We did a 10-day ring road trip from May 13th to 23rd and I booked a motorhome with Campervan Reykjavik. A few days before the trip, I received an email to pick up the motorhome from Europcar! (if I had known that the motorhome is from Europcar, I would have not booked it).
Overall the experience was good and customer service was quick enough to sort out the issues (comes later) but I would not book another camotorhome from them.

1. We asked for two child seats and they were really old, torn and all internal cushions visible. It looked very unsafe.
2. They asked us to leave the great water valve open as there is some problem with the pipe.
3. Two days into the trip, some strange noise started coming from the rear wheel. 24-hour breakdown service had no info about motorhomes so had to call the next day. A visit to the mechanic cost us half a day.
4. A few days into the trip, the gas detector started making strange high pitch noises and jumped between (Alarm and some other mode). After a few more calls to customer care, they informed me that it may be a malfunction so remove the detector.
5. The clean water tank had some strange leak that was constantly leaking water and we had to refill it every few days even though we did not use it.
6. The heating did not work and felt cold most of the time.
7. No rearview camera, later we realized there are better vehicles from other providers for the same price.

Overall, the experience was good but I please avoid if possible.

Hello, recently bought galaxy buds 2 pro and it came with a c to c cable. Do I need to use it or can I use any other cable like from my OnePlus phone? I believe the case should be able to adjust the electricity no matter which cable and charging brick but on the official site it says to only use the provided cable.

So, i have this pc for a couple years now, few months back upgraded the RAM, the GPU, and a SSD for windows boot and a new TV as monitor, where i live is very common power outages, or power surges, but power outages really quick, enough to turn off the pc, so i have all the setup in a UPS, today there was a thunderstorm, and the power went off for a second or two, the pc turned off, the power came up and i turned on the pc as usual, but, the boot screen that is normally black, was like the picture, and was like offset, with the Pro Series not in the middle and a loading icon, this is just in that screen, when windows boot ist normal, and almost none visual glitches or performance issues. I say this because i was playing a game, then opened it again after the outage and i saw a little visual tearing for a second, then it was fine for the rest of the playtime
Seen multiple forums with multiple solutions, changing the GPU, the hdmi cable ( i use hdmi into the monitor ), the Mobo, the monitor itself, disabling CSM in the bios and windows.
I havent changed the hdmi cable yet, but, ive changed the hdmi slot in the tv, slot 1 its the primary, ok, slot 2 and 3 have static and a high pitch noise and black screen for an instant randomly, so, its the gpu, the cable or the tv, gpu and tv are quite expensive for my budget if theyre faulty, but i think the gpu warranty its still good ( ordered in amazon, delivered outside of USA)
Should I worry? How much? Can i ignore that screen if windows boots ok and theres no aparent hardware issues? Any other solution?
PC Specs: MOBO: MSI A320-A PRO MAX CPU: Ryzen 5 3600 GPU : XFX MERC 308 RX 6650 XT RAM: Corsair Vengeance Pro 2x 16GB Monitor : Samsung AU7000 43 inch 4k tv
Extra: 2- 1Tb HDD 1tb Crucial Bx500 SSD ( Boot ) Case: Aerocool Split PSU: Aerocool Stock, VX PLUS 600 BLACK (600 W)

Hey there, fellow Redditors! Today, I want to dive into a common issue that many of us have encountered: the perplexing squeaking sound that emanates from our brakes when we first hit the road. It can be a bit unsettling, but fear not! I'm here to shed some light on this topic and hopefully help you understand why your brakes might be serenading you with their squeaky symphony. So, buckle up and let's get started!
🔍 Uncovering the Culprits: When your brakes squeak upon initial driving, several factors can contribute to this auditory annoyance. Let's explore some of the most common culprits behind this squeaky phenomenon:
1️⃣ Brake Dust Buildup: Over time, a thin layer of dust accumulates on the brake rotors. When you first start driving, this dust can rub against the brake pads, resulting in a high-pitched squeak. Annoying? Yes. Harmful? Usually not.
2️⃣ Moisture and Condensation: If your car has been parked outside overnight or in a damp environment, moisture can accumulate on the brake rotors. As you hit the brakes, this moisture can cause temporary squeaking until it evaporates, usually within a few stops.
3️⃣ Brake Pad Glazing: Intense braking or prolonged periods of inactivity can lead to glazing, a hardening of the brake pad material. Glazed brake pads have reduced friction and may produce a squeak until the glaze wears off, which often occurs after a few stops.
4️⃣ Brake Pad Wear Indicators: Many modern brake pads come equipped with wear indicators. These small metal tabs make contact with the rotor surface when the brake pads wear down to a certain point. This intentional contact can cause a high-pitched squeaking sound, signaling that it's time for a brake pad replacement.
🛠️ Solutions to Silence the Squeak: Now that we've identified the potential culprits, let's discuss some practical solutions to alleviate or prevent the squeaky brake blues:
🔧 Light Brake Application: When you first start your car, apply the brakes gently a few times to help remove any surface rust, dust, or moisture buildup on the rotors.
🔧 Brake Pad Inspection: Regularly check the thickness of your brake pads. If they're nearing the wear indicator or have become glazed, consider replacing them to restore optimal braking performance and bid farewell to the squeaking.
🔧 Rotor Cleaning: If you're feeling handy, you can clean your brake rotors using a brake cleaner spray. This can help remove brake dust and other contaminants, potentially reducing or eliminating the squeaking.
🔧 Brake Pad Lubrication: Applying a specialized brake pad lubricant (avoiding the friction surface) can help minimize noise caused by vibration and ensure smooth brake operation. Just remember to follow the manufacturer's instructions.
🧐 When to Seek Professional Help: In most cases, squeaky brakes are a minor annoyance that can be resolved with some DIY methods. However, there are instances where professional intervention might be necessary:
✅ The squeaking persists or worsens over time, even after trying the above solutions.
✅ The brake pedal feels spongy or unresponsive, or you notice other braking abnormalities.
✅ You're unsure about your mechanical abilities or prefer to have a professional evaluate your brake system.
Remember, safety should always be a priority when it comes to your vehicle's braking system. If you have any doubts or concerns, it's best to consult with a qualified mechanic.

I'm looking I have a iPhone 14 pro max. So I don't know if there are options with a lightning connector or if I'll have to buy a portable DAC to be able to drive most of the headphones.

• Budget- I have a budget of around 100$ that I'll be willing to spend. Maybe a bit more cause of the DAC I'll have to spend.
• Source/Amp- I have a iphone 14 pro max. So I don't know if there are options with a lightning connector or if I'll have to buy a portable DAC to be able to drive most of the headphones.
• How the gear will be used- Not going to be used for anything crazy, just using them while going on walks, at work, at home while doing chores or just lounging around wherever I find myself.
• Preferred tonal balance- Here is where I wont be able to be specific. I am more of a balanced audio listener. Sure who does'nt like a little bit more kick of base, I sure do but I'd say I like to hear all the instruments with a pinch of extra base.
• Preferred Music Taste- I mostly listen to a lil bit of everything but I find myself coming back to these genres and artists. My top artists are Daft Punk, Kanye West, and Mana. For the more obscure options I've been listening to a lot of City Pop (1986 Omega Tribe, Yurie Kokubu) and J-pop (Yoasobi, Gesu no kiwami otome) and my favorite obscure guilty pleasure is Myth&Roid. I have no clue wtf genre they are but god do I bop that.
• Past gear experience- Ive never had top tier earbuds or headsets. Most of what I've owned were the wired apple earbuds, airpods, Akg wired headphones that came with the galaxy s10. The only high end options were the Bose Soundlink 2 wireless headphones, and i recently bought myself a pair of Sennheisers HD 559 that I found on special for 70$ (god those headphones are sick af)

“Hey Raz, I got one!” Raz’s voice was cut by static as he called back, “Great! …at quarry …die.” Well, that wasn’t ominous at all, I thought to myself as I adjusted the rear-view mirror to check on the operator I had just blown past. They were doubled over coughing, their gas mask swayed side to side on the ground next to their feet. I don’t know what compelled me to not flatten what I had thought to be an AQ soldier, but I’m glad I didn’t.
I slammed my hummer in reverse, coming to a stop next to the helpless operator. “Hop in bud, we can get you to final exfill yet.” He slowly hauled himself into the bed of my hummer, landing with a dull thud and a groan as he fell onto his back. We cleared the gas, and I was immediately put on edge as my passenger started to gain consciousness. If he was planning anything nefarious, there wasn’t much I could do about it now. “You good back there? Normally I’d stop to send an invite but given the situation that might have just caused more problems.” He leaned through the non-existent rear window, “Nah, I understand man. When we get further from the gas we can stop and squad up. Don’t need to risk lighting each other up if things get hot at the exfill.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, “I don’t think that would be much of an issue regardless. Hey, we didn’t leave any of your friends back there, did we? I know we peeled out pretty quick.” I saw him shake his head and point to our left in the rear-view mirror. “We got split up, but they were running for a car, so I wasn’t too worried.” I followed his finger, a white hatchback cruised along parallel to us, swerving through buildings trying not to eat too many AQ bullets. “Hey boys, Dutch here is gonna roll with us to final. We’ll squad up when we get there.” I was barely able to make out one of his squad mates call out “Tight!” over his earpiece.
“Hey, listen, I’ve got friend I’m rolling with. His name’s Raz, he’s gonna meet us at final. If you see a red, white, and blue LTV, don’t shoot alright.” Raz chimed in, his radio finally clear of the static, “That’s very kind of you to tell them not to shoot me Dutch.” Before I could respond, a black turreted LTV slid out of Said City ahead of us. “Is that your boy Dutch?” I wanted to give my passenger the benefit of the doubt, it is windy in the box after all, he might not have heard me. “Nah man, wrong colour, and he didn’t have a turreted LTV last I saw.” The black LTV continued North along the main road as we cut away into the quarry proper. “Raz, company is headed your way. Looks like it’s just a solo in that truck but you can never be too careful.” “Thanks for the heads up Dutch.”
I rolled to a stop at the base of the helicopter ramp, gently flattening a couple of AQ who were getting a little to close to the bird for comfort, just shy of the battery running dry. The other two operators in the hatchback slid to a stop just down the hill from us. I got out of the hummer, a tad worried that my good fortune was about to come to an end at the hands of these fellas. As they ran up the hill, the notification finally popped. I accepted and ran down the hill to grab the hatchback, breathing a sigh of relief. “Wait, where you goin’ Dutch?” One of my clients called out. “Raz and I will run interference while we wait for the chopper to take off. Any AQ or unfriendly operators are gonna have to go through us.” “You keep talking about this Raz guy, but I’ve yet to see anyone other than that black LTV.” Almost on queue, a black LTV flew up the hill narrowly missing my hatchback. My clients went into a frenzy. “Operators pushing us! Take ‘em down!” The LTV spun in the sand in front of me, a glorious and perfectly oiled moustache glinting in the Al Mazrah sun. “Hold your fire! It’s Raz!” I called from below my clients. I sent an invite to him which he had hopped out and accepted faster than any of these guys could pull the trigger. “You see the operator that was in that earlier?” Raz shook his head, “No, I pulled up on it and they were gone. Must be out on foot somewhere.”
With 5 seconds left on the clock, there wasn’t enough time to go find them, our clients now panicking as they realized we weren’t on the bird. “What are you two doing?!” They shouted from the air as we waved goodbye. “Al Mazrah is our home gentlemen. That bird was never meant for us.” I gave Raz a pat on the shoulder as the gas rapidly approached, another successful day had come to a close.
The clack of a Kastov charging handle was almost unmistakable. We both turned to see the operator from the LTV standing there, rifle honed on us. “Well shit.” Their rifle dropped towards the dirt as they looked back over their shoulder at the nearly out of sight exfill chopper. They pushed through us, wandering towards the North side of the quarry. Raz and I locked eyes, shrugging in unison. That was one of those moments where we really wouldn’t have blamed them for their decision, whatever it might have been. “We better get back to HQ, Compton said I.T dropped off something for you.” Raz said as the gas engulfed us.
“I’m going back to the island boss.” My hands were shaking as I gripped the file folder that I.T had left for me. “Twitch.” “He’s back, it took him a bit, but he’s managed to re-take the castle and hunker down since we last saw him. And if he’s back then we might finally be able to get some proper intel on those blue tracers, direct from the source.” I handed the folder to Raz. He took it, turning to no doubt address the rest of the crew. I grabbed his shoulder, stopping him before he could speak. “Not everybody, not this time. They’ve doubled the defences; we’d be walking into a slaughterhouse.” “Well, you can’t go in there alone, we look out for our own Dutch, you know that.” Raz’s brow tightened, I could tell he was already trying to figure out what my plan was. “I’m bringing Maze and Alex. They’ll provide sniper cover while I infiltrate the castle. I still have my old uniform. As long as they haven’t drastically changed up their callsigns, I should be able to get in undetected.” I could tell Raz wasn’t convinced. “Dutch, like you said, you’d be walking into a slaughterhouse. How does you going in solo make that any better.” “After what happened in the complex…I’m not putting anyone else at risk, I can’t. The Bomb Maker…Twitch, I’ve gotta face him myself. Look him in the eyes so he knows I crawled out of Hell to drag him back down there.” “Alright, I couldn’t really stop you if I wanted to, could I?” Raz shrugged. “No, not unless you shot me, and honestly, I’d take those odds.” I punched his shoulder and started heading for the breakroom to grab Maze and Alex. “You keep that up I’ll be moving you back out to that sea can of yours.” Raz smirked.
The locks took a bit of fighting to get open. While this footlocker had only been on Ashika Island for a few months, the constant spray of salt water had worn away what little integrity it once had. The black uniform, emblazoned with the Rook and Spade of Shadow Company, was still in excellent condition, save for a bullet hole just under where the plate carrier would sit. I paused for a moment, holding it up in the air, memories of the past flooding in. “Not a lot of fond memories in that uniform I take it.” Maze called out from the catwalk in our home away from home. “I think part of the problem is that there are good memories. It’s a little concerning that such fond memories can hide out amongst so much evil.” “We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of. Some of us just did things other people also wouldn’t be proud of either.” Alex chuckled to himself as he cleaned his rifle on the cot next to me. I grimaced, mostly because he was right. I slipped into the old black fatigues and strapped on my old plate carrier. My weapons were all still intact too, I pulled my Taq-56 out of the footlocker, running my fingers over the engraving in the side, ROOK-XLIV. I cycled the charging handle a few times before loading in a fresh magazine and setting it on the cot next to me. I pulled out a pistol belt, two pearl handled revolvers, one with an ebony Rook on the grip, the other, an ebony Spade. Umbra Catavae engraved along each barrel. Maze had come down from the rafters now, a look of mixed intrigue and concern on her face, “I take it those don’t invoke fond memories.” I had done a poor job of hiding my look of disgust. “No, unfortunately they do.” I felt a wave of guilt wash over me. “Each of these was given to me for completing outstanding performance in the field. I did things I’m not proud of, and I was rewarded for it, handsomely. Holding these in my hands, I feel the same pride I had felt when they were first handed to me. It makes me sick.” I strapped the belt around my waist. The pearl handles shining against my all black silhouette. Alex piped up again, “Hey, at least you are trying to make amends for your sins, not many can say the same.” I let out a long sigh, “I suppose you’re right. You both remember the plan?” “Get to the radio towers and start lighting the place up when shit inevitably hits the fan.” Maze grinned. “Close enough.” I pulled my balaclava up and headed for the door.
The guard at the gate didn’t immediately shoot me which gave me some spark of hope that this might work. “In position!” Alex and Maze called out almost simultaneously. “Jinx, you owe me a beer!” Maze rejoiced. “What? Why would I give you a beer for that?” Alex sounded genuinely confused. “Hey, cut the chatter you two, don’t need to give them any reason to not let me in alright.” The guard held up his hand. “I don’t recognize you, let’s see your I.D.” I held up my old I.D card. “Well I’ll be damned, look who crawled out if his grave.” He pulled my mask down to confirm. “You look pretty good for a corpse, though your I.D card is out of regulation. You might want to stop by the I.T guy to get a new one made.” “Thanks, I’ll head right over.” The first thought that came to my mind was Bob. There’s no way he still worked for these assholes, is there.
“You used your old I.D?! You mad man!” Maze cackled over the radio. “Ok, I’ll admit, this wasn’t my greatest plan. I honestly thought they’d just capture me after seeing who I was.” Alex cut me off, “Go with the flow I suppose.” “Spade-499 up one-two.” The local radio channel began to drown out my squad’s comms. “Rook-3468 down one-one” “This is some odd radio traffic Dutch.” Alex quipped. I watched as a Shadow Company mercenary approached a stairwell, each step primed and ready to pop a leg off whichever unfortunate soul chose to ascend. “Spade-5454 up one-two.” “It’s how they know to deactivate the traps.” I whispered into our secure line. I approached the same stairwell. “Rook-44 up one-two.” I could hear the traps audibly click off. The guard at the to put his hand out as I reached the top step. “Sorry, no ghosts allowed on the second floor.” “Ghost? What…” He bent over laughing. “I’m just messing with you man. They said you died holding off the ULF while Bob and Twitch escaped, going out in a blaze of glory. Clearly, they didn’t have their facts straight. Glad to have you back.” I’m glad I had the balaclava on because I was struggling to hide my confusion. Last I checked I was the scape goat for the largest backstab in Shadow Company history, not a hero. I was never a hero when I worked for them. “I take it you are going to see the boss, call up two-zero, we don’t want people to be just guess on the fly, just in case someone tries to sneak in.” If only he knew.
“We don’t have eyes up there Dutch. Whatever happens, you’re on your own.” I could hear a tinge of worry in Alex’s voice. “Just make sure whoever is in here doesn’t get reinforcements.” “You got it!” Alex and Maze both called out in unison. “Jinx, you owe me another beer.” “There’s free beer at headquarters, why would I owe you a beer for that.” Alex called back clearly still confused. “Radio silence please. I’ve got a rat to kill.” I took a deep breath, pulling my Bryson from its sheath, the chrome exterior brushed over with a dull grey to blend in. “Rook-44 up two-zero.”
“Well, well, well. I was wondering when I’d see you again after our last encounter. Urzikstan and Al Mazrah clearly hadn’t kicked your ass enough so you decided to come crawling back to me for another round.” The traps clicked off. “Come on up, I’ve been looking forward to this.” I slowly ascended, keeping my Bryson trained at the top of the stairs, my eyes scanning each stair for an actual trap. As I crested the stairwell, my eyes were immediately drawn to him. His back turned to me, Trophy Systems whirring and clicking around him. “I missed you Dutch. Well, the old you. The one that would shoot through a hostage just to prove a point, the one that would dangle captives from buildings by their collar until they squawked like a bird, and then still dropped them anyways. I miss the Dutch that smoked Keller because his gas mask worked and yours didn’t when we those crazy Russian’s tried to hit us with mustard gas. I still get a little nauseous when I think about you peeling his face out of there.” “I’ve changed Twitch, I’ve moved past all that. I found a calling that doesn’t require me to be a conniving bastard.” Twitch laughed as he turned around, his hands empty. I kept my Bryson trained on him. “That’s what you think I am huh? I prefer shrewd businessman, but if that’s what helps you sleep at night.” He walked to one of the barred windows. “You really think what you and those taxi driving hooligans are doing matters?” “Clearly it does, or you and the Chemist wouldn’t be working so hard to sabotage us.” I took a few steps towards him. “Well, I suppose it matters to one of us. The Chemist and Raz go way back, but you know that. What I care about is the money, and I get a lot of money for helping that crazy bastard try to wipe out your little band of Merry Men.” “And Women. This guy just loves the sound of his own voice. Can I remove his head already? He’s looking right at me, practically begging me to pull the trigger.” I could hear the contempt in Maze’s voice. Twitch always did love a monologue. “You can still fix your mistakes Twitch. Gives us what info you have on those tracers of yours and I might consider not killing you.” I snarled. “When you went soft Dutch, you lost any respect I might have had for you. We are long past the point where you can intimidate me. Besides, any info I did have, is with the Chemist. He paid a handsome sum to get the formula, and really, it was becoming a logistical nightmare to ship enough of those little blue gems across the sea. Better for everyone to have it made close to the front lines.”
“Spade-101 up two-zero.” Bob’s voice cut through the tension. “Well I’ll be, it looks like we are gonna have a little family reunion.” Bob’s head poked up the stairs, “Hey boss, another server bank has shorted out from the sea air, I told you we should invest in better waterproofing the housings but if you still…” He trailed off as I dropped my Bryson, the sling catching it just before it hit the ground, and drawing my two revolvers. “Oh, hey Dutch. Nice to see you too.” Bob stammered. I cocked the hammer on each one, keeping one trained on each of my old squad mates. “Really Bob? Really! I understand you sticking around the day of the heist. But now? After everything that Shadow Company has done to these countries. To its own people.” Before he could respond, a siren blared over the intercom system. “Defensive positions! Hostile operators have breached the perimeter.” “Dutch you’ve got six operators approaching the castle, I think it’s time to bounce.” Maze was drowned out by her own gun fire, her Signal .50 raining death into the courtyard. “Looks like our time is up here Dutch. Since you clearly don’t have los cojones to pull the trigger, you might as well see yourself out, and let me and my men handle this.”
“Fuck it.” The hammer of the first revolver slammed down, dropping Bob instantly. I turned to face Twitch, his face a mix of surprise and pride. “Maybe I was wrong, the old Dutch still lives.” I charged forward, tackling him through the window and off the roof. Both of us lay on the ground, groaning as the chorus of gunfire roared around us. He dove for one of my pistols, but unfortunately for him, I had managed to hold on to the other, putting a round through his arm just before he could grab the gun. He rolled out of the way of the second round, bringing his one working hand up to the radio on his chest. The explosion from the castle threw both of us across the courtyard, debris raining down around us. I felt like I was reliving one of the worst days of my life all over again. I hauled myself to my feet, Shadow Company mercenaries and operators wandered aimlessly through the ashes. Everyone seemed too disoriented to fight. “I think it’s time to leave Dutch.” “I second that.” Maze and Alex were barely audible over the ringing in my ears. “Regroup at the boat. If I’m not there in 5, go without me.” I never heard a response, even if they tried, they wouldn’t have convinced me to leave, not with him still breathing.
I combed through the smoke and fire, carefully checking every nook and cranny I came across but the slippery rat was nowhere to be seen. “Looks like you 3 aren’t thick as thieves after all, eh Dutch. Poor Alex here was left all alone on the beach, no boat to be seen.” Twitch was sucking in air between words, no doubt kept standing by adrenaline. “You lay a finger on him, and I’ll make you wish you had died in that explosion.” I spat into my mic. “Don’t make me wait too long.”
I limped over a hill towards the beach where we were supposed to regroup. “Alex! Where’s Maze?” I called out as I stumbled down the sand bank. Alex didn’t respond, his head held in a tight headlock by Twitch, my second pistol against his temple. “She abandoned you both, and now I get the pleasure of killing you both after yet another betrayal. When will you learn Dutch. This world is a cruel place. Only the strong survive, clearly Maze knew that.” Twitch cut me off before I could retort. “Save the fight me with honour B.S that I know you are gonna spew.” I’m gonna kill you and your buddy and salvage what little I can of this operation. Then maybe retire to Cuba. I do love a good cigar.” “Adios, pendejo!” Alex brought his arm down, the knife concealed in his hand connecting with Twitch’s thigh. Twitch let out a high-pitched yelp, letting loose a round from the revolver which narrowly grazed Alex’s hair. Alex dove into the sand right as Twitch’s shoulder exploded in a pink mist followed shortly by the unmistakable crack of Maze’s Signal .50. I squinted trying to see where the shot came from, all I caught was the glint from her scope in the sun, the boat hardly visible in the rolling surf.
I limped forward, Bryson in hand, chrome starting to show through the worn grey paint. I kicked the revolver away from Twitch, placing a boot on his chest and the barrel of my Bryson against his forehead. He began to mumble and cry, hardly able to string together an understandable sentence. “Save it, you’re gonna need your energy for what comes next.” Our boat slammed into the shore, Maze hopping off, rifle raised and ready. “Oh shit I actually hit that!” “I’m not gonna lie, I thought you’d actually just bailed.” I laughed as she helped Alex to his feet. “You still go those claymores?” I asked Maze as Twitch continued to writhe in panic under my boot. “You wanted the old Dutch, eh Twitch. Ask and you shall receive.” Maze handed me the claymores, while Alex kept sidearm pointed at Twitch. I planted 4 around him, just far enough away that they wouldn’t go off unless he moved. I drew one of my revolvers, popping the cylinder out and emptying all but one round. I gave the cylinder a spin before flicking it closed. I tossed the revolver at Twitch. “Don’t waste that on me. You’ll only regret it in about an hour.” I took my other revolver, and hurled it towards the sea, the pearl grip glinting in the sun as it spun through the air, disappearing into the crashing waves. “Good riddance.” I sighed, that chapter of my life finally ended. Twitch was silent, his whimpering now just deep, laboured breathing. I turned back before I stepped onto the boat, watching as his hand slowly moved to the pistol in the sand next to him. “Well played Dutch, well played.”

Trigger warning: Mentions of abuse
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POV: Milko

I didn't know how Mateo did it. Forgave so easily. I was not that good; not that benevolent.
The way I saw it, the galaxy was a cruel thing tenanted mostly by uncaring inhabitants who willfully caused pain and suffering to other beings, or at least felt no concern for the hurt they dealt or tolerated.
Whenever I thought about my father - the begetter of children he never saw as people but merely expendable commodities - I started to seethe and sulfuric, slender ringlets of smoke drifted menacingly from my nostrils.
It's not like I didn't try to be better, I really did. Those hours trying to get help from him to my mother bleeding to death in front of me spawned a darker me. The hours sitting in my mother's and siblings' blood with the quiet of their deaths screaming in my mind, those hours depleted something vital in me.
I am able to forgive if not forget. I forgave the commander when he intentionally hurt me with the gravity change. I forgave the IASO for her antics in our initial interview. But my sire? I didn't think so. Other Coltavalke? I didn't feel like being a member of that particular gang.
So how is Mateo ok with Ouer, the Eoan teenager?!? Her entire species was guilty of the most horrible acts against sentients and sapients. I understood not blaming the kid but how did he stay in the same room without being overwhelmed with disgust and fury?
Well, Mateo was befriending the monster lookalike and I was there to support him.
We were behind the door of the youth habitation unit belonging to Saša, Ouer's guardian for the moment. An almost breathtakingly handsome, young Deblom male opened the door.
Deblom male: Yes? Who're you here for?
Milko (after shaking his head slightly to clear her thoughts): I'm Milko, a Coltavalke, and this is Mateo, a human. We're here for Ouer.
Deblom male: Who?
Mateo: It's ok, we're on the list of approved visitors.
Deblom: Great for you.
His handsomeness was waning in my eyes. There's no beauty in the galaxy to make up for these manners. Still, I tried again, politely. I tried to keep smoke from escaping but keeping it in was making my eyes water.
Milko: This is Saša's habitation unit, isn't it?
Deblom: Maybe.
Mateo: Is Saša here?
Deblom: ^Don'tknow.
Or care, it seemed. He was leaning to the doorframe at an increasingly alarming angle. His eyes were half closed in a way he probably thought was sexy but came across as exhausted and dull. Suddenly I saw Ouer in the room behind the obtuse Deblom.
Ouer: Are you here to see me?
At the sudden sound of the low gurgling Eoan nightmare fuel of a voice, the Deblum guy exceeded his maximum lean angle and unceremoniously plonked on the floor. It was very satisfying to see him blinking several times like a confused Huuq.
I held Mateo's hand and we curtly stepped over him to our new friend.
Milko: Good...
Mateo: ...morning,...
Milko: ...Ouer!
Ouer: You came! You actually came! That guy kept telling me you didn't mean it as a promise. He said nobody would think twice betraying the likes of me!
Saša (stepping into the room from some smaller room in the back): Who said that?
It took him about half a human second to find the Deblom guy on the floor wearing an obnoxious smirk. He was lying in a weird pose on the floor, one leg bend up, opening his crotch area in a way that would be obscene if it weren't so utterly ridiculous. Saša sighed.
Mateo: Saša, we came to take Ouer to play in the private shore area. One of our friends is already there. If Ouer wants to come, of course.
Saša: This is just having some good-natured fun together, kids only?
Milko: "Young people", please, not "kids"! Sir.
Saša: Of course. It was just a slip of the tongue.
Mateo: Then yes, sir, just us. If we happen to start discussing some legal stuff, we'll inform everyone. It's not the idea, though.
Saša: Ouer, do you wish to go?
Ouer: Oh, yes, yes, please!
Saša: Use the lift at the end of the corridor. Tierpe, c'mon, let's go discuss this in my office. Up, up, up: other people need to use that threshold. It's not there purely as a background for your pin-up poses!
Mateo: We have a friend, Caleo. Please, be very careful with him. He very nearly died a few days ago. He is aquatic, small, and cute.
Milko: He used to be enslaved, his entire life until now. And his slavers directly caused his condition. He had never seen a bath, not to mention a beach. He wasn't taught anything. He didn't even have a name until Mateo gave him one.
Mateo: We were there when he woke up, and feel very protective towards him. He doesn't know how the real world works.
Milko: He has known no kindness.
Mateo: He has never had anything, not even the basics.
Milko: They didn't give the enslaved children even a glass or a mug to drink from. A bowl on the floor if they were really lucky, mostly just some used water was splashed on the floor for them to lick.
Mateo: I took a bath with him on our spaceship. He - an aquatic child - had never before been immersed in water!
Milko: Sorry to rant on you. It's not like you did anything to him.
Mateo: The injustice of it, the sheer agony these kids endured...
Milko: ...it just gets us very riled up.
Mateo: Partly because of our own trauma and enslavement. Which was not that bad.
Ouer: Not as bad?! You almost died. Your sister did die. You were tortured and eaten for months until you rescued yourself!
Milko: Not to mention the slave work we were forced to do at the space station, Mateo.
Ouer: Aren't you still having physical problems you are here to fix? And the degree of enslavement and torture is not some competition! What one person might not even remember might be extremely traumatic to another. And it doesn't mean they're weaker or anything.
Mateo: Wow, Ouer! That was well put! Race you to the elevator!
Milko: No fair! My legs are short!
Ouer (whisking by Milko): Well I don't have legs at all, just one muscular foot!
Really wouldn't have thought it possible but despite Mateo's head start the legless mollusk won the race. Soon we were at the private shore. It was - of course - an artificial beach with one-third sand and two-thirds water. The HOTCHI-station had several of these as well as other environments to help with rehabilitation after surgeries or hospital stays.
It was perfect for our purposes. Ouer wasn't guilty in any way of the previous attack on the HOTCHI station. But his physical form would trigger horrendous memories in several patients and many of the staff here. We decided public areas were to be avoided, for now.

POV: Ouer

I couldn't believe it. All my life I had been hiding, knowing exposure to others would only bring suffering and death. Our species was hated for good reason and our form was disgusting.
And here I was, on the very station our hated warriors had desecrated in acts more vile than anywhere else. But I was allowed to move around and meet people! And now someone - two someones - wanted to do something incredibly nice to me!
Their friend had never been immersed in water in his life. Mateo and Milko seemed to find this especially condemning since the child was of an aquatic species. Like me.
I didn't know if I should tell them that I hadn't even ever seen enough water to submerge in. I wondered if it would make me look too pitiful.
"Shore." I knew what the word meant. I had seen a low-resolution picture of one. I almost hyperventilated thinking I'd get to see one in real life. It was artificial, I knew that. But most things in space are.
We stepped in the omnidirectional hover-lift. The lift had minimal friction as it hovered magnetically in the shaft. The ride was smooth, as were the transitions from vertical to horizontal.
But the best part was the interior of the lift. Even though the travel only took some minutes there was ample room and an abundance of seating options. This was a hospital and the convalescents were given every opportunity to do things and not just forlornly lie on a bed.
One side was for mammals with seats that conformed to different kinds of people. On the opposing side were perches and nests for avians. That section also had branches and caverns for insectoids.
And the back wall, directly where you looked when you entered, was the section for aquatic and amphibious species. With a push of a button, you could get either freshwater or saline water in different concentrations.
You could get totally underwater, sit in a seat partially underwater, or get water osmotically just by holding onto a bar with a partially permeable membrane. I used the last method. These humans, they think of everything. You could even add small molecules of nutrients of your choice to the solution. It was so refreshing after so long in the relatively dry spaces the Terrans preferred.
In truth, when the elevator ride was over I kinda wishes it had lasted longer. But the siren song of a shore was too enticing to ignore.
The elevator chauffeured us right outside our private shore. The door faded out to let us pass into a corridor. A small cephalopod child was impatiently waiting for us.
They were mostly diaphanous with a blue tint, possibly for sun protection. Some parts of them were darker blue, presumably for more protection against harmful UV and galactic cosmic radiation.
They had no hard external shell or internal bone, three hearts were visible, and their delicate tentacles were curling and uncurling with excitement.
Caleo: Mateo! Milko! Is the shore here? Right here? I feel weird but good weird. Is that normal? Who is that with you? Are they nice? I'm feeling sooo good weird!
Mateo: Slow down a tad, Caleo! Good weird is probably excitement. Excitement is a really good feeling, right?
Caleo: Yes, good, good! Good weird excitement! A good, new word!
Milko: Caleo, this is our new friend Ouer. She is an Eoan, of the good ones. Ouer, this is our friend Caleo. We don't know the species' name, though.
Ouer: Very good and exciting to meet you, Caleo. My parents taught me how to recognize many sapient, aquatic, and amphibian species. You know, not to... accidentally mistake them for a food source. Caleo is an Urtsas. They are masters in camouflage.
Mateo: Wow, thanks, Ouer! Did you hear that, Caleo? Your people are called Urtsas!
Milko: Later, it would be really great if you, Ouer, could tell us what else you know about the Urtsas. We hope to eventually contact Caleo's people, maybe even some relatives.
Mateo: But now, behold the shore!
The large door dissolved into the air and revealed the paradise within.
Warm airflow with tiny drops of salt water caressed me tantalizingly, practically propelling my body toward the shore. I felt directional warmth and light. It looked like the ceiling wasn't there. Instead, it looked like the sky, incredibly high above. And the warmth came from a light yellow ball in the sky. I looked at Mateo, incredibly. He lifted his shoulders for a moment.
Mateo: Our cradle has one white-colored yellow dwarf star. I'm told this is an approximation of how it looks seeing it through Earth's atmosphere. It looks yellow.
Ouer: You're told? You haven't been there?
Mateo: We were six when our detestable uncle decided to kill us slowly by selling us to an Eoan ship as food. The few years with him before that weren't any better. We weren't let outside much, and he had newspapers glued to cover the windows for some obscure reason. I must have seen the Sun, but don't recall.
Milko: I'm not even sure if there are beaches on our planet. The space station we grew up on definitely didn't. This will be our first time experiencing this as well! Let's go!
These two were candid when talking about their frankly horrible past. But they were not wallowing in the wretchedness of it all. They looked towards new, positive experiences with their heads held high. They had their severe trauma. I had seen that myself. They just seemed to grasp whatever positive experiences they encountered with all manipulation extremities. And then share it others.
The floor transitioned into fine sand. There was a rockier part but I wanted to feel the sand under my foot. It was so much finer than the coarse rubble my family had to acquiesce with. Rubble made from ground, non-metallic spaceship salvage.
I reveled in the sublime experience of the smooth sand, the sunshine, and the glorious breeze. Only it was cut short by excited, high-pitched squeals. I turned around at couldn't help but laugh.
Now I knew my form was monstrous. That was the day I found out my laugh was a sound causing instinctual, instantaneous horror in other beings. Had it only been Mateo - whose association with the sound was in all probability horrific. But no. Equal terror had engulfed also Caleo and Milko, who had never heard it before.
Mateo recovered first. He had stepped in front of Milko protectively and was extending a hand to yank Caleo to safety as well. Milko had dropped her head. Something was coming out of her nostrils, something gaseous, burning, and sulfuric. Also, some sort of chitin plates on her back were raised.
Caleo had frozen mid-squeal. Half of his tentacles were pointing up at varying angles, clearly just thrown sand up in the air. A few were digging sand out of his gelatinous body, and the rest had been threading the sand, making him half-sink inside the sand dune.
I couldn't help it. It was all so hilarious. I fell backward into the sand and roared in laughter. As I said, Mateo recovered first.
Mateo: That... that eldritch sound came from you?
Milko: Eldritch?
Mateo: Right. It's a handy word for something otherworldly, eerie, and unnatural that inspires immediate fear.
Milko: A good word working hard to convey a lot of meaning.
Mateo: Quite. Ouer, was that your laughter?
Ouer: Well, yes. Caleo looked so adorably funny, I couldn't help it!
Hardly had I said that when something sandy and sticky with way too many thin tentacles jumped on my unsuspecting and unprepared soft part. It was my turn to squeal shrilly. Except it came out more like a feeble yelp due to the tentacles pressing on my air-breathing organ.
I was stunned for a moment. A good thing I was. The child was obviously not attacking with menace but incredibly with joy. They were laughing in a way that distantly mimicked mine! Seeing that my other two friends' alarm converted into hilarity as well.
The sand was fun but the smell of salt water and the sound of the water moving rhythmically soon became irresistible. When we arrived at the point where the water started we all just looked at it in wonder. It was magical. It was soothing. Peaceful. Awe-inspiring. Home.
In the shallow, the water was turquoise and moved further into the sand and then back again in a gentle, slightly froth-edged movement. The water seemed to sparkle in the light of the sun. I was hypnotized.
Mateo: Those are waves! They're so...so... beautiful!
Ouer: Yes, that's the word I was looking for: waves!
Caleo: Ayeeeij!
We turned to look at Caleo who was waddling towards the water. He stopped at a place where the water was only a few centimeters deep.
Caleo: Ooooh, I like this moving water! And I like the water-sand that moves under me! C'mon, you slow people, come try this!
That was all the rest of us needed to join the kid. Mateo had quickly taken off most of his clothes and was wearing short pants. I had to fast intake a large amount of air when I saw the scars on his body.
I would never, ever, in any circumstance belittle anyone's trauma again like I did when we first met. How - just how - had he survived?
He joined Caleo in the shallow water, lifting his legs like a decapod crustacean, trying to bring wet sand up with his toes and throwing water on himself - and Caleo who happened to be near him. Caleo retaliated by sucking water in through their body and then squirting it on Mateo's face in a stream. A war ensued, one with water, wet sand, and laughter as weapons.
I looked at Milko. She stood timidly at the fringe of the water, just letting the very tips of her feet touch the water. She felt my gaze and looked a little embarrassed.
Milko: I don't think our planet has surface water in any meaningful quantities. We have mountains and meadows, valleys and small mountain brooks. And rocky desert galore. I'm also not sure if my form is compatible with floating.
Mateo: Neither is Ouer's. You could always dive and just come back up for short periods to take some air.
Milko: Brother, you don't swim either!
Mateo: No. But I can always stand and walk in shallow water. And I can sit in the water!
And that's when he plopped down to sit. The water splashed everywhere, even on Milko. I got some, too. That's when Milko charged right in front of Mateo, made herself as wide as possible, and splashed him really well when she plopped down to sit.
Mateo cleared the water from his face and laughed. But that was the moment the dragon girl had waited. She lifted and struck the water hard on her long, prehensile, and powerful tail. Mateo got a good spurt of salt water into his open mouth.
By then Milko had sprinted away. Mateo gave chase. But the two were laughing the entire time. It was just play.
I went to the shallow and let the waves wash my lower body. It was almost overwhelming. Caleo approached me and tapped my shell with one thin tentacle.
Caleo: I know. More water than you can understand. I had no words. I couldn't think, just feel.
We stood there together for several minutes, two aquatic beings, pondering things too big for our brains.
Caleo: Wanna go deeper?
Ouer: I'm afraid I go underwater completely and my gills won't work. I have never needed them before.
Caleo: Don't worry. Even if they don't work, you can hold your breath until you get up again.
Ouer: You are very smart.
Caleo: No, I'm dumb. No one says it here, but my owners did. All the time.
Ouer: They weren't your owners, Caleo. They were criminals, kidnappers, and slavers. Slavers of children, which makes them the worst of all slavers.
Caleo: What is kidnapping?
Ouer: Take a person away by force or by lying and not letting them go.
Caleo: They didn't do that. They bought my egg and made me. So I was theirs to do what they liked with.
Mateo: Is that what they said? They were lying to you. They didn't make you, Caleo. Your parents did.
Caleo: But maybe my parents gave ... sold...
Milko: That doesn't matter. Stolen, bought, kidnapped, cheated, found, incubated, whatever. You are a sapient being and sapient beings cannot be owned.
Mateo: Ouer was right: they didn't own you. They were illegally keeping you imprisoned, they hurt you and they forced you to work for them. They are scum.
Caleo: Scum?
Mateo: You know how trash comes to the surface of water? If you have really dirty, trashy, smelly, horrible water, what comes to the surface of that? The most horrible of the horrible? That is scum.
Caleo let out a peal of surprised laughter. We all joined. Then we all went a little deeper into the water. Caleo suddenly disappeared from view to our alarm. But soon I could see them swooshing here and there, propelled by their tentacles. I pointed them to Mateo and Milko.
I approached the deep carefully. The more of my body I got under water the better I felt. The buoyancy of the water made me feel a lot more graceful. A lot less monsterlike.
At some point, I realized I was getting oxygen from the water when my gills were still above it.
Ouer: Mateo and Milko, why am I breathing water without my gills?!
Milko: I read about this. Many beings like you can breathe through your skin. And your gills double as a sort of mouth.
Ouer: Mouth?!? You're not serious!
Mateo: It's true. If you are in a body of water that has food particles, your gills trap those small particles. You are quite remarkable, Ouer!
Ouer: Can you come with me to the deep water? I'm a little apprehensive still...
Mateo; I would love to ... but ... I don't know how to swim...
Ouer: Oh, I'm sorry I asked.
Mateo: It's nothing. I mean...it doesn't matter.
Caleo: Ouer! Ouer! Ouer! Come and swim with me!
Mateo: Go on, Ouer! Go have fun!
And fun I had! I started to feel like these people could be trusted. Mainly because they genuinely wanted to give me and Caleo a wonderful day. And they asked no questions or even hinted that I should now reciprocate somehow.
I slept so well after that day. I only wondered if our planet used to be like that. I also wondered if my parents experienced water like that.
And slowly I started to feel some hope for the future. Maybe my people could find a watery home. Live and not only exist.
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Got this part finished! It took some doin, but I got there. Anyway, let me know what you guys think, and I hope you enjoy. I'm not very good at these intros.
First / Prev / Next (Coming eventually)
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“-ck.”
David’s apartment wasn’t overly furnished to begin with. He lived with the bare essentials that came with state housing, but the fiks decided to make it more homy. Their idea of a home was converting it into a flophouse. Beds, cots, and pallets soon spread out along the walls while boxes and crates soon took up residence in the middle of the room. His coffee table, end tables, and small dining set were conspicuously absent.
He stared slack-jawed for a moment before a crash sounded from his kitchen. “Saa! No food!”
“Lie! How can human starve?” After a brief pause, “Saa! No food!"
David was about to investigate when a short…well, relatively short fik stood in his way. “Ah, David! Yes, yes, we come as soon as we could.” He was just a few inches taller than David and wearing more ornate garb. About as ornate as something stolen from a seamstress’ dumpster. He was also an albino. That was important to fiks, right?
“Am Wesh. Clan Ermin.” That sounded important, alright.
“Ermin? Are you the one in charge here? Tell them to stop ripping up my-“
Another clatter sounded from the kitchen. “Look, look! Hidden door!” Oh right, the pantry. Great. Now they’re in his walls.
With a content smile the Ermin said, “Yes, this will be good den. The wise clan lives close.” He illustrated his point by interlacing his fingers. “Builds strong bonds. And now with human! Wise human no less!”
“Wise? Look man, if I was wise, I’d be doing better than I am. Now, will you tell them-“
“Bah! Yes, human wise…Maybe David does not see. Or hear. Wesh hears wisdom you recite.”
“…You could hear me in the shower?” he asked sheepishly.
“Saaaaa. Yes. David sings song of fik! Sings of fik’s struggle in new world. About lies and hate fik suffer. But our fighter spirit keeps us going. Keeps us strong. You sing such wisdom without knowing?” He placed his hands on David’s shoulders, “Fear not! Wesh will hear and speak David’s wisdom. Even if David cannot see.” With a pat on the shoulder the albino shuffled away to the warriors who seemed at odds over sleeping arrangements.
“I guess it’s good to know they like Simon and Garfunkel.” He mumbled to himself. David summoned his courage to finally investigate what was happening in his kitchen when the door chimed, and the apartment went abruptly silent.
*****
Sarif didn’t need a canid nose to know something was off. The various tables and bits of broken furniture stacked up beside the building leading a trail of dust and debris to David’s door was a decent tip off. Another would be the small din coming from the building. Sure, any tenant could be having company over making a decent noise, but they wouldn’t stop after pressing David’s chime. But of course, she could also smell the small number of people who’ve passed by recently. It didn’t seem likely David would give up being a recluse overnight. What worried her was the smell of his pursuers from last night.
After a moment of silence, Sarif pounded on the door as a bit of anxiety seeped into her mind.
“Who’s there?” called David.
She let go of a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “It’s me. I’ve come to check on you, and…And apologize.” She struggled to get the last word out.
After a brief pause the door slid partially open revealing David’s suspicious expression. “Apologize?”
“Yes…Who’s in there with you?” She looked above him, but no one was in view. The place looked like a mess.
“Just, uh…Just some friends. Could you maybe come back another time? Now’s a bit…Busy.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Please let me in. It’s-“ She caught herself before saying ‘my job’ “Important to me that I know you’re safe.”
With a grimace David looked back into his apartment before relenting and opening the door. Her eyes quickly scanned the room looking for the intruders as she stepped through the threshold. The fiks were hiding in the doorways to the kitchen and bedroom. She caught sight of the impromptu bedding and realized this was an infestation.
She took a couple strides to put herself between as many of them and David as she could. “David, what are they doing here?” she demanded in a hoarse whisper. “They were the ones chasing you last night. You’re letting them move in?”
“I’m not letting them do anything.” He replied as hushed as he could. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a bit on the short side. When someone twice my height wants to do something there’s not much I can do about it.”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked over her shoulder before leaning down and whispering in his ear, “Do you need me to get rid of them? If you feel in danger I’ll-“
“No! No. They’re fine. Just a bit…excited? Eager?” He sighed, “Look…Last night was a bit of a misunderstanding. I didn’t know all of this was happening until a few minutes ago. It’ll sort itself out.”
“You can’t let these people stay here. It’s not safe. They’re…”
It was David’s turn to squint, “They’re what?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t. Enlighten me.”
“They’re dangerous. They steal, they’re violent-“
“Violent? Violent? Everyone in this galaxy is violent. So far, they haven’t stolen anything, and have been polite with everything I’ve asked. Meanwhile the other high and mighty races have done their very best to make my life a living Hell. They haven’t beaten me. They haven’t starved me! They haven’t shoved shit in me without my consent like those fucking snakes or big fuckers did!” David shouted while pointing to the scar behind his ear. He realized he was shouting and leaned around Sarif to see a dozen or so eyes staring at the two.
Sarif closed her eyes and took a breath. “Look, I…I’m sorry. I’m sure they’re fine. I just…” She looked up and around, searching for the words. “I’m trying my best to keep you safe. I really am. Sometimes that…Sometimes that makes me come off a little harsh. You know the galaxy isn’t a nice place. So do I. I tend to see the worst in people.” She looked down into his eyes, “Will you meet me halfway? Help me, help you? I just want to help you however I can.”
The tension left David as he sighed and rubbed his forehead. He opened his mouth to speak when there came a rough knock at the door.
*****
Hilda took a seat at the bar in the Aimless Wind Café. It had mostly emptied out as the breakfast rush died down. She perused the menu on her comm then checked for any upcoming entertainment. Looks like authentic human music was a random flash promotion. After a brief wait, a black furred felinoid walked up behind the counter.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Yeah, I’ll take a tea and is the owner in today?”
She looked the taurian up and down before replying, “Sure. I’ll go grab him.” With that she disappeared into the back. A few minutes passed as Hilda looked around the restaurant. It wasn’t small exactly. The bar and stage took up a good portion of the room, but judging by the tables the place could seat just over fifty patrons.
“Well, if it isn’t our resident human wrangler. A bit wilier than herding troqs, huh?”
Is my accent that bad? The man rose to eye-level on the hidden step that ran the length of the bar. He was dressed in more conservative clothing with a handkerchief tied around his nubs holding his hair back. While he readied the kettle and dug out a large earthenware cup, Hilda cleared her throat.
“We grew nist, but yeah. I’m here to-“
“Learn what you can about our little music-man.” He set the cup down in front of Hilda and began wiping down the immaculate counter. “He’s been here a few times; engaging in his impromptu therapy sessions. Not much of a talker I’m afraid. What were you hoping to learn?”
Hilda went back and forth in her head about just how much she wanted to say, before deciding honesty would be best. “This is…only our second day with David. So far, we’ve only read his file, picked him up from the hospital, then chased him through half the station. We can’t get a word in edgewise because he doesn’t trust…Well, anyone. But, he kept coming here. I just want to see why. Maybe find something we can do to help him.”
The owner raised his eyebrows then leaned on the bar, “Well. I suppose things have nowhere to go but up, now. If you were looking for some great truth or revelation about David, I’m afraid I have none. All I can say is the man loves-no, needs to sing. I don’t know why. Maybe it distracts him from the here and now or takes him back to when life made more sense to him. Though, if I were to guess…I would say he probably always loved singing. Might well have been his drive before everything was stolen.”
She mulled that over. For someone without all the answers the man had a better bead on David than most of the evals in his file. “That’s as good a guess as any. I just don’t know what I can do with that Mr…”
“Rodrik, and it may be a bit selfish on my part, but it also may bring David a bit out of his shell. Maybe you and your partner could finally bring our bard to perform on that stage over there.” He pointed to the back corner. “I’m more than willing to accommodate whatever he needs.” Standing straight again he told her, “I’ll be here whenever if he decides to perform up there or in the back. I live on the floor above. For now, Shasa here will take care of you.”
Stepping back down, the man passed the felinoid and returned to the backroom. Hilda nursed her tea and thought when Shasa spoke. “I do hope you get him to perform again. I’m a bit of a fan now.”
Hilda eyed the woman. She realized her fur wasn’t solid black but covered in hazy, faint spots. A bit on the taller and bulkier side for felinoids she seemed a bit out of place, but she didn’t know why. “Have you spoken to David much?”
“Not as much as I’d like to. He’s adorably uncomfortable whenever anyone is…particularly friendly to him. But I do love a man with baggage. They melt in your hands once they’re comfortable around you. Lean on you for support. Oh, but you’re not here for that kind of advice. Or are you?” She smiled mischievously.
Squinting at the other woman, Hilda rose and paid her tab, “Thanks. I guess.” She left the café and headed for David’s apartment, learning all she could and a bit more besides. I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for that one.
*****
The room was silent for a beat before Sarif opened the door. She was staring at a leather clad chest before she craned her neck back and saw the single largest fik she had ever seen. I didn’t know they could get that big.
The fik woman seemed equally confused to see Sarif and looked past her to the other fiks approaching the door.
“Chief!” called a fik.
“Chief?” parroted David and Sarif in unison.
A grin split the chief’s lips as she bowled past Sarif and strode in to meet her clan.
“Hey! You can’t just barge in here!” cried Sarif as she rebounded off the wall and planted her paws.
“Why? Am chief. Chief can go anywhere.” The fik giant explained as if to a child. Ignoring the canid, the chief’s gaze wandered the apartment before settling on David, “You!” She took a couple quick strides before bending down and scooping David up in a bear hug.
Sarif launched herself with reckless abandon at the fik’s back with teeth and claws bared. The chief spun as she hauled David up throwing Sarif’s lunge off causing her to shoot past. She dug her claws in the floor and spun around. David was effectively a hostage and meat shield.
I’m gonna have to go low or else I’d rip David open with her. But what if she lands on him? That could be just as…Wait, what’s she saying?
The fik, seemingly oblivious to the attack was rocking David side to side saying, “So happy to finally find you! Humans so hard to find. Always hiding. Always running. But now I have you! You’ll be so safe and happy now!”
She blinked. That wasn’t quite what she expected, but violence still hadn’t been ruled out. She was plotting her next move when she noticed a sharp blade of some description enter her peripheral, threatening her to stay still. Right. The others.
Then the door opened.
*****
Hilda heard voices and a scuffle as she approached the door. Deciding she needed to get in there quickly she opened the door and stepped inside.
She didn’t know how to process what she was seeing. There were almost a dozen fiks around the redecorated room. One was just about her size, clutching a squirming David while another was holding a knife to Sarif who had murder in her eyes. And all eyes were on her.
The door slid shut behind her when she turned and glared at the big fik. “Put. Him. Down.”
A confused expression crossed her face. She looked down and saw the human struggling for air then released him. He dropped to the floor gasping for breath, bracing his hands on his thighs.
Her gaze settled on Sarif who was beginning to relax. “What happened?”
“These f-“ She glanced at David, “These people broke in and seem to be trying to move in.”
A white fik stepped forward, “There are lies! Fik was welcomed into new den. David is most gracious. Fik would not break anything!”
“I broke something!” Piped up a fik in the back.
“Silence!” the white fik yelled, spinning around.
“You about broke David’s spine!” Sarif growled and stalked up to the chief. “Where do you get off thinking you can just whip him around like that?”
She seemed unperturbed by the chastisement. “Human is fine. Sulta knows her own strength.” The argument carried on for another couple minutes when the door chimed again.
*****
That’s it! I’m ripping the chime off and bricking up the door! No more visitors! No more headaches! David had slipped out of the middle of the verbal clash in case it became more physical, but that put him closest to the door. With a roll of his eyes and a groan he answered it.
Standing in the doorway was a blue and red colored avian. It gave David a quick glance before handing him a slim paper package. “You must be David. Not a lot of humans running around here. Anyway, have a pleasant day!” he called before striding down the street.
David tried to get a question out but the avian’s long legs carried him away before David even knew what to ask. With a sigh he inspected the package. It was more like an old Earth manilla envelope, bulging with something weighty. It had his address and even a description of him, but no return address or even the name of the sender.
Frowning down at it he turned around and closed the door once again. Then looked up and realized he was once again the center of attention.
“Uh…You all keep doin…Whatever. I’m gonna go check my mail.” He shuffled along the wall until he entered his bedroom then shut the door. Thankfully he was alone.
He sat down in his desk chair by his comically oversized desk and pulled out the envelope’s contents. It held a pad and a card. He set the pad aside a read the card with someone’s face on it.
You are formally invited to attend the celebration of life/graveside service of Mortemer J. Albrecht.
A funeral? I don’t even know this guy. He quickly read the dates and brief life summary on the inside before setting it aside and powering on the pad. It blinked to life before displaying the front camera view. God, I look terrible.
It blinked a couple times before scanning his face, with special attention to the eyes. I wonder if I get to keep this thing. Passing whatever check, the pad displayed the directions to the desolate planet Mr. Albrecht was going to be buried on. It drew up a diagram of the landing zone, gravesite, and where the Guardians will wait.
Guardians? Plural? Realization dawned on him. Multiple humans in one place. They never did that. David never fully understood why. He missed that bit of collective trauma. In some instances, it made him feel more disconnected to humanity than he already was.
He continued reading the invitation. It seems Mr. Albracht wanted as close to a traditional funeral as he could have, but he had no surviving family. That’s where David and the other invited humans come in. He pondered his options. He really didn’t want to venture out. He didn’t want to meet people and see that all too familiar pity in their eyes. Especially other humans. He didn’t know if it’d be worse to see them looking as bad as himself or doing better.
On the other hand…He was lonely. It’d been so long since he’d spoken to another human. Another person with a shared background and experience. Someone who’d just understand. He thought about it for a minute before reaching a decision.
He opened the door, and it seemed everyone really went back to arguing and shouting.
“Hey!” Silence. “You.” He pointed at Ruk’sa, “Keep everyone from wreaking my apartment. You.” He pointed at Sarif, “Keep them from getting into trouble while I’m gone. You.” He pointed at Hilda, “Come here.” He stalked back into his room while everyone looked at each other.
Hilda followed him to his room. “Gone?”
David spun around and squinted at the towering taurian, “You and Sarif really want to help me?” She nodded immediately, “Then take me here.” He pointed at the uninhabited planet displayed on the pad.

Motivation — A Close Reading of Tea Time

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

Prelude to the Close Reading

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

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

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

A ringing of bells.

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

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

Existentialism.

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

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

Genre conventions as grammar.

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

What the fuck is happening?

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

Pre-TtH Context

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

Nimander 1

Rum-induced memories.

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

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

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

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

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

Dal Honese burial practices.

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

Finding a tower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts

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

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

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

I have a query? Several times this week I have heard a REALLY high pitch noise that lasts for about 10-15 seconds at a time. The noise comes twice about 30 seconds apart at random times throughout the day. Every time I have heard it I have been outside. On Sunday I was outside in the sun having coffee with my parents who are in their late 60’s who couldn’t detect it. My 11yr old daughter was inside and came outside covering her ears asking what that noise was. My husband and son didn’t hear it. I am in my 40’s. It actually hurts my ears and head. Same as my daughter. It also starts my dog barking and she then seems upset. My father looked at me concerned because it was really uncomfortable. Today I noticed it also set off other dogs in the neighbourhood. From what I recall of the noise it seems to happen around midday. Does anyone have any clues as to what the noise could be and why?

30 years of this Motormouth
On three decades of cars, controversy, and cow dung at the Sunday Times (May 28)
By Jeremy Clarkson
Thirty years. That’s how long I’ve been writing for The Sunday Times. When I joined the paper, back in 1993, John Major was in power, Neil Kinnock was a fan of Ford Sierras, they were still digging coal out of the ground in Yorkshire and other columnists on the paper included AA Gill, Michael Winner and, not long afterwards, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.
I’m the only one left now. Still here. Still bashing away at the keyboard. And still feeling like a fraud. I went recently to a party celebrating the newspaper’s 200th birthday and during a film that had been made to commemorate the milestone, I was left reeling at the amount of truly important stories it had broken over the years. And the journalistic colossuses who’d translated these shapeshifting events into readable, punchy prose.
Me? Well, I got a job in journalism — on the Rotherham Advertiser — simply because my grandfather, a doctor, had gone out during an air raid in the Second World War and delivered the editor’s first baby. “I’ve always wanted to pay him back,” he said, “so you start on Monday.”
He sent me on a block release course to learn the tricks of the trade and I was terribly shit at everything. I only managed to pass my 110-word-a-minute shorthand exam by using a two-speed tape recorder and very long hair to cover up the secret earpiece. But while there I did meet a chap from the Harrogate Herald who told me about a great gig. If you could get a motoring column in the newspaper, carmakers would send you a brand-new model every week, fully insured and brimmed with fuel. All you had to do to keep the gravy train running was say how brilliant it was.
So I became a motoring journalist — that’s the profession’s bottom rung, just below being a travel hack. And that was fraudulent too because I had no clue how a car works. Back then my peers and colleagues in the specialist motoring press would talk about gear ratios and steering racks and tread shuffle, and I had literally no clue what they were on about. In my mind you turned the key, witchcraft happened and you moved about. The gearbox? That was pure sorcery.
In some ways this ignorance helped, because if you know how a car works you aren’t all that surprised when it does. With me, I always have a boyish, tinkle-grabbing excitement when I push the throttle pedal and the whole car moves. It excites me. And I don’t think that excitement would be there if I were on some kind of a know-how par with the engineers who’d made it possible.
To get round the problem of not knowing what I was talking about, I wrote mostly about how a car made you look and feel. And that seemed to go down quite well, so pretty soon the gravy train became a foreign junket jus train as carmakers started inviting me to product launches. A lot of product launches. In the mid-Eighties I spent more time in Cannes and Barcelona than I did at home. And all I had to do in exchange for all the private jets and champagne was write a piece saying that the car made me feel and look very nice. And that it would do the same for you too.
At one of these product launches — for the Citroën AX, in case you’re interested — I bumped into a BBC producer who asked me to appear on Top Gear, and pretty soon I was so busy doing that, I didn’t have time to go to Cannes and Barcelona any more. Which meant I had nothing to lose and could say what I liked.
Many of the carmakers didn’t like me saying what I liked, so an association of car industry press officers despatched a chap from Ford called Harry Calton to speak to my bosses. They told him that my directness was bringing more viewers to Top Gear and that this was good for the motor industry. Which in turn was good for Ford. He agreed and pretty soon I was rushing about, refusing to review the Vauxhall Vectra because it was too boring. And likening the new Toyota Corolla to a fridge-freezer. And saying that the Ford Scorpio looked like a slightly melted waxwork model of Marty Feldman.
This brought me to the attention of The Sunday Times, which asked me to do something similar in print. Which is quite an achievement if you think about it. Being asked to write for one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world, on a subject about which I knew nothing.
I couldn’t even drive very well back then. This was a bit of a hindrance, because to write about how a car behaves “at the limit” you have to be able to take it to the limit, and to find out where that is you have to go beyond it, which meant doing some kind of skid. It was my old colleague Tiff Needell who taught me how to do that, at Kemble airfield, in a Lamborghini Murciélago.
I still don’t do it properly. Instead of using power to break traction at the back, which is what the professionals do, I use too much speed. I arrive at the corner far too quickly, lift off the throttle to pitch the weight of the car forwards and therefore reduce traction at the back, and then turn the wheel while rubbing some rosaries. It’s messy and smoky and scary sometimes, especially when you’re doing it three feet from the back of a camera tracking car. But it looked good on television, and it convinced millions of people that I was some kind of cross between Ayrton Senna and Adrian Newey, all wrapped up in a sandwich filled with idiotic metaphors and similes.
Soon The Sunday Times asked me to start writing about other things as well, which is how I ended up with Adrian Gill, in Baghdad, in 2005, reporting on the Iraq War. I was useless at this as well, choosing to use hyperbole instead of actually finding stuff out. “There were a hundred million soldiers” is so much easier than calling the MoD and finding out how many there really were.
I also had a terrible nose for news. Back in the autumn of 2013 — I did look that up — I was in Kyiv doing some kind of Top Gear live show when I received a call from a different editor of The Sunday Times, asking me to go down to Independence Square to see if the protests were as big as he’d been led to believe.
I was thrilled because this was my big chance to be a proper hack, at the pointy tip of a breaking story. So off I went with a notebook and no pen. No journalist ever has a pen. And having talked to the lone policeman and signed autographs for the six rather bored-looking protesters, I called the editor and said the whole Russia/Ukraine thing was a nonstory.
Incredibly, after 30 years on the paper, I’m still here. But will I still be kicking around after 40 years? With cars I think not. I recently borrowed a 2005 Ford GT and, on a beautiful spring evening, I took it from Chipping Norton to Badminton House, along some of the loveliest and quietest and fastest roads that Britain has to offer, and I truly loved it. But in the not too distant future drives like that will simply not be possible. And cars like that will be gone. It’ll all be 20 mph and giving way to cyclists and pulling over for 60 hours to fill up the batteries. And I want no part of that.
I may not know how proper cars work. But at least they interest me. The new breed? I have even less of a clue what makes them move along and I find them all to be more boring than Jane Austen giving a four-hour talk about Chaucer.
When I began doing this columnism lark you could say that the combustion engine was brilliant and that men can’t have babies. These days, though … you can still say those things. It’s just that now people get very angry with you. And I like that because I’ve always liked throwing rocks in ponds. It’s all I’ve ever done, really. Tried to mess things up. It’s been fun.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Does the red trouser mob speak fluent nimby? You better you bet
By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, May 28)
I have some experience of not getting planning permission, and what I’ve come to understand is this: whether you want to build a conservatory, or a funeral home, or a nuclear power station, you’ve got to get the language right. Sustainable. That’s an important word. Your conservatory may feature window frames made from depleted uranium, but that doesn’t matter if you describe it as sustainable. And mental health. That’s critical. You need a sustainable sun room full of eco-plants because it’s good for your mental health. Plus you will empower the local building trade in a way that will be “transformative” to the low-income “community”.
Sadly, however, no matter how well versed you may be in modern government-speak, you will come up against a neighbour in red trousers who knows the even more powerful language of nimbyism. And he’s going to say that your new conservatory will cause more “pollution”, “traffic” and “noise”. That’s the holy trinity for those who worship at the altar of Laura Ashley. And if that isn’t working, they’ll wheel out the trump card: dark skies. They’ll argue that your new conservatory will cause light pollution, and then, I’m afraid, you’ve had it. Especially if there’s even a suggestion that you might harm a bat.
All of which brings me on to the Duke of Beaufort. He recently applied for permission to stage two summer concerts in the agreeable grounds of Badminton House — the Who and Rod Stewart, in case you’re interested. And I’m sure his representatives used all the right words.
They’ll have glossed over the fact that it’s bloody expensive to run a big house and new income streams are necessary, because that sort of argument doesn’t sit well in a country where anyone with a big house is wrong. That’s the law. So the duke’s advisers will have relegated the business angle to page 12 of the application and concentrated instead on how the sustainable, low-impact, green events will empower the low-income rural community and boost the mental health of the region’s bats.
Sadly, though, the duke’s neighbours are not just well versed in the language of nimbyism. They are fluent — they are past masters — in the art of objecting. So they started by pointing out there’d be increased traffic in the area and that noise would “reverberate” in nearby villages — presumably causing many bat deaths and “mental health issues”.
Naturally, they also said the concertgoers would engage in “rowdy behaviour”, even though it’s the Who and Rod Stewart we’re talking about. Most of the audience will be in their sixties, and when Roger Daltrey sings, “The kids are all right”, they’ll turn to one another and say, “They really are. Henry’s a commodity broker now, and Harriet is doing ever so well at Freuds.” Then, when it’s all over, they’ll go back to Stanton St Quintin in their Teslas, and Keith Moon will not head over to the local hostelries to blow up the lavatories because he died 45 years ago.
Fearing perhaps the council might cotton on to the fact the audience are extremely unlikely to drive their cars into the nearest swimming pool, the red-trouser people decided then to open up with sustained machinegun fire. Crime. Disorder. Public nuisance. Emergency services. Road safety. Pandora’s box. This was the Middle England playbook, and if they’d stuck to it, they might have got somewhere.
But they got high on their own supply and became silly, saying, “With 11 to 12 hours’ drinking licences, drunks will camp overnight . . . increasing the potential for a major fire incident.”
Right. I see. So this 65-year-old reveller overdoes it on the noon balloons and the Whispering Angel, puts up a tent he’s somehow smuggled into the venue and then, using some of the kindling he’s brought from the wicker basket in his snug, gets a fire going, which, despite the constant rain that goes hand in hand with British summertime concerts, somehow turns into a major Australia-style inferno that completely engulfs three neighbouring villages and ruins the dark skies for miles.
It’s the most preposterous argument I’ve ever heard. There was, once, a fire at an outdoor gig. It was caused by a faulty light on the stage and was quickly extinguished using stamping and a blanket. No one was injured and Bruno Mars was back at the mike eight minutes later. So the fire argument doesn’t wash.
And I’m delighted to say the duke’s local authority saw it for the nonsense it was and gave the gigs the go-ahead. And before you write in saying, “How would you like it if your neighbour invited the Who to perform in his garden?”, I’d say: “I’d like it a lot. Especially if they bring some lasers and do 'Baba O’Riley'.”
I fear, however, that this is not the end of the story, because now “sustainable” has been balanced out by “traffic”, and “empowering” by “light pollution”, the red-trouser brigade is going to become increasingly desperate in its constant battle to keep Britain as it was in 1957.
Mr Sunak announced recently that planners will be encouraged to look favourably on rural schemes, but they’re going to be up against a tub-thumping army that will quickly recognise that the fire argument was a bit of an oxbow lake and will start to argue that the new housing estate for the low-income community will cause a plague of luminous locusts that will spoil the dark sky. Or that it will attract immigrants who all have ebola. And that your longed-for barn conversion is actually a Russian missile silo capable of turning all of Chipping Sodbury into a nuclear desert for the next 10,000 years.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Driving website of the Sunday Times has also published a freely accessible interview with Clarkson, on his 30 years at the paper. It's part of a larger feature that also reproduces several old columns.
And here's the Sun column: "Three things bother us in the UK..."
Clarkson's columns are regularly collected as books. You can buy them from his boss or your local bookshop.

Does anyone know what the weird high pitched screeching noise on the fox broadcast?

The Elevator Pitch

I am creating a weekly tabletop game night group (that's a mouthful) focused on roleplaying/acting using various systems and a rotating cast of players every week. Super low stress; just picking up with whoever is available and playing whatever we're in the mood for. I'm seeking out fellow imaginative individuals who also enjoy TTRPGs and tabletop games that focus on improvisation and narrative more than crunch and crits. Bonus points for those interested in GMing or playing colab story games. Sessions will typically lasting 3-6 hours, and I usually run my games in the evenings (EST). Hoping to build a small community of friends and create unique, memorable gaming experiences.

THE GAME OPTIONS

Let's get to the meat and potatoes: I'm wanting to start up a new tabletop group and make some friends! I've made a handful of attempts in the last 6 months to start up new campaigns, some with players I've played with a bunch already, but sadly I'm at the point now where I'm not excited by the idea of shopping around a single idea anymore. SO -- instead of looking to set up a campaign table, I'd like to arrange for more of a game night weekly event with roleplaying as the focus!
Each game will be predominantly theatre of the mind but might use some maps, some of which might be combat maps, but not at all focused on providing a balance of roleplay and combat. The focus will be on roleplay first and foremost, tactical combat isn't as much my priority but if the other members of the group have that listed higher I'm fine including some of it. Systems I'm interested in running/playing include:

• Most one-page systems
• GURPS
• Genesys
• Anything Powered by the Apocalypse
• FATE Core
• Shadowrun (to some extent)
• And always open to suggestions.

I'll only be running games for 5 people~ at a time, but given this is hopefully going to be a small community of friends eventually there's no limit hard limit on how many people I'd like to bring into the fold. I'm getting up there in age (my early 20s are a fond memory at this point) so I'd prefer older folks, but as long as you're not underage and you're a relaxed person looking to play some games and make some friends, I'm not too picky. Creative ability and personality is ultimately more important to my endeavors than anything else.

Bonus Points

If you also enjoy GMing, I'd love to incorporate something similar to this idea I've tried to get going a few times where several people in the group would alternate GMing privilege's to run a concurrent story line letting it evolve and go to all sorts of crazy places as the current GM tries to build off of the last one. Not mandatory, but I'd love to give something like this a try!

What I'm looking for in prospective players:

1. Decent microphone quality: Don't sound like you're broadcasting from a submarine or a wind tunnel, okay? Let's keep our ears happy and avoid the earbud microphone crisis of 2021.
   
2. Discord access: It's like a virtual clubhouse for our gaming shenanigans. Don't worry, no secret handshakes required. Just bring your virtual self and your A-game.
   
3. VTT knowledge or willingness to learn: We're not all tech wizards, but knowing a bit about Virtual Tabletops (or being willing to learn) makes our gaming experience smoother than a freshly ironed shirt. Trust me, it's worth the effort!
   
4. Imagination and flexibility in play: We're looking for gaming yogis here – be ready to bend, twist, and stretch your creativity like you're in a cosmic game of Twister. Expect the unexpected and embrace the chaos!
   

As I'm imagining things, there could be a lot of jumping from one shot ideas back into a campaign we started, then back to something else until I'm ready to go back again. I'm only really looking for players who will be cool not necessarily doing the same thing every week; I might later decide and ask the group if they're okay with sticking to one idea for awhile, but it isn't a certainty. Most likely it will look like this:

1. Early in the week I'll let everyone know what I'm feeling like running, either using a poll to let everyone vote on an option or just declaring what we'll be doing.
2. Everyone playing that week will have 2-3 days to either figure out a character or otherwise prep.
3. Anyone who doesn't get a charactematerials ready by game day [but still wants to play] will be given a premade of some sort to improvise off of.
4. Session plays as normal, and then process repeats following week.

Voice will be done exclusively on Discord, table stuff will either be Roll20, images via discord, or possibly FantasyGrounds. We might also use something like Tabletop Simulator or VR if people are in them mood. I'm perfectly fine using webcam during sessions as well, and you're free to do so if you want to. I may also record some of these one-shots for my own purposes (with forewarning and consent of course), so if that is an issue for you please let me know up front (not a big issue but wanted to throw that out there!).

About me, the guy starting this endeavor off

• Experienced GM: With over 16 years of roleplaying under my belt, I've seen it all – from epic battles to heartfelt character moments. I've been a professional DM for three years now, and I've run more than 15 campaigns to successful conclusions.
  
• Focus on story and collaborative narration: I'm all about creating memorable stories together. My GM style is rules-light, with an emphasis on theater of the mind and player-driven storytelling. I strive to make sure everyone's engaged and invested in our shared narrative.
  
• Inspired by podcasts, fantasy films, and books: My creative juices get flowing thanks to amazing content like Tabletop Champions, The Crit Squad, Star Wars (pre-Disney), Lord of the Rings, The Goblin Emperor, and works by Octavia Butler.
  
• Passionate about Storytelling: As a pro DM, I understand the value of creating high-quality gaming experiences for players. I'm always learning, growing, and trying to make each game better than the last.
  
• Runs a variety of systems: I've run games in systems like 5e, Shadowrun, Blades in the Dark, and others. I love exploring different worlds and mechanics, keeping things fresh and exciting for both myself and the players.
  
• Believes in the power of the community: I'm not just here to run games, but to build lasting friendships and connections within the TTRPG community. We're all in this together, creating unforgettable moments and epic stories that we'll look back on fondly for years to come.
  

If you're interested in this little endeavor, send me a private message telling me a bit about What you yourself are looking for, and we can arrange a time to introduce ourselves properly and chat a bit. Don't think of it like too much of an interview - You don't need to sell yourself, I just want to Make sure that we're all looking for the same things and personalities will clash as little as possible.
Alternatively, you can fill out this Google Form and I'll contact you instead! Booyah!