Pep rally face paint ideas

Well this was suggested for me to do considering the desperate circumstances I find myself in. I'm looking for Paypal or CashApp or Zelle donations to use for a $5,000 retainer to hire legal counsel! And here's why...
I will be brutally honest even though the truth may turn people from wanting to help due to the stigma and stereotypical mind sets people seem to carry towards those that suffer from drug addiction and mental health issues. I suffer from a mental health diagnosis called shizo-effective depressive type. I also had a heroin addiction for many many years. In 2017 I had been on methodone for several years at a 50mg daily dose at your local friendly methodone clinic. I also drank daily, Id buy a fifth of Captain Morgan on my way home from work everyday. Id drink about 3/4 of this fifth daily after work. For years this went on all the while I worked doing basement waterproofing 6 days a week, running a jack hammer daily or digging huge deep holes around the outside perimeter of homes. I rented a small apartment a mile away from the beach, had a live in girlfriend, paid all my bills with simply one paycheck out of the monthly 4 pay cycles. Life was seemingly perfect! Compared to my earlier years of homelessness and heroin addiction. Slept in abandoned houses on the east side of Detroit, drug houses, homeless shelters and warming centers in the winter months. I committed retail frauds daily to support my drug habit, to eat, to support every financial need I had. Inevitably I did alot of time in county jails. Visited over 12 county jails and was a repeat customer at several of the jails. I spent approximately 5-6 years incarcerated in county jails. Then despite my crimes being non-violent, petty in nature, low class misdemeanors and felonies... The judges grew tired of my revolving door antics seemingly serving 90 days in jail out for 90 back in for 90 for over 5 years this went on. With quite a few 6 month sentences and a couple 1 year sentences. After being viewed as a career criminal with no regard for the law I was sent to prison, twice actually! I served almost 6 years total with the M.D.O.C. AKA Michigan prisons. For a grand tally of almost 11 years of incarceration on the installment plan, in pieces not straight 11 years. Moving forward I got out in 2012 and turned over a new leaf after serving 3 years for stealing 10 cans of baby formula from the local Kroger market. I went on what they call M.A.T. (medicated assisted treatment) methodone. This is viewed as a "harm reduction" module, basically for the severely addicted that have a very difficult time accumulating any clean time what so ever! Methodone gave me what I imagine people would refer to as a normal life. I worked, I rented a place, I paid bills, I was a productive member of society for the first time in my life at age 30. I landed a job with the local 687 carpenters union out of Detroit worked as an apprentice on commercial cooling towers. I attended apprenticeship school, or trade school once a week for 8 hrs and collected $19 an hr to sit in class. I had a pension, an annuity, top class health insurance with an Express Scripts debit card that collected $120 a month to use toward prescriptions, doctor appts, copays etc. Life was grand I was finally proving myself to be more than the stereotyped street addict career criminal. Moving forward the carpenters union didn't pan out and unfortunately wasn't vested enough to collect any of my pension I paid into, my employer paid into for over a year. I then got into Basement Waterproofing and stuck with this trade from there on out. Well in the year 2017, 5 years out of prison now and heroin free I became ... What's the perfect adjective to use here... Complacent I suppose. Life was good had all I wanted, never went w/o. Even had the live in girlfriend situation going. Learning to step outside of my own selfish self-centered geared mentality. Into a loving compassionate individual that did my best to provide, support, love another human being. This was foreign territory for me absolutely! As before the world evolved around me me me. Safe to say I was growing and learning to live "normal" (despise that reference but seemingly fits here). I in fact was doing so well I decided I no longer needed to be on methodone and if I'm gonna stop that I may as well not drink either! I cold turkey approached a 50mg daily 5 year dose of methodone and quit drinking almost the daily fifth of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. Now here in lies the confliction and perhaps even someone could view as controversial because I claimed to be growing and living my best life yet I was taking a strong narcotic medication and drinking daily on it! However I view this in a relative standpoint, in comparison to the way I lived prior ... Street junky retail fraud extradenair in and out of incarceration, not to mention around 20 inpatient substance abuse rehabilitation centers. So in comparison to that lifestyle I did view myself as experiencing "my best years." In fact I would still argue that logic, despite my own mother not seeing it in that perspective. Which brings me into mental health and my schizo-effective major depressive and substance abuse severe diagnosis. The classic coined term Dual Diagnosis, suffering from drug addiction and mental health issues. So to back it up briefly and quickly move forward with this because I'm honestly not wanting this to be long in the sense of people dont even contemplate reading it. But yes my decision to quit drinking and abruptly quit methodone against doctors advice to gradually wean down to a near 0mg dosage . I had made up my mind and couldn't of been more ready to see this thing thru! Well I'd say it was 10 days into my detox (methodone is a long drawn out detox due to a "half-life" term that basically means the medication builds up in your system and takes forever to not only complete a detox, but to simply feel like your self again) it gets in your bone marrow and does NOT see itself out as normally as say other drugs would! In fact I would argue that after being on methodone long term that you never fully recover from that. Simply put you never quite feel the same again, that the daily "norm feeling" is far from normal anymore. It is common knowledge that fatigue, depression, and for me, being in a never-ending state of not ever again experiencing pleasure in mundane things that (here we go again) normal people find joy in. There is no drive to do anything, to go anywhere, or simply go out and enjoy the company of socializing and interacting with other people, even loved ones. Simply put it is very difficult to find pleasure in anything, with no high or low emotions rather like being stuck at a constant medium. Combine that with chronic fatigue and a general baseline of feeling depressed. That is what it is like to come off a synthetic opiate that you took daily for 5 years or better! But I haven't even started on the mental health aspects of my experience. Back to the point of being about 10 days into my detox... I experienced what they call a drug induced psychosis. Which was basically like being schizophrenic but times 10. I was in such a state that when I watched T. V. I was being sent subliminal messages from corporate America trying to indirectly turn me on to something that was extremely important but yet no matter how hard I tried I couldn't understand "what the TV was truly trying to tell me." When I put music on I was convinced that the artists I was listening to had a direct feed into my personal life and were rapping about me, again sending me messages. When I walked down the street the traffic in the road was deliberately trying to lead me somewhere that I needed to follow or sometimes avoid. I mean it is very difficult for me to put in words what I experienced because it's like trying to write something that makes absolutely no sense, but then try to make the reader understand what I was experiencing and trying to explain. Another thing I recall was people around me in stores or wherever they would be on there cell phones talking but they weren't actually talking to anyone on their phones they were indirectly talking to me. Ill stop there with the attempted explanation of what a psychosis was like, I'm sure the reader can see it's basically going from never having any psychological issues to becoming absolutely crazy! It's like the most intense self-centered experience one could ever go thru. As everything, the traffic, people, music, television literally everything surrounding you is directed at you! As if the entire world is circulating around you because everything that happens has to do with someone or something directing a message or a signal to you. Basically I lost my fuckin mind ok. I went from never having any mental health issues perhaps a little situational depression due to my life choices, my addiction, being incarcerated etc. But nothing worthy of note nothing pre-existing here that got triggered in my detox. It wasn't like that, I wasn't previously even slightly off my rocker then thru detox it enhanced it. No it was more like being completely normal experiencing what I was considering my best life to being completely utterly insane! So naturally 3 weeks into this I had lost my job, my car broke down, and I wasn't leaving my apartment at all. It progressed and got worse for a period of, no exaggeration here, almost 3 years. I moved back in with my mother and step father in 2017. Having lost everything I worked for and accumulated, even my pets! My family thought I was gone beyond repair that I would never be myself again. I went to the psychiatric hospital a few times and they couldnt even explain what had happened or the why I ended up in such a long state of insanity. Id say it was about 2020 at which point community mental health workers had been coming to my mom's place 3 times a week to check in on me. I had been taking a medication called Abilify for quite some time at this point. And I don't know hard to elaborate on but I just kinda started to snap out of it. Then eventually I did completely snap out of it and I was wonderfully sane and capable of sitting down and having a rational conversation again. The catch was severe depression lingered, a depression that was more intense than the horrible adjustment phase of not having methodone to jump start brain synapses, and working with a completely deleted amount of dopamine and serotonin levels. It became my personality a general baseline of depressed. Sane again yes but depressed to the extreme of finding little to no pleasure in doing things. Sleeping 12 hours a day, chronic fatigue... Basically discontented at all times. At this point of my life I had been out of prison for 11 years, had 0 police contact, no problems with drug abuse at least not on the level of being anything remotely close to a street junky.
So this turned out to be way longer and more detailed then I had originally intended this to go. I'm writing this for a purpose because I am currently in trouble and I honestly do need financial assistance to acquire legal representation. A situation I never ever thought I would be in again. As I had over 10 + years outside of living in such a miserable existence of constantly worrying about being incarcerated or worrying about my next fix. So anyway I'm sharing my story here to first of all present an honest persective into my life. Yes I struggled for many years but I never once went into the how i got into heroin at age 17. I didn't play the point my finger at the adult game that turned me and my best friend onto the drug telling us it was only ketamine that is essentially non addictive. That I used heroin for the duration of a year before I new it was heroin. Finding out too late because I was already in a state of being chemically dependent. That it was in fact my best friend thru middle and high school, his older brother that turned us onto becoming junkies and mislead the whole way into thinking we were doing a drug that doesn't have serious addictive properties. I mean there are so many blame games I coulda orchestrated in this writing, perhaps sharing my own father being a crack addict that routinely embarrassed me in high school by going on crack binges then coming over to like my girlfriends house and trying to manipulate money outta them. Or having me in the car with him as a kid while he smoked crack telling me to turn my head while he blasted away 50 dollar rocks filling the entire car with crack smoke. My point is yes there was learned behaviors I picked up at an early age that perhaps made me more susceptible to turning out the way I did. Or the trauma I experienced as a child that had me running to drugs to get high at 13 years old. There were so many contributing factors but the simple truth is despite all that stuff, the trauma and learned behaviors all the things the licensed therapists will play on and then tell u it's not your fault. Well I kinda disagree with all that because no one forced me to do the things I did, I made a conscious decision every day in doing the things I did until it completely spiraled outta control and my life became completely unmanageable. Textbook powerlessness over the ability to simply say no and to just stop using. I couldn't do that, I still can't do that I have to be on medication to balance myself out if I'm not using. Because I dont feel normal or happy when I'm not on my medicine in fact I'm out right miserable. Which brings me to the current perdictment I'm in, with the legal issues. To get to the point of summing this up after 12 years of no legal trouble I did end up being charged with a felony. I had given an old friend a ride and he stashed a meth pipe in my truck, that had been there for over 6 months without my knowledge until the day came where I was pulled over. And with my history when I get pulled over they search my vehicle every time! And yes this happened and they find this meth pipe and apparently meth is like the worse drug in the world to be charged with. Over having a meth pipe in my truck I was charged with felony possession of methinphetamines. I go to court and because of my past the charges from over 12 years ago, it enhanced my sentencing guidelines. I was told I was going to do anywhere from 5 months to 41 months, for this pipe found that wasn't even mine. And it mattered not that all this time had went by where I didn't get in trouble and did well for myself. So with looking at prison again, and having mental health problems now being a bit older and settled down... I completely panicked over the ideal of long term incarceration again. So I signed up for the mental health court program which is basically the same thing as drug court for those that are familiar. And I did 18 months on this program of seeing the judge every single week to check in with status reports. Going to take drug tests 3 times a week. Doing mandatory counseling 5 days a week at community mental health on top of seeing my recovery coach once a week and my therapist once a week. To top it off with 5 NA/AA meetings a week. I did all this for 18 months only had 6 months of this intense probation left to go. Then my uncle died of lung cancer and the man was like a father figure to me. I relapsed and I can't really explain the why, it was like I was in a state of just not caring being so lost with grief is a overbearing thing idk but yes I relapsed. I immediately told on myself, told my therapist told the judge told everyone on the mental health team. And the judge was not happy I told her I had a rehab set up and I could get in that very next day. I went on to tell her that there was a 90 day program they offered at this facility and I was aiming to get into that. She then completely cut me off said I was to go there I was to do not a day less than 90 and if I deveaated in any way she would take me off this jail diversion mental health program that I would be resentenced on original charge and basically it wouldn't be good! And I do know from experience in my dealings with the judicial system and being around other inmates hearing there stories, that when put into one of these jail diversion/ sentence diversion programs like mental health court or drug court.. that if you sign up for it then end up messing it up not completing for whatever reason that they go to the very high end of your sentencing guidelines and give you every bit of time they are permitted to according to your scoring sheet.
Coming to conclusion here I went to this program and IMMEDIATELY found out that the 90 day program they offered was merely for a select few individuals that there was never bed space to get into it and unfortunately you had to of been from that same county receiving funding from that particular county in order to get accepted into it! So I was a far ways off from even being remotely close to being eligible for this 90 day program that my judge demanded me to do. Then I find out my program is only a 2 week program which is a far ways off from 90. And I knew my judge wasn't gonna wanna hear any kinda excuses or reasons. So what I did was I did 2 weeks then I applied for 2 week extensions at the end of my 2 week funding period. Long story short here I got 7 weeks in and then my funding source decided that was sufficient and I wasn't getting anymore funding for additional time there in the program. So I panicked and I ended up calling medicaid switching my address to a local address then I called the local funding source for inpatient rehabs and I gave them this new local address. Well they issued me more funding to stay and I thought I was good, no worries. Few days later I'm being told that I have to zoom in for mental health court that day which was not routine at all as I had been there 8 weeks almost at that point and never had to zoom in because the judge new I was in rehab. So I zoom in to court the judge tells me that I'm to leave the rehab and report immediately the following Tuesday to court for resentencing that I was being kicked of the program because I was no longer a resident of Lapeer county. I tried to explain and I was shunned wasnt allowed to explain then I got hung up on whole on the zoom app. I immediately call my therapist because she's part of the mental health court team. She tells me that in changing my address and using it to fasely acquire funding for medical services in a fraudant way was in fact a felony. Then she said that she was sorry but there was nothing she could do for me that the judge was gonna resentence me. So my life flipped upside down immediately here I am in rehab going on almost 8 weeks doing great participating the best I could attempting to get the most I could outta the experience so I could get out stay clean and move forward with my life and be off the court probation thing it under 6 months. To my reality becoming I'm not going to do 41 months in prison over a meth pipe which is technically a paraphernalia ticket but they trumped it up to a felony and now I have to go back after 12 years of being out. I stressed and stressed and stressed then I ran. I didn't go to court because honestly I'm scared to death over the idea of going back to prison. I struggle with mental health problem now, I'm older and simply just not the young healthy person l was when I had to go in last time! I convinced myself that I wouldn't mentally be capable of enduring that again in the current state of my well-being. And I left the trailer I own because staying there woulda been me being arrested with in a week. So now here I am staying with a friend no money no job no where to go family mad at me and im looking at 41 months :( .
I need help I'm trying to raise 5 grand to retain this lawyer that already knows the ins and outs of my whole case. And believe he can get me a deal to no prison time! Which is a miracle because as of now I'm looking at 41 months! So we're talking roughly 30 months being shaved off for an expense of 5 grand! That is worth the money it's worth me doing something like this that I would under normal circumstances not even think about writing my personal life to be painted on the internet for the world to see. And maybe just maybe a few individuals out there that have the means to help people financially will read this and decide I've suffered enough in my life time already and won't wanna see me go do 41 months in prison!
That's all I got, if your in a position where u can donate to my freedom clause GREAT, it's more than appreciated! If ya can't help well I hope you enjoyed the short version of my life story.
ASKING FOR CASH APP DONATIONS AT $shortchange214 IS MY CASH APP TAG NAME... MIKE W
OR ZELLE DONATIIONS USING THE EMAIL [email protected]. (lowercase letters in email)
FINALLY PAYPAL DONATIONS USING EMAIL [email protected] ( use lowercase letters)
God bless and thank you for your time and consideration if nothing else!

Fall, 1945 After the failure of repeated efforts to break into European territory after the Normandy landings, Britain was looking to upgrade its aging fleet of cruiser light tanks to better combat the mysterious new “King Panther”, which were appearing more and more frequently on the battlefield. Internal conflicts within the British War Office escalated to fierce debates over whether to pursue upgrade packages for the Covenanter tank, or the Crusader tanks. Eventually, it was determined that the best way to determine which vehicle would be better for upgrading is to outsource development and pick the best result. You are now tasked with this momentous task of analyzing the existing fleet of cruiser vehicles, determining which one to upgrade, and designing the upgrade package. Good luck!
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Contest details:
In this contest, you will get to choose whether to support the Covenanter team or the Crusader team, and utilize newer technologies to procure an upgrade package for your vehicle of choice. Entries will be judged based on their aesthetics and combat performance, along with bonus points and markdowns that can affect the score. While the War Office has permitted any feasible turret (or casemate) configuration to manufacture, they have also specified certain restrictions that entries must follow in the final product.

• Upgrade packages for both vehicles cannot cause the vehicle to exceed 30.0 tons in weight.
• Vehicles cannot exceed 7 meters in length (excluding the gun), 3 meters in width, and 3.2 meters in height. Foldable utilities like machine guns and antennas are not counted.
• Vehicles cannot be designed in a way that requires cramming more objects into the hull than is possible. The turret also cannot collide with objects mounted on the hull.
• The driver must have at least 0.6 cubic meters of room to sit in, while all other crew members will need at least 0.8 cubic meters of room.
• Vehicles must be equipped with sufficient ventilation and external water stowage (prototypes may use blue paint to mark the intended container for water). They also must have at least 250 L of fuel, 40 rounds of ammunition, and three crew members.

Vehicle upgrade packages will need to use engines and guns already in production, in order to avoid complicating Britain’s war machine further than necessary.
Available gun options (AP rounds): -Ordnance QF 6-pounder -Ordnance QF 17-pounder -Ordnance QF 32-pounder
Available gun options (APHE rounds): -Ordnance QF 95mm howitzer -QF 4.7 inch Mark IX -BL 5.5-inch Howitzer -BL 7.2-inch Howitzer Adjusting the gun recess and counterweight, along with increasing its thickness, is allowed. You also are allowed to shorten the gun barrel length, but this won’t be looked at as favorably by the War Office.
Available engines: -R-975E-C2 (400hp) -Rolls-Royce Meteor (600hp) -Wright G-200 (800hp) -Rolls Royce Griffon (1000hp) -Merlin XX (1100hp) -Bristol Hercules (1300hp) All engines can have their RPM settings adjusted.
All necessary files for the permitted guns, engines, and the base tanks (provided by DarioXN and Prim Olaf in the Discord) can be found in the attached .zip file at the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o-vIRVMuA0NX48AaUZeD46wH9Q9t6hWu/view?usp=sharing
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Bonus points: These can be awarded for vehicles that meet requirements posted by the War Office. Points here will be added to your final score, after assessment of the vehicle’s aesthetics and combat score.
reaches a top speed of 60km/h
2 points
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100mm of effective frontal armor
2 points
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Utilizes twin transmission
1 point
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gun has over 150mm of penetration
4 points
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carries 450 L of fuel
3 points
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Capable of -12 degrees of gun depression
3 points
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Covenanter: Radiators relocated to rear (this is required if frontal armor is added)
5 points
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Crusader: New ventilation installed (this is required if engine deck is extended)
5 points
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Markdowns: These can occur if vehicles are modified in a way that increases the complexity of the vehicle’s upgrade process, or reduces its effectiveness. Note that some markdowns can be offset by gains through combat performance, such as extending the engine deck geometry to allow adding a bigger engine.
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Extra hull armor is applied internally (over 5mm)
3 points
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Crew is exposed to standard rifle shots
3 points
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Hull requires labor-intensive disassembly
4 points
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Engine deck does not have sufficient vents
3 points
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Vehicle cannot exceed 40km/h
3 points
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Cannot turn while stationary
2 points
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Barrel length is shortened
1 point
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Hull modifications: Both the Covenanter and Crusader contain thickened frontal and side armor, along with complex mechanisms attached to them. The roof and backside, however, are much easier to modify and build upon. As a result, vehicles will be looked at less favorably if additions to the vehicle’s geometry require dismantling portions of the front, side, or bottom armor plates. This does not mean, however, that you cannot add more to them. Bolt-on armor shielding, regardless of armor thickness, will not incur a penalty. Additionally, the driver’s compartment and its respective armor face can be modified at no penalty. Vehicle aesthetics: Your prototype vehicles will be easier to get into production if the layout of vehicle components is included with your prototype. The generic hulls that you will be given to experiment with have a standard equipment and utilities loadout, and will be considered a “base” value in terms of aesthetic traits. These will both score 10 points in their current state. Adding more to its aesthetics scoring, and extending it to any turrets you may add, will increase this score by up to 10 points. Consequently, the opposite can lead to aesthetics points being removed. Should you wish to also model the interior, a “combat-ready” version of your prototype will also need to be supplied. Your combat-ready vehicle will be used for analysis in combat performance, interior space, and other physical traits. Meanwhile, your detailed prototype will be used for aesthetics scoring, and will not have weight or space limitations imposed upon it.
Combat trials: Vehicles will be fought against a fleet of captured King Panther tanks in a “trial by fire” match. Entrants will have a budget of 250 tons, meaning that lighter vehicles will have a higher team count during combat. Points will be earned based upon how many enemy vehicles are killed, and how many allies survive the mock battle. Bonus points can also be earned based on performance relative to competing proposals.
We are still awaiting for the captured King Panther tanks to arrive on the mainland, but so far we have received some details about their characteristics: -Front and side armor has received large upgrades compared to typical Panthers, in some cases up to 50mm of added thickness. -The engine seems to have been changed, to compensate for the added weight. -The vehicle’s interior seems much different than previous Panthers, which could mean they have better handling than previous models. -The gun itself seems to be the same as previous Panthers -Shielding has been added to the side, helping to further improve the armor’s performance.
Overall scoring weight: Combat trials: 60 points Aesthetics: 20 points Bonus points: 20 points Markdowns: -20 points Maximum points possible: 100
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Submission deadline: June 19th at 11:59 PM UTC
Additional Contest Rules
Are resubmissions allowed?
Yes
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Are multiple submissions allowed?
No
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Is Aesthetic Applique Armor enabled?
No
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What vehicle era should be used?
Latewar
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How much can the loader be file edited?
2.0
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Are custom MGs permitted?
No
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Are custom mantlets permitted?
Yes
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Can turrets be used to make spaced armor?
No
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What cheats will be turned on for the judging?
“Place anywhere”
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Can models be imported via SPETS?
Yes
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Is there a maximum amount of guns permitted?
6
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Can cosmetic compartments be overfilled?
Yes
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Are “always-spinning” compartments allowed?
Yes
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How to submit: Email submissions to [email protected] with the .blueprint file and any decals, paint schemes, lore, or other items you wish to include with your submission.

Bad LSD Trip: Terrifying Descent
Strap in because I'm about to share my most horrifying trip experience to date, actually most horrifying experience period. Now, I've had my fair share of bad trips, but this one took the cake and shattered my perception of reality. Here's how it all went down:
So, I had this brilliant idea of dropping acid with a friend. Knowing that I've had some rough experiences in the past, I decided to take a relatively low dose of 1.5 tabs, mainly to supervise my newbie friend. Little did I know that this trip would turn into an absolute nightmare.
At first, everything seemed to be going smoothly. The visuals were fading as we reached the end of the trip. But then, I made a fatal mistake—I decided to smoke some weed. Within a mere five minutes, the weed hit me like a freight train, catapulting the visuals into a mind-bending frenzy.
The intensity of the visuals was beyond anything I had ever experienced before. It was as if my entire field of vision had been hijacked by some incomprehensible cosmic force. I couldn't even see the room anymore; I was lost in a psychedelic abyss.
Describing what I saw is impossible; it was so unfathomable that I questioned whether I was still on LSD or had accidentally ventured into a Salvia-induced nightmare. The feeling of losing touch with reality was overwhelming—it felt like being trapped in an unknown, terrifying realm. The closest sensation I can compare it to is the imminent dread of death itself.
In moments of fleeting clarity, I would catch glimpses of my room, but these fragments were quickly devoured by the voracious visuals. Time became a twisted construct as I found myself trapped in endless loops, unable to escape the mind-bending chaos unfolding before me.
But let me tell you, words can't fully convey the sheer horror I experienced. The mind is incapable of comprehending the depths of this trip unless you're living it in real-time. Strangely enough, I later recalled a previous bad trip that I had completely forgotten, realizing that this unfathomable sensation was eerily familiar.
After mustering some semblance of control, I managed to make my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I returned to the room, I spiraled into a full-blown psychotic episode, desperately begging my friend to "turn it all off." It was as if I had become a broken record, repeating the same plea over and over again.
All of a sudden I froze, unable to speak or move. (In my perspective the visuals took over again) My friend's attempts to communicate with me were unsuccessful; he later said it was as if I was trying to communicate but I was trapped in my body.
He tapped me on the shoulder and out of nowhere, I had what looked like a seizure then blacked out and hit my head. The memories surrounding this moment are hazy at best. I vividly recall teleporting into reality, staring at my friend's face, and hearing a jarring bang before everything went blank.
For the following hours, all I could focus on was my breathing, desperate to prevent the visuals from consuming me once again. I shook uncontrollably, my entire being engulfed in fear. Even after a week had passed, I still couldn't shake off the trauma. The visuals persisted (not cause LSD was still in my system but I guess my brain still scared and just seeing things in the dark and what not), a constant reminder that I had traversed the depths of a bad trip.
For a few daysafter a fear haunted me: what if I was still trapped in the clutches of that horrific experience? What if I was doomed to find myself sitting on my bed, minutes after the ordeal had begun, forever locked in a twisted time loop?
And, if that wasn't enough, even three weeks later, every time I smoked weed I got visuals, making me paranoid and scared.
Im writing this at work, just recalling the incident I feel sick and am slightly shaking, or that could be the fact I've only had a red bull and KitKat today.
TL;DR: Had such a bad acid trip that I had a seizure and blacked out, took weeks to recover, this bad trip out my other bad trips to shame (which I considered the most frightening thing ever st the time)
I'll reply to any questions you guys have

[Underworld - Chireiden]
You decide to flip a coin, the left hall being heads and the right hall being tails. Where you found the coin is a question for another time. You launch the coin into the air, watching as it descends. Heads.
You follow the left hall until you reach an opening. There’s a large hole in the center of the courtyard. You decide to go in. What’s the worst that could happen? You follow the slope leading downwards, noticing the air suddenly getting hot.
I’m changing the location indicator slightly. Hope it doesn’t bother you.
[Remains of Blazing Hell]
As you continue downward, you notice the area glowing a bright orange. The air begins to become unbearably hot and you notice patches of lava in the distance. Burning corpses litter the landscape and you can see vengeful spirits filling the skies. Just as you begin to think this was a terrible idea, something starts flying towards you. Considering how fast it’s approaching, running doesn’t seem to be an option. You hold your ground and hope it doesn’t crash into you.
They grind to a sudden halt before you, sending a gust of hot air directly into your face. “Hello, stranger! What brings you to the Hell of Blazing Fires?” She asks cheerfully. She wears a green skirt, white shirt, and a cape with a starry night sky on the interior. She has black hair and large, feathery wings. There’s an odd orange eye on the center of her chest and a rod on her arm. Her innocent demeanor starkly contrasts her appearance.
How will you respond?
View Poll

It was called disassociation, the change in my life had been so traumatic that I just... kind of existed, largely doing things on autopilot, only engaging in things when necessary.
I hadn't wanted to be a Kobold, part of me kept thinking, 'this isn't real, I'm going to wake up any moment now'. But I never woke up to anything but this reality. Rather than tackle this like a normal, sane person, I just withdrew and didn't engage.
"Hello, I'm Ruuk." I said. "I haven't exactly been here the past year and some."
The way everyone welcomed me to the warren, not like a stranger finally being accepted, but as a family member who was gone for far too long- It felt good to just... connect.
While I sequestered myself to my shack on the edge of town, the warren had been organizing, fixing things up, just generally working their asses off to make things as comfortable as possible for people. The result was kind of an anachronistic mess, but it worked. Roads had been turn up and repaved, taking a mess of a car-reliant town and streamlining it so people could actually walk from place to place.
The Artificers had taken cars apart and reused the tools to make a tramway that was convenient for everyone. Why bother with cars when half of us can't even reach the pedals? With the restructuring of the town building by building, done simply because it needed to be done, the surrounding houses could be utilized more efficiently.
The reason why my house was largely untouched was because it was still my house, there was no committee ruling that demanded I give it up. It was understood that I'd know what I wanted to do with it when I was finished being a hermit.
Well, more than a handful of people suggested I just have a full-on mage tower, I realistically didn't need that much space, and even then, the things I wanted to keep were so few that having an entire four-story house to myself with more rooms than I realistically needed.
"Besides, when you get to Level 15, you can create your own demiplane." Tudru, the Fighter, remarked.
The plans for such a hypothetical mage tower put it toward the center of the town, just north of the central tramway. It would be convenient to get to me, and it would be convenient for me to go anywhere.
"Plus, well, we've been wanting you to be the Sorcerer on the Council." Goss, the Sorcerer, remarked.
"The what on the what?" I asked.
The Council, as I understood, was comprised equally of Humans and Kobolds. Kobolds with a set Class were put into a position to discuss the needs of the town. No matter who it was, no matter the Class, there was a representative, even if they were the only one present.
There was no Sorcerer Councilor yet, in spite of us being fairly common.
"Why me?" I asked after being given a significantly less truncated explanation.
"Because you're the most competent one out of all of us, are unbound by preconceived notions of how things work." Goss replied. "I mean, I would have never thought of using Magic Missile on that boulder, or staggering the hits like that so nobody got hurt."
I rubbed the back of my neck. "I mean, anyone could have done it." I said.
"The fact of the matter, Ruuk, is that most of us have assumptions based on a bunch of books in a situation that we still don't really understand. I choose to believe that another world has made contact with ours, and we're the ones burdened with responsibility. That doesn't mean I am correct."
They further broke down expectations.
"I am in charge of infrastructure." Rekka, the Artificer, spoke. The goal was to transform the town into an entirely self-sufficient place. Since we were still technically under quarantine, we couldn't get supplies in or out, not without the government allowing it through. The dissemination of magic items and technology that was essential to our continued existence hinged on understanding where to put it and how to ensure it was used correctly.
Barbarians and Fighters- in spite of Kuvli and Tudru being the only ones- were in charge of town defense.
"We work in tandem to find the best solution to a threat." Tudru said. "While thus far purely theoretical, we have options for if and when monsters show up. Let's not forget the Dire Rat that came out of the mine."
"Dire Rat?" I asked.
"Big fuckers." Kuvli said. "Ever seen a nutria? That fucker you killed was even bigger."
It was understood that if monsters came about, we would need weapons. Artificers took care of that, we had a small cache of magically enhanced swords ready and available, as well as every gun in town somewhere where people could grab and react.
Bards, when we would eventually get one, would be in charge of communications and entertainment. With the quarantine in place and us having no actual income at the moment, short of going out and stealing shit, we were largely on our own with what we already had.
"I am in charge of ensuring the town's spiritual needs are taken care of, and the adjudication of our laws." Galax stated. "Given the high probability of Gods existing, and the likelihood of demons, ghosts, and other beings eventually showing up, This includes discerning which deities are existent, and which ones are not. So far, we've only had minor to moderate luck with divine magic. Prayer is necessary for it to work, as we have to explicitly petition our Gods for it every long rest."
"Aren't you biased toward Bahamut?" I asked.
"Of course." He said. "Any anyone who comes to the Temple is welcome to hear anything I have to say on the matter. The biggest problem is figuring out how it all relates."
Next was Merti. "We Druids are in charge of ensuring this town's sustainability and harmony with nature." She said. "That includes recycling materials, ethical and sustainable logging, hunting, farming... Essentially, as long as it pertains to nature, it's our duty to ensure we don't shoot ourselves in the foot."
"Well, while you're busy speaking for the trees, we're responsible for going out there and making sure nothing is coming to kill us. That and getting meat." Tatla spoke. "We're also in reserve in case of a combat situation, we defer to our Fighter and Barbarian for that."
"When we get a Rogue, they will focus on security. As the closest thing we've got to that, I've got plans set up for establishing a wall around the town, just outside the Anomaly, so that people can't just waltz right in, and to prevent any wild animals or hypothetical monsters from getting in." Nakk the Locksmith who might actually be a Rogue said. "And for the record, I've tried everything I can think of to awaken to a Class, and I'm reasonably certain Rogue isn't one." He paused. "That being said, I am offering lockpicking lessons to anyone who thinks it might help."
"Considering we just share and share alike, I don't think we need to worry about our Rogues." Someone I wasn't familiar with yet said.
The way Nakk reacted to his statement, avoiding his gaze, made me wonder why he reacted that way.
"Nakk, why do you look guilty?" I asked.
He looked at me with wide eyes, and for a tense moment, it seemed like he was about to run. I walked up to him and gently put my hand on his shoulder. "It's better to get it out now, rather than later."
He looked away. "I... I've been overcharging everyone since I moved in." He said. "On top of that, I've used my skills as a locksmith to steal from people."
He expected us to get angry, and a fair number of us did.
"Honor and Correction to the enemies of Justice and Good." Galax spoke, "Nakk, is the confession you have spoken true?"
"Y-yes." Nakk said softly.
"When you moved here, was it your intention to steal from us?"
"No." Nakk said. "I just- I had some bad debts, I was trying to escape, start a new life. But then they found me, told me if I didn't pay off the debt, they'd make me regret it. So I stole, but no matter how much I took, the debt never seemed to shrink. When we were all transformed, I was so happy because I could finally escape. They couldn't possibly hurt all of us, and with the quarantine..."
"Nakk." Galax spoke. "Is it your intention to atone for your crimes?"
Nakk nodded. "Yes."
"Then I shall ease your burden, that you no longer are swayed into such temptation." Galax took a pouch out of another pouch on his belt. "This is powdered silver." He said, several eyes widened, clearly understanding the significance of this. "Bahamut, Grandfather of Dragons, Grand Master of Flowers, Justicemaker. Before me stands a penitent soul seeking to atone for his sins against his fellow people. If he hides from you, you are the one who shall bring him into the light. If he hides his face, you are the one who shall reveal it. If his tongue betrays him against his people, you shall be the one who frees it from evil machinations."
He threw the powdered silver upon Nakk, and as he did so, he roared.
"NOMAG SVABOL UI WHEDAB RANNOX EKESS MITNE!"
The silver flashed with brilliant light that, somehow, didn't hurt to look upon, and then Nakk was engulfed in flames. Before anyone could panic, the flames swirled as if caught in a whirlwind and flew into Nakk's open mouth.
For a moment, Nakk was suspended in the air, and then he fell onto his feet, then onto his hands and knees. He gasped for breath, faint wisps of silvery fire escaping his open maw.
"What the fuck just happened?" Kuvli asked.
"That was the Atonement spell." A Player remarked. "You touch a willing creature whose alignment has changed, and if you're powerful enough, you bring them back to their original alignment. In this case, maybe neutral leaning toward evil back to good."
Galax nodded. "You have caused suffering to your people, Nakk. I have firmly put you back on the path to righteousness. You will no longer fear the reprisal of your warren, but will openly accept it. You will no longer hesitate, you will do what is necessary to make amends. Though I can do this as many times as I deem necessary, for you, this is but one chance. In the guidance of Bahmut, go forth and sin no more."
"I will. Thank you." Nakk said.
"I do not need thanks, I am simply the one who interceded on your behalf. Zhin mrith filkiati."
With that out of the way, the meeting resumed.
"Ruuk, as the Sorcerer Councilor, you would be responsible for the responsible use of magic. As every Sorcerer has unique spells, there is a level of versatility that the Warren can use. It would be your duty to advocate for your fellow Sorcerers, to ensure we do not end up taking advantage of them for our own selfish desires." Rekka said. "What do you say?"
I gave it some thought, then nodded. "I'll do it." I said.
What the Council does, as I learned, is convene every week to go over current events and how to deal with them, and occasionally plan ahead on hypothetical situations. We were each paired with a Human who was chosen by other Humans to serve as their representative on specific matters.
My partner is Dave. Dave is a Pagan, he practices magic as a form of spirituality. He is also, currently, the only Human with any level of magical skill, being able to use magic items fairly easily without it blowing up in his face.
"The only reason why I'm not a Kobold is because I want to be an Elf." He said. "I'm hoping that learning more about the Anomaly on the magical end of the spectrum of scholarly pursuit will allow us to do that." He paused. "I will also settle for Dragonborn. You and Galax are currently the best chance of either."
"Why would we want to do that?" I asked.
"Well, presently, only Kobolds are capable of magic, meaning that Humans in the Forgotten Realms are different from us."
"The what?"
"Common setting for D&D." He said. "Now, back when this was all make-believe, Earth was mentioned as being existent in the D&D multiverse, meaning that something decided to mess with us." He paused. "Look, from what I've been able to gather, Earth is in a part of the Prime Material plane that has very weak connections to other planes, we lack magic because of this. However, we are currently in a dome of sustained magic-"
"It's actually a relatively short column." I corrected.
"-which means something has connected us, and specifically us." He finished.
"Alright, so this raises several presumptions, like the notion that someone did this to us for a reason. Do you have any ideas as to what that reason would be?"
"Interplanar invasion, the astral plane bleeding into ours, maybe we're crashing into another plane, maybe a wizard got lucky. We don't have enough information."
I sighed. "Look, let's just get some work done."
We got started on requests, most of them were just questions on if a certain spell was viable for use, some were requests to run experiments with certain spells. With Dave and I debating back and forth, we got them done by the end of the day.
​
[Navigation for 'Dragon Rising'- [1] [2] [3] [4]]

I recently got an Samsung S22 Ultra. Its on the latest May 2023 patch. I am facing a weird issue while capturing images from 10x telephoto lens by default camera app. In indoor lighting conditions its capturing blurry images. What I observed is that the post processing doesn't seem to kick in to clear the image. While the same image with Expert Raw turns out clearer. In outdoor lighting conditions there seems to be no difference between the two in terms of clarity. I have tried every possible solution, disable lens switching from camera assistant, reset phone, reset camera settings, safe mode, but the issue is still there. Any idea what could be the cause and solution for this problem? Thanks in advance

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching recently and ended up falling down, again, in the rabbit hole of astrology. Trying to figure out who you are and what makes you tick is a lot harder than I thought it would be!
I have my Sun and Saturn conjunct in Aquarius, right in the 10th House. Now, I've been reading up on this and, to be honest, I'm feeling more than a little confused. And yes, i know my birth time accurately.
Aquarius is all about freedom, questioning the rules, breaking the mold, doing your own thing... And I can kind of relate to that, but then there's Saturn, sitting right next to my Sun, adding all this structure and discipline into the mix. It feels like I'm being pulled in two directions and I'm not sure how to reconcile that. Some people say that the sun's influence mitigates saturn, and vice-versa.
And then there's the 10th House. I'm trying to navigate my professional life and it's been a bit of a struggle. Sometimes, I feel like I have these big, innovative ideas but at the same time, I'm constantly battling this fear of stepping out of line or facing rejection. It's like I want to make a difference, shake things up, but something keeps holding me back.
Is anyone else experiencing this? How do you handle it? Do you think it's the Sun and Saturn conjunct in Aquarius causing this, or is it just me? If you have any advice, interpretations, or even some reading suggestions, I'd really appreciate it.
Sorry if I'm not making much sense. I'm just trying to understand myself a bit better. Thanks for reading this far, and I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

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

During school, I made two different friends during my photography class, which i will just call them sara and chloe. Now for the first year of friendship i’ve had with the both of them was great, as are friendship grew, we started to hang out more. Now i’m going to skip forward the next year. I’m not sure when it started but chloe started being really rude for no reason. I wasn’t sure if i was just imagining it and i thought i was just a bad friend for thinking something like this, but one day i finally told her something and she said, “oh yeah, i dared myself to be mean to you for a while” Like wtf? And also when we can jokingly messing around then randomly she would say something so rude and it was just kinda shocking. She was also using a lot of cuss words and would also push you. One time she pushed me hard and I finally said something and all she had to say was “oh my bad” with a smile on her face like it was only a joke. Even Sara notice she was being rude and agreed with me that it was weird. I’m not sure if it’s just her way of humor, she’s an amazing friend but this just makes me upset that she just started doing it. I have no idea was going on in her personal life but i’m just confused.

First the Heat only went to a zone defence 9 times by the way I tracked it in game 6. The Celtics went on to miss 9 shots grab 2 offensive rebound and draw two fouls. In game 7 the Heat went to a zone for 25 possession the Celtics once again struggled to heat shots. Going 2-12 from 3pt land, 3-6 in the restricted area, 0-1 from the mid range and 0-1 in the paint but not the RA. They also turned the ball over 4 times and grabbed only one offensive rebound opposed to the 6 they grabbed when Miami went to man. Tracking sheet I made
The Celtics struggled from outside tonight going 7-36 (19%) from 3. But when Miami went to man the Celtics were able to attack the basket and get two feet in the paint. The Celtics shot 11-19 in the RA against Miami's man defence good for 58% as well as 2-4 in the paint outside of the RA but that was the only bright spot for the Celtics defence.
The Celtics struggled in transition. First they didn't get many chances to get out and run. But even when they did it was pretty 50/50. The Celtics went 4-4 in the RA in transition but shot 0-3 from 3 point land in transition. The Celtics (mostly Jaylen Brown) hand very lose hands turning the ball over 4 times in transition.
I think what once again has become painfully clear is that the Celtics lack a real elite playmaker. Tatum can be elite in spots but not when he is seeing different looks every other play. Brown also needs to work on his handing and passing he had 8 turnovers tonight and was awful for most of this series.
Coach mazzulla did a solid job but Spo is just on his own level. He saw that in game 6 to end the game the zone really gave the Celtics problems and went to it in spots to throw the Celtics off in game 7 and once the Heat got the lead they never looked back. They now go on to face the Nuggets in the finals.
Go Cable Martin dude was the heats best player

Does anyone else think that the Roys may have actually backed into the better long-term play? As in, they sold when the company's value is high. And indicators from the show seem to show both Waystar and GoJo have major issues with their futures.
Waystar, as it's mentioned several times, is becoming a relic of the past. Print media is all but dead. TV news is becoming less and less watched (just look at CNN's ratings struggles today). Sure ATN is having a good moment now due to the election and subsequent controversy, and may do well for the next 10-20 years or so. But as the decades go by and the older generations pass, TV news ratings will shrink along with revenue. I really don't know anyone my generation (millennial) that watches TV news and I'd assume that trend will continue down the generations. And as Logan put it, getting Waystar to pivot strategy is like trying to turn a tanker. They're galacial.
That leaves the film industry/parks/cruises. Those may be stable enough industries to generate a profit for the foreseeable future, but it wouldn't be the "global media empire" it once was. Kendall also admitted to problems with the film studios, even firing a top produceexecutive. And Matsson may decide to shutter one or all of these departments if it doesn't meet his personal tastes.
As for GoJo, it at least seems to be modern and future-facing, but there are problems beneath the surface. Obviously there's the false subscriber numbers. This is a symptom that this company/their products are not a global phenomenon such as Facebook. The founder has some personal flaws (Ebba, immaturity, a stubbornness to make bad ideas try to work), but the same could have been said about Logan, so this is not as worrisome. Plus he has Tom as the front man to smooth all that over. If I recall correctly, I think Matsson had a line that GoJo would be fine with or without Waystar which I think is true; probably better off even. But now it's too late. What's the return policy?
I foresee GoJo/Waystar leadership running this conglomerate into the ground and selling it off for parts.
As for the Roys, let's assume they sell off most or all of their stock, they'd have billions in cash. They probably won't work together anytime soon giving their falling out. But if power is what they want, a billion is enough for Kendall (for example) to go out and buy a majority stake in a company he likes and if it's private, install himself as the CEO and get to be the boss again. Maybe take on WaystaGoJo as the up and coming competitor who knows all their secrets (if there's not some kind of non-compete contract - depends on the state).

Hello!
I’m planning to redo a bathroom, and I want to turn a shower from an acrylic one-piece shower to an acrylic base with tile walls. However, I’m confused by all of the posts I’ve read about having a vapor barrier.
2 of the 3 walls of the shower are on exterior walls. Because of this, I believe I have to use a plastic (or tar paper?) vapor barrier. And not also use a paint-on waterproof membrane. However, for the third (interior) wall, I’ve heard to not use plastic and to use something like RedGard. However, having a mixture of those two seems like a bad idea.
Should I just use the plastic membrane on all 3 walls? Also, could I use tar paper for that, or do I have to use plastic?
Thank you!

I may have posted this before so I apologize if that’s so
I have two very different painting styles. Ones more traditional and the other is very fantasy supernatural. I planned to try and make a name for myself with the more traditional work and use the fantasy work as more a side gig I don’t take as seriously.
But from what I hear you still need to promote your work, and some argue you need to have your name attached to it for a personal touch. They especially say this for instagram- have a face behind the work. But I don’t like the idea of using my real name if it means I have two extremely different works for sale.
Even if I just had the fantasy work sold on Etsy and I have my more traditional work on my own site, can I keep them separate? Can I get away with using a fake name for the fantasy work? Is that professional to not reveal my real name?

Hi everyone! I became temporarily enamored with this game a couple of months back, and did a ton of research with some buddies. I recently watched a video on youtube claiming that there was some lingering mystery that there may be more than 10 questions you can ask Wheeliam, so I wanted to put out what I had found somewhere in regards to that and some other tidbits.

1. The questions you can ask Wheeliam are very limited. There are not any other missing questions. Here's a pastebin of all the answers and what you have to ask to get them: https://pastebin.com/1Dp7fiiN
   
2. In the Wheeliam area, the portraits of characters spread around are present on every map in the game, not special to the corrupted map. If you get into freecam, you can see these on any map in the game. These are pointed at by a camera when the face is visible on the right side of the screen during dialogue. It's possible to move Will in front of the camera in the corrupted area and see him appear on the right side of the screen (second screenshot, bottom right).
   
3. There is one piece of dialogue that is totally inaccessible in game. Going to throw a spoiler tag on this part, heavy spoilers for the ending of the game. Once you have achieved every ending and see the scene that gives you "The Last Secret" achievement, Lila whispers something to Yu, and we are never clued in on what she said. I'm sure you noticed this line appearing during this scene. I looked through the full game script, and YuEndPart2 contains the following unseen lines from Lila: "...My nature is exactly this. I am all this. (null, Smile)I am not a tulpa, not the mother of UIW-AM, Not even Lilith or an archetype And yet I am all those things I am the mystery of not knowing who Lila is. As long as the one playing this game doesn't undrestand [sic] what I am I will remain alive in their mind I am the mystery itself. I was designed in a way that makes me just about explainable But at the end of the day I am no more than a simple question: Who is Lila?" Unfortunately, my buddies and I concluded that this line is not typically accessible in game. The tag is present in the script, but the only tag that ever gets called in the code is YuEndPart1, and this ending will only ever play once. It may be possible to trick the game into calling it using some kind of debug console, but I had no success with this. I don't see this discussed much. My friend who had played the game more than I had read it it before, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere on this subreddit. I think this obviously fits in with being what Lila whispers to Detective Yu, and explains more about what she is and why she can't be destroyed. Seems like the most important line of dialogue to me, and I believe GH left it in the game files purposefully. The idea that you have to delve into the game like this to find it fits so well with what Lila says and the idea that the player seeking out the mystery keeps her alive.
   
4. Apart from those more concrete things, there are a few tidbits/loose ends I found. Wheeliam can be asked about the body, and tells you that "His body is beneath.... His hands are gripping the underbelly of the forest." By breaking into freecam again in the forest (The Lovers ending, among others, are achieved here I think, but my memory is fuzzy), you can find this massive guy underneath. Additionally, T-Gotchi is standing on the shore of the river on the same area. I have not played T-Gotchi, only watched my friend play it. Given 1) Wheeliam's answer about for "Body" and "Daddy", 2) The Clues To Unlocking The Mystery mentioning the trees, and 3) T-Gotchi having references to the Sycamore Woods and "Daddy" all over it, I think there is definitely more to this. I couldn't come up with anything conclusive though.
   
5. Finally, if you own the soundtrack on Steam and go to the party, you can switch the music tracks and get a single unique line from The Stranger depending on what song is playing. They will only talk to you once and not be interactable unless you reload the area. I didn't find anything too interesting here, but you can take a look at the possible dialogue lines here: https://pastebin.com/tD9aGeeS. The mystery of The Stranger still bothers me. Especially once I gained access to the Daemon for the first time and The Stranger referred to it as a "servitor." I won't get into Chaos Magick too much here, but this led to me wondering if UIW-AMs are sigils and Lila is some kind of egregore. Someone with more knowledge on the topic could probably draw better conclusions than I.
   

That's all I got. Hopefully some of this is interesting to you. I had a lot of fun cracking the game open and investigating, and of course left with more questions than answers. But I suppose that was the point of it all.

Hello Base Builders!
Another round of updates for my colony-sim base builder Magic Base Defense (working title).
I've finally added some magical abilities for the villagers to live up to the 'Magic' part of the title. I also did a lot of work on the combat system in general.
My goal is for each unit in combat to act as if a player were controlling them, almost like a match of Chivalry 2 if you've ever played that. It's basically a chaotic mess of players running around and trying to score hits and kills where they can, often times stepping out of position with dire consequences. My game's AI is a long way off from that but so far, I think it's looking pretty cool.
The villagers and raiders in my video are following simple rules for combat at the moment:
- Each has a random chance of selecting ranged or melee combat upon first detecting an enemy
- They will then try to maintain the proper fighting distance during combat
- If they're in ranged mode and the enemy ends up getting too close, they will switch to melee.
- If they're in melee mode and their health gets to low, they will switch to ranged and begin to back away if they can.
- If their health gets even lower, they will just run away from the closest enemy or towards a friendly unit.
Also, while in melee combat, they will constantly move around to add to the chaos. They step back while their attack is on cooldown and move in range again to swing. This leads to fights looking pretty hectic and organic I feel.
My later goal is for each villager to have their own fighting style and preferences, which spells and weapons they prefer. I also want to make them rally on their own when they see enemies. For example, if a villager encounters a pack of wolves, they could call out to nearby villagers, and together they could decide whether to face the threat. Of course, as the player you can still override that and make them run back to base, but if you're focusing on something across the map you shouldn't have to look back and find that one villager dead by some wolves when they could have run away or fought together and survived.
So that's the direction I'm going with respect to AI and villager behaviors. Please check out my dev log if you're interested and let me know what you think!
https://youtu.be/wQXcV41wTHs

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 love my MK8 GTI, thing is a touring beast and it has done almost everything I’ve asked of it and more.
But there is one fault, one glaring issue so minuscule but so annoying it makes me want to kick the shit out of whoever moronic designer had the bright idea to make a key fob where the highest button on the face of the fob IS THE PANIC BUTTON. HOW do you screw that up? Even just walking to the car with keys in my pocket I hear the horrid blaring of the alarm. VW, love you to death but fuck your key fob and the cheap amazon cover I had to buy for it.
Rant over.

Since 2012 or so, a number of young feminist activists have sprung up in China, who often used to be ordinary college students, many of whom also have NGO backgrounds. Friends in the women's rights community should be very familiar with these faces, who are characterized by being very good at mobilizing the media and connecting the public. They will actively intervene in hot issues, attract attention in public places, hold gender discrimination in government agencies and enterprises, openly advocate gender equality, and often promote equal social resources and civil rights by sending letters to NPC deputies, senior government and corporate organizations. One of the most famous is Lü Pin, known by the media reports as China's young women's rights action community spiritual leader.
Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist, was born on January 13,1972, and was admitted to Shandong University at the age of 15. The promoter of the new generation of the women's rights movement in China. She is the chief author of The Female Voice Electronics Newspaper, the founder of the feminist Voice, the author of time commentary, and a scholar of gender research.
Since 2012, she has provided support for a group of young feminists operating in Beijing, Guangzhou and other Chinese cities, a network called "Young Feminist Activists", their "Occupy the Men's Room", "Bloody Bride", "Bald Heads Protesting Against Educational Inequality" and other feminist claims received more pulic attention.
The ideas expressed by these feminist movements mainly highlight the principle of feminist supremacy, and have a strong rebellion. Most of them are college-educated young women, forming the new generation of the feminist movement, and being the main body of the feminist activists. Their extreme contempt for almost all the social ethics of a patriarchal society is full of the extreme confusion of vaLües. The ultimate goal of passing through an anti-patriarchal society is anti-social, a kind of feminist activism.
Curiosity about Lü Pin's women's rights movement has raised questions. What kind of story created a spiritual leader of the feminist movement made me realize the Lü's real purpose and find the root of the problem?Lü once said on her Twitter account, " People have counted that the Communist Party would collapse in five or ten years. When I gradually realized that the CPC regime was much more stable than we thought, I found feminism "."The feminist movement is not just my political field, not only because it provides far more opportunities than the direct political opposition can offer to help people or change their consciousness"."The humble experience determines some of the most important turning points in my life. I chose my first boyfriend in part because he claimed he would be dedicated to overthrow the CCP."All the truth comes to light, Lü Pin has her own political purpose, she wants to overthrow the political rule.
How about Lü Pin's political ambitions. Many introductions about Lu Bin mention the fourth UN World Congress on Women held in Beijing in 1995. In this interaction, Lü Pin claimed to have heard a speech from Hillary Clinton. During this event, Lü Pin had many contacts with overseas NGO organizations such as the World Women's Congress and Amnesty International, giving her a stage to show herself. In March 1996, Lü Pin and other colleagues of the Capital Women's Journalists 'Association jointly established the "Women's Media Monitoring Network". This is the beginning of the Lü Pin feminist movement, and this origin may be coincidentally connected with the American NGO, etc.
Lü Pin realizes the backer of ambition. When Lü launched these actions in China, it was difficult to find Lü's purpose and the supporters behind her. But after the east window incident, Lü Pin's backer came to the surface. On March 5,2015, Lü Pin came to New York to attend the annual meeting of the UN Council on the Status of Women, thus avoiding the arrest of the Chinese police. Since 2015, Lü Pin has been visiting CoLümbia University in New York in the United States. Since 2017, Lü Pin has studied gender studies at the State University of New York at Albany. In 2020, Lü Pin began pursuing a PhD in Women and Politics in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. In the crisis, Lü Bin can only escape to her backer America.
Let's look at Lü Pin's main work in the United States? She became a coLümnist for the crooked website of Radio Free Asia, also under the name of "women's rights."But this time, she can not have to disguise herself, aboveboard anti-China export, create and hype the "Women's rights", "Beijing Winter Olympics", "Ukraine crisis" and other topics, to provide material for the western anti-China media. That means it's not hard to see who the master is.

ive gone to therapy to speak about my trust issues and learnt they stem from thsi man’s lies as he lies to us in our face and whenever we get the slightest mention of GO+ (tattoos, shirts, nail paint, mv teasers) we get blue balled and dont get any information whatsoever