked edge. All mod work was done by EDC House/Way of the Knife. The knife has not been used since it was modded, just fidgeted with. Functions perfectly and fires great. Some snails on the show side. This is an automatic tool, please be aware of your local laws and regulations. Comes with the box. SV $180
https://imgur.com/gallery/E9VRrf4
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9.) Sharper By Design Micro Exo Typhoon with carbon fiber inlays.
M390 blade with carbon fiber inlays. Second owner but the original owner got this one directly from the original drop. Beautiful action, fit, and finish. One of the sharpest factory edges I’ve seen. Comes with the box. SV $300
https://imgur.com/gallery/I1SrdIS
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SOLD 10.) Benchmade Bailout 537SGY.
CPM-3V partially serrated tanto DLC blade with black Grivory scales. Original owner but only carried a few times and never used to cut with. Practically new-in-box. Super light (2 oz) and super thin! Solid knife that is an easy carry and opens and closes with ease and fluidity. Comes with the box and Benchmade pouch. SV $175 SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/vd5EXlP
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SOLD 11.) Benchmade Rift Osborne Design 950SBK.
154CM partially serrated DLC blade with black and charcoal layered G-10 scales. Original owner with light carry and only used to open Amazon packages. Sharp factory edge and perfectly flips open and closed with minimal effort. Very functional edge shape that is similar to the 940 but easier to hold onto with the textured scales. Comes the box and Benchmade pouch. SV $125 SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/JsYli2r
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SOLD 12.) Berg Blades Slim
M390 stonewashed blade with stonewashed titanium scales. This thing is pretty cool and despite its easily carryable size, makes you feel like you could chop down trees. Not the first owner, I flicked it open a dozen times or so, tested putting it in my pocket a few times, and then put it back in the box. Small snails on the scales but the stonewash hides them well. SV $275 SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/3BjQkTS
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13.) Ray Laconico & Massdrop Keen.
S35VN blade with brushed titanium scales anodized bronze. Gorgeous knife that shows almost no signs of being carried. This thing literally snaps open with early lockup, perfect centering, and no lock stick. Drops shut with the slightest shake. Comes with the box, taco, and R. Laconico cloth. SV $140
https://imgur.com/gallery/w8kACQ4
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SOLD 14.) Giantmouse Vox/Anso ACE Biblio with green Micarta scales.
M390 stonewashed blade with green Micarta scales. Original owner and only carried for one week. Found out that micarta wasn’t my style. Great knife with the only signs of carry being slight patina on the micarta but there is still a long way to go to have them fully patinated. Comes with the box and original packing material. SV $150 SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/Qw5NoOF
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15.) Pena X Series Lanny’s Clip Flipper.
S35VN clip point blade with green G-10 scale inserts. Beautiful two tone satin and stonewashed blade and blue anodized hardware. The fit and finish is amazing and the action is smooth. Small snails on the titanium bolster. Previous owner added the lanyard and bead. Comes with taco only. SV $210
https://imgur.com/gallery/mzVWxhD
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SOLD 16.) Ferrum Forge & Massdrop Falcon Wing Edition.
All black edition with stonewashed DLC S35VN blade with titanium scales milled to resemble a bird of prey’s wing. Really great detent and action. Drops shut with a shake. Second owner with almost no signs of carry. Perfectly centered. SV $85 SOLD https://imgur.com/gallery/2F1sYTg

90@$2
$180
Benchmade Bugout 535bk-4
Timestamp/pics: https://imgur.com/a/H0LZvgO
Justification:
$220 sold 22 days ago
Escrow: No
Pay via PayPal FRIENDS AND FAMILY with NO NOTES!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do not click "paying for goods and services" or "add purchase protection"
Waitlist calls will receive one spot, unless a quantity is specified in the call.
If a called spot is already taken, a random will be assigned in its place, unless otherwise specified.
If your call is ambiguous (ex: "I'll take 3"), I will make my best guess as to what you intend (spot 3 or 3 randoms), but please be clear if you don't want to leave it to chance.
Description:
Benchmade Bugout, m390, aluminum scales. Second owner. Blade favors the clip side slightly. Some wear on the thumb studs. Other than that, it's in great condition. Barely carried and used. Includes box and baggie.
International shipping: No

PayPal Info: [REDACTED]
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I know what you're all probably thinking, "Legends and Leaders, what is wrong with you?". But hear me out! All must know of the divisions the Big Ten used from 2011 to 2013! Rutgers and Maryland joined in 2014 when they switched to the East and West divisions, so I tallied the responses from my comment on my previous post to decide who of the two would be the legend. Tomorrow Rutgers will be the leader along with Notre Dame. The year in parenthesis is the date the teams last played each other. As always if I missed any dates or matchups, please let me know!

1. Michigan

Arizona State (0-1) (1987)
Kansas State (0-1) (2013)
Mississippi State (0-1) (2011)
Oklahoma (0-1) (1976)
Tennessee (0-1) (2002)
Texas (0-1) (2005)
TCU (0-1) (2022)
Toledo (0-1) (2008)
Wesleyan (CT) (0-1) (1883)
Cleveland AA (OH) (0-1) (1891)
​

1. Michigan State

Alabama (0-2) (2015)
Army (0-2) (1984)
Auburn (0-1) (1938)
BYU (0-1) (2016)
Colorado State (0-1) (1998)
Florida State (0-2) (1988)
Georgia Tech (0-3) (1985)
Houston (0-1) (1967)
LSU (0-1) (1995)
Louisiana Tech (0-1) (2003)
Texas Tech (0-1) (2010)
Saint Louis (MO) (0-1-1) (1924)
Marietta (OH) (0-1) (1920)
Haskell Indian Nations (KS) (0-1)
Fort MacArthur (TX) (0-1) (1917)
Creighton (NE) (0-2) (1923)
Cornell (NY) (0-1) (1926)
Chicago (IL) (0-1) (1923)
​

1. Minnesota

Arizona State (0-1) (1969)
Hawaii (0-1) (1997)
North Carolina State (0-1) (2000)
Notre Dame (0-4-1) (1938)
Oklahoma (0-2) (1986)
Tennessee (0-1) (1986)
Texas Tech (0-2) (2012)
Virginia (0-1) (2005)
Iowa Navy Pre-Flight (0-3) (1944)
Chicago Naval Reserve (IL) (0-1) (1918)
​

1. Iowa

Colorado (0-2) (1992)
North Carolina State (0-3) (1992)
Miami (FL) (0-4) (1992)
Oklahoma (0-2) (2011)
Stanford (0-1) (2016)
Texas A&M (0-1) (1931)
Utah (0-1) (1978)
Physicians & Surgeons (IL) (0-1) (1897)
Iowa Navy Pre-Flight (0-2) (1944)
Great Lakes NTS (IL) (0-4) (1943)
Doane (NE) (0-1) (1895)
Denver AC (CO) (0-1) (1893)
Centenary (LA) (0-1) (1930)
​

1. Northwestern

Akron (0-1) (2018)
Arizona (0-2) (1976)
Arizona State (0-4) (2005)
Arkansas (0-1) (1981)
Florida (0-2) (1966)
North Carolina (0-2) (1977)
Southern Cal (0-5) (1995)
Tennessee (0-2) (2015)
Texas A&M (0-1) (2011)
Texas Tech (0-1) (2010)
Washington (0-3) (1984)
New Hampshire (0-1) (2006)
Iowa Navy Pre-Flight (0-1) (1942)
Harvard Prep School (IL) (0-1) (1886)
Denver AC (CO) (0-1) (1893)
Chicago University Football Club (IL) (0-2) (1890)
Chicago Naval Reserve (IL) (0-1) (1918)
Carlisle Indian School (PA) (0-1) (1903)
​

1. Nebraska

Arkansas (0-1) (1964)
BYU (0-1) (2015)
Duke (0-1) (1954)
Georgia Tech (0-1) (1990)
Georgia Southern (0-1) (2022)
Houston (0-1) (1979)
Ole Miss (0-1) (2002)
Stanford (0-1) (1940)
Southern Cal (0-4-1) (2014)
Saint Louis (MO) (0-1) (1907)
Iowa Navy Pre-Flight (0-1) (1942)
Carlisle Indian School (PA) (0-1) (1908)
Camp Dodge (IA) (0-1) (1918)
Butte AC (MT) (0-2) (1896)
​

1. Maryland

Houston (0-1) (1977)
Miami (OH) (0-1) (1969)
Marshall (0-1) (2013)
Nebraska (0-2) (2019)
Notre Dame (0-2) (2011)
Ohio State (0-8) (2022)
Oklahoma (0-4) (1967)
Oregon State (0-1) (2007)
Stanford (0-1) (2014)
Texas A&M (0-2) (1958)
Washington (0-1) (1982)
Wisconsin (0-4) (2022)
Walbrook AC (MD) (0-1) (1901)
Swarthmore (PA) (0-1) (1919)
Princeton (NJ) (0-2) (1922)
Mount Washington AC (MD) (0-1) (1906)
Haverford (PA) (0-2) (1916)
Gibraltar AC (DC) (0-1) (1900)
Gallaudet JV (DC) (0-1) (1898)
Curtis Bay Coast Guard (MD) (0-1) (1943)
Columbia AC (DC) (0-1) (1894)
Chicago (IL) (0-1) (1926)
Chemical Warfare Service (DC) (0-1) (1918)
Carnegie Mellon (PA) (0-1) (1921)
Baltimore Medical College (MD) (0-1) (1897)
Alexandria Episcopal HS (VA) (0-4) (1900)
https://freebiesupply.com/logos/big-ten-logo/
*Don't sleep on Iowa Navy Pre-Flight!

Hey all! I am a terrarium hobbyist and all around plant enthusiast. I have always been pretty good with plants since I was raised by two avid gardeners, so I have a very skewed view of what's an easy plant and what isnt.
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My friend REALLY wants me to help her build a terrarium for her birthday. She has the opposite of a green thumb, so I suggested a semi-closed system (lidded but not fully sealed) as she does want to learn to do some care, so a fully closed system wouldn't be much fun for her. What are some good plants I can get her that are darn-near murder proof in a semi-closed terrarium? I've looked online and there seems to be mixed opinions. I'd just use clippings from my own setups, but through research have found out that most of my stuff is sensitive to the non-green thumb people. Any ideas would be great! She wants a foresty/jungly feel over succulents.