We're a 145 SFH neighborhood built between 2017 and 2021. 90% of the residents are 55+ and the rest are between 30 and 54. Our neighborhood was originally marketed as a non-age restricted 55+ and why it has so many one story plans. This age aspect played a role in the challenges of transition from builder to homeowner as well as overall engagement and activities in the neighborhood. I feels like we're in a senior community (without pickleball) while the rest of us go to work everyday.
There are (17) exteriors across (3) one story and (2) two story plans. All are Hardie board with stone at the foundation. Eight color palettes were provided by the builder. The builder enforced the rule that you can't have the same house exterior and/or color within two houses next, diagonal or in front of. So we'd have to do the same.
The HOA transitioned to homeowner led in December 2021. I volunteered to join the ARC because we had a hellacious entry into the neighborhood due to the Board making decisions as the ARC that were unbeknownst to the working ARC. And because you preach volunteer if you don't like it.
Current rules for choosing paint color for your front porch or your back deck are as follows: you have to submit approval for a front deck concrete color and it must be complementary to your house color. While your back deck can be any complementary color, without approval requirement. I cannot recall any guidance regarding changing siding, gable or trim colors. Perhaps right now it's individually approved or not at all.
At some point someone will want to paint their house. Should we consider individual colors or a palette? Should we work with a designer for i individual or pallette options?
Our neighborhood is primarily white, gray, dark blue, and beige. Five chose pallets with light green siding or dark red in the gable.
The goal would be to have something in place when the question is asked and we can provide homeowners support and easy access to options versus a piecemeal back and forth. Ex: if you have this builder color scheme, you can individually change the siding, gable, or trim to these colors. Or you can choose this complete new color palette.
Also, is it feasible to ask the community to vote on options, maybe host a viewing party at the common area so they can see the colors in person, to create buy-in? It'd be great to set a wide range of color options to grow with our neighborhood.

Good Morning Patriots
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Free place to chat and a good place to discuss whatever you like with other sub users
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Key dates on the 2023 NFL / Patriots calendar.

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New England Patriots News Link Catchup - Patriots already a better team than pre-free agency

• Patriots 2023 Free Agent Tracker.
• Mike Dussault notes that according to reports, the Patriots are adding a move tight end to their roster. Mike Gesicki should form a nice pairing with veteran Hunter Henry, providing the offense with an athletic player to be utilized by offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien.
• Transactions: Patriots sign OT Calvin Anderson; Release QB Brian Hoyer.
• Mike Dussault reports the Patriots are bringing back long-time long snapper Joe Cardona.
• Mike Dussault reports DT Daniel Ekuale re-signs with Patriots. He appeared in 15 games last season with two sacks.
• Evan Lazar reports the Patriots are bringing back LB Mack Wilson on a one-year contract. Along with maintaining their depth at off-ball linebacker, Wilson should remain a regular in the kicking game.
• Patriots Catch-22: JuJu Smith-Schuster reaction, analysis of New England’s roster moves in free agency. (84 min.)
• Patriots Unfiltered: Reaction to Pats’ free agency moves so far, JuJu vs. Jakobi debate; More. (2 hours)
• Mike Reiss passes along a report the Patriots agreed to a one-year deal with free-agent tight end Mike Gesicki that is worth up to $9 million.
• Mark Daniels believes that after signing Mike Gesicki, the Patriots offense is headed in right direction.
• Dakota Randall isn’t buying the Patriots doomsday takes amid the Aaron Rodgers-Jets rumors.
• Khari Thompson feels that all in all, the Pats are a better team than they were when they started free agency and still have some money they could use to put toward negotiating extensions, but it’s not nearly enough.
• Andy Hart wants to emphasize that the Patriots are the fourth-best team in the AFC East and yes, he’s aware it’s only March. /Insert eye-roll emoji here.
• Chris Mason writes that after jettisoning Jonnu Smith, Bill Belichick has landed Mike Gesicki, the top free agent TE on the market. Gesicki has averaged 52 catches for 604 yards and five touchdowns over the past four seasons.
• Darren Hartwell says Mike Gesicki is a nice pickup for New England: The 27-year-old set career highs in receptions (73) and receiving yards (780) during a breakout 2021 campaign and caught five touchdown passes in 2022 despite taking a backseat to Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle in the Dolphins’ offense.
• Alex Barth brings up how for the second time in three years, the Pats are signing a high-profile free agent TE.
• Mike Reiss offers his take on why Bill Belichick took a risk in signing JuJu Smith-Schuster over Jakobi Meyers.
• Alex Barth talks about the Patriots bringing back underrated DT Daniel Ekuale on a multi-year deal.
• Doug Kyed explains how the Patriots haven’t missed on re-signing defensive free agents.
• Doug Kyed reports the Patriots finally released QB Brian Hoyer on Thursday.
• Matt Dolloff explains that no, the Patriots are not just dropping $8 million for a running back.
• Zack Cox considers what’s the Patriots’ plan at Tackle after the team’s free agent additions.
• Mike D’Abate (Patriots Country) Patriots host five free agent visits including Rams safety Taylor Rapp and former Patriots DL Trey Flowers.
• Zack Cox notes the Patriots are reportedly hosting oft-injured free agent wideout Bisi Johnson for a visit. Johnson missed the 2021 and 2022 seasons with injuries.
• Tyler Lamb (StadiumRant) The Patriots should look Into these under the radar free agents.
• Zack Cox notes Jakobi Meyers explains his ‘childish’ tweet after the Pats signed JuJu Smith-Schuster.
• Sean T. McGuire highlights Jakobi Meyers’ response when asked about his lowlight at introductory Raiders presser. As always, he handled the question well.
• Sean T. McGuire notes former Patriot and Jet WR Braxton Berrios is staying in the division, signing with Miami.
• Locked On Patriots podcast: Mike D’Abate discusses the JuJu Smith-Schuster signing, his take on the RB James Robinson and more. (20 min.)

Hello FanFiction and welcome once again to another month of daily prompts! This one will be a little bit different to the normal format, where instead of posting one prompt a day I will release them in batches around a particular theme. In this case, there will be six batches, each with five prompts. You can choose to treat these as you would normal daily prompts and do one small short ficlet a day, or to use 1 or more of the prompts in each batch to write a longer oneshot… or even something else altogether as long as you’re having fun.
Since our theme is “genres of fanfiction”, we will be covering some of fanfic’s biggest genres angst, fluff, humour, relationships, canon universe and alternate universe. Of course, we always welcome creative interpretations here, so if you want to just use the prompts as a jumping off point for something else, or twist a fluffy prompt into something angsty or dark, feel free!

• All ratings and fandoms are welcome, but only ficlets up to T rating may be posted in the thread – M or E snippets should be shared via link with relevant warnings. You can use JustPasteMe if you don't want to publish your snippets on a fanfic site.
• If a reply goes too long (let's say over 750 words), it would be easier on those perusing the thread if you posted a short snippet and then linked to the rest offsite.
• No original fiction.
• Any and all interpretations are allowed. The prompts are about creativity!
• We all love getting comments, so try to remember to read the other responses and leave a reply with your thoughts!
• This post is going to be live for a whole month, so please tag your ficlet appropriately so we know what prompt you’re responding to.

Formatting example: Angst 1 Fandom Rating “Title” Wordcount (optional) Offsite link

Angst

1. Survivor's guilt
2. Not good enough
3. I don’t see the way out
4. Tending to injuries
5. Don’t look at me

Everything in my inventory is up for trade. The most valuable items are listed here, the rest you can find in My Inventory

Feel free to Add Me or even better send a Trade Offer. Open for any suggestions: upgrades, downgrades / knives, gloves, skins / stickers, patterns, floats.

All Buyouts are listed in cash value.

KNIVES

★ Butterfly Knife Freehand FN #1, B/O: $1867

★ Butterfly Knife Bright Water MW, B/O: $1098

★ Butterfly Knife Blue Steel BS, B/O: $907

★ Butterfly Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $789

★ Butterfly Knife Stained FT, B/O: $695

⎯

★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW #1, B/O: $888

★ Bayonet Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $727

★ Bayonet Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $608

★ Bayonet Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $521

★ Bayonet Rust Coat BS, B/O: $253

★ Bayonet Night FT, B/O: $251

★ StatTrak™ Bayonet Lore MW, B/O: $751

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★ Karambit Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $1343

★ Karambit Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $774

★ Karambit Rust Coat BS, B/O: $537

★ Karambit Boreal Forest FT, B/O: $488

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★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1523

★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1523

★ M9 Bayonet Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $1008

★ M9 Bayonet Blue Steel FT, B/O: $534

★ M9 Bayonet Rust Coat BS, B/O: $449

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★ Flip Knife Fade FN, B/O: $703

★ Flip Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) MW, B/O: $509

★ Flip Knife Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $406

★ Flip Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $228

★ StatTrak™ Flip Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $332

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★ Falchion Knife Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $292

★ Falchion Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $264

★ Falchion Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $258

★ Falchion Knife Bright Water MW, B/O: $133

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★ Stiletto Knife Fade FN, B/O: $822

★ Stiletto Knife Slaughter FN, B/O: $569

★ Stiletto Knife Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $530

★ Stiletto Knife Crimson Web FT, B/O: $396

★ StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $172

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★ Gut Knife Doppler (Sapphire) MW #1, B/O: $830

★ Gut Knife Fade FN, B/O: $204

★ Gut Knife Tiger Tooth FN, B/O: $138

★ Gut Knife Bright Water MW, B/O: $104

★ Gut Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $92

★ Gut Knife Urban Masked FT, B/O: $82

★ StatTrak™ Gut Knife Rust Coat BS, B/O: $93

⎯

★ Shadow Daggers Fade FN, B/O: $258

★ Shadow Daggers Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $165

★ Shadow Daggers Blue Steel FT, B/O: $82

★ Shadow Daggers Bright Water FT, B/O: $82

★ Shadow Daggers Blue Steel WW, B/O: $80

★ Shadow Daggers Rust Coat BS, B/O: $74

★ StatTrak™ Shadow Daggers Marble Fade FN, B/O: $186

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★ Classic Knife Slaughter MW, B/O: $311

★ StatTrak™ Classic Knife Stained BS, B/O: $163

⎯

★ Talon Knife Slaughter MW, B/O: $605

★ Talon Knife Scorched MW, B/O: $290

⎯

★ Ursus Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $405

★ Ursus Knife Night Stripe MW, B/O: $162

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★ Paracord Knife Stained WW, B/O: $125

★ Paracord Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97

★ Paracord Knife Safari Mesh FT, B/O: $96

⎯

★ Navaja Knife Safari Mesh FT, B/O: $71

★ Navaja Knife Scorched WW, B/O: $71

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★ Nomad Knife Fade FN, B/O: $1015

★ Skeleton Knife, B/O: $909

★ Bowie Knife Boreal Forest MW, B/O: $106

★ Survival Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97

GLOVES

★ Driver Gloves Crimson Weave FT, B/O: $335

★ Driver Gloves King Snake BS, B/O: $270

★ Driver Gloves Lunar Weave WW, B/O: $113

★ Driver Gloves Overtake WW, B/O: $88

★ Driver Gloves Overtake BS, B/O: $67

⎯

★ Moto Gloves Transport MW, B/O: $171

★ Moto Gloves Polygon BS, B/O: $137

★ Moto Gloves Transport WW, B/O: $71

★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $62

⎯

★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono WW, B/O: $1027

★ Specialist Gloves Tiger Strike FT, B/O: $654

★ Specialist Gloves Mogul FT, B/O: $295

★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander FT, B/O: $277

★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Web FT, B/O: $275

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★ Sport Gloves Slingshot FT, B/O: $796

★ Sport Gloves Amphibious BS #2, B/O: $699

★ Sport Gloves Omega FT, B/O: $656

⎯

★ Broken Fang Gloves Unhinged BS, B/O: $60

WEAPONS

AK-47 Case Hardened BS, B/O: $130

AK-47 Bloodsport MW, B/O: $79

AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76

AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76

AK-47 Bloodsport FT, B/O: $70

AK-47 Neon Rider MW, B/O: $60

⎯

AWP Fade FN, B/O: $864

AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $84

AWP Containment Breach FT, B/O: $69

AWP Containment Breach FT, B/O: $69

AWP Wildfire FT, B/O: $59

AWP Chromatic Aberration FN, B/O: $59

StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $65

StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $65

⎯

Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $565

Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $565

Desert Eagle Printstream FN, B/O: $155

Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $58

⎯

M4A1-S Icarus Fell FN, B/O: $414

M4A1-S Printstream MW, B/O: $204

M4A1-S Printstream MW, B/O: $204

⎯

M4A4 Poseidon FN, B/O: $1402

M4A4 The Emperor FN, B/O: $152

M4A4 Asiimov WW, B/O: $97

⎯

USP-S Kill Confirmed MW, B/O: $65

USP-S Printstream FT, B/O: $69

StatTrak™ USP-S Kill Confirmed FT, B/O: $123

StatTrak™ USP-S Neo-Noir FN, B/O: $106

⎯

AUG Flame Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $218

P2000 Ocean Foam FN, B/O: $139

Souvenir SSG 08 Death Strike MW, B/O: $81

CZ75-Auto Emerald Quartz MW, B/O: $61

Trade Offer Link - Steam Profile Link - My Inventory

Knives - Bowie Knife, Butterfly Knife, Falchion Knife, Flip Knife, Gut Knife, Huntsman Knife, M9 Bayonet, Bayonet, Karambit, Shadow Daggers, Stiletto Knife, Ursus Knife, Navaja Knife, Talon Knife, Classic Knife, Paracord Knife, Survival Knife, Nomad Knife, Skeleton Knife, Patterns - Gamma Doppler, Doppler (Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, Phase 4, Black Pearl, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald), Crimson Web, Lore, Fade, Ultraviolet, Night, Marble Fade (Fire & Ice, Fake FI), Case Hardened (Blue Gem), Autotronic, Slaughter, Black Laminate, Tiger Tooth, Boreal Forest, Scorched, Blue Steel, Vanilla, Damascus Steel, Forest DDPAT, Urban Masked, Freehand, Stained, Bright Water, Safari Mesh, Rust Coat, Gloves - Bloodhound Gloves (Charred, Snakebite, Guerrilla, Bronzed), Driver Gloves (Snow Leopard, King Snake, Crimson Weave, Imperial Plaid, Black Tie, Lunar Weave, Diamondback, Rezan the Red, Overtake, Queen Jaguar, Convoy, Racing Green), Hand Wraps (Cobalt Skulls, CAUTION!, Overprint, Slaughter, Leather, Giraffe, Badlands, Spruce DDPAT, Arboreal, Constrictor, Desert Shamagh, Duct Tape), Moto Gloves (Spearmint, POW!, Cool Mint, Smoke Out, Finish Line, Polygon, Blood Pressure, Turtle, Boom!, Eclipse, 3rd Commando Company, Transport), Specialist Gloves (Crimson Kimono, Tiger Strike, Emerald Web, Field Agent, Marble Fade, Fade, Foundation, Lt. Commander, Crimson Web, Mogul, Forest DDPAT, Buckshot), Sport Gloves (Pandora's Box, Superconductor, Hedge Maze, Vice, Amphibious, Slingshot, Omega, Arid, Big Game, Nocts, Scarlet Shamagh, Bronze Morph), Hydra Gloves (Case Hardened, Emerald, Rattler, Mangrove), Broken Fang Gloves (Jade, Yellow-banded, Unhinged, Needle Point), Pistols - P2000 (Wicked Sick, Ocean Foam, Fire Element, Amber Fade, Corticera, Chainmail, Imperial Dragon, Obsidian, Scorpion, Handgun, Acid Etched), USP-S (Printstream, Kill Confirmed, Whiteout, Road Rash, Owergrowth, The Traitor, Neo-Noir, Dark Water, Orion, Blueprint, Stainless, Caiman, Serum, Monster Mashup, Royal Blue, Ancient Visions, Cortex, Orange Anolis, Ticket To Hell, Black Lotus, Cyrex, Check Engine, Guardian, Purple DDPAT, Torque, Blood Tiger, Flashback, Business Class, Pathfinder, Para Green), Lead Conduit, Glock-18 (Umbral Rabbit, Fade, Candy Apple, Bullet Queen, Synth Leaf, Neo-Noir, Nuclear Garden, Dragon Tatto, Reactor, Pink DDPAT, Twilight Galaxy, Sand Dune, Groundwater, Blue Fissure, Snack Attack, Water Elemental, Brass, Wasteland Rebel, Vogue, Franklin, Royal Legion, Gamma Doppler, Weasel, Steel Disruption, Ironwork, Grinder, High Beam, Moonrise, Oxide Blaze, Bunsen Burner, Clear Polymer, Bunsen Burner, Night), P250 (Re.built, Nuclear Threat, Modern Hunter, Splash, Whiteout, Vino Primo, Mehndi, Asiimov, Visions, Undertow, Cartel, See Ya Later, Gunsmoke, Splash, Digital Architect, Muertos, Red Rock, Bengal Tiger, Crimson Kimono, Wingshot, Metallic DDPAT, Hive, Dark Filigree, Mint Kimono), Five-Seven (Neon Kimono, Berries And Cherries, Fall Hazard, Crimson Blossom, Hyper Beast, Nitro, Fairy Tale, Case Hardened, Copper Galaxy, Angry Mob, Monkey Business, Fowl Play, Anodized Gunmetal, Hot Shot, Retrobution, Boost Protocol), CZ75-Auto (Chalice, Crimson Web, Emerald Quartz, The Fuschia is Now, Nitro, Xiangliu, Yellow Jacket, Victoria, Poison Dart, Syndicate, Eco, Hexane, Pole, Tigris), Tec-9 (Rebel, Terrace, Nuclear Threat, Hades, Rust Leaf, Decimator, Blast From, Orange Murano, Toxic, Fuel Injector, Remote Control, Bamboo Forest, Isaac, Avalanche, Brother, Re-Entry, Blue Titanium, Bamboozle), R8 Revolver (Banana Cannon, Fade, Blaze, Crimson Web, Liama Cannon, Crazy 8, Reboot, Canal Spray, Night, Amber Fade), Desert Eagle (Blaze, Hand Cannon, Fennec Fox, Sunset Storm, Emerald Jörmungandr, Pilot, Hypnotic, Golden Koi, Printstream, Cobalt Disruption, Code Red, Ocean Drive, Midnight Storm, Kumicho Dragon, Crimson Web, Heirloom, Night Heist, Mecha Industries, Night, Conspiracy, Trigger Discipline, Naga, Directive, Light Rail), Dual Berettas (Flora Carnivora, Duelist, Cobra Strike, Black Limba, Emerald, Hemoglobin, Twin Turbo, Marina, Melondrama, Pyre, Retribution, Briar, Dezastre, Royal Consorts, Urban Shock, Dualing Dragons, Panther, Balance), Rifles - Galil (Aqua Terrace, Winter Forest, Chatterbox, Sugar Rush, Pheonix Blacklight, CAUTION!, Orange DDPAT, Cerberus, Dusk Ruins, Eco, Chromatic Aberration, Stone Cold, Tuxedo, Sandstorm, Shattered, Urban Rubble, Rocket Pop, Kami, Crimson Tsunami, Connexion), SCAR-20 (Fragments, Brass, Cyrex, Palm, Splash Jam, Cardiac, Emerald, Crimson Web, Magna Carta, Stone Mosaico, Bloodsport, Enforcer), AWP (Duality, Gungnir, Dragon Lore, Prince, Medusa, Desert Hydra, Fade, Lightning Strike, Oni Taiji, Silk Tiger, Graphite, Chromatic Aberration, Asiimov, Snake Camo, Boom, Containment Breach, Wildfire, Redline, Electric Hive, Hyper Beast, Neo-Noir, Man-o'-war, Pink DDPAT, Corticera, Sun in Leo, Elite Build, Fever Dream, Atheris, Mortis, PAW, Exoskeleton, Worm God, POP AWP, Phobos, Acheron, Pit Viper, Capillary, Safari Mesh), AK-47 (Head Shot, Wild Lotus, Gold Arabesque, X-Ray, Fire Serpent, Hydroponic, Panthera Onca, Case Hardened, Vulcan, Jet Set, Fuel Injector, Bloodsport, Nightwish, First Class, Neon Rider, Asiimov, Red Laminate, Aquamarine Revenge, The Empress, Wasteland Rebel, Jaguar, Black Laminate, Leet Museo, Neon Revolution, Redline, Frontside Misty, Predator, Legion of Anubis, Point Disarray, Orbit Mk01, Blue Laminate, Green Laminate, Emerald Pinstripe, Cartel, Phantom Disruptor, Jungle Spray, Safety Net, Rat Rod, Baroque Purple, Slate, Elite Build, Uncharted, Safari Mesh), FAMAS (Sundown, Prime Conspiracy, Afterimage, Commemoration, Dark Water, Spitfire, Pulse, Eye of Athena, Meltdown, Rapid Eye Move, Roll Cage, Styx, Mecha Industrie, Djinn, ZX Spectron, Valence, Neural Net, Night Borre, Hexne), M4A4 (Temukau, Howl, Poseidon, Asiimov, Daybreak, Hellfire, Zirka, Red DDPAT, Radiation Hazard, Modern Hunter, The Emperor, The Coalition, Bullet Rain, Cyber Security, X-Ray, Dark Blossom, Buzz Kill, In Living Color, Neo-Noir, Desolate Space, 龍王 (Dragon King), Royal Paladin, The Battlestar, Global Offensive, Tooth Fairy, Desert-Strike, Griffin, Evil Daimyo, Spider Lily, Converter), M4A1-S (Emphorosaur-S, Welcome to the Jungle, Imminent Danger, Knight, Hot Rod, Icarus Fell, Blue Phosphor, Printstream, Master Piece, Dark Water, Golden Coil, Bright Water, Player Two, Atomic Alloy, Guardian, Chantico's Fire, Hyper Beast, Mecha Industries, Cyrex, Control Panel, Moss Quartz, Nightmare, Decimator, Leaded Glass, Basilisk, Blood Tiger, Briefing, Night Terror, Nitro, VariCamo, Flashback), SG 553 (Cyberforce, Hazard Pay, Bulldozer, Integrale, Dragon Tech, Ultraviolet, Colony IV, Hypnotic, Cyrex, Candy Apple, Barricade, Pulse), SSG 08 (Death Strike, Sea Calico, Blood in the Water, Orange Filigree, Dragonfire, Big Iron, Bloodshot, Detour, Turbo Peek, Red Stone), AUG (Akihabara Accept, Flame Jörmungandr, Hot Rod, Midnight Lily, Sand Storm, Carved Jade, Wings, Anodized Navy, Death by Puppy, Torque, Bengal Tiger, Chameleon, Fleet Flock, Random Access, Momentum, Syd Mead, Stymphalian, Arctic Wolf, Aristocrat, Navy Murano), G3SG1 (Chronos, Violet Murano, Flux, Demeter, Orange Kimono, The Executioner, Green Apple, Arctic Polar Camo, Contractor), SMGs - P90 (Neoqueen, Astral Jörmungandr, Run and Hide, Emerald Dragon, Cold Blooded, Death by Kitty, Baroque Red, Vent Rush, Blind Spot, Asiimov, Trigon, Sunset Lily, Death Grip, Leather, Nostalgia, Fallout Warning, Tiger Pit, Schermatic, Virus, Shapewood, Glacier Mesh, Shallow Grave, Chopper, Desert Warfare), MAC-10 (Sakkaku, Hot Snakes, Copper Borre, Red Filigree, Gold Brick, Graven, Case Hardened, Stalker, Amber Fade, Neon Rider, Tatter, Curse, Propaganda, Nuclear Garden, Disco Tech, Toybox, Heat, Indigo), UMP-45 (Wild Child, Fade, Blaze, Day Lily, Minotaur's Labyrinth, Crime Scene, Caramel, Bone Pile, Momentum, Primal Saber), MP7 (Teal Blossom, Fade, Nemesis, Whiteout, Asterion, Bloosport, Abyssal Apparition, Full Stop, Special Delivery, Neon Ply, Asterion, Ocean Foam, Powercore, Scorched, Impire), PP-Bizon (Modern Hunter, Rust Coat, Forest Leaves, Antique, High Roller, Blue Streak, Seabird, Judgement of Anubis, Bamboo Print, Embargo, Chemical Green, Coblat Halftone, Fuel Rod, Photic Zone, Irradiated Alert, Carbon Fiber), MP9 (Featherweight, Wild Lily, Pandora's Box, Stained Glass, Bulldozer, Dark Age, Hot Rod, Hypnotic, Hydra, Rose Iron, Music Box, Setting Sun, Food Chain, Airlock, Mount Fuji, Starlight Protector, Ruby Poison Dart, Deadly Poison), MP5-SD (Liquidation, Oxide Oasis, Phosphor, Nitro, Agent, Autumn Twilly), Shotguns, Machineguns - Sawed-Off (Kiss♥Love, First Class, Orange DDPAT, Rust Coat, The Kraken, Devourer, Mosaico, Wasteland Princess, Bamboo Shadow, Copper, Serenity, Limelight, Apocalypto), XM1014 (Frost Borre, Ancient Lore, Red Leather, Elegant Vines, Banana Leaf, Jungle, Urban Perforated, Grassland, Blaze Orange, Heaven Guard, VariCamo Blue, Entombed, XOXO, Seasons, Tranquility, Bone Machine, Incinegator, Teclu Burner, Black Tie, Zombie Offensive, Watchdog), Nova (Baroque Orange, Hyper Beast, Green Apple, Antique, Modern Hunter, Walnut, Forest Leaves, Graphite, Blaze Orange, Rising Skull, Tempest, Bloomstick, Interlock, Quick Sand, Moon in Libra, Clean Polymer, Red Quartz, Toy Soldier), MAG-7 (Insomnia, Cinqueda, Counter Terrace, Prism Terrace, Memento, Chainmail, Hazard, Justice, Bulldozer, Silver, Core Breach, Firestarter, Praetorian, Heat, Hard Water, Monster Call, BI83 Spectrum, SWAG-7), M249 (Humidor, Shipping Forecast, Blizzard Marbleized, Downtown, Jungle DDPAT, Nebula Crusader, Impact Drill, Emerald Poison Dart), Negev (Mjölnir, Anodized Navy, Palm, Power Loader, Bratatat, CaliCamo, Phoenix Stencil, Infrastructure, Boroque Sand), Wear - Factory New (FN), Minimal Wear (MW), Field-Tested (FT), Well-Worn (WW), Battle-Scarred (BS), Stickers Holo/Foil/Gold - Katowice 2014, Krakow 2017, Howling Dawn, Katowice 2015, Crown, London 2018, Cologne 2014, Boston 2018, Atlanta 2017, Cluj-Napoca 2015, DreamHack 2014, King on the Field, Harp of War, Winged Difuser, Cologne 2016, Cologne 2015, MLG Columbus 2016, Katowice 2019, Berlin 2019, RMR 2020, Stockholm 2021, Antwerp 2022, Swag Foil, Flammable foil, Others - Souvenirs, Agents, Pins, Passes, Gifts, Music Kits, Cases, Keys, Capsules, Packages, Patches

Some items on the list may no longer be available or are still locked, visit My Inventory for more details.

Send a Trade Offer for fastest response. I consider all offers.

Add me for discuss if there is a serious offer that needs to be discussed.

So we all know there's five prayers at different hours and that most countries do not have the same time zone. So is God in the possession of hundreds of watches to be able to control at the second if you ate on time, if you prayed on time, like its a drama if you did it one minute before the right time. All that just makes it even more visible that this is nonsense like only if every countries had the same time zone it would have probably made sense. You could cheat like idk you live in Canada but want to do it on Japan's time zone, it is still valuable because in fact the sun is setting in another country. Its like you just traveled and you're still settled on your country's timezone. I don't know how to explain that hope you understood my point

I'm one of those DM's that has been trying to pull away from 5th edition for quite some time. It's hard to do because 5th edition isn't all bad, I mean I can list a number of things I like about 5th edition but . . . I can also list an even larger number of things I 100% HATE about 5th edition, even more so now with the D&D Direct stream they just did with the new and upcoming (Video Game) VTT.
I'm jusat tired of the direction D&D is going, it's becoming to modern. When I watched that stream during the VTT and saw the table FULL of laptops, I mean in 5th edition the computer just does everything for you. No need to have real books, dice or character sheets, just let the computer do it all for you.
Anyways . . . I think I am just done with 5th edition. It has been a LONG time since I ran 1st edition games - I was running those back when 1st edition was the only edition to play so yea, MANY years ago. But let me get to the point . . .
I love the two adventures of Lost Mine of Phandelver & Dragon of Icespire Peak and I've really wanted to run those adventures for my players but I guess now I need to convert them both to 1st edition. Has anyone done that before and if so how hard was it to manage?
Also . . . I want to place the village of Phandalin within the Kron Hills in the World of Greyhawk. I kinda think it would work. I'd just have to do a little reskinning. WotC did announce they are releasing an actual campaign that focus's on these two adventures, I hope that this campaign picks up right after these two adventures.
Anyways . . . what do you guys think about converting these two adventures to 1st edition and placing them in the Kron Hills in Greyhawk? Maybe in this region? https://i.imgur.com/xnTFRBA.png

I'm one of those DM's that has been trying to pull away from 5th edition for quite some time. It's hard to do because 5th edition isn't all bad, I mean I can list a number of things I like about 5th edition but . . . I can also list an even larger number of things I 100% HATE about 5th edition, even more so now with the D&D Direct stream they just did with the new and upcoming (Video Game) VTT.
I'm jusat tired of the direction D&D is going, it's becoming to modern. When I watched that stream during the VTT and saw the table FULL of laptops, I mean in 5th edition the computer just does everything for you. No need to have real books, dice or character sheets, just let the computer do it all for you.
Anyways . . . I think I am just done with 5th edition. It has been a LONG time since I ran 1st edition games - I was running those back when 1st edition was the only edition to play so yea, MANY years ago. But let me get to the point . . .
I love the two adventures of Lost Mine of Phandelver & Dragon of Icespire Peak and I've really wanted to run those adventures for my players but I guess now I need to convert them both to 1st edition. Has anyone done that before and if so how hard was it to manage?
Also . . . I want to place the village of Phandalin within the Kron Hills in the World of Greyhawk. I kinda think it would work. I'd just have to do a little reskinning. WotC did announce they are releasing an actual campaign that focus's on these two adventures, I hope that this campaign picks up right after these two adventures.
Anyways . . . what do you guys think about converting these two adventures to 1st edition and placing them in the Kron Hills in Greyhawk? What about right in this region? https://i.imgur.com/xnTFRBA.png

Hello Everyone my name is Matt or Panda is well I go by, and Im trying again to get a group going as not having great luck as usual.
Being blunt it is actually getting to me always getting to the end of the application to be rejected over and over again, so has affected me and being might be one of the last times i post unless i get a second wind, cause it is affecting me alot not getting chosen 30+ times now
I'm 27 He/him on GMT timezone looking for a game some really bad luck and personally it been getting to me
(To prefix this I am not looking for a paid game of DND sorry it's something that Ive had a few friends bad experience with)
For 6.5 years I been playing 5e and not once have o ever done a full campaign to completion so I'm looking for some new friends to Play a RP campaign
Everything from meta/powergamers, bullies, racists , bad dms I seen it all during my time , and it has gotten to me almost made me not want to play this game anymore
I am willing to play practically anything
I have also DM a Campaign before & done a few one-shots. I like to think of myself as someone that commits a lot to roleplay, and planning, in campaigns, if I could pick a personal weakness of mine, I say solving puzzles would be my weak point.
I like to say I am pretty witty and love getting into Character quite a bit through the campaigns I had played in and Dm, I am more used to something akin to 60/40 or 70/30, but do not mind more campaigns being Combat heavy.
Whilst I am GMT, I am a night owl so Est, CST Times work perfectly for me.
I have a couple of Character Concepts in my head some I wanted to fully go through a long campaign in. (Each i have written up Backstories on google docs)
​
Tiefling Levistsus Artificer Alchemist/Forge domain Cleric
Half-Orc Rouge mastermind/Genie warlock
Dragonborn green Shepperd druid Assimar Kensei monk Shifter Lycan blood hunter Hill Dwarf Rune knight fighter Tabaxi Oathbreaker Paladin
Tauren Wizard school of chronomancy Aarakockra Valor bard Gnome bard school of creation/order of scribes bard Goliath forge cleric

Period: 273.51 days

	Submissions	Comments
Total	812	2378
Rate (per day)	2.97	8.79
Unique Redditors	114	550
Combined Score	19417	5704

Top Submitters' Top Submissions

1. 3904 points, 218 submissions: itisverynice
   
   1. Shashi Tharoor has a secret admirer (84 points, 5 comments)
   2. Bajrang Dal activists thrash Muslim youth for meeting Hindu girl by telling his name as 'Kashi' in Indore (69 points, 9 comments)
   3. Sex with minors an offence even after a valid marriage, Kerala High Court refuses to exclude Muslim personal law from POCSO Act (63 points, 5 comments)
   4. Retired IB officer RN Kulkarni, who wrote a book exposing Jihad, murdered by unknown persons by hitting him with a car (58 points, 3 comments)
   5. Donald Trump promises Hindu holocaust memorial in US, India's Opposition smells 'RSS agenda' (56 points, 2 comments)
   6. Commercial Bank of China demands Pakistan to repay $500 million loan in 72 hours (55 points, 10 comments)
   7. Morbi bridge collapse: Bajrang Dal volunteers saved lives of over 170 people amid heartbreaking scenes, read details (53 points, 1 comment)
   8. POCSO Act overrides Personal Law, minor Muslim girl’s marriage invalid as the age for sexual activities is 18 years, rules Karnataka High Court (51 points, 6 comments)
   9. Shubham Sharma: One person from a Dalit family has imposed four cases of the SC-ST act on a single person and earned 15000, 75000, 75000, and 75000 for merely registering an FIR. All are related to land dispute cases. Happened in Deoria, UP. No media will show you this side of the SC-ST act. (51 points, 1 comment)
   10. Uttar Pradesh: Students protest against illegal construction of mosque at Udai Pratap College campus, police intervenes (51 points, 2 comments)
2. 2419 points, 117 submissions: IndiaRises
   
   1. Be Proud of Your History 💪 (119 points, 13 comments)
   2. We were not aliens 👽 (85 points, 16 comments)
   3. Poland outrightly rejects EU's request to accept muslim asylum seekers/migrants; deploys maximum force to prevent influx (75 points, 9 comments)
   4. Stand against wolfophobia (75 points, 1 comment)
   5. India and Russia poised to bypass dollar in energy deal. (70 points, 4 comments)
   6. Armored and Bulletproof JCB’s to be used in Jammu & Kashmir (49 points, 1 comment)
   7. 2022 Anti-Hindu Timeline (48 points, 4 comments)
   8. Men [email protected] a teenager at night-time. This is not a joke. (48 points, 12 comments)
   9. मां ❣️ (47 points, 1 comment)
   10. Pseudo History. (45 points, 3 comments)
3. 1243 points, 41 submissions: putin_sharma
   
   1. Islam ki haar hui :( (123 points, 34 comments)
   2. Librandus : 😭 (98 points, 2 comments)
   3. lol (86 points, 7 comments)
   4. Chad 🗿 (68 points, 9 comments)
   5. Here you go Hindus. That's what you deserve. (62 points, 16 comments)
   6. yeh kya hua ? (54 points, 10 comments)
   7. Anand chacha... (52 points, 1 comment)
   8. 🐾kistanis ☕ (51 points, 6 comments)
   9. hmm (48 points, 5 comments)
   10. hmm (47 points, 2 comments)
4. 1222 points, 29 submissions: woke_ka_choda
   
   1. Suara 🐖 (109 points, 7 comments)
   2. hmm (97 points, 13 comments)
   3. Anand ChaCha xD (90 points, 10 comments)
   4. On this day in 2008, Mumbai experienced a coordinated series of 12 terrorist attacks, popularly known as 26/11, with the motive of Islamic Fundamentalism lasting across a spam of 4 days killing a total of 166 innocent Indians. May the world never experience such deed again. (81 points, 5 comments)
   5. Islamophobia vs Kafirophobia (80 points, 0 comments)
   6. Vivek's Response (67 points, 4 comments)
   7. Missionaries would die but won't tell you facts. (62 points, 0 comments)
   8. GlUbul HanGuR EnDeX 🤡 (61 points, 9 comments)
   9. Tradition over regressive trends (57 points, 1 comment)
   10. The left getting destroyed (55 points, 1 comment)
5. 1070 points, 24 submissions: EclecticIndividual99
   
   1. Karnataka Hijab Row (90 points, 0 comments)
   2. Vince McMahon Reaction Meme Indian (Bharatiya) Version (90 points, 6 comments)
   3. Baikunth (82 points, 3 comments)
   4. The Wire when it gets some fake news about Modi / BJP: (79 points, 5 comments)
   5. Will the real Tukde-Tukde gang please stand up? (68 points, 7 comments)
   6. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel - The REAL Bharat Jodo Campaigner. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. (60 points, 27 comments)
   7. Unadulterated / Shuddha Hindi Ep 81-85 (53 points, 3 comments)
   8. Unadulterated / Shuddha Hindi EP 41-60 (u/johnkarter767612 & u/shuddhahindi, reuploaded on UnadulteratedHindi) (50 points, 7 comments)
   9. Unadulterated / Shuddha Hindi EP 21-40 (u/johnkarter767612 & u/shuddhahindi, reuploaded on UnadulteratedHindi) (48 points, 4 comments)
   10. [Republic Day Special] Unadulterated / Shuddha Hindi Ep 100 India - Hindustan - Bharat India that is Bharat This one is dedicated to J Sai Deepak's Book [2india] (48 points, 3 comments)
6. 841 points, 9 submissions: Capitalist_KarlMarx
   
   1. Parivesh Bhai is dangerous (270 points, 20 comments)
   2. Mishraji got up and chose violence (212 points, 14 comments)
   3. World-class idiots at it again! (91 points, 11 comments)
   4. Uncle got no chill (swipe >>) (81 points, 5 comments)
   5. Bharat awakens at last! (73 points, 4 comments)
   6. Wannabe jihadi with a -ve IQ from UK (47 points, 0 comments)
   7. Some old farts NEED to be punched in the face for the larger good! (38 points, 18 comments)
   8. Chal kya raha hai inke saat? (23 points, 5 comments)
   9. Bootlicker made to resign (6 points, 0 comments)
7. 570 points, 14 submissions: giveittomeIamworthit
   
   1. Releasing today at evening 6 , what are your views? (92 points, 14 comments)
   2. Ye hota asli gigachad. (83 points, 2 comments)
   3. 🇷🇺Russian Ambassador says "Dosti se zyada kuch bhi nahi hota". (72 points, 2 comments)
   4. Gold Swastika Amulet, 1st Century BCE, Found at Sirkap, Taxaxila. On display at National Museum, New Delhi, India (58 points, 0 comments)
   5. Farmaan (order) from Augranzeb to bury Hindu idols under the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi. (42 points, 1 comment)
   6. How Indians ARE FOOLED Guruphobia (37 points, 0 comments)
   7. National Anthem on an electric guitar: Nagaland Hornbill Festival 2022 Artist: Imnainla Jamir (33 points, 2 comments)
   8. This is the subtle Salafism that Bollywood ingrains in Hindu viewers - imprint a characters look in the gullible bullywood (29 points, 4 comments)
   9. Unadulterated Hindi EP 44 (u/johnkarter767612 & u/shuddhahindi) - honest - imandar - nishthavaan Always knew the words but no one in our society used, it's time we use words consciously (28 points, 0 comments)
   10. All is not well in West Bengal. Your opinions (25 points, 1 comment)
8. 414 points, 11 submissions: LulExtract
   
   1. You Sam, Again??? India US Relation (70 points, 0 comments)
   2. It was the British who united us, bro (65 points, 12 comments)
   3. Just Business (61 points, 3 comments)
   4. Guest, Propaganda and plight (44 points, 0 comments)
   5. Priyam Bharatam Sanskrit Patriotic Song (41 points, 1 comment)
   6. Sir Herbert Hope Risley, the architect of the caste system in India (a system of social precedence deriving from a race-based hierarchy of social life) (38 points, 18 comments)
   7. Balkanization of Bharat: Breaking India forces, what drives them, and how they operate (26 points, 7 comments)
   8. Minimum legal age of marriage by countries and the progress made by India in legalizing the prohibition of child marriage (19 points, 12 comments)
   9. Alexander Duff: For the last 3000 years, an inexhaustible India has been pouring an uninterrupted stream of opulence upon civilizations of the western world. (18 points, 0 comments)
   10. B. A. IRVING in his book published in 1853: How the French fell in India (16 points, 1 comment)
9. 352 points, 12 submissions: The-first-laugh
   
   1. Damn.... waay too much corruption. (73 points, 5 comments)
   2. They keep shouting fascism over and over again but don't understand that fascism would kill them for this crap. (62 points, 22 comments)
   3. I want to know how they are lowering it? (49 points, 2 comments)
   4. Jai Shree Ram (36 points, 0 comments)
   5. Please Help (31 points, 0 comments)
   6. Of 110 nations, India tops global minority index, finds study (24 points, 18 comments)
   7. Shahbaaz and Wahid arrested for strewing nails on a road leading to the Hindu pilgrimage site Datta Peetha (24 points, 0 comments)
   8. Now everyone is shutting up regarding this argument. (18 points, 0 comments)
   9. Meerut: Hijab-wearing teacher gets death threats after she complained of harassment by students (14 points, 4 comments)
   10. Anti-India cabal in US State Department manipulated online discourse on PM Modi: Ex US diplomat - The Sunday Guardian Live (10 points, 1 comment)
10. 339 points, 24 submissions: closetbimbosissy
    
    1. On this day, 1966, India lost one of it’s finest nuclear scientists at the prime of his career. He is the father of India’s nuclear program. He is Homi Jehangir Bhabha. (37 points, 5 comments)
    2. Bike-borne men throw acid at minor girl in Delhi, one detained. (35 points, 5 comments)
    3. On this day, 1925, Raja Ramanna was born. He was the head of India’s first nuclear bomb program. He headed a team of 75 scientists for the program and he was responsible for designing and manufacturing the first nuclear device which was exploded in Pokhran on 18 May 1974. The day when Buddha smiled. (26 points, 2 comments)
    4. On this day, in 1600, a Queen of a western empire granted her charter to a group of prominent merchants n explorers. That charter allowed for the formation of an organisation that shook the destiny of the subcontinent n changed its future forever. It was called the East India company. (25 points, 1 comment)
    5. On this day, in 1911 calcutta session of INC, 'Jana Gana mana' was sung for the first time. Tagore's niece Sarala Devi Chowdhurani and a few other students sung the song. (24 points, 1 comment)
    6. 🥲 (24 points, 2 comments)
    7. On this day, 1992, India established full fledged diplomatic relationship with one of its key partners, Israel. Both the nations’ ties have only grown closer and have been a trusted ally of each other. (21 points, 1 comment)
    8. Sale of single cigarettes to be banned by parliament to reduce consumption. (19 points, 14 comments)
    9. On this day, 1931, India’s IVF architect was born. He made world’s 2nd and Asia’s 1st test tube baby in 1978. He didn’t get ‘nobel’ like his foreign counterpart. He was harassed by the West Bengal government n called a fraud. He committed suicide in 1981. Decades later his findings were uncovered. (16 points, 1 comment)
    10. On this day, 1957, Asia’s oldest nuclear reactor was inaugurated and dedicated to the nation. It was designed by Bhabha and named “Apsara” by Nehru. It paved the way for India’s nuclear program. It was shut down in 2009, upgraded and turned on again as “Apsara-U” in 2018. (16 points, 1 comment)

Top Commenters

1. itisverynice (415 points, 189 comments)
2. shabbyyr (165 points, 63 comments)
3. sadrevenge55 (160 points, 35 comments)
4. ididacannonball (154 points, 73 comments)
5. evammist (140 points, 27 comments)
6. giveittomeIamworthit (117 points, 41 comments)
7. JungleGym81 (113 points, 60 comments)
8. DefiantDeviantArt (107 points, 37 comments)
9. Chromeboy12 (93 points, 22 comments)
10. Atma-Army-9099 (89 points, 23 comments)

Top Submissions

1. Parivesh Bhai is dangerous by Capitalist_KarlMarx (270 points, 20 comments)
2. Mishraji got up and chose violence by Capitalist_KarlMarx (212 points, 14 comments)
3. Ye lo meme by XiLongHusk (181 points, 19 comments)
4. Sums up everything by adityanath_putin (160 points, 20 comments)
5. Thoughts by r_harshit011 (143 points, 94 comments)
6. Islam ki haar hui :( by putin_sharma (123 points, 34 comments)
7. Garv se kaho hum hindu 🟠 hai by iNeverLie4Real (122 points, 3 comments)
8. Be Proud of Your History 💪 by IndiaRises (119 points, 13 comments)
9. Suara 🐖 by woke_ka_choda (109 points, 7 comments)
10. video from MP by naughtkhalifa2 (98 points, 26 comments)

Top Comments

1. 42 points: Atma-Army-9099's comment in Thoughts
2. 31 points: PepperBisket's comment in Five Muslim men were sent to jail over the incident. But no action has been taken against the Bajrang Dal members.
3. 28 points: Mysterious-Earth2256's comment in Thoughts
4. 28 points: PepperBisket's comment in This Subreddit is dying
5. 23 points: jackhawk56's comment in GlUbul HanGuR EnDeX 🤡
6. 23 points: putin_sharma's comment in Here you go Hindus. That's what you deserve.
7. 22 points: Fearless_Bee_6299's comment in Ziya and Zahad from Kerala praise Allah for being India's first transgender couple pregnancy.
8. 22 points: deleted's comment in Islam ki haar hui :(
9. 21 points: Aka2005's comment in Islam ki haar hui :(
10. 21 points: Flamboyant-2's comment in Mishraji got up and chose violence

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https://youtu.be/4arPzzv0vPY 📷hey chatgpt, tell us about Australian Grand Prix
The Australian Grand Prix is a Formula One World Championship race that has been held annually since 1985. The race takes place in Melbourne, Australia at the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit.
The Australian Grand Prix is typically held in March, marking the beginning of the Formula One season. It is a popular race among both drivers and fans due to its unique track layout, challenging corners and high-speed straights.
Over the years, the Australian Grand Prix has been won by many legendary drivers such as Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, and Lewis Hamilton. The race has also produced many memorable moments, including close finishes and surprise upsets.
In addition to the main Formula One race, the Australian Grand Prix also features support races, such as the Porsche Carrera Cup and the Australian GT Championship. The event also includes a variety of off-track activities, such as concerts and exhibitions, making it a popular event for motorsport fans and casual spectators alike.
However, it's worth noting that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian Grand Prix was cancelled in 2020 and 2021. It is currently scheduled to return in 2022.
📷📷tell us about the best driver and best team of Australian GP
The Australian Grand Prix has seen many great drivers and teams over the years, making it difficult to single out the "best" of each. However, I can provide some information on some of the most successful drivers and teams in the history of the race.
In terms of drivers, Michael Schumacher holds the record for the most wins at the Australian Grand Prix, with four victories to his name. Other drivers with multiple wins at the race include Damon Hill, Jenson Button, and Nico Rosberg, who have all won the race twice.
As for the best team at the Australian Grand Prix, that honor arguably goes to Scuderia Ferrari. The Italian team has won the race a total of ten times, making them the most successful team in the history of the event. Other successful teams at the Australian Grand Prix include McLaren, who have won the race six times, and Mercedes, who have won five times.
It's worth noting, however, that the Australian Grand Prix has seen its fair share of upsets and surprise winners over the years. So while these teams and drivers may have a strong track record at the race, anything can happen on race day.
📷📷#ChatGPTsays
#chatgptsays #australiangrandprix #f1 #f12023 #motorsports #racing #history #michaelschumacher #nicorosberg

DISCLAIMER: This is an updated version of an older post of mine that dealt with grinding 100 Galactic Season levels on multiple servers.
The Galactic Season has one particular perk some people might not be aware of (I certainly wasn't until I read about it in this very sub towards the end of season 1; unfortunately it was pretty much over by then): You have one reward track per legacy, and not just for your entire account: Which means that you can get 10,000 CC overall and 25 random crates on top of all that other stuff if you soldier through the track, because you'll get the CC-rewards mostly towards the end.
(This is a departure from how it has been in seasons 1 and 2, where you got 4,000 CC on each legacy evenly distributed over twenty 200 CC-chunks which you got every 5 levels - which means that it also paid off to do or even buy just a few GS-leves: doing, say, 30 levels on every server was a perfectly viable approach during that tie because you still managed to get 6000 CC out of it back then; an approach that isn't feasible anymore.)
So, where to start:
1) To subscribe or not to subscribe

• The bad news first: Since I am operating under the assumption that you have literally nothing on most or all other servers, subscribing for an initial month is highly advisable - simply because you need to be able to hold more than 1,000,000 credits in your hands. (If you already did this, ignore this part.)
• the rewards on the subscriber track are what you want: all of those sweet 2000 CC are there, and most of the season tokens. This means that even if you don't start as a subscriber, you certainly have to finish the season as one (the good news is that subscribing retroactively unlocks all rewards on the subscription tracks, including those you earned while you were not subscribed). If you don't want to fork over the subscription fee at all, you might just as well stop reading here.

2) Creating characters and starting the game

• Generally, this guide assumes that RP or playing through the story is no priority of yours; and neither is an optimized legacy (my guide for that is here ) - this is just about getting through the Galactic Season with as many legacies as possible in relatively little playtime.
• Unsurprisingly, stealth classes are most convenient for this endeavor - whether you are doing FPs, do the usual 8 quests/100 mobs-thing or whatever else that isn't a space or GSF mission, you're best off with a stealther - ideally a Shadow/Assassin (since they get crowd control a lot sooner than the tech stealthers), but a Scoundrel/Operative will do as well.
• create one character per faction - as a rule, you don't need more than these two (and in fact you should concentrate your efforts on these two because anything else tends to be a waste of time). Occasionally you will have to create new alts if a weekly objective asks for it, but these are little more than deco for your legacy otherwise.
• In addition to this: If you are one of those people (like me) who never bothered to blow their character boosts, now is their time to shine: A legacy that consists exclusively of fresh characters is somewhat limited in its options and might have to resort to skipping weekly objectives because the respective planets or FPs are out of reach; a level 70 character however can do pretty much everything as long as it isn't faction-exclusive (also, they get a heap of conquest points simply for reputation increases, which is the easiest way to get the daily 25k). I would strongly suggest to prioritize Leviathan and (if you have a second boost left) Tulak Hord for these - not just because of the language barrier, but also because these two servers are less populated than the English-speaking realms. It's particularly jarring on Leviathan where even during peak time you might have a hard time finding a group for world bosses or FPs, so having a high level character here is immensely helpful.

3) Getting started, getting to level 10, finishing the first two planets

• as soon as you enter the game, activate "exploration missions" on your map interface.
• get a companion from your collection (more on that under #6). At the very least you should have universal access to Amity, since you only need GS level 1 on your main legacy and unlock that compantion for your entire account. (unlocking Amity costs 60 CC).
• as soon as you get your first +25% XP boost, activate it.
• once you're level 8, get to the fleet:
• there you learn a few gathering skills (preferably bioanalysis and scavenging among them since you're most likely to use these)
• then you buy a speeder (this part is most important)
• and you may buy your faction's capital stronghold.
• return to your starter planet and do all the quests there (they're generally quick and easy), without any double XP event currently active, you should be around level 17 before you move on to your faction's capital world.
• once you finished the starter planet, pick up the stronghold quest from the hologram; if you haven't bought a stronghold yet, do it now. In this stronghold, you place a legacy cargo hold (reward from the hologram quest mentioned above), Felusia Stato (same), a mail box (same), and finally a personal cargo hold (available for 15k at the security key vendor). If you can't afford this right now, definitely do it ASAP.
• This should have taken a bit more than an hour or so. Rinse repeat for the other faction's character.
• Depending on this week's objective, you might want to complete the class story on the capital with at least one character: if, say, space missions are needed, you need to get your ship first.

4) What about guilds?

• One of the things you should definitely do soon is finding a guild - if only for the XP bonus and the weekly conquest yield. Bigger guilds are of course better (maxed out XP bonuses, Flagship perks and large yield invasions are quite helpful), but small ones will do as well as long as they're invading something. This also means: if you get ninjainvited by a huge guild on a starter planet - even if you otherwise hate that, now is not the time to be picky.
• with "soon" I mean before your first weekly reset: you only start collecting conquest points on behalf of your guild after the reset, and you'll get your first conquest yield the week after that. I.e. only in week 3 you will start to capitalize financially. All the more reason to not drag that out.

5) What about legacies?

• I wrote extensively about optimizing your legacy in my guide for fresh legacies, but this doesn't apply here: With only two active characters which you won't level more than necessary, you can also forget about leveling your legacy - i.e. no perks, no heroic moments, no bonuses. After getting to level GS level 100, most of my legacies were around level 7 at the end of season 2 and around level 12 at the end of season 3. Go figure.
• This also means that the only useful thing you can buy is the rocket boost, on a 2 minute timer (yayyy...) - if you have enough money (unlikely, at least in the beginning). Once you hit legacy level 2, you can buy Fast Travel I (minus 2 minutes on your fast travel CD), which is actually worth the 100k.

6) What about companions?

• apart from their usual role (supporting you), a very crucial element of companions is that they're a source of conquest points via the daily "Influencer"- and "Benefactor"-objectives, which you'll need unless you have a character over level 50 (for the Reputation-objective). While it's easy to do in the beginning, the higher your companion gets the more gifts you need to push him further. For that reason you might want a wider selection of companions.
• apart from Amity, you have your first companion plus your ship droid, and if you don't level your character's class story, that's pretty much it for you unless you have a bunch of companions in your collection. If you don't, one way of collecting those is buying them at the Galactic Season vendor - they change on a weekly basis and cost 5 (or was it 6?) tokens, and unlocking them for your entire account is pretty cheap. Which means that while you may not be able to afford them in the beginning, once the season has progressed far enough that you have 6/15 tokens on every server, you can basically buy half of them in one swoop, and can still save tokens on your main server for stuff like the penthouses.

7) Leveling

• since currently there's no dual XP event, leveling is relatively tedious, even with aforementioned 25% XP token and the 15% guild bonus (and since you have neither the legacy level nor - at least in the beginning - the money for the legacy perk "class mission experience V", this isn't really an option either).
• I suggest to level as far as you need for the easily available objectives. For example, for the "Terrors of Taris"-objective I had to bring the imperial character on every server to the mid 30s. Other than that, I would leave them where they are unless you have some spare time.

8) Finances

• For bullet point #9 (strongholds), you need loads of cash - not very much for a seasoned player with a lot of charcters, but a lot for a legacy that's essentially virginal - getting enough money without a sponsor and exclusively by yourself is out of question, especially after the cuts for weekly conquest.
• I suggest to sell your encryptions, legendary embers and whatever else you can turn into credits as soon as possible. In my experience and right now (April 2023) encryptions sell for between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 - depending on the servers of course. If you manage to sell those for a decent price, you should have enough cash to afford your 150% stronghold bonus after a few weeks.
• if you did enough GSF weeklies (and therefore collected a bunch of fleet commendations) you might also buy epic equipment for space missions relatively early on. Those are so expensive on most servers that even if you manage to sell one piece faaaaar below the averge price, you end up wealthy enough to afford six fully expanded strongholds (and since there isn't really anything you can do with anything you acquire on those other servers, that loss in cash doesn't really hurt you).
• another option would be a "galactic season pact", if you manage to find trustworthy people: you trade around 50 million credits with someone from another server (which is very little if you have an established account in today's economy), then both of you can buy six fully expanded strongholds right off the bat. If you can repeat this on all other servers, this would be 200 million - for multibillionaires not that big of a deal; but one that saves you a lot of conquest grinding time down the road.
• For more on finances during Galactic Season check this post.

9) Strongholds

• if anything, getting your 150% stronghold bonus is even more important than usual: depending on how you do it, up to ~50% of your 800 GS points may come from the daily quest (25k conquest, always available) or the occasional "Marching Through the Galaxy"-weekly (200k conquest, pops up occasionally). So you want to get these 150% as soon as possible.
• You get up to 25% for one fully expanded stronghold, so in order to get there, you need at least six strongholds (but more likely seven, since partially expanded strongholds might do the trick as well). Here is a table for the least expensive combinations.
• unlike all the others, the Umbara stronghold is only available on Odessen. If you know how to get there with a low level character, let me know.
• the strongholds are the reason why being subscribed is advisable: Without a subscription, you're capped at 65% since you can't spend more than 1 million credit at once (which limits you to 9/9 Coruscant, 9/9 Dromund Kaas and 5/9 Nar Shaddaa).

10a) Getting to season level 100

• a Galactic Season lasts 20 weeks- this means that you have to gain at least 40 points per week on average if you want to complete the reward track (800 points) just in time, more if you start later.
• as a subscriber, you gain: 8 points per smaller objective, 12 points per larger objective, 8 points as a 4 day-login bonus, and 2 points for the daily objective. So, if you do at least 2-3 small goals per week, and regularly log in for the "influencing the galaxy"-objective, you get between 38 and 46 points per week.
• as a non-subscriber, you gain: 6 points per smaller objective, 10 points per larger objective, 4 points as a 4 day-login bonus, and 2 points for the daily objective. So, if you do 3-4 small objectives per week, and regularly log in for the "influencing the galaxy"-objective, you get between 36 and 42 points per week - and between 46 and 54 points per week as soon as you resubscribe for the last month. Because even if you are trying to minimize your subscription fees and only subscribe for cashing out on a completed reward track, you still don't want to wait until you have hit level 100 with every legacy, but subscribe quite a few weeks before that (around the 600 points-mark, depending on how many GS points you can reliably make within 4 weeks and 2 days as a subscriber) and finish while you are still subscribed.
• since every week has 10 possible goals, you don't have to do the bare minimum - I would always try to do as many as you can comfortably do (well, up to 7 objectives, that is): it enables you to take a break, do fewer objectives than required, or finish earlier. Personally I pick those that take the least amount of time, but if you like specific mission times better even with fresh characters, you might also do those.

10b) Time spent on objectives
Fortunately, it seems that the objective structure is for the most part the same as it was during GS 2 and 3 (I am working under the assumption that most of the objectives that haven't popped up yet will appear in the future, so I am sticking to my GS 2-guide here). I will update this part of the post if necessary, depending on how many new objectives appear, or how many old ones have been shelved.

• "Influencing the Galaxy" is the daily objective that is always available; and it requires you to get 25k conquest points - and it's also the main reason why you want that 150% stronghold bonus. Because with that bonus, all you need is "Influencer" (just level a random companion with cheap level 1 gifts; buy a bunch of those in advance at the fleet), "Crew skill up" (just send a companion to do a yellow quest) and "Decorator" (just move one piece of furniture around 5 times); if you have less than 150%, you may want to do a few more objectives ("Benefactor", 5 crew skill missions and using a taxi are the best suited). But if you have a character of level 50 or higher, you can do the daily simply by raising your reputation with any faction. This quest yields around 18k-19k conquest points even without a stronghold, over 25k once you have around 45% stronghold bonus, and almost 44k if you have the 150%.
• "March across the Galaxy" only requires you to regularly do "Influencing the Galaxy" (which yields at least 175k per week) and get a few extra conquest points on top of that. Time invested: practically 0.
• the collecting 40 notes-objective can be achieved as a side effect of just doing your thing. Time invested: practically 0.
• the 1000 reputation with Amity-objective can be achieved by just trading in enough notes with her. Time invested: practically 0.
• "Ace of the Armada" just needs you to do the very first escort mission four times, and since that only takes 3.5 minutes, you can do that quest in around 15 minutes. More importantly, as long as your starship doesn't get shot down (and with some cheap ship armor and shields this is basically impossible), you can AFK this mission because all you need is survive - you don't even have to protect the ship you're supposed to escort. Read something or watch youtube or whatever and only get back to the game every 4 minutes until you're done with that objective. Downside: only available for characters with a starship (i.e. those that have finished the capital world class story).
• doing 15 quests as a specific class is fairly simple: just create a new toon and do every quest you find with them. Takes around 30 minutes. (Unless of course it's a class you already have.)
• simple tasks like "kill 25 mobs without a companion", "affect 15 mobs with usables" etc. are super easy, barely an inconvenience. Do them. (Bonus tipp: "This will do nicely" can be done in 1 minute by doing the Coruscant H2 "The Republic's Most Wanted": just enter the phase, get to the room on the left, trigger the usable, get out and reset the phase. After the third explosion, you have done it.)

And then there are those objectives that are judgment calls or may be out of reach for your characters:

• those grindy regional objectives (doing 8 quests/100 enemies on a planet) are fairly straightforward; especially with stealthers. Shouldn't take much longer than half an hour, possibly even less. Downside: You need a sufficiently leveled character for this - but since you get a selection of planets, this shouldn't be that much of a problem.
• world bosses are generally easily done for the points they give (the exceptions are Ossus and Voss), but finding a group might be a bit tedious. The bigger problem however is that you may not have a character that is high enough, which means that you either have to skip that objective or level your respective toon.
• "Legacies of..."-objectives require you to run instances - either once with bonus bosses, or twice without (since unlocking the bonus boss - if available - can be extremely tedious, I personally stick to doing them twice). By the way, if an FP has a storymode available, it counts as well; and these can be super quick if done with a stealther - "Boarding Party" or "Assault on Korriban" for example take around 10-15 minutes. Ultimatelly, I actually ended up doing all FP objectives since those were pretty convenient and easily done - there's always at least one FP that doesn't take too long or can even be solo'd.
• Daily Sweep quests depend on which area you're sweeping. Doing 2/2 CZ-198 dailies was pretty chill (even though I had to do it on two separate days, which I usually am not too fond of), but I skipped everything else.
• 6/6 starfighter matches may take around 1 hour - assuming you win as much as you lose, it takes 4 games to meet the goal; and if each game takes a bit longer than 10 minutes on average, that's where you end up. Even though I like GSF, after my experiences during GS 2 I ultimately came to the conclusion that the juice isn't really worth the squeeze here - 20 GSF matches on five servers (assuming that you win as much as you lose) in a week are simply too exhausting if you ask me. However, if you still want to do it - don't forget to do "Introduction to Starfighter" and then regularly the daily/weekly for upgrading your starfighters! (Also for Fleet Commendations.)
• something similar can be said for the 8/8 PvP matches.
• medal collecting-objectives (both for PvP and for GSF) aren't something I would recommend unless you are really good at it.

My personal experiences:

• Season 2: It took quite some time in the beginning, because a lot of objectives were effectively behind level restrictions (which means that I had to level my characters every once in a while), and I had to get enough money to get the 150% conquest bonus - but once I had gotten there, it was pretty easy and most obejctivess little more than a formality; and it became a breeze once I had one character over level 50 (i.e. was able to do the "Influence the Galaxy" with a single click as long as I had rep tokens).
• Season 3/4: This one was a bit easier since I already had at least on level 50 character on every legacy, but the objectives were harsher: While GS 2 had a pretty forgiving start with plenty of low level objectives, GS 3 required you to have characters in their 30s or 40s pretty on. Same goes for the beginning of GS 4: My legacies are pretty solid by now, but the first week already starting with objectives that include killing the Voss WB is pretty harsh.

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“The lover carves into his soul the model of the beloved. In that way, the soul of the lover becomes the mirror in which the image of the loved one is reflected.” - Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium
Nietzsche’s criticisms of Hegel are often conflated with Schopenhauer’s. Often by people who type things like, “I’m in the Schopenhauer camp when it comes to Hegel and his ilk.” In a series of Beeps-and-Boops they copy-and-paste Schopenhauer’s loathing without any of Schopenhauer’s substance (which would require actually engaging with Schopenhauer and Hegel) instead these Thinkers exists as little framed photos on a candle covered shrine in Geocities. Even if they’re correct they’re still wrong and worthy of immediate scorn and derision. We must express the most profound sense of Christian Pity and Charity at the sight of their nakedness.
It’s easy to spiral on this particular subject but unbecoming, revealing, even damning. What they don’t seem to process, is that the seethe and the scolding and the tantrums are in their manner the highest form of compliment either philosopher could muster. That the younger Schopenhauer’s response to Hegel’s semantic blunder should be a kind of ecstatic fury that propelled his career as a philosopher. That Schopenhauer is endearing when he puts pen to paper and writes:
“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”
Tempestuous little man. Without Hegel’s error what would’ve become of Schopenhauer? Would he have attempted to actively compete against Hegel? Hegel as the Phantom of Eric Roberts in the Killers Miss Atomic Bomb music video? The Other-Ghost, Hegel’s Smirking Geist cucking Schopenhauer, Sophia in his arms, Schopenhauer casts the wedding ring to the ground and runs away. As was the case in respect to Kierkegaard. Cucked out of marriage by the Ghost & Machine. “And it’s all in my head, but she’s touching his chest now, he takes off her dress now, LET ME GO. And I just can’t look it’s killing me. And taking control.”
An error is a wound is a mercy.
Nietzsche is different. Unlike Schopenhauer he doesn’t pretend to create a superior metaphysical system (the Platonic Carnivalesque) to rival Hegel’s.
I think the spirit of a Nietzschean critique of Hegel is best exemplified by aphorism 317 in Daybreak,
“The judgment of the evening. - He who reflects on the work he has done during the day and during his life, but does so when he has finished it and is tired, usually arrives at a melancholy conclusion: this however is not the fault of his day or his life, but of his tiredness. - In the midst of our work we usually have no leisure to pass judgment on life and existence, nor in the midst of our pleasures: but if we should happen to do so, we should no longer agree with him who waited for the seventh day and its repose before he decided that everything was very beautiful - he had let the better moment go by.”
Hegel as a Christian Nihilist and the Dialectic as Slave Morality. All finite forms of life attain their truth in the process of self-overcoming. Hegel uses Negativity to pacify an excess of Negativity. Hegel’s System annuls the Abyss. The Truth of any given determination is realized in its exhaustion. This Truth is what Remains. As part of a Whole. Eternal. Defeat for Hegel is what brings us to our Truth. That the subject’s defeat should purify it of its particularities and its impositions. My thoughts are already part of reality. This Knowledge leads to renunciation. I’m no longer attempting to impose or enforce myself on reality, to shape it in the heat of my perverse gaze. I look up at the stars and recognize a series of sores oozing out a brilliant light. In the Beggar’s Eye I see Christ. Saint Lazarus draped in indigo rags surrounded by dogs. In the Eyes of the King of the World, Christ. In the Illness the Cure. In the Poison the Medicine.
Hegel stands next to his student, the student looks up at the starry sky in awe. “They are the abode of the blessed.” Hegel grumbles, “The stars, hum! Hum! The stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.’” Like Lorde, he never watches the stars because there’s so much down here. As he puts it in one lecture,
“The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity - a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night; the interior of [human] nature, existing here - pure Self - [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns, terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out towards us.”
Let us then briefly think with Hegel whose underling problem is, from the very beginning of his thought, that of love.
What is Blue?
According to Goethe in his Theory of Colors,
“As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it.
This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.
But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its affinity with black.
Rooms which are hung with pure blue, appear in some degree larger, but at the same time empty and cold.
The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.”
Goethe and a defense of Goethe’s critique of Newton’s Opticks unites Hegel and Schopenhauer. That color is produced by light and by what stands against it. Goethe who said that were the eye not of the sun how could we behold the light. Brilliant in the poetic continuity this expresses. A golden chain from Empedocles to Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics and so on. Summarized here elegantly by the physicist Arthur Zajonc, “the interior light coalesces with daylight, like to like, forming thereby a single homogenous body of light. That body, a marriage of inner light and outer, forges a link between the objects of the world and the soul. It becomes the bridge along which the subtle motions of an exterior object may pass, causing the sensation of sight.” Aristotle proposed the existence of a Proton Organon or Primary Instrument, an organ of congealed pneuma, located in the heart, that reconciles the division between the sensible and the intelligible. The Stoics would go on the rename this Mercurial (both volatile-subtle and fixed) Instrument, the Hegemonikon, the synthesizer or icon-maker. Whose function is to produce phantasms. The instrument through which the soul transmits all vital activities to the body and also the body’s way of capturing the sensations from the five senses and translating them into phantasms or images that could be understood by the soul.
The Lover longing loving unrequited. Smiling like she means it. Being-thrown into this World. Never fully at home, refracted, out of joint. That this affliction is our common inheritance. I think this is our patrimony. We are the heirs of this Abyss. It is to some degree I think fundamentally "Western" fundamentally "Romantic". Regardless of political opinion or alignment. It speaks to us. Through us. Perhaps it's because the Republic of Letters is largely comprised of Melancholic Perverts. Nostalgia or homesickness, as a longing for a reality which can only be possessed through the imagination and through the dream, the genuine site of anamnesis or recollection in the unreal. Evoking for us the movement of the soul described by the Venetian Magician-Philosopher Guilio Camillo; descending through the Lunar Gate of Cancer (of man), drinking from the cup of Bacchus and, depending on how much one imbibes, forgetting about all the things ‘up there’ before making our way back through the Saturnine Gate of Capricorn (of the gods). Tightrope walking to Luna. I see her so very clearly. My Corporeal Dasha, Giordano Bruno would rebuke me harshly, that I should Simp as I do for "these eyes, these ears, this blush, this tongue, this tooth, this hair, this dress, this coat, this little shoe .. . , this sun in eclipse, this crazy person, this slut, this stench, this deathbed, this privy, this mensturation, this corpse... which, by means of a superficial appearance, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, a Circe-like charm in the service of procreation, deceives us by taking the form of beauty." Fuck it. Yet there is an Image behind the Image, a Woman behind my woman. The Platonic Dasha. Daria the Luminous Homunculi. Madonna Intelligenza who has served as a guide throughout this journey. “Keep your eyes on me.” I wobble on the tightrope, your eyes are what kept me, you and your rose-wreathed heart lit. A Unity-of-Opposites. Georges Bataille writes in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, “The image through which, in an instant, destiny has become alive thus finds itself projected into a world foreign to everyday agitation. The woman toward whom a man is draw, as to his human destiny, no longer belongs to the space that money controls. Her sweetness escapes the real world, through which she moves without allowing herself to be any more imprisoned than a dream. Misfortune would ravage the spirit anyone who lets himself be possessed by the need to reduce her.”
On Love Hegel writes, “Since love is a sensing of something living, lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there were really a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence. In the lovers there is no matter; they are a living whole.” That the Unity of Love is informed precisely by the division or difference between the Lover and the Beloved. The Union of Love, “…can remain so only as long as the separate lovers are opposed solely in the sense that the one loves and the other is loved, i.e., that each separate lover is one organ in a living whole.”
Here we might ponder Hegel’s Philosophy as a Philosophy of Death. The vespers-born melancholy conclusion is perhaps being that all Love is Unrequited. As Marsilio Ficino notes in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, “Insofar as it is death, it is bitter, and insofar it is voluntary, it is sweet. He who loves dies; for his consciousness, oblivious of himself, is devoted exclusively to the loved one, and a man who is not conscious of himself is certainly not conscious in himself. Therefore, a soul that is so affected, does not function in itself, because the primary function of the soul is consciousness…. Therefore, the unrequited lover lives nowhere; he is completely dead.”
Blue the color of Sulfur ignited. Blue the color of the Ocean of the Dead, of Dasein. The blue knees of a prayerful lover and the blue lips of the lovelorn fool, “Here’s to my love - O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. - Thus with a kiss I die.” That the smell of bitter almonds should remind the good doctor of unrequited love.
Such a melancholy conclusion can only be produced by a proper melancholic. Melancholy was regarded by Ficino as one of seven exemptions in which the bond between body and soul was weakened, allowing the soul to take flight and acquire the gifts of premonition and clairvoyance. Saint Albertus Magnus writes of the two kinds of melancholy. Hot melancholy and its two primary effects on the subject’s phantasmic activity he describes thusly,
“The first consists in the mobility of the phantasms within the subtle organism: the second, in the great capacity of phantasms to stay impressed upon the pneuma. This brings with it, besides a prodigious memory, an extraordinary capacity for analysis. This is why, Ficino tells us, 'all the great man who have ever excelled in an art have been melancholic. Either because they were born so or become so through assiduous meditation.”
Philosophy begins with this Unhappy Consciousness. The Alienated Soul lithe and loveless, which is the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being. Dissatisfied with its Self and the World it retreats inward, like a Nymph fleeing Pan, fleeing into Reflection, which might likewise take the form of a fleeing into Nature (think Thoreau’s Walden). Herein is the mirk. This Narcissistic dialectic between Subject and Phantasmata. The Ouroboric Narcissism of the Beautiful Soul.
Another affliction associated with Melancholy is Hysteria. The Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to Hegel as the most Sublime Hysteric. The Hysteric asks questions because they experience their own desire as if it were the desire of the Other.
The Spirit retreats into a pre-rational state of life, a Life of Feeling, that this feeling expresses a movement in which the soul is no longer simply natural, but able to realize a mastery over itself.
“Finally, in the “feeling of self,” the individual becomes “a sensitive totality.” But the gradual formation of the ‘I’ is paradoxically accompanied by a loss of fluidity, leading to “ruin and disaster within the conscious spirit.” This crisis results from the fact that the subject, being constituted in a free relation to the self, feels at the same time like ‘another’, and this tension pushes it into a state of ‘trembling’ (durchzittern).” The Future of Hegel, Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectics, Catherine Malabou.
How does Hegel escape? Or perhaps more accurately how can we escape this trap? This Pneumatic Mirror-World. Of Subject-Mirror-Phantasmata. The Romantic Prison? Of one who learns of Love in order to be Loveless? Hold that thought.
Returning to the color blue, the psychologist James Hillman writes in Alchemical Psychology,
“This is the realm of the alchemical (kyanos, blue; kynos, dog); blue takes on a dog-like quality: hangdog and dirty dog, both. Why does depression seek porn? For arousal? For Eros and Priapos and Venus to come to life? Rather, I think, to maintain the depression, to re-direct the verticality of desire downward and backward (doggy fashion), clipping the wings of eros. Pornography - an opus contra naturam, a counter-instinct of the psyche, perverting the conventionally natural, enslaving, torturing; an erotics of despair.
To translate these esoteric references into the blue dog’s perverse obsessions we discover this: Invisible Hades appears in the world as Dionysus. There is a divine (i.e., invisible, unfathomable) impulse that seeks to enter ordinary life. It wants to know the soul in the Biblical sense. Carnal knowledge, intimate knowledge, knowledge of intimates. (Hence the innumerable images of copulation throughout alchemy.) The soul longs for this copulation, and sings its longing in the blues, blueing its own flesh, drawing the divine down into the ordinary body. (Hence the blues’ libidinous mood.)”
My Cup Overfloweth.
Pure thinking-subjectivity is phantasmological or hauntological. The role of the Phantasmata in the context of medieval philosophy, is described exquisitely by Mauricio Loza in The Hounds of Actaeon. The Phantasm or Phantom is understood “as a mental image with effects reaching not only the level of perception but that of social construction, the phantasm exists in the twilight between the objective and the subjectivity, the material and the immaterial, a zone of indistinction between reality and unreality. This is why the phantasm pulls us towards the twilight from whence it comes: Its central action is to drag us into the shadow of the world.”
Minerva’s Owls unfurls its wings only with the falling of dusk.
For the great Persian scholar Avicenna, sensory phantasms were processed through five virtues or powers corresponding to five cavities in the cranium; phantasy or common sense, imagination, cogitative virtue, the estimative virtue, and finally the reminiscent virtue. According to Georgio Agamben in his work Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Avicenna conceives of this gradation through the inner senses as a "progressive 'disrobing' (denudatio) of the phantasm from its material accidents."
Material accidents in this instance, evoking the etymological origins and proliferation into common speech of the word "accident" itself.
Ad - 'towards to' and cadere - 'to fall'. The Latin Accident - 'happening' used in late Middle English to refer to 'an Event'. Used to refer to the parts of the sacred bread and wine that remained after the transubstantiation through the sacrament of The Holy Eucharist,
“Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church, in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and the ‘Monstrous Crow’ of nursery legend. But it is no disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word accident is an excellent example. We use it every day without realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The accidents, when they first came into the English language, meant that part of the sacred bread and wine which remained after the substance had been transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.” History in English Words, Owen Barfield
Here we see a process of Pneuma returning to Pneuma through this process of Rising and Falling. That the Absolute Idea is a Radiant Star. That the Phantasm undergoes a kind of purification process, from the sensible to the spiritual to the mnemonic. That this purification entails a kind of excremental remainder. A material accident. An excess which goes?
This brings to mind the question that the Sophist Parmenides (in Plato's Parmenides) raises to Socrates, which forces Socrates to admit to his own limitations. It utterly stumps the Apostate Tragedian. That being whether or not there is an eidos or Pure Idea of the lowest material things. Things like excrement and dust and I might add these eyes, these ears, this blush, this tongue, this tooth, this hair, this dress, this coat, this little shoe .. . , this sun in eclipse, this crazy person, this slut, this stench, this deathbed, this privy, this mensturation, this corpse...
The Ghost and The Star
Recall the episode with Hegel comparing stars to leprosy sores. This got out around town and Hegel found himself having to address this controversy,
"It has been rumoured round the town that I have compared the stars to a rash on an organism where the skin erupts in an countless mass of red spots: or to an ant-heap in which too, there is Understanding and necessity. In fact, I do rate what is concrete higher than what is abstract, and an animality that develops into no more than a slime, higher than the starry host."
The rock is a rock.
Hegel defines the Domain of Art as the “sensible appearing of the idea”… or the Idea given expression in Sensuous Form. This is to be understood as The Star shining through The Ghost. This opposition between Form and Content. This Contradiction is what animates the Motion of Spirit. From Art towards Philosophy.
She is and is not. Ah wait. I'm not her. But in this regard I am the same and suddenly the Ghost is Concretized.
Alexandre Kojève in his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit writes,
"It is known that Hegel asserted that his knowledge is circular, and that circularity is the necessary and sufficient condition of absolute truth - that is, of complete, universal, and definitive (or "eternal") truth."
The Hysterics quandary finds some resolution. The question of the Other is reflexively transformed into the answer to the question.
"In the Wise Man's absolute Knowledge, each question is its own answer, but is so only because he goes through the totality of questions-answers that forms the entirety of the System. Likewise, in his existence, the Wise Man remains in identity with himself, he is closed up in himself; but he remains in identity with himself because he passes through the totality of others, and is closed up in himself. Which (according to the Phenomenology) means, quite simply, that the only man who can be Wise is a Citizen of the universal and homogeneous State - that is to say, the State of the Tun Aller und Jeder, in which each man exists only through and for the whole, and the whole exists through and for each man."
We return to Self-Consciousness. We're not the same. We're different. Tonight.
Eros pins Pan. Chronos clips Eros’ wings. Compulsion is overcome by Love. Love is overcome by Time. Love can only be actualized and concretized through Time. When it must Dwell in a given Space. This is the Poetic-Plasticity. This is the Commitment.
“Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby unalloyed feeling of self. This satisfaction, however, just for that reason is itself only a state of evanescence, for it lacks objectivity or subsistence. Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing.” (Phenomenology of Spirit)
We begin with the Problem of Love and in the Problem find the Solution. Love is the Answer to the Question of Love. Loving is to give what one does not have.
Our Unrequited Love is Mutual,
“In fact, there is only one death in mutual love, but there are two resurrections, for a lover dies within himself the moment he forgets about himself, but he returns to life immediately in his loved one as soon as the loved ones embraces him in loving contemplation. He is resurrected once more when he finally recognizes himself in his beloved and no longer doubts that he is loved. O, happy death, which is followed by two loves. O, wondrous exchange in which each gives himself up for the other, and has the other, yet does not cease to have himself.” Commentary on Plato's Symposium, Marsilio Ficino.
To be Overcome is to Animate. This is the Labor of Love. Productive Labor as Art.
You understand why Hegel is so very frustrating? In his System. In the Movement from East to West back East. We find the Heiros Gamos, the Sacred Matrimony of Eros and Sophia, and in this Unity of Opposites the philosopher becomes the Sage. In the production of this Heiros Gamos, Hegel's System becomes the Perfect Pneumatic Circle.
​
I make of Nietzsche a traveling companion through Hegel’s Aesthetics. Why? Because The Birth of Tragedy is crudely Hegelian. Here we find ourselves encountering what is so very frustrating about Hegel and his Pneumatic Circle, his method and his system. From the occultists perspective this is because Hegel’s System is an Artifice of Sacral or Mythic Time, of Cyclical Time. The genuinely infuriating thing is realizing that the Artifice, the “Copy” is in fact the original. This is why some speak of the feminizing effect of Hegel. Feminizing in the way Achilles’ is feminized by Scamander. That not only do we never step in the same river twice and that the river is the site of the Doom-driven Hero’s self-fulfilling prophesy.
As Nietzsche himself puts it, “one cannot refute an eye disease.” I thought it would be stimulating to read The Birth of Tragedy through the lens of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Framing Nietzsche and his insights within a Hegelian Tableaux. Nietzsche who denounces Metaphysical Systematization. Demurely objecting he says, “unhand me woman,” with a little blush. Does he mean it? I don’t think it was Hegel’s Dialectical Method or Logic that Nietzsche objected too. Denouncing instead the refraction between the Philosopher and the Logic (an ironic detachment)… that the Philosopher and his Logic are not two separate beings. That for him the Philosopher is Alkahest or Universal Solvent. Body and Soul collapse into a singularity, Art and Artists. No, in a sense Nietzsche celebrates the animating antagonism at the Heart of Hegel’s work. That this refraction is what results in the System which Nietzsche saw as modeling contemporary German Bourgeois fearfulness and timidity simply solidifies into Consensus. “I’m old and I don’t want to be alone.” That the System should be a kind of Metaphysical Prison concretized around the Fiery Pneuma, the brilliance of Hegel’s Esprit.
The application of the Dialectical Method is evidenced throughout The Birth of Tragedy; The Apollonian thesis, the Dionysian antithesis, the Tragic synthesis. Or perhaps in a manner more accurate to Hegel; The Dionysian Abstract, the Apollonian Negation, the Tragic Negation-of-Negation, and the Socratic Concretization.
The section dedicated to a retrospective appraisal of The Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche concludes that all the good things he had ever written about Richard Wagner were actually about him. He was talking about himself the whole time without even realizing it, “"Even psychologically all decisive traits of my own nature are projected into Wagner’s - the close proximity of the brightest and the most calamitous forces, the will to power as no man ever possessed it, the ruthless courage in matters of the spirit, the unlimited power to learn without damage to the will to act.” Poor Nietzsche he who was too high-strung for his own good. Comes to a conclusion paralleling Hegel as it concerns Art, specifically Music. Perhaps one day, there will be Dionysian future for music. But for now, the Pneuma roils through space-and-time, and it culminates in Nietzsche or Zarathustra, as the Last Philosopher or the first Tragic Philosopher. Who despite all the aristocratic pretensions cannot help but write in a popular and accessible manner. Writing into motion the conditions for the Dionysian resurgence he had once thought was being spearheaded by the compositions of Richard Wagner.
He goes so far as to be both Beethoven and Goethe’s response to Beethoven in the anticipation of his works and in the need for them to remain ‘exclusive’ despite their undeniably popular character. Goethe in his old age weeping softly to Beethoven’s sonatas, proclaims “If such music were performed by a large orchestra, it would destroy everything around it.”
The stylish and inspirited Vitalism of Nietzsche’s ruminations is Pneumatic. A red dot in the center of a dark blue sphere.
Dialectics reveals an Infinite Spiral. The Circle divided by a straight-line. Containing the spiral. The straight-line breaks through the circle. Above and Below. Revealing three other spheres. Above the configuration one spiral. Beneath it two spirals; one winding up and the other winding down. On a Hegelian theological note. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit proceed from God the Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1.
Here we might locate the Traumatic Temporality of Christianity. The introduction of History. Time as Chronos. With God the Son. Without the historical personage of Jesus Christ, there wouldn’t be a Trinitarian Unity and Division. From God the Son proceeds God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. In this wound we are brought to an awareness of another Time. A Timeless-Time or a Time sans History. “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” a time in which God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit had always been. The Triune God. Whether or not, in this Aionic Time, God the Holy Spirit proceeds from God the Father or from God the Father and God the Son, is the division between East and West.
This Times overlap and nowhere is this more evident than in the anachronisms or perhaps more accurately, the Archeo-modernity, of the romantic painting. Or perhaps further still, in the Ethiopian depiction of Christ, in the Korean depiction of Christ, and in the Italian depiction of Christ. Black Jesus, Asian Jesus, and European Jesus.
As that obscure note by Nietzsche produced by Gilles Deleuze in his work Nietzsche and Philosophy goes, “Universal chaos which excluded all purposeful activity does not contradict the idea of the cycle; for this idea is only an irrational necessity.” Here we see Nietzsche approaching something akin to the Infinite Dialectic realized and developed in Mao Zedong’s contributions to Dialectical and Historical Materialism. As Mao writes in On Contradiction, “The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end.”
The stylish and inspirited Vitalism of Nietzsche’s ruminations is Pneumatic. Being Pneumatic it is Phantasmic. Here we locate the Girardian critique of Nietzsche. As Nietzsche proclaims in Ecce Homo that everything his was praising Wagner for is in fact praise he was unconsciously directing at himself, at his values or innate dignities, the obverse is true. For Nietzsche every great philosophical work is a confessional, an involuntary and unconscious autobiography. He invents the Overman and by extension the Last Man. Will to Power and Ressentiment. One cannot exist without the other and in Nietzsche they collapse into a singularity (a point worth keeping in mind when we eventually venture into Deleuze and his Anti-Hegelianism). The Last Philosopher. In sum Girard’s contention is that in the production of these Phantasmata, Nietzsche ends up offering to his audience another Scapegoat. The Man of Ressentiment and the Slave Morality. Obviously within Nietzsche the potential for this is treated triumphantly. Nietzsche refuses to have his Poetic Revelry stifled by timorous considerations. That stupid people might read his works and take it as an excuse to persecute Christians or to locate the Man of Ressentiment in their political adversaries. That they might completely forget the contradictions inherent to the very office of “Tragic Philosopher” and how the Vagabond and the Prophet are a singular figure, hybrid and lovelorn and glorious. “If I had power I’d know how to immediately and brutally exercise it.” None of this concerns Nietzsche. People will misinterpret you regardless. Still the points are well worth reflecting on and prove stimulating as we move from the Symbolic-Classical to the Classical-Romantic.

"About time!" Lu t'Cca thundered at her. "Split find hiding spot!
Najia backpedaled, giving the irate Split prisoner plenty of room to get past without coming into arms' length of her. At least he seemed to get that this was a prison break, and he made no move for her or her firearm, darting well clear of her, and out from the cell block.
Axiom's voice cut the sudden quiet that was otherwise punctuated only by her racing heart. "While you two were chatting, I've found a way to temporarily disable security in the hangar. That's where we'll hitch our ride. Head for the second level; the Ministry seems to have installed more switches. They'll require some adjustment, but I know you love a good puzzle." Najia snorted. She did, in fact, love a good puzzle, but breaking out of a prison was not the time to indulge in that. Usually. Unless one looked at the prison as the puzzle. She shook her head, huffing, and drew her pistol again. There was no marked pathway this time, but she made better time; it was reckless, but she jogged, since the place was seemingly totally unguarded. And, if it wasn't, chances were that Lucca would run into the guards first, and she'd hear the struggle ahead. She passed the lift, glancing towards it, and hurrying past in the other direction she hadn't been yet, coming to a door. Slowing, she closed enough with it that it opened automatically.
Najia let out a huff; Lu t'Cca was on the other side, but so was Axiom. She stepped forward, and looked from Axiom, who nodded to her, to Lucca, who snarled. "Creature reveal Split hiding spot! Creature nothing better to do?" This is a hiding spot? Najia shook her head; the two of them were literally standing in the middle of an intersection, in front of an airlock with two branches off on either side. She huffed, looking at Lu t'Cca. "Hey, Mellerd said -"
"Split not talk about friend-foes!" Lucca ranted. "Kriss went against family! Betrayal followed petty betrayal! Way of Windfall, yes. Way of some Split, maybe, but not how real warriors do revenge!" He made a guttural sound of anguish, shaking his head vehemently. Kris? He was on a first-name basis with her? The fact that Ace had spoken so frankly of xenosexual encounters popped into her head, the constant talk of betrayal, pettiness, personal matters, and suddenly it was obvious; somehow, this was personal. Personal; and none of her damn business. She held her hand up placatingly, holstering her other pistol, trusting to Axiom's physical presence to keep peace between her and Lucca. "Fine. I'll leave you to it," she said. "Split thought so," Lu t'Cca spat, looking back to Axiom. She looked to Axiom as well. "Switches, Wildcard. Get to it."
Najia nodded, and darted down the left-hand branch of the intersection, fuming all the while. It ran into a dead-end, and she uttered "ah fuck," turning and sprinting in the other direction, slaloming between Maestro and Lucca. At the end, she dead-ended there, and exasperated raised her voice, "the hell?!" Back in the middle, she examined the airlock carefully; she could see that it connected to nothing, which is why she discounted it previously. Carefully she moved into the airlock, her hand on her pistol just in case Lucca tried to kill her by cycling it, but he and Axiom seemed to be in the process of discussing old times.
Exasperated, Najia stepped back out of the airlock. "Axiom, where are these buttons you're talking about? How are we supposed to get out of here?" "Er..." Axiom blinked, tri-ocularly, at her, and looked around. He looked at his datapad. "They should be... Through..." He let out a discontent rumble. "Oh my. That is not obvious on a computer systems diagram schematic." "They're on the other side of the frigging airlock," Najia said. "You're probably already aware that humans can't survive in vacuum, let alone maneuver in it, right?" She snorted, her sarcasm at least getting a sheepish shuffle on his long legs out of Axiom. "Can we get out the way we came back in? Even if it means abandoning the Raven?"
"No," Axiom said gravely. "The tampering I did to activate the cell block doors will be caught by someone sooner or later - probably later than sooner, but sooner if we try to leave the cell block." "Split has been implanted with a tracking device," Lucca growled. "It will raise quite the ruckus when Split leave the cell block!" "If we're leaving by... Unconventional mechanisms, that will be no trouble," Axiom noted. "But if we enter the lift, it will lock down and security will be summoned immediately."
"Outstanding," Najia huffed. "Let me double-check something, see if I can think of something." She turned and left the way she had come from. She bypassed the lift; she had no intention of simply bailing on them. But now, she had two options. Neither was good, but one was significantly less good, so she hoped the other option worked. She opened a channel to Boso Ta. "Boso Ta, I hope to hell you've been listening in." "I have, Assistant!" Boso Ta's voice came through loud and clear. "You are in quite the conundrum. I hope you see a manner in which I may be able to extricate you, for I do not." "You and the Professor have been upgrading teleporters with the ability to upgrade themselves. To do so, you've been transporting equipment, right?" "Hai!" Professor Nakagawa's voice cut in. Clearly he was on the line. "This capability is within our grasp. What is your proposal, Takio-San?" "Can you teleport my EV suit to me?"
There was silence for a long few moments which felt like an eternity. "Potentially," Boso Ta broke the silence. "Have it placed in one of our lifts." "I'll get right on that," Marta cut in on the line. Najia smiled to hear her voice. "Any other requirements?" "If this will work, we will need very precise measurements," Professor Nakagawa said. "The teleporter is more your project than mine, Boso Ta. My thought is that it will require at least three triangulating vessels, and a beacon, and a substantial amount of open space." "Will an empty cell block do for that," Najia asked, hustling down the corridor. "It should yes... Yes! That will work." Rei Stringer cut in on the call, and Najia blinked as she saw Rei's comm-code. "I can arrange the fly-by," she said. It had been awhile since Najia had heard from the friend she had left in charge of the Eighteen Billion Terran-tech construction supplies factory, and generally, in charge of Eighteen Billion affairs. "There's a patrol of Katana in the area already, it won't look suspicious if they do a swing-by of Wormwood Scrubs."
Najia set her datapad down on the floor in the middle of the cell block. "I put my datapad down on the floor. Is that beacon enough," she asked. "Hai, Takio-San," the aged professor's voice informed her. "But I would endeavor to be in another room when the teleport takes place. This is... Highly experimental." "Vacating the room," Najia said, sprinting out into the hallway and down it. "Tell me when it's gonna happen."
"In... About twenty seconds," Boso Ta informed her. "You might want to cover your ears, assistant." Najia didn't even bother to complain about being called 'Assistant' again, she simply crouched and closed her eyes, covering her ears and tried to become one with the railing. She counted to thirty, then opened her eyes. "Did anything happen?" "Your EV suit and EMU aren't in the lift anymore," Marta said to her. "Better go check."
Najia did, and she laughed heartily. Her hardshell carapace EV suit and EMU were sitting on the floor of the cell block. "A perfect teleport! I didn't even hear anything." "Fantastic," Boso Ta said. "You had best hurry, Assistant."
One fast donning later, Najia opened the door to where Axiom and Lucca were still standing around, chatting like old gossips. They both started when they saw her, and she held her hand up. "Easy, guys, it's me." She was hauling her EMU with her. "Split wonders where creature was hiding that," Lu t'Cca said, pointing at her. "Ancient secrets," Najia flippantly answered, as she hefted her EMU into the airlock, and sat in it, strapping in. "Right, let's do this." Reaching up, Najia slapped the airlock cycle button. The door behind her hissed shut; air was evacuated. Her suit indicated a total drop of external pressure, and the airlock's A-grav let go, letting her float free, and so she pushed off the floor.
"Excellent!" Axiom crowed at her, over the comm. "Level 2 is right through there. That exhaust fan may impede your movements, but it won't make our mission impossible. See those alcoves? There's where I'd hide if I were you, whenever the fan is blowing at full speed."
Exhaust fan? I'm in vacuum! Najia carefully maneuvered out. She was in vacuum and microgravity; but she was also inside a large, cylindrical space. Below her was something like a massive fuse-box with a big holographic turret outline, and she jetted down to examine it, but could see no obvious way to tamper with it without most likely setting off major alarms, so she looked back up - just as a synthesized alert klaxxon sounded.
I hate this place, Naija thought, as she saw a fan at the top of the cylinder spin up. At a guess she thought, perhaps it was something like an exhaust, which struck as horrifically wasteful in space, but she could only grit her teeth, watching it spin. At the bottom of the cylindrical space, she only felt the slightest of buffeting; it might have been substantially stronger closer to the top. I am very confused, very frustrated, and I just want to get the hell out of here, she thought. She was seriously considering revisiting her first plan, which had been to simply teleport herself, Axiom and Lucca to Ace's ship.
But now, though, she was pissed, and she wanted to poke something spiteful in Mellerd's eye herself. So she jetted to the top of the cylinder, looking around. As she did, Axiom popped up in her comms. "These airlocks are shut, so you'll need to find a way to bypass their locks." She responded with only a quick "roger," looking around. One airlock, contrary to Axiom's words, was hanging open, but the lights next to it were red. She tried it anyway; but for once, Axiom was spot-on. The airlock door might have been open, but its functions were locked out, the panel totally nonresponsive. She returned below, and looked around; there was an open airlock opposite Axiom and Lucca, so she tried it, and it worked for her automatically.
"Well, let's see what's down this way," Najia muttered to herself, slipping out of her EMU and leaving it in the lock. She unholstered the pistol that was now clamped to her hardshell-clad thigh, and started to look around again.
To her surprise, she found only another cell block - it was a dead end! She was about to hiss in frustration, when she heard someone call to her. "You there! You! Hey! You are not supposed to be here!" Najia turned to face the Teladi voice, her pistol half-raised, when she saw that the figure in question was imprisoned. She lowered her aim to the floor, and appraoched the bars. Standing within was a Teladi, who looked rather forelorn. Najia's shoulders slumped. Well, this is awkward, she thought. When the Teladi seemed to realize she wasn't a guard, she started to ask, "Oh please, please, please! You cannot leave me here! I am friends with Urgu... Ugusa... I can help you make profitsss! I promise."
Najia sighed at the pathetic display, but she understood the Teladi's desire for freedom; though, on the balance, she also had no idea what this Teladi had done to become imprisoned. Knowing Kriss Mellerd, it was a total crap-shoot; she might be a real scum-bag, or she might be being shaken down. Axiom cut in on her. "I sympathize with the little lizard, really I do, but we cannot compromise this mission in the name of charity."
Najia huffed out a sigh, and looked around. Frustratedly, she slapped the door panel on the imprisoned Teladi's cell, and to her surprise - and the prisoner's surprise - it opened. The prisoner looked around, confusedly, and Najia was glad that her mirrored helmet hid her gaze. "That's the best I can do," she said, resignedly. "You'll have to effect your own escape from here, if you can. Good luck." Turning, she huffed back into the airlock, slapping the button to cycle it as the Teladi prisoner looked around in tentative confusion, taking a few steps out of her cell.
Najia pulled her EMU's straps back on. "Well, that was a fucking bust," she snarled. "I'm about to start lasering shit," she muttered, floating back into the massive vacuum cylinder, and back up towards the locked airlocks. She found a third floor of airlocks, but they only offered some shelter from the fans starting up. After waiting that, frustratedly she flew back out again, and started looking around. "Axiom, there aren't any switches here!" "My diagrams say there are switches, Wildcard. Look more carefully - and swiftly."
Najia let out a guttural growl of frustration, and switched to her cutting laser. Giving in to a pique of frustration, she hit her Mk.2 thrusters, blowing past level 1 to the sub-level, coming up level with the big fuse-box. "Right, let's see what this does," she said with a snarl, and targeted her suit's cutting laser on the big set of what looked like fuses.
She blazed a neat line down the middle of them, and, gratifyingly, the 'Turrets' hologram switched to a big red repair icon... She looked around for a moment. Nothing happened. Najia smirked. "On the one hand, this place is frustrating, confusing, and I kind of want to blow it up out of spite by now. But on the other hand, the gross criminal negligence on display is really working in my favor. Fuck it. Lasers for everything," she said, snarling and going back up the shaft. There were a bunch of unmarked panels, and, giving in to the frustration she felt earlier - which she had barely restrained herself from allowing herself to hold Lu t'Cca at gunpoint - she started lasering the panels like a schoolgirl hooligan on a vandalism spree.
"Your new laser is low-powered, but if you keep it aimed at the lock, it will break eventually," Axiom said. Najia blinked. New laser? This is my laser and I've had it for a while, and... Oh, piss on this! She laughed, however, as she saw that one of the panels had indeed fractured.
One deeply-cathatic vandalism spree later, every panel had been opened, and had revealed that inside the two panels nearest the top-level airlocks were two further, smaller panels, with similar mechanisms. With the fan starting up again, Najia took shelter in one of the alcoves at the top, just under an airlock, and, deciding to use her time productively, she lasered the opposite airlock's control panel. After holding her laser on the box for awhile, it was a glowing ruin, and Axiom commed her. "Partial access to level two established," he informed her.
Najia nodded. She didn't even bother to sarcastically snark at him, though the phrase no shit, Sherlock ran through her mind. Rather, she charitably assumed he was reporting to her something he was learning electronically, and turned around. This is gonna be bright, she thought, as she trained her laser at close range on the near access box, and closed her eyes. She held in the firing stud, and held it - counting in her head to seven, when Axiom's comm made her let up off the laser. "And just like that, we have free reign over level two! They can't stop you now!"
Najia grinned, and opened her eyes to behold a molten, glowing hole drilled into the electronics she had blasted. "Right. Let's get this show on the highway."
On the level above her, in the half just above, she slipped in, and found herself facing a door to another cell block, just through the airlock. She went in and looked; no prisoners. Walking out, she huffed, and decided to walk the half-circuit around the big cylinder again. To her surprise, she found a console, just attached haphazardly to a railing. Really? Najia examined it, and snorted; it looked shoddy, ad-hoc. She tapped the console's screen, and it simply changed color. Axiom piped up. "Magnificent! That'll give you access to half of the switches! There must be another console nearby that will let you remove the second cover."
"Got it. Moving on," Najia said. Back to the airlock she went, after checking the other half of the crescent hallway she was in; without any luck, she just floated across to the other airlock on her EMU. Predictably, she found that, on the opposite railing in the other half of the level, was another console haphazardly attached to a railing, and she rapped it quite firmly with her knuckles. It flashed. "How's that, Axiom?" "Both covers confirmed open," Axiom informed her. "Let's flip some switches. Get back into your spacesuit."
"Never got out of it. Who has time to undress four times? Anyway, switches, yaaay switches," she snarked, as she cycled the airlock again, strapping her EMU back on. "Whoever designed this place is both a madman and criminally negligent."
Once the airlock cycled through again, Najia saw that the two panels she had manipulated had caused five boxes that she had previously taken as unimportant junction boxes to slide their panels open. She groaned to herself when she saw that there were five more lock-like switches within. "Great, time for more vandalism, yay." She lasered the first of the boxes' interiors, the one that was lit, and held it for a long few moments.
"Something's not right," Axiom said, comming her. She had a sinking feeling. "The switches are also setting the state of their neighbors," he declared. Sure enough, she had blasted the leftmost switch, and the second had lit up. Worryingly, the leftmost switch did not look damaged in the slightest. "You'll have to find a combination which turns them all off," Axiom said, as Najia groaned. "I don't think a game of whack-a-mole will get you there," Axiom continued. "Though... Actually, it might!"
Najia groaned, and briefly considered calling for a five-hundred-some member boarding party attack from two capital ships instead. "What tail-hole thought this was a good idea," she bitched. "Who dreamed this up? Why install it like this? Don't anybody answer that, those questions were rhetorical," she snarked, as she set about the process of shooting the junction boxes like they were a juvenile 'turn them all off' game.
About eighty seconds and the false start of thinking she could shoot an inactive switch to switch it on and switch its neighbors states (it transpired that she could only make an active switch toggle neighbors' states), all five boxes were dark, and Najia snarled, bristling with outrage that this was evidently considered part of a high security system and not a child's game.
"You got it, Wildcard!" Axiom commed her. "Access to Level 3 established. And it turned off the darned fan! Off to the hangar, then." Up one level, Najia cycled herself into the airlock, and groaned. She was getting mightily tired of this, and she rolled her shoulders. "I am going to need a massage and to soak for an hour in the shower," she griped to no-one in particular. She hefted her EMU half-over her left shoulder, unholstering her pistol, just in case. The EMU was very heavy, but her EV suit had a fairly substantial low-profile power assist mechanism. Not enough to turn her into a super-soldier by any means, but enough to let her heft a 150kg load like a bulky and cumbersome backpack. She was tempted to leave it behind... But it was a good thing she didn't. The corridor she found was only a straight shot to - and she groaned - another airlock. As she approached it, Axiom unhelpfully congratulated her. "Excellent," he said. "Yo're approaching the internal hangar now. Our getaway ship is right over there." Cycling through, she passed into the deep well of an internal ship hangar - and groaned.
Najia was looking at a Magpie. That was the big, innovative, unique ship?
"If we want to make it out of here, you'll have to destroy the clamps on the hangar doors," Axiom informed her. Najia groaned, sighed, and rolled her shoulders. "Right. I can do that. All this for a..." She seethed, and looked back at the ship.
No, it wasn't a Magpie, but it sure as hell looked like one. It was clearly a derivative design, but it had not the Magpie's massive cargo pods; rather, it had smaller pods, and a lot more gubbins - antennae, dishes, and the like. Fan-dabbie-dozie she thought balefully to herself as she set about finding and destroying the lockdown clamps. As she did so, she also saw a couple more panels that had a turret hologram over them, and, thinking, why the hell not, fried them, too. Moments later, the lockdown clamps fell, too, and she saw a red light glare through one of the hangar windows.
Axiom piped up, "Holy triangle, that's the station alarm! Lucca and I are going to make a run for the ship!" She blinked, looking up - two EVA-suited figures, with full EMUs, cycled through the airlock she had come through.
What, she thought. Where... I... What... Where...? In a moment of dumbfounded confusion, she stared openly, unmoving, before both of them dipped between the ship's large thrusters, and headed for its belly, while Axiom said, "approaching the dock. Be with you in a moment!" Fearing being left behind, Najia abandoned the question of where they had gotten EV suits, let alone EMUs, in favor of making haste to join them.
As Najia negotiated into the airlock, Axiom and Lucca reported that they had boarded, and Axiom was working on powering up the ship's systems, and Axiom was transferring the ship's ownership - and hence, control - to her. They were trying to talk over one another, making it confusing, but, as she got into the ship and shed her MMU, running for the seat, Axiom noted, "This prototype ship does not appear to have an emergency eject system. I assume it was supposed to be added later." "Great," she snarled. "This is going tits-up and I'm in a little ship with no ejection system." "Split been moving into position," Maestro informed her, in a bit of good news. "Alarm must have mobilized more Ministry forces than Split anticipated."
"Thrice blasted!" Axiom roared from the back. "Mellerd deployed a capital ship to head off the Arcadian Endeavour!" Najia groaned, checking her map. A Pheonix-class vessel named Rolling Rock was engaging the Arcadian Endeavor.
As Najia got the Raven's struts up and pushed it forward, she got a comm from the Rolling Rock itself. She snarled as she saw Kriss Mellerd in her comm pane. "Thank you for leading the old man, and his crew of clowns, right to my doorstep. Crossing them off the Ministry's list will do wonders for my career advancement."
Najia gawped at her, in shock at the sheer gall on display, as Mellerd laughed. "You just stumbled into this whole affair, so I will offer you a one-time chance to get out of this. All you have to do is dock at my ship and hand over the pirates youy are currently harboring. You won't be able to keep the ship, but -"
Najia cut her off, snarling in anger. "You just love the sound of your own voice, bitch. Even if I was inclined to take an 'out,' though, nobody can trust you. For anything." Najia switched the comms to her ships, as she powered the Raven up to full. It seemed to be armed with two cannons; she test-fired them by holding in the trigger. They didn't fire immediately, but when she let go, they let fly. "Woah. These must be those Teladi charger things," she muttered. "Whatever. Ladies? This bitch cannot be trusted to keep her word. End her rightly!"
The Rolling Rock was already exchanging fire with Arcadian Endeavor, while Ace nipped at her heels, firing off shots from that launcher and the frontal cannon. Shiv and Kunai - the name chosen for the Paramerion - lifted from the Jackdaw and Arcadian Endeavour respectively, while Jackdaw and the Snapping Tortoise broke from formation with it to engage.
"L beam turrets... Problematic," Najia muttered to herself. "Let me see what I can do about that," she added, as she set the Raven prototype in motion. She could only hope, at least, that Kriss was at least rethinking her decision, now that the odds had tilted decidedly against her.
She dove into action against Rolling Rock, testing out the Muon Chargers, as the ships with her split and attacked. The destroyer was big, and problematic, but it seemed rather... Awkward to control, in fact. Ponderous, its turrets, even the lasers, seemed slow to respond. She nipped around it, firing a few times, as her four ships slipped past it. A plasma bolt struck her shields, and she yelped, diving to evade. "That's it," she heard Rei - not over the open comms, but in her earbud. "I am not letting you get your ass killed like this. I'm dispatching help," she said, and Najia winced.
Great. So this is how the war with the Ministry starts? And yet, oddly... There was no sign of Ministry reinforcements. Najia fled from the immediate vicinity to recharge her shields, coming in close to the Arcadian Endeavour, and watched as the Eighteen Billion Katana squads roared in. She winced as she saw that Okayama and her defense fleet had also been dispatched - a Destroyer squadron was going to bear down on Rolling Rock... Eventually. And yet, the Ministry was doing nothing.
It hit her suddenly; Kriss was rogue. Was doing this on her own. She snarled and grinned. The Ministry might be mad, when this shook out, but they'd have a hard time proving her involvement. Especially if she could play it as her ships responding to a distress call because a rogue vessel with an unaffiliated transponder had attacked a ship. It was flimsy... But it was enough. "Bear down on her, ladies. Tear that thing apart." Najia crowed, as she pulled the Raven in to touch down on the Arcadian Endeavour's landing pad. She looked back. "Axiom, they're gonna need you in the engine room. Lucca, you're not gonna wanna be on this ship!" The back ramp was dropping as she settled down; neither waited for her to have landed fully, they dropped from the ship and sprinted past, to the lift.
"So, you've decided to go down with the sinking ship? One less loose end for me to tie up later!" Mellerd crowed at her, and Najia smirked; of course she knew she couldn't trust Mellerd. "You're worse than a pirate, Kriss. Nobody can trust you," Najia said. "Prepare to kiss your ass goodbye."
Maestro was rattling on in her ear, but Najia could barely hear him over the combat calls. She hoped he was smart enough not to fire upon the T.E. vessels responding - it would be awkward later, and they were joining the fight on his side, after all. He was saying something about escape, and turrets. Najia snorted. "Actually, we're just going to blow this thing up," Najia declared. "We can't leave someone like Kriss Mellerd at our backs."
Things seemed to be doing well at first; the Rolling Rock was handling clumsily, awkwardly, as if she was critically undermanned. That gave Najia an odd hope that she might actually succeed at boarding her; the responding vessels were quickly tearing down her turrets and shields.
Then, everything went dramatically pear-shaped. Najia yelped as lasers tickled the the Raven's shields down and she got them back up again; again and again this happened, each time the hull started to fracture more and more. She made attack runs, damaged a surface element, and then things got worse. Where were those lasers coming from?
"Missile. Incoming missile." She slapped the countermeasures button, only to see the screen flash ammo empty. "Fuck!" A missile slammed into her, followed by a fly-by from a starfighter. She didn't catch it, but she took a pot-shot at it as it went past. Things were going from bad, to worse, when she heard someone howl, "Jackdaw's taking heavy fire! Jackdaw's... Oh fuck!"
Najia felt a moment of total disassociation. Numbly, her hand drifted over the stick, trying to maneuver the clunky ship like a starfighter, whilst fighting through mental fog.
Marta.
"We've got them!" Rei stringer called out, over her line. "I've got the crew of Jackdaw at the depot, but now we're under attack by a Ministry warship!" Najia gasped, shoving her stick forward, hard. Her ship was flying apart around her, and she snarled. "Someone get these motherfuckers!" "We're coming in," she heard - both the first, and last, person she wanted to hear. "Fenrir, engaging!" "Okayama, engaging." "Kagawa, engaging!" "Ark Royal, moving to engage!"
Najia laughed, incredulously. That was four fleets. Four fleets that most definitely were not supposed to be engaging to support the Arcadian Endeavour. One of them the Teladi wasn't even supposed to know about - Alarms blared. The Raven had taken a nasty hit, and a Ministry Kea was lining up on her six. She tried to pull away - she wasn't going to be fast enough - the ship jerked - the world went white.
Najia crashed forward to the deck, yelping, arms up to guard her head. She looked up; a Marine was standing next to her, offering her hand to Najia. "Better get to the skipper, ma'am," the Marina said. "We're Koshirae." Najia laughed, taking the proffered hand and climbing to her feet, hustling down to the bridge's main deck. Selaia Kevlin was standing in the middle like the Maestro, calmingly barking out orders with command presence. She looked up at Najia, briefly, smirking at her. "Does the owner have the conn?"
Najia shook her head, laughing. "Fight the ship, captain. I've got to coordinate this clusterfuck." Selaia laughed at her and nodded, barking out, "bring us up ninety, show her our broadside. Turret gunners, you are cleared to engage."
She hustled down to the fleet coordination console; the crewwoman at it hopping away for her. "This is Takio," she said, hopping on the controls. "Ladies, clear my skies of red. I don't know what the hell has gotten into the Ministry, attacking our stations like this, but if it's hostile out there, we kill it."
Rolling Rock was not having a good day, and it was getting exponentially worse. Her engines had been disabled, and Najia heard Maestro call out over the pirate channel, "Her engines are disabled. Now is the time to get away! But, where is Wildcard?" Najia winced. How was she going to explain that? Did she even want to? "This is Snapping Tortoise," Raleen, the captain of her pirate Baku called out. "We are picking up the crew of Jackdaw and Raven. Let these big bruisers fight, we'll get back to you."
"No!" Kriss Mellerd called out, yelping. "I don't wanna die!" Rolling Rock was coming apart under the growing tide of fire it was enduring, and more ships were still arriving. Najia snarled. Part of her wanted to bid Kriss a bon voyage to the afterlife, but she looked up to Selaia. "If anyone gets out of that ship, I want them. And we don't tell the Ministry."
"Roger that," Selaia said, and barked out orders to the helm to move closer to Rolling Rock. Najia looked back - a Ministry Razorbill was thoroughly engaged, and another had just blown up, attacking the construction depot.
She gritted her teeth, snorting hard. There was going to be hell to pay for this later. Righteous indigation - no, fury - was going to be the order of the day. Her ships had responded to a distress call from a Windfall trader, by an unidentified vessel. It was attacking relentlessly, wasn't on-record as being anything official. Then Ministry vessels, apparently heeding the aggressor's pleas, had jumped in, attacking Takio Enterprises assets, and the inevitable happen.
That was the tack she was going to have to take, and she clenched her fist. Outside, Rolling Rock came apart in a dazzling blossom of red that polarized the bridge windows for a long several moments. When they cleared, the ship was a debris field. Part of her hoped that Mellerd was dead; part of her hoped she wasn't. There was going to be a butcher's bill for today, and she tried - probably vainly - to make peace with that.
"Get us close enough to the Ministry Wharf to make contact," Najia said, looking to Selaia. "I've some barking to do." Selaia smirked at her. "After this? They should know damn well your bark isn't nearly as bad as your bite. They should be happy to get barked at. You should put on a respectable jacket at least." Najia let out a huff of exasperation, hurrying to do just that.
Najia needed to work to summon the righteous indignation she required for the bluff, but she reminded herself of the fate of Ace's mother to do so; the Ministry were assholes, even if they were also the lawful authority; and they had attacked her. She had clear and convincing evidence that Mellerd was up to no damn good. Not that she waas going to reveal it to anyone.
Hence, she found herself with eyes coldly blazing over the comms to the Ministry Police Kea craft which had departed from the wharf to intercept Koshirae. "Enough is enough," she snarled over the holo, standing in the conference room. "My ships responded to an attack upon a free trader from a destroyer that was not transmitting appropriate Ministry codes - not that the Ministry should be allowed to attack random traders, either."
"Your ships fired upon Ministry vessels," the captain of the Kea shot back, clearly outraged - but also, like the pilot who had followed her through the rift - terrified at being massively outnumbered and outgunned.
"Let me be clear, on the record, so there is no ambiguity," Najia said, leaning forward, placing her fist on the table. The effect was to lean closer to the hologram - and on the little attack ship's screen, her face would loom larger. "My ships responded to a distress call from a ship being attacked by an unknown vessel not transmitting appropriate ID. The Ministry, for whatever reasons, chose to respond to the event by siding with the aggressor and attacking my ships. Takio Enterprises warships responded by destroying the Ministry vessels." Her heart was thumping in her chest, but she narrowed her eyes. "If this is the gratitude of the Ministry of Finance, for all that Takio Enterprises has done here in Eighteen Billion, in Grand Exchange and at large, for the Ministry and the company, up to and including constructing facilities and securing neutral diplomats to mediate the dispute between the Company and the Ministry... Well, you might want to check with your superiors before you write a check they have to make good on. To be absolutely clear, this is a threat; you are the highest-ranking Ministry combat officer in Eighteen Billion. It is your decision whether this conflict continues or ceases, here and now. Ah - ah! Shut your fucking muzzle and listen to me carefully," she snapped, as the pilot opened her muzzle to retort.
"If you say anything but words to the effect of 'this was a horrible misunderstanding and we should deescalate the situation' - if you, personally, choose to escalate the situation, the first step I will take will be ordering all of my shipyards to stop producing vessels for the Ministry. The second step will be that I shall cripple the Ministry's ability to replace vessels by destroying the Ministry Shipyard and Wharf here in Eighteen Billion. I shall then proceed onward to prosecute this destructive and pointless war - a war chosen by you, pilot, here and now - by destroying each and every Ministry of Trade station I can find, until someone with some competent authority asks me to please stop doing that. You can see the weight of tonnage I have here, you know the Ministry does not have the tonnage to stop me. The choice is in your claws, pilot; war, or peace. War, or peace. Escalate, or deescalate. Your call."
The Kea pilot visibly shrank backwards in her command chair, obviously struggling to attempt to retain composure and command respect in the face of an overt and direct threat to bring fire and flame directly to the Ministry of Finance. Finally she steeled herself, straightening up in her chair. "This has obviously been a dreadful misunderstanding, miss Takio. The Ministry is undoubtedly going to demand reparations for our lost warships, but such matters are the purview of the financiers, not myself. If you will cease giving offense, we too shall cease attacks upon your vessels."
"Thank you," Najia said, leaning back. She fought not to visibly slump and sigh in relief, or to show how badly her heart was racing. "As for the reparations, they can take that up with the diplomat I have on payroll. Out." She cut the channel, and collapsed back into the chair behind her.
A moment later, the comm lit up again, and she flicked it on. It was a huge conference call, with the commanders of her fleets, the captain of Koshirae, Marta on the Snapping Tortoise with a small bandage on her forehead; Rei Stringer on the 18B construction depot, Tsukiko Peterson back at the headquarters, Professors Nakagawa and Okoye - whom Najia realized with a pang of guilt she hadn't yet formally re-introduced herself to -, Boso Ta,, and Ace. Najia let out a heavy sigh of relief. "Please for the love of god tell me we didn't lose anybody," she said, first off.
"Nobody from Jackdaw, Marta confirmed. "I took a headcount. We got lucky. "That seems to be a recurring theme," added Captain - probably should be Commodore - Xiaowen Kapoor - one of Najia's older friends, and currently the commander of T.E.S. Fenrir. "It helps that we responded with overwhelming firepower. My fleet is reporting no fatalties; thirteen casualties, mostly caused by haste in the heat of battle."
That proved to be the recurring theme; all of her responders reported sustaining injuries, mostly 'workplace accidents' incurred whilst in the heat of battle, but though some were serious, none were life-threatening.
"Najia Takio," Professor Yoriko Okoye - an aged-but-not-venerable, steel-haired professor-turned diplomat said, with the same tone of voice that she had used when reproaching Najia in class. "You are now, as ever you were, charmed, lucky, and reckless. You choose to act with passion first and foremost. This is a fine mess that I'm going to have to clean up, you understand. Can I expect this sort of thing to deal with in the future?"
Najia took in a breath, glancing around at her fellows. Barring a few, they were all young - Tsukiko was the third-oldest and Najia knew she was closer to thirty-five than forty - barely. Most of them looked grave, but not mutinious. She sighed, and smiled, wryly. "While I don't plan to go to war with the Ministry, there may be future... Rough spots to smooth over, yes. If you'd like to resign and go home -" "Not yet," the aged professor said, sharply. "But for dealing with this, I am going to require a pay rise!"
A chorus of chuckles surrounded her, and Najia sighed, face-palming and smiling. "That's fair, professor. We're going to have a fine time untangling this. Ace, how are the Curs?"
Ace looked into her eyes, then looked away for a moment, then back to her. "Secure in Windfall, awaiting your hopefully-safe return." She trilled, and Najia nodded. "Next stop, then."

Hello,
I just need to vent so badly because I'm in such a dark hole and I want nothing more than reach out to him and I would do anything to be in his arms right now.
So for context this all started about a year ago. I started a new job and about two months later my manager and I got close he basically came on to me via text and was extremely persistent. He is nearly twice my age btw not sure if this is important but yea I seem to not mind much older men...
Anyways things where ok at first we got along so well. Things took a turn when I wanted to stop being interment and just be more friends because the age gap and power dynamics at work. So we would basically have massive fights almost 1 every week or two about this. He would turn into the most cruel person I have ever met in my life he would basically throw fits and call me names and make sort of "threats" that people would find out about us and he would look like a winner and I'd look so bad. He also went on my computer one time at work and stole my personal photos (nudes) that I had sent to some guy a while before I even started at this new job.
When we would argue he would use it as leverage just sleep with me 5 more times and I will delete them he would say. Or again more "threats" like if my photos got out it wouldn't be on him. He always made me false promises like just get me through this month then I promise we will be friends for life. Or just 5 more times and io be your friend for life ? What's five more times for a life time of friendship? Just get me through the summer, winter sucks let's just get through winter. And that when on for about a year constant highs and lows we would have horrible heated screaming matches and then he would always message me and call me non stop to try to "fix" things. And when we weren't fighting there's almost always non stop communication.
Things got really bad when he started bringing the arguments into work. He would text me all throughout the day if we where arguing trying to convince me of all the reasons I need to be intimate with him and how badly he needed me and wanted me. He was very sexual and would constantly talk about sexual stuff and sexualized me and I felt very wanted by him but it also was too much. He would make me very uncomfortable at work either harassing me with text to convince me to sleep with him or him texting me cruel aweful things basically calling me a whore and making me feel a shamed of past sexual partners. ( Which I know he would do cause he knew it pissed me off) he knew exactly what "triggered* me or got under my skin and anything I had ever confided in him as a friend was used against me.
When we where in an argument fase at work he would go around telling people all about my sex life and paint me out to be a huge slut. ( I'm not ) Mind you he has told me he's slept with over 200 women (according to him) cheated on his wife and ex gf. An over all bad history with women it seems but he is an extreme smooth talked and can talk his way into people pants it seems.
One last thing, he basically needed and expected sex from me once a week so every weekend pretty much and I hated it. I wanted to just be friends and if things got sexual naturally then fine whatever. But he basically refused to be kind or nice to me if he wasn't getting the full package. I think a part of the lack of desire for sex with him was partly because he could only orgasm through BJ and it was just kind of exhausting. Even if I wasn't feeling well like sick he would push and push and push for a bj like I don't think he truly cared about how I felt. Sexual needs clearly were too priority. He would also tell me he loves me and cares about me and respected me but I honestly never felt respected ever he never respected my boundaries and would always push and push for what he wanted even if that ment hurting me.
Anyways, I reached my breaking point last week and broke down at work after he sent me a disgusting text message. I couldn't take it anymore and I hated coming to work. I ended up telling the manager everything and he has now since been fired.
The worst part is I miss him so fucking much it's killing me inside I'm so depressed and I cry every day. I want him to reach out to me so badly but I know right now he probably hates me the most in this world. I can't stop thinking about him and work sucks we are all under alot of stress to fill his shoes until we find a replacement. I hate being at work cause I just feel like I'm waiting for the day to end so I can go and cry. The whole environment at work feels like a trigger I just want to see him, I want him to come back to me. Even tho I was so miserable and unhappy and I wanted him to leave me alone.
I didn't want him out of my life like this but I didn't know what else to do. Work was so ahirry and now I just feel so much worse. I think I need to quit but I'd feel guilty because it would out more stress on everyone but I'm mentally so broken it's scarry.
I don't know that anyone else has ever been in this situation and I just feel so alone and broken and the only person I want is him. I think it's a trauma bond I feel like I need him like a drug. I want to know if he's okay, what he's doing and what he's thinking. I want him to mis me as much as I do I hope he does. I hope he realizes what he's done but I gueanteed he thinks he is the victim in ll of this.
I just want to feel like me again and feel happy to be alive this is truly killing me. I can't eat and I feel so broken. He was such a huge part of my life and now there's nothing.
Any advice would be much appreciated

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below the link, the article continues
https://www.innovatingcanada.ca/diversity/growing-business/how-one-canadian-ai-company-is-driving-digital-transformation-in-retail/?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=251398566&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--0EHxAkONksFaKgjKedfy74oUpt88J6Z49Bu80dtWxkEj0bKNCb67kMb4nPHH38pgD_xZdMAMidKD-4J_G75sTdKI1bg&utm_content=251398566&utm_source=hs_email

Hey all! I've been lurking this sub since the whole OGL debacle, which is when I decided to make Pathfinder the first TTRPG I'd run. I just wanted to thank all the people on here and DMAcademy who posted tips, stories, resources, and a number of other various things that prepared me for this point. Both myself and my players had never played anything like this before, and I'm very happy to report that we all ended up having a blast (despite an awkward first five minutes).
I ran a beginner adventure I found online called [The Polymorph Plague](https://scribe.pf2.tools/v/hQQJdbvF-the-polymorph-plague), mainly because the beginner box seemed too dungeon-crawly to me. My setup was kind of scuffed because I didn't want to throw money into it before the first session, so I used a chessboard and pieces instead of a battlemap and minis, but the players didn't seem to mind. The session lasted only about two hours because we had places to be, but I was pleasantly surprised that they were disappointed that we couldn't keep playing.
Once again, I'm really appreciative of all the help available on this sub, I'm sure I would've bungled it completely otherwise and lost my players interest. Thanks heaps!