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I have been attempting to set up RW_LEGACY boot on my Alderlake Chromebook (Acer Chromebook 516 GE) to dual boot Fedora 38. I am having trouble accessing the RW_LEGACY BIOS boot menu to try and boot from USB.
I ran the MrChromebox script, choosing to install RW_LEGACY firmware, and restarted. However, from the developer mode window, I could select alternate boot options (which would send me to a GRUB GNU), but all of the options gave errors (error: file '/syslinux/vmlinux.(A/B)' not found). Window shown below. For now, I've been trying to boot from a live USB, and I verified that it worked on a separate Windows Machine, but even Alternate USB Boot threw an error, saying "disk 'hd0,3' not found." I can still boot from internal drive and go back to ChromeOS, and in fact did so several times while troubleshooting.
GNU GRUB window I saw when selecting alternate bootloader in developer mode *NOT CTRL+L*
Ctrl+L didn't work either, instead saying "Something went wrong launching the alternate bootloader. View firmware log for details." Firmware log shown below. I also tried using the USB boot command in the shell. I now know that only works for ChromeOS, so I stopped trying that.
https://preview.redd.it/1yiiclrhny2b1.png?width=647&format=png&auto=webp&s=47e6ad1cfd293561c9dc28a0b73f04e4aeb8616f
https://preview.redd.it/2y15zvrnqy2b1.png?width=682&format=png&auto=webp&s=75ceac14937a3aaa0e95ab67ae1854344a63286e
Updating the firmware did not do anything either.
MrChromebox script response, screenshotted right before I reran the RW_LEGACY script.
I've been trying to access the RW_LEGACY BIOS boot menu, yet doing the above did not get me into that menu. I also do not want to get rid of ChromeOS, I just want to dual boot Fedora *with* ChromeOS. Any help/ideas?

As a side and far less important note, would it be a good idea to run chrx just to resize the partition I want to use for Fedora? chromeos-resize didn't seem to work for me, which seems to be because it was not given support for newer Chromebooks. I will eventually install Fedora onto a partition on my SSD, I just want to ensure it runs well on my Chromebook first, which is why I'm booting from USB right now.

Thanks for the help, and I'll try to respond quickly to any questions/responses.

Hello everyone, it's pretty much just the title. I guess I would add that this is just gonna be used for Microsoft 365 software and I'd like to have 144fps on multiplayer games, i dont mind lower fps on high end AAA games, at least like 70-80 fps. Thank you for the help.
Edit: Is there any advantage to getting the 6750xt over the 3070 other than price? I've heard people say it even performs better on some games.
- MetallicGear Neo Air Mid Case Black
- Microsoft Windows 11 Home OEM DVD
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with Wraith Stealth
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD 500GB
- Team Vulcan Z 2.5inch SATA SSD 1TB
- Phanteks PH-P750GS 750W Gold Power Supply
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& two Philips 272E1GSJ FHD 144Hz FreeSync 27in monitors.

Looking to build my first PC this summer, but it's getting kind of pricey. I was wondering if the build I have now is overkill, and I could downsize a little bit? Here's what I have now
https://preview.redd.it/ppvejcak7y2b1.png?width=1321&format=png&auto=webp&s=40671662854105da54e794ed65700ddf391f879d
Some calculators online said it could run some games at like 340 fps, so would it be worth downgrading a little bit? I don't even know of any monitors that has 340hz, so does it make sense to get a pc that can't even use all its frames? Completely new to the whole process, so any feedback/help is appreciated.

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Can someone help me read my crash log I don't even know where to start
[00:00:00]:
System Memory:

Memory Load: 59% Available Physical Memory: 3273m/8121m Available Page File: 7786m/17337m Available Virtual Memory: 134213455m/134217727m Available Extended Virtual Memory: 0m

[00:00:00]:
Process Memory:

Peak Working Set Size: 32m Working Set Size: 32m Quota Peak Page Pool Usage: 252k Quota Page Pool Usage: 250k Quota Peak Non Paged Pool Usage:17k Quota Non Paged Pool Usage: 17k Page File Usage: 6m Peak Page File Usage: 6m

[00:00:00]: PersistRootStorage is now APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe
[00:00:00]: Starting Up
[00:00:00]: Version: 556225
[00:00:00]: Current time: Mon May 29 23:10:21 2023

[00:00:00]: Don't Starve Together: 556225 WIN32_STEAM
[00:00:00]: Build Date: 1984
[00:00:00]: Mode: 64-bit
[00:00:00]: Parsing command line
[00:00:00]: Command Line Arguments:
[00:00:00]: Initializing distribution platform
[00:00:00]: Initializing Minidump handler
[00:00:00]: ....Done
[00:00:00]: Steam AppBuildID: 11192167
[00:00:00]: ....Done
[00:00:00]: PersistUserStorage is now APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/
[00:00:00]: Fixing DPI
[00:00:00]: ...Done
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'GAClient' (7104)
[00:00:00]: CurlRequestManager::ClientThread::Main()
[00:00:00]: ProfileIndex:2.88
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/klump.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/shaders.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/fonts.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/anim_dynamic.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/bigportraits.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/images.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/scripts.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'IC' (3404)
[00:00:00]: Texture Streaming: DISABLED
[00:00:00]: Texture Streaming: DISABLED
[00:00:00]: Threaded Renderer: DISABLED
[00:00:00]: [Connect] PendingConnection::Reset(true)
[00:00:00]: Platform: 1
[00:00:00]: Network tick rate: U=15(2), D=0
[00:00:00]: Authorized application D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Don't Starve Together\bin64\dontstarve_steam_x64.exe is enabled in the firewall.
[00:00:00]: WindowsFirewall - Application already authorized
[00:00:00]: could not load ping_cache
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'StreamInput' (7232)
[00:00:00]: Offline user ID: OU_76561198148930176
[00:00:00]: Cached userid loaded:
[00:00:00]: SteamID: 76561198148930176
[00:00:00]: HardwareStats:
OS
name Microsoft Windows 10 Home
version 10.0.19045
platformSpecific SP 0.0
architecture 64-bit
CPU
clockSpeed 2904
name Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400F CPU @ 2.90GHz
manufacturer GenuineIntel
numCores 6
features SSE,SSE2,SSE3,SSSE3,SSE41,SSE42,AVX
RAM
megsOfRam 8192
GPU
megsOfRam 4095
videoModeDescription 1920 x 1080 x 4294967296 colors
name NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER
driverVersion 31.0.15.1694
driverDate 20220721000000.000000-000
refreshRate 60

[00:00:00]: cGame::InitializeOnMainThread
[00:00:00]: WindowManager::Initialize
[00:00:00]: CreateWindow: Requesting 1920,1080 - 5/6/5 - -1/-1/-1 - 0
[00:00:00]: CreateEGLContext: 12 configs found
[00:00:00]: 0: 8/8/8 - 0/ 0/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 1: 8/8/8 - 0/16/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 2: 8/8/8 - 0/24/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 3: 8/8/8 - 0/24/ 8 - 0
[00:00:00]: 4: 5/5/5 - 0/ 0/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 5: 5/5/5 - 0/16/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 6: 5/5/5 - 0/24/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 7: 5/5/5 - 0/24/ 8 - 0
[00:00:00]: 8: 8/8/8 - 8/ 0/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 9: 8/8/8 - 8/16/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 10: 8/8/8 - 8/24/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 11: 8/8/8 - 8/24/ 8 - 0
[00:00:00]: WindowManager::SetFullscreen(0, 1920, 1080, 60)
[00:00:00]: GLInfo
[00:00:00]: ~~~~~~
[00:00:00]: GL_VENDOR: Google Inc.
[00:00:00]: GL_RENDERER: ANGLE (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER)
[00:00:00]: GL_VERSION: OpenGL ES 2.0 (ANGLE 1.0.0.2249)
[00:00:00]: GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.00 (ANGLE 1.0.0.2249)
[00:00:00]: OpenGL extensions (19, 19):
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_depth_texture
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_framebuffer_blit
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_framebuffer_multisample
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_instanced_arrays
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_pack_reverse_row_order
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_texture_compression_dxt3
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_texture_compression_dxt5
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_texture_usage
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_translated_shader_source
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_read_format_bgra
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_robustness
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_texture_compression_dxt1
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_texture_format_BGRA8888
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_texture_storage
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_get_program_binary
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_packed_depth_stencil
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_standard_derivatives
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_texture_npot
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE = 16384
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS = 16
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE = 16384
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS = 16384, 16384
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VARYING_VECTORS = 10
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VERTEX_ATTRIBS = 16
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VERTEX_UNIFORM_VECTORS = 254
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS = 4
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_FRAGMENT_UNIFORM_VECTORS = 221
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'WindowsInputManager' (13776)
[00:00:00]: 4 compressed texture formats
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f0
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f1
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f2
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f3
[00:00:01]: Renderer initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: AnimManager initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: Buffers initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: cDontStarveGame::DoGameSpecificInitialize()
[00:00:01]: GameSpecific initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: cGame::StartPlaying
[00:00:01]: AppVersion::GetArchitecture() x64
[00:00:01]: LOADING LUA
[00:00:01]: DoLuaFile scripts/main.lua
[00:00:01]: DoLuaFile loading buffer scripts/main.lua
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: default Together
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: classic Classic
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: cave_default Underground
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: lavaarena_taskset The Forge
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: quagmire_taskset The Gorge
[00:00:02]: Running main.lua
[00:00:02]: loaded modindex
[00:00:02]: Event data unavailable: lavaarena_event_servelavaarena_achievement_quest_defs
[00:00:14]: LOADING LUA SUCCESS
[00:00:14]: PlayerDeaths could not load morgue
[00:00:14]: PlayerHistory could not load player_history
[00:00:14]: ServerPreferences could not load server_preferences
[00:00:14]: ConsoleScreenSettings could not load consolescreen
[00:00:14]: bloom_enabled true
[00:00:14]: EnableShadeRenderer: true
[00:00:14]: loaded shardsaveindex
[00:00:14]: OnFilesLoaded()
[00:00:14]: OnUpdatePurchaseStateComplete
[00:00:14]: Klump load on boot started.
[00:00:14]: Klump files loaded: 0
[00:00:16]: Load FE
[00:00:20]: Load FE: done
[00:00:20]: THREAD - started 'FilesExistAsyncThread' (14432)
[00:00:20]: FilesExistAsyncThread started (22365 files)...
[00:00:20]: OnLoadPermissionList: APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/blocklist.txt (Failure)
[00:00:20]: OnLoadPermissionList: APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/adminlist.txt (Failure)
[00:00:20]: OnLoadUserIdList: APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/whitelist.txt (Failure)
[00:00:20]: [MOTD] Downloading info from https://motd.klei.com/motd.json/?game=dst&platform=STEAM&locale=US&lang=english&version=556225
[00:00:20]: Check for write access: TRUE
[00:00:20]: Check for read access: TRUE
[00:00:20]: Available disk space for save files: 12404 MB
[00:00:20]: ModIndex: Load sequence finished successfully.
[00:00:20]: Reset() returning
[00:00:21]: FMOD detected a new audio device and set audio to the current default device.
[00:00:22]: [MOTD] Done Loading.
[00:00:22]: Do AutoLogin
[00:00:22]: [Steam] Auth Session Ticket requested...
[00:00:22]: [Steam] Got Auth Session Ticket
[00:00:23]: [200] Account Communication Success (3)
[00:00:23]: Logging in as KU_NPndrG5T
[00:00:24]: There is no active event to get the status of.
[00:00:24]: could not load pending_keyvalues_prod
[00:00:25]: loaded inventory_cache_prod
[00:00:25]: using inventory state token from cached file
[00:00:25]: saved APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/inventory_cache_prod
[00:00:25]: saved APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/inventory_cache_prod_sig
[00:00:25]: ... FilesExistAsyncThread complete
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ItemQuery got this many results: 0, matching: 0
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ModQuery got 0 results
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished all queries, moving to download phase
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished downloading everything
[00:00:45]: Getting top mod details...
[00:00:45]: Frontend-Unloading mod 'all'.
[00:00:45]: GOT top mod details...50
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery got this many results: 0, matching: 0
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ModQuery got 0 results
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished all queries, moving to download phase
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished downloading everything
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery got this many results: 0, matching: 0
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ModQuery got 0 results
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished all queries, moving to download phase
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished downloading everything
[00:00:51]: Network tick rate: U=15(2), D=0
[00:00:51]: [Workshop] CancelDownloads for all pending downloads
[00:00:51]: About to start a server with the following settings:
[00:00:51]: Dedicated: false
[00:00:51]: Online: true
[00:00:51]: Passworded: true
[00:00:51]: ServerPort: 10999
[00:00:51]: SteamAuthPort: 8766
[00:00:51]: SteamMasterServerPort: 27016
[00:00:51]: ClanID: false
[00:00:51]: ClanOnly: false
[00:00:51]: ClanAdmin: false
[00:00:51]: LanOnly: false
[00:00:51]: FriendsOnly: true
[00:00:51]: EnableAutosaver: true
[00:00:51]: EncodeUserPath: true
[00:00:51]: PVP: false
[00:00:51]: MaxPlayers: 2
[00:00:51]: GameMode: survival
[00:00:51]: OverridenDNS:
[00:00:51]: PauseWhenEmpty: true
[00:00:51]: IdleTimeout: 1800s
[00:00:51]: VoteEnabled: false
[00:00:51]: InternetBroadcasting: true
[00:00:51]: [Warning] Could not confirm port 10999 is open in the firewall.
[00:00:51]: Online Server Started on port: 10999
[00:00:51]: SUCCESS: Loaded modoverrides.lua
[00:00:51]: Found a level data override file with these contents:
[00:00:51]: K: desc V: The standard Don't Starve experience.
[00:00:51]: K: hideminimap V: false
[00:00:51]: K: id V: SURVIVAL_TOGETHER
[00:00:51]: K: location V: forest
[00:00:51]: K: max_playlist_position V: 999
[00:00:51]: K: min_playlist_position V: 0
[00:00:51]: K: name V: Survival
[00:00:51]: K: numrandom_set_pieces V: 4
[00:00:51]: K: override_level_string V: false
[00:00:51]: K: overrides V: table: 000000005DD66B50
[00:00:51]: K: alternatehunt V: default
[00:00:51]: K: angrybees V: default
[00:00:51]: K: antliontribute V: default
[00:00:51]: K: autumn V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bananabush_portalrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: basicresource_regrowth V: none
[00:00:51]: K: bats_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bearger V: default
[00:00:51]: K: beefalo V: default
[00:00:51]: K: beefaloheat V: default
[00:00:51]: K: beequeen V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bees V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bees_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: berrybush V: default
[00:00:51]: K: birds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: boons V: default
[00:00:51]: K: branching V: default
[00:00:51]: K: brightmarecreatures V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bunnymen_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: butterfly V: default
[00:00:51]: K: buzzard V: default
[00:00:51]: K: cactus V: default
[00:00:51]: K: cactus_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: carrot V: default
[00:00:51]: K: carrots_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: catcoon V: default
[00:00:51]: K: catcoons V: default
[00:00:51]: K: chess V: default
[00:00:51]: K: cookiecutters V: default
[00:00:51]: K: crabking V: default
[00:00:51]: K: crow_carnival V: default
[00:00:51]: K: darkness V: default
[00:00:51]: K: day V: default
[00:00:51]: K: deciduousmonster V: default
[00:00:51]: K: deciduoustree_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: deerclops V: default
[00:00:51]: K: dragonfly V: default
[00:00:51]: K: dropeverythingondespawn V: default
[00:00:51]: K: evergreen_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: extrastartingitems V: default
[00:00:51]: K: eyeofterror V: default
[00:00:51]: K: fishschools V: default
[00:00:51]: K: flint V: default
[00:00:51]: K: flowers V: default
[00:00:51]: K: flowers_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: frograin V: default
[00:00:51]: K: frogs V: default
[00:00:51]: K: fruitfly V: default
[00:00:51]: K: ghostenabled V: always
[00:00:51]: K: ghostsanitydrain V: always
[00:00:51]: K: gnarwail V: default
[00:00:51]: K: goosemoose V: default
[00:00:51]: K: grass V: default
[00:00:51]: K: grassgekkos V: default
[00:00:51]: K: hallowed_nights V: default
[00:00:51]: K: has_ocean V: true
[00:00:51]: K: healthpenalty V: always
[00:00:51]: K: hound_mounds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: houndmound V: default
[00:00:51]: K: hounds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: hunger V: default
[00:00:51]: K: hunt V: default
[00:00:51]: K: keep_disconnected_tiles V: true
[00:00:51]: K: klaus V: default
[00:00:51]: K: krampus V: default
[00:00:51]: K: layout_mode V: LinkNodesByKeys
[00:00:51]: K: lessdamagetaken V: none
[00:00:51]: K: liefs V: default
[00:00:51]: K: lightcrab_portalrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: lightning V: default
[00:00:51]: K: lightninggoat V: default
[00:00:51]: K: loop V: default
[00:00:51]: K: lureplants V: default
[00:00:51]: K: malbatross V: default
[00:00:51]: K: marshbush V: default
[00:00:51]: K: merm V: default
[00:00:51]: K: merms V: default
[00:00:51]: K: meteorshowers V: default
[00:00:51]: K: meteorspawner V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moles V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moles_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: monkeytail_portalrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_berrybush V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_bullkelp V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_carrot V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_fissure V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_fruitdragon V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_hotspring V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_rock V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_sapling V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_spider V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_spiders V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_starfish V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_tree V: default
[00:00:51]: K: moon_tree_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: mosquitos V: default
[00:00:51]: K: mushroom V: default
[00:00:51]: K: mutated_hounds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: no_joining_islands V: true
[00:00:51]: K: no_wormholes_to_disconnected_tiles V: true
[00:00:51]: K: ocean_bullkelp V: default
[00:00:51]: K: ocean_seastack V: ocean_default
[00:00:51]: K: ocean_shoal V: default
[00:00:51]: K: ocean_waterplant V: ocean_default
[00:00:51]: K: ocean_wobsterden V: default
[00:00:51]: K: palmcone_seed_portalrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: palmconetree V: default
[00:00:51]: K: palmconetree_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: penguins V: default
[00:00:51]: K: penguins_moon V: default
[00:00:51]: K: perd V: default
[00:00:51]: K: petrification V: default
[00:00:51]: K: pigs V: default
[00:00:51]: K: pigs_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: pirateraids V: default
[00:00:51]: K: ponds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: portal_spawnrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: portalresurection V: none
[00:00:51]: K: powder_monkey_portalrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: prefabswaps_start V: default
[00:00:51]: K: rabbits V: default
[00:00:51]: K: rabbits_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: reeds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: reeds_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: resettime V: default
[00:00:51]: K: rifts_enabled V: default
[00:00:51]: K: rifts_frequency V: default
[00:00:51]: K: roads V: default
[00:00:51]: K: rock V: default
[00:00:51]: K: rock_ice V: default
[00:00:51]: K: saltstack_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: sapling V: default
[00:00:51]: K: season_start V: default
[00:00:51]: K: seasonalstartingitems V: default
[00:00:51]: K: shadowcreatures V: default
[00:00:51]: K: sharks V: default
[00:00:51]: K: spawnmode V: fixed
[00:00:51]: K: spawnprotection V: default
[00:00:51]: K: specialevent V: default
[00:00:51]: K: spider_warriors V: default
[00:00:51]: K: spiderqueen V: default
[00:00:51]: K: spiders V: default
[00:00:51]: K: spiders_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: spring V: default
[00:00:51]: K: squid V: default
[00:00:51]: K: stageplays V: default
[00:00:51]: K: start_location V: default
[00:00:51]: K: summer V: default
[00:00:51]: K: summerhounds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: tallbirds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: task_set V: default
[00:00:51]: K: temperaturedamage V: default
[00:00:51]: K: tentacles V: default
[00:00:51]: K: terrariumchest V: default
[00:00:51]: K: touchstone V: default
[00:00:51]: K: trees V: default
[00:00:51]: K: tumbleweed V: default
[00:00:51]: K: twiggytrees_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: walrus V: default
[00:00:51]: K: walrus_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: wasps V: default
[00:00:51]: K: weather V: default
[00:00:51]: K: wildfires V: default
[00:00:51]: K: winter V: default
[00:00:51]: K: winterhounds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: winters_feast V: default
[00:00:51]: K: wobsters V: default
[00:00:51]: K: world_size V: default
[00:00:51]: K: wormhole_prefab V: wormhole
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_beefalo V: default
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_bunnyman V: default
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_carrat V: default
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_catcoon V: default
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_gobbler V: default
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_pig V: default
[00:00:51]: K: year_of_the_varg V: default
[00:00:51]: K: playstyle V: survival
[00:00:51]: K: random_set_pieces V: table: 000000005DD66380
[00:00:51]: K: 1 V: Sculptures_2
[00:00:51]: K: 2 V: Sculptures_3
[00:00:51]: K: 3 V: Sculptures_4
[00:00:51]: K: 4 V: Sculptures_5
[00:00:51]: K: 5 V: Chessy_1
[00:00:51]: K: 6 V: Chessy_2
[00:00:51]: K: 7 V: Chessy_3
[00:00:51]: K: 8 V: Chessy_4
[00:00:51]: K: 9 V: Chessy_5
[00:00:51]: K: 10 V: Chessy_6
[00:00:51]: K: 11 V: Maxwell1
[00:00:51]: K: 12 V: Maxwell2
[00:00:51]: K: 13 V: Maxwell3
[00:00:51]: K: 14 V: Maxwell4
[00:00:51]: K: 15 V: Maxwell6
[00:00:51]: K: 16 V: Maxwell7
[00:00:51]: K: 17 V: Warzone_1
[00:00:51]: K: 18 V: Warzone_2
[00:00:51]: K: 19 V: Warzone_3
[00:00:51]: K: required_prefabs V: table: 000000005DD66BA0
[00:00:51]: K: 1 V: multiplayer_portal
[00:00:51]: K: required_setpieces V: table: 000000005DD66BF0
[00:00:51]: K: 1 V: Sculptures_1
[00:00:51]: K: 2 V: Maxwell5
[00:00:51]: K: settings_desc V: The standard Don't Starve experience.
[00:00:51]: K: settings_id V: SURVIVAL_TOGETHER
[00:00:51]: K: settings_name V: Survival
[00:00:51]: K: substitutes V: table: 000000005DD66C40
[00:00:51]: K: version V: 4
[00:00:51]: K: worldgen_desc V: The standard Don't Starve experience.
[00:00:51]: K: worldgen_id V: SURVIVAL_TOGETHER
[00:00:51]: K: worldgen_name V: Survival
[00:00:51]: Loaded and applied level data override from ../leveldataoverride.lua
[00:00:51]: Overwriting savedata with level data file.
[00:00:51]: Not applying world gen overrides.
[00:00:51]: Collecting garbage...
[00:00:51]: lua_gc took 0.06 seconds
[00:00:51]: ~ShardLuaProxy()
[00:00:51]: ~cEventLeaderboardProxy()
[00:00:51]: ~ItemServerLuaProxy()
[00:00:51]: ~InventoryLuaProxy()
[00:00:51]: ~NetworkLuaProxy()
[00:00:51]: ~SimLuaProxy()
[00:00:51]: [Workshop] CancelDownloads for all pending downloads
[00:00:51]: lua_close took 0.06 seconds
[00:00:51]: ReleaseAll
[00:00:51]: ReleaseAll Finished
[00:00:51]: cGame::StartPlaying
[00:00:51]: AppVersion::GetArchitecture() x64
[00:00:51]: LOADING LUA
[00:00:51]: DoLuaFile scripts/main.lua
[00:00:51]: DoLuaFile loading buffer scripts/main.lua
[00:00:51]: taskgrouplist: default Together
[00:00:51]: taskgrouplist: classic Classic
[00:00:51]: taskgrouplist: cave_default Underground
[00:00:51]: taskgrouplist: lavaarena_taskset The Forge
[00:00:51]: taskgrouplist: quagmire_taskset The Gorge
[00:00:51]: Running main.lua
[00:00:51]: loaded modindex
[00:00:51]: ModIndex: Beginning normal load sequence.
[00:00:51]: SUCCESS: Loaded modoverrides.lua
[00:00:52]: Event data unavailable: lavaarena_event_servelavaarena_achievement_quest_defs
[00:00:52]: LOADING LUA SUCCESS
[00:00:52]: PlayerDeaths could not load morgue
[00:00:52]: PlayerHistory could not load player_history
[00:00:52]: ServerPreferences could not load server_preferences
[00:00:52]: ConsoleScreenSettings could not load consolescreen
[00:00:52]: bloom_enabled true
[00:00:52]: EnableShadeRenderer: true
[00:00:52]: OnFilesLoaded()
[00:00:52]: OnUpdatePurchaseStateComplete
[00:00:52]: Loading world: session/4C1A51003C00F8E0/0000000002
[00:00:52]: Save file is at version 5.141
[00:00:52]: Klump load on boot started.
[00:00:52]: Klump files loaded: 0
[00:00:52]: Unload FE
[00:00:52]: Unload FE done
[00:00:54]: LOAD BE

Can someone help read my crash log idk where to even begin
[00:00:00]:
System Memory:

Memory Load: 59% Available Physical Memory: 3273m/8121m Available Page File: 7786m/17337m Available Virtual Memory: 134213455m/134217727m Available Extended Virtual Memory: 0m

[00:00:00]:
Process Memory:

Peak Working Set Size: 32m Working Set Size: 32m Quota Peak Page Pool Usage: 252k Quota Page Pool Usage: 250k Quota Peak Non Paged Pool Usage:17k Quota Non Paged Pool Usage: 17k Page File Usage: 6m Peak Page File Usage: 6m

[00:00:00]: PersistRootStorage is now APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe
[00:00:00]: Starting Up
[00:00:00]: Version: 556225
[00:00:00]: Current time: Mon May 29 23:10:21 2023

[00:00:00]: Don't Starve Together: 556225 WIN32_STEAM
[00:00:00]: Build Date: 1984
[00:00:00]: Mode: 64-bit
[00:00:00]: Parsing command line
[00:00:00]: Command Line Arguments:
[00:00:00]: Initializing distribution platform
[00:00:00]: Initializing Minidump handler
[00:00:00]: ....Done
[00:00:00]: Steam AppBuildID: 11192167
[00:00:00]: ....Done
[00:00:00]: PersistUserStorage is now APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/
[00:00:00]: Fixing DPI
[00:00:00]: ...Done
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'GAClient' (7104)
[00:00:00]: CurlRequestManager::ClientThread::Main()
[00:00:00]: ProfileIndex:2.88
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/klump.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/shaders.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/fonts.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/anim_dynamic.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/bigportraits.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/images.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: Mounting file system databundles/scripts.zip successful.
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'IC' (3404)
[00:00:00]: Texture Streaming: DISABLED
[00:00:00]: Texture Streaming: DISABLED
[00:00:00]: Threaded Renderer: DISABLED
[00:00:00]: [Connect] PendingConnection::Reset(true)
[00:00:00]: Platform: 1
[00:00:00]: Network tick rate: U=15(2), D=0
[00:00:00]: Authorized application D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Don't Starve Together\bin64\dontstarve_steam_x64.exe is enabled in the firewall.
[00:00:00]: WindowsFirewall - Application already authorized
[00:00:00]: could not load ping_cache
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'StreamInput' (7232)
[00:00:00]: Offline user ID: OU_76561198148930176
[00:00:00]: Cached userid loaded:
[00:00:00]: SteamID: 76561198148930176
[00:00:00]: HardwareStats:
OS
name Microsoft Windows 10 Home
version 10.0.19045
platformSpecific SP 0.0
architecture 64-bit
CPU
clockSpeed 2904
name Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400F CPU @ 2.90GHz
manufacturer GenuineIntel
numCores 6
features SSE,SSE2,SSE3,SSSE3,SSE41,SSE42,AVX
RAM
megsOfRam 8192
GPU
megsOfRam 4095
videoModeDescription 1920 x 1080 x 4294967296 colors
name NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER
driverVersion 31.0.15.1694
driverDate 20220721000000.000000-000
refreshRate 60

[00:00:00]: cGame::InitializeOnMainThread
[00:00:00]: WindowManager::Initialize
[00:00:00]: CreateWindow: Requesting 1920,1080 - 5/6/5 - -1/-1/-1 - 0
[00:00:00]: CreateEGLContext: 12 configs found
[00:00:00]: 0: 8/8/8 - 0/ 0/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 1: 8/8/8 - 0/16/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 2: 8/8/8 - 0/24/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 3: 8/8/8 - 0/24/ 8 - 0
[00:00:00]: 4: 5/5/5 - 0/ 0/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 5: 5/5/5 - 0/16/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 6: 5/5/5 - 0/24/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 7: 5/5/5 - 0/24/ 8 - 0
[00:00:00]: 8: 8/8/8 - 8/ 0/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 9: 8/8/8 - 8/16/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 10: 8/8/8 - 8/24/ 0 - 0
[00:00:00]: 11: 8/8/8 - 8/24/ 8 - 0
[00:00:00]: WindowManager::SetFullscreen(0, 1920, 1080, 60)
[00:00:00]: GLInfo
[00:00:00]: ~~~~~~
[00:00:00]: GL_VENDOR: Google Inc.
[00:00:00]: GL_RENDERER: ANGLE (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER)
[00:00:00]: GL_VERSION: OpenGL ES 2.0 (ANGLE 1.0.0.2249)
[00:00:00]: GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.00 (ANGLE 1.0.0.2249)
[00:00:00]: OpenGL extensions (19, 19):
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_depth_texture
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_framebuffer_blit
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_framebuffer_multisample
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_instanced_arrays
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_pack_reverse_row_order
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_texture_compression_dxt3
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_texture_compression_dxt5
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_texture_usage
[00:00:00]: GL_ANGLE_translated_shader_source
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_read_format_bgra
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_robustness
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_texture_compression_dxt1
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_texture_format_BGRA8888
[00:00:00]: GL_EXT_texture_storage
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_get_program_binary
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_packed_depth_stencil
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_standard_derivatives
[00:00:00]: GL_OES_texture_npot
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE = 16384
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS = 16
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE = 16384
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS = 16384, 16384
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VARYING_VECTORS = 10
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VERTEX_ATTRIBS = 16
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VERTEX_UNIFORM_VECTORS = 254
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS = 4
[00:00:00]: GL_MAX_FRAGMENT_UNIFORM_VECTORS = 221
[00:00:00]: THREAD - started 'WindowsInputManager' (13776)
[00:00:00]: 4 compressed texture formats
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f0
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f1
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f2
[00:00:00]: texture format 0x83f3
[00:00:01]: Renderer initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: AnimManager initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: Buffers initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: cDontStarveGame::DoGameSpecificInitialize()
[00:00:01]: GameSpecific initialize: Okay
[00:00:01]: cGame::StartPlaying
[00:00:01]: AppVersion::GetArchitecture() x64
[00:00:01]: LOADING LUA
[00:00:01]: DoLuaFile scripts/main.lua
[00:00:01]: DoLuaFile loading buffer scripts/main.lua
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: default Together
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: classic Classic
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: cave_default Underground
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: lavaarena_taskset The Forge
[00:00:02]: taskgrouplist: quagmire_taskset The Gorge
[00:00:02]: Running main.lua
[00:00:02]: loaded modindex
[00:00:02]: Event data unavailable: lavaarena_event_servelavaarena_achievement_quest_defs
[00:00:14]: LOADING LUA SUCCESS
[00:00:14]: PlayerDeaths could not load morgue
[00:00:14]: PlayerHistory could not load player_history
[00:00:14]: ServerPreferences could not load server_preferences
[00:00:14]: ConsoleScreenSettings could not load consolescreen
[00:00:14]: bloom_enabled true
[00:00:14]: EnableShadeRenderer: true
[00:00:14]: loaded shardsaveindex
[00:00:14]: OnFilesLoaded()
[00:00:14]: OnUpdatePurchaseStateComplete
[00:00:14]: Klump load on boot started.
[00:00:14]: Klump files loaded: 0
[00:00:16]: Load FE
[00:00:20]: Load FE: done
[00:00:20]: THREAD - started 'FilesExistAsyncThread' (14432)
[00:00:20]: FilesExistAsyncThread started (22365 files)...
[00:00:20]: OnLoadPermissionList: APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/blocklist.txt (Failure)
[00:00:20]: OnLoadPermissionList: APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/adminlist.txt (Failure)
[00:00:20]: OnLoadUserIdList: APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/whitelist.txt (Failure)
[00:00:20]: [MOTD] Downloading info from https://motd.klei.com/motd.json/?game=dst&platform=STEAM&locale=US&lang=english&version=556225
[00:00:20]: Check for write access: TRUE
[00:00:20]: Check for read access: TRUE
[00:00:20]: Available disk space for save files: 12404 MB
[00:00:20]: ModIndex: Load sequence finished successfully.
[00:00:20]: Reset() returning
[00:00:21]: FMOD detected a new audio device and set audio to the current default device.
[00:00:22]: [MOTD] Done Loading.
[00:00:22]: Do AutoLogin
[00:00:22]: [Steam] Auth Session Ticket requested...
[00:00:22]: [Steam] Got Auth Session Ticket
[00:00:23]: [200] Account Communication Success (3)
[00:00:23]: Logging in as KU_NPndrG5T
[00:00:24]: There is no active event to get the status of.
[00:00:24]: could not load pending_keyvalues_prod
[00:00:25]: loaded inventory_cache_prod
[00:00:25]: using inventory state token from cached file
[00:00:25]: saved APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/inventory_cache_prod
[00:00:25]: saved APP:Klei//DoNotStarveTogethe188664448/client_save/inventory_cache_prod_sig
[00:00:25]: ... FilesExistAsyncThread complete
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ItemQuery got this many results: 0, matching: 0
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ModQuery got 0 results
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished all queries, moving to download phase
[00:00:25]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished downloading everything
[00:00:45]: Getting top mod details...
[00:00:45]: Frontend-Unloading mod 'all'.
[00:00:45]: GOT top mod details...50
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery got this many results: 0, matching: 0
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ModQuery got 0 results
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished all queries, moving to download phase
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished downloading everything
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery got this many results: 0, matching: 0
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ModQuery got 0 results
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished all queries, moving to download phase
[00:00:45]: [Workshop] ItemQuery finished downloading everything
[00:00:51]: Network tick rate: U=15(2), D=0
[00:00:51]: [Workshop] CancelDownloads for all pending downloads
[00:00:51]: About to start a server with the following settings:
[00:00:51]: Dedicated: false
[00:00:51]: Online: true
[00:00:51]: Passworded: true
[00:00:51]: ServerPort: 10999
[00:00:51]: SteamAuthPort: 8766
[00:00:51]: SteamMasterServerPort: 27016
[00:00:51]: ClanID: false
[00:00:51]: ClanOnly: false
[00:00:51]: ClanAdmin: false
[00:00:51]: LanOnly: false
[00:00:51]: FriendsOnly: true
[00:00:51]: EnableAutosaver: true
[00:00:51]: EncodeUserPath: true
[00:00:51]: PVP: false
[00:00:51]: MaxPlayers: 2
[00:00:51]: GameMode: survival
[00:00:51]: OverridenDNS:
[00:00:51]: PauseWhenEmpty: true
[00:00:51]: IdleTimeout: 1800s
[00:00:51]: VoteEnabled: false
[00:00:51]: InternetBroadcasting: true
[00:00:51]: [Warning] Could not confirm port 10999 is open in the firewall.
[00:00:51]: Online Server Started on port: 10999
[00:00:51]: SUCCESS: Loaded modoverrides.lua
[00:00:51]: Found a level data override file with these contents:
[00:00:51]: K: desc V: The standard Don't Starve experience.
[00:00:51]: K: hideminimap V: false
[00:00:51]: K: id V: SURVIVAL_TOGETHER
[00:00:51]: K: location V: forest
[00:00:51]: K: max_playlist_position V: 999
[00:00:51]: K: min_playlist_position V: 0
[00:00:51]: K: name V: Survival
[00:00:51]: K: numrandom_set_pieces V: 4
[00:00:51]: K: override_level_string V: false
[00:00:51]: K: overrides V: table: 000000005DD66B50
[00:00:51]: K: alternatehunt V: default
[00:00:51]: K: angrybees V: default
[00:00:51]: K: antliontribute V: default
[00:00:51]: K: autumn V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bananabush_portalrate V: default
[00:00:51]: K: basicresource_regrowth V: none
[00:00:51]: K: bats_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bearger V: default
[00:00:51]: K: beefalo V: default
[00:00:51]: K: beefaloheat V: default
[00:00:51]: K: beequeen V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bees V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bees_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: berrybush V: default
[00:00:51]: K: birds V: default
[00:00:51]: K: boons V: default
[00:00:51]: K: branching V: default
[00:00:51]: K: brightmarecreatures V: default
[00:00:51]: K: bunnymen_setting V: default
[00:00:51]: K: butterfly V: default
[00:00:51]: K: buzzard V: default
[00:00:51]: K: cactus V: default
[00:00:51]: K: cactus_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: carrot V: default
[00:00:51]: K: carrots_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: catcoon V: default
[00:00:51]: K: catcoons V: default
[00:00:51]: K: chess V: default
[00:00:51]: K: cookiecutters V: default
[00:00:51]: K: crabking V: default
[00:00:51]: K: crow_carnival V: default
[00:00:51]: K: darkness V: default
[00:00:51]: K: day V: default
[00:00:51]: K: deciduousmonster V: default
[00:00:51]: K: deciduoustree_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: deerclops V: default
[00:00:51]: K: dragonfly V: default
[00:00:51]: K: dropeverythingondespawn V: default
[00:00:51]: K: evergreen_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: extrastartingitems V: default
[00:00:51]: K: eyeofterror V: default
[00:00:51]: K: fishschools V: default
[00:00:51]: K: flint V: default
[00:00:51]: K: flowers V: default
[00:00:51]: K: flowers_regrowth V: default
[00:00:51]: K: frograin V: default
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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:

Nimander 1
Desra 1
Desra 2
Skintick 1
Desra 3
Nimander 2
Desra 4
Kedeviss 1
Nimander 3
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:

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

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Starting to warm up here in Ohio, with forecast calling for temperatures around 90 F or 32.2 C and I figured this weekend would be a good time to set up my air conditioner in the window.
Small problem.
The filter I had been using in that unit for the last eight years or so is well and truly shot.
According to the sticker on the unit, it's a Continental Electric. Should I therefore try to limit my Amazon shopping list to filters just for that particular make and model or may I be a bit more "open-minded" in my search?
I'm trying to keep the price around $20 USD

"Mission accomplished. The survival rate was 4% and valuable human resources were lost, but that is war. The mission objective takes priority over everything else. Holding to that principle is why I have never failed a mission. The Death cannot die…"
Very little is known of the Umbrella Security Service's best agent, save for his codename: HUNK. With a track record of being the sole survivor of dangerous operations, he’s earned the illustrious nickname The Grim Reaper(sometimes mistranslated to Mr. Death or The Death). The Raccoon City incident wasn’t much different, as HUNK was the only survivor of a mutated Birkin’s rampage and barely made it out alive. Always professional, HUNK didn’t let a little thing like a sewer and police station full of assorted B.O.W.s or the threat of a nuke keep him from completing his objective with a cool head.
Note: Since HUNK has one notable canon appearance done multiple times (The 4th Survivor scenario in both versions of Resident Evil 2, as well as Umbrella Chronicles) and half his existence is bonus modes like Mercenaries (RE4 and 3D) and Raid Mode (The Revelations games), this thread’s gonna involve some definitely noncanonical stuff, including Operation Raccoon City. Hover over feats to see what they're from.
Physicals:
Strength:

Durability:

Speed/Agility:

Skill:

Headshots two Hunters at close range as they lunge at him.
Forget double tapping, HUNK triple taps downed foes. Here's another example if you're tired of looking at the 3DS game.
Quickly takes out two guards in close quarters with a knife to the chest and a neck snap.
Takes out a guard's leg for an easy throat slit.
Invented CQBZ (Close Quarters Quarantined Battle Zone), a combat style adopted by Umbrella Corps mercenaries. Here's some counterattacks involving avoiding strikes, a few funny little slides, gratuitous stabbing, and of course a neck snap.
Will cram a grenade in your mouth, if he must.

Misc:

Ate Tofu.
Despite earlier showings having him pretty callous about his squad's lives, later games have HUNK show some concern for people under his command.

Weapons/Gear: The Umbrella Corps gear isn't being used by HUNK, but was supposedly developed by him so I feel it's worth noting.
Blades:

A combat knife.
Retractable wrist blades.
Seems to have a retractable blade built into his boots.
- Here's HUNK showing off his hidden blades in his Reaper costume.
The Brainer, a specialized ice axe made for zombie combat. The Brainer's blade can become heated, being hot enough to cut/burn through an Umbrella Corps Bite Guard/arm and helmeted head.

Firearms:

In the on rails shooters, gunfire from any weapon is able to destroy environmental objects. This ranges from smashing through locked doors and busting a dresser to making cars explode or even busting the statue in the main hall of the Police Department.
Custom TMP: A modified SMG.
AK-74: An assault rifle.
H&K P8: HUNK's 3DS sidearm.
MUP: The standard 9mm handgun.
Lightning Hawk: The trusty magnum, great for popping heads.
LE5: Totally not an MP5, guys.
W-870: A pump shotgun.

Explosives:

Hand grenades
Incendiary grenades
Flashbangs in both throwable and launcher forms. These can instakill Ganados Plagas, super parasites which are sensitive to UV light.
Proximity mines.

Special Gear:

Active Camouflage: HUNK can briefly become invisible. HUNK can deactivate it at will, but the camo will also break if he attacks or takes damage.
- The camo returns in Raid Mode, oddly enough.
The Bite Guard: An arm guard that extends into a small shield that can deflect incoming gunfire. Couldn't find much footage showing it off clearly, so here's the promo poster featuring a bullet deflect. It's coated in a resin that sticks to zombies, preventing them from getting closer while making them into temporary meat shields.
Terrain Spikes: Umbrella Corps boots basically have built in crampons good for climbing and zombie stomping.
Zombie Jammer: This back mounted device generates an electromagnetic field that disorients zombies. While it's active you can even bump into them without provoking them. Of course, if the device is destroyed the horde will notice you.

“This is war, survival’s your responsibility.”

I recently moved to a place that has a window air conditioner and it helps me a lot with tinnitus, the air conditioner is somehow a bit close to my bed, since the room is small. also i was researching that coffee and sugar can spike the T sound in many people.

Hi there! 👋 first time pc user here, and I’m being gifted a heckin chonker of a pc for my first rig, a lower end R15. Specs below-
PROCESSOR: 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 13700F (16-Core, 54MB Cache, 2.1GHz to 5.2GHz P-Core Turbo Max 3.0)
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 11 Home, English
GRAPHICS CARD: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4070 Ti, 12GB GDDR6X
MEMORY: 16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz
HARD DRIVE: 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD
CHASSIS: Dark side of the Moon, 750W PSU, Air Cooled CPU & Solid Side Panel
Msrp- 2,899 My folks purchased it for- $2200 on sale
With that, I have a few questions. I’ve been doing some homework , and to me, it sounds pretty decent but my concerns lie primarily with the cooling. Everything I’ve looked up or watched so far has said the cpu gets stupid hot so the liquid cooling is the way to go. So I suppose my questions are as follows.

What do some of you more knowledgeable folk think of this rig for a newbie to PCs?
Should I be worried about the cooling at all or focus my attention elsewhere? If so, what should I do?
Say later on down the road I wanna be extra, regardless if I NEED it, and I wanted to add a AIO, is this possible on an Alienware? And would it have to be proprietary or could it be 3rd party? ( bonus to this question: can you even buy Alienware liquid coolers solo?)
I’ve been seeing a lot of people on here shortly before posting this say that there are a lot of issues with it black/blue screening. Is that something I need to be worried about with the lower specs?

I understand that with these beefy bois you don’t get much upgradability, but I dont know how limited it is and I can’t find anything on this specific model (everything everywhere showcases the $4000+ liquid cooled models and zilch about the air cooled). Any help would be appreciated! It’s already been bought and is shipping so I just wanna know what I can look forward to and what I need to start saving for. Thanks y’all!

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.

CPU	Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor
CPU Cooler	Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE ARGB 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
Mother Board	Gigabyte B760 GAMING X AX ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory	G.Skill Flare X5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory
Storage	MSI SPATIUM M470 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Video Card	MSI VENTUS 3X OC GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB Video Card
Case	Fractal Design Pop Air RGB ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply	Corsair RM750e (2023) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
System	Microsoft Windows 11 Home Retail - USB 64-bit
Monitor	Pixio PX243 23.8" 1920 x 1080 165 Hz Monitor

This is a PC Part list that I have been working on. I have been reviving suggestions from other people and a few from this page. So this is pretty much finalized. So I wanted to see if anyone has any kind of other suggestions before I finalize this. In total price is about $1800 and I want to keep it at this price unless there is an opportunity to make it lower. Here is the link for the part list https://pcpartpicker.com/list/69r86r so take a look if you want and please let me know what you think about this list if it's any good.

Salvaged from a recent thread that got deleted by the OP very fast. Obviously all half-baked and unsubtle, but with the current power creep, there's hardly any danger of overdoing this.
Koda: add forward momentum to both his breakers.
Lord Zedd: Shock Quake goes all screen. Vicious Poke has a sane recovery time.
Robo Knight: special strike can't be blocked if the first shot hits; both breakers are cancellable.
Kendrix: add forward momentum MY GOD IT'S 2023 WHY ARE THERE CHARACTERS WHO CAN'T LAND A HIT THREE PIXELS AWAY?
MMPR Trini: make spinning blades cancellable, make flying dagger as quick as e. g. Taylor's darts.
Zeo Kat: make Feint Palm into a breaker and/or increase the air time of her fireball's launch.
Zeo Tommy: give his breaker a slight "pull in" effect (like Blaze's strike, DS Zack's counter etc.), so it can be safely used from a dash away/right after his flying kicks.
Ecliptor: reduce start-up time across the board and/or make some of his moves cancellable before the first hit.
Snide: make Personality Split cancellable.
Ryan: I dunno, make his overpriced Lightspeed Kick stun instead of knockback so it can better combo into Shockwave Slam?
Sam: revert the nerfs.
Gemma: make her breaker less stupid.
Zhane: reduce Star Shot recovery time.
Ninjor: make Burning Ninja start-up less ridiculous, make Deceptive Dash travel faster.
Kendal: make Reverse Blas cancellable after the first hit/miss.
Zeo Jason: make Lord's Assault go full screen like Sam's assist.
Sledge: buff damage.
Udonna: reduce Blizzard Rush cost, buff Bizzard Rush damage, fix Cold Spell range issues (knocking the target out of its own rage, preventing the final strike).
Wes: reduce Split Second start-up a bit.
Jen: make Temporal Takedown cancellable before the first hit, and/or improve its range.
Both Wes and Jen: give their Time Strike breakers a half-second time stop window like a super mode activation (with no energy recovery, but with an option to cancel the whole thing).
Cassie: reduce Wind Chaser recovery time, and/or make Turbo Charge move faster & hit farther.
Lauren: reduce Samurai Strike to 3ep.
Astronema: improve Wrath Staff damage.
Psycho Red: make Psycho Rage second hit stagger, knockdown, microstun or something - in short, prevent blocks between 2nd and 3rd hits.
Green Tommy v1: reduce Dragon Charge cost to 4.
Green Tommy v2: reduce Flying Assault cost to 6, that's as high as any move has the right to cost. Make it so that if Power Beatdown hits an enemy in the air, they stay in the air after the last hit instead of forcibly landing.
White Tiger Tommy: make his flying kicks unblockable after the first hit lands, like Zeo Tommy's.
2017 movie guys: emphasise their niche as clumsy, unwieldy, easily blockable, damage machines like 2017 Kim currently is. That is, buff their damage across the board, then buff it some more. They won't be meta picks even with 99999 base damage across the board, I guarantee.

I've been having so much fun with this little story. Here's part one if you'd like to read it in its entirety! Alien learns what "sleep" is and how humans prefer to do it in a comfy bed with blankets and pillows. And they find it utterly adorable.
To summarize:
Vr'ocria and Human Aldrick were sent on a survey mission together. Things went south, Aldrick made sure they were safe, and then Vr'ocria learned what human sleep is and how vulnerable humans are when they sleep. Vr'ocria's people don't sleep, but enter stasis, a form of rest in which they typically stand, and they are still slightly aware of their surroundings. Vr'ocria finds human sleep utterly adorable, and also decided she would protect Aldrick while he slept. And she also developed a massive crush on him. (Her scales turning purple is her version of blushing)
Vr’ocria ran the engine diagnostic again, and again it came back inconclusive. She slammed her fist on the dusty controls. “Blasted thing.” Of course she got stuck with the rusty, crusty old shuttle pod that no one else wanted. Why did these things always happen to her? She just wanted to do her job!
Not for the first time, she wished she had Human Aldrick for company.
It had been two moon cycles since Vr’ocria had last seen Aldrick. They’d only served on the one away mission together, and once they returned to the ship, they’d been sent their separate ways. They worked in separate departments, after all.
But that didn’t stop her from missing him. She’d only spent a few solar cycles with him, but somehow was already totally enamored by the human–the human who was supposed to be a terrifying, dangerous, nearly indestructible monster.
Vr'ocria had met a handful of humans during her service, and they were all polite enough. But Aldrick was the first human she'd ever spent any extended alone time with. It was on that away mission that Vr’ocria learned what “sleep” was: The human form of rest in which the human becomes completely unconscious, and thus, totally defenseless. Something about learning humans were even able of being defenseless at all, much less in such a complete way, had changed her entire perspective on them. She’d grown up always being told to fear the humans, the wild, indestructible humans.
She had been nervous enough to quake in her scales, but he was nothing but kind to her. And when she saw him sleep for the first time–planets, what a blasted cutie. During their few cycles together, she always stood by him when he slept and she went into stasis. Her people were still slightly aware of their surroundings while in stasis, so she would be able to protect him if there was danger.
She couldn’t help but worry about him ever since they separated. Who was going to keep watch while he slept? What if something happened, what if there was an ambush or a ship malfunction and he couldn’t wake up fast enough? She wanted to be there for him…
Vr’ocria cringed at the memory of when she asked her nestmate, Galek, about human mating rituals.
“You want to mate him? Are you insane?”
"No! I mean–well…" Vr'ocria reminded herself to keep her voice down; Aldrick was still sleeping in the next room. "I…Galek, listen–"
"He's a human!" Even through the communicator, she could hear his scales snap. "He's dangerous!"
"He's nice! When the away mission went wrong he made sure we were safe and–" her voice caught when she remembered the way Aldrick strolled fearlessly through a thunderstorm, one warm hand gripping her wrist, unflinching at every thunderclap and lightning strike in the sky that rattled her to her core, as he led them to a cave for shelter.
Galek sighed. "Vr'ocria, let it go. We are not compatible with humans, they do things differently anyway. They don't mate."
Vr'ocria stilled. "They don't?"
"No. Well, kind of? Ugh, why am I even telling you this…"
"Because I'm your favorite nestmate," Vr'ocria grinned.
"Shut up." There was no bite to his words. "Anyway, what I mean is that humans usually court each other first, and then mate. I think they call it 'marriage.' But that's all I know."
She hummed in thought. "This is good to know."
"Vr'ocria, I mean it." Galek was back in protective-nestmate-mode. "Drop it, it's a terrible idea. Humans are…it's just a bad idea, okay?"
"I'm not gonna do anything," she mumbled.
And what if he doesn't even like me anyway?
Her scales faded to a faint red and her shoulders slumped at the thought. Back in the present, she absent-mindedly flicked through the controls on the cracked panel in front of her. Maybe Galek was right, and she should just stay away from Aldrick altogether.
“Agent Vr’ocria, report.”
Vr’ocria jumped at the tinny voice that suddenly filled the cabin. She pressed the comm button. “Commander, this pod is–” she stopped herself from using a few choice words– “in a state of engine malfunction. I can’t even diagnose a problem. I’m not going anywhere in this thing.”
”Stand by.”
Vr’ocria drummed her fingers on the consol.
”Agent Vr’ocria, you’ve been reassigned to shuttle pod Delta. You will join a crewmate there.”
That’s right, Delta was a two-person pod. She groaned inwardly at the prospect of working with someone else in such a cramped space.
Vr’ocria tried not to drag her feet as she approached the Delta pod. The loading door was already open, and she climbed inside. “Hello? I’ve been re–”
“Vr’ocria!”
She turned towards the cockpit, and her scales flashed to purple in record time. “Aldrick?”
The human was beaming as he maneuvered through the tight space to approach her. “It’s so good to see you again!”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, silently urging her scales to go back to green. “Aren’t you in engineering?”
He shrugged, suddenly looking everywhere except her face. “I uh...I asked to be transferred to the survey department.”
“Why?”
His cheeks turned pink. They seemed to do that a lot. Vr’ocria really needed to ask the ship’s doctor if that was normal for humans or if he was getting sick. “Engineering just wasn’t doing it for me, y’know? Needed a change of pace. I volunteered for that one survey mission and it turns out I liked it, so why not try it full time?" He turned back towards the cockpit. “We should get going! I think this mission is gonna be more fun than the last one. The planet we've been assigned has a more stable atmosphere, so fewer storms."
So she and Aldrick would be working together, alone, again. Vr'ocria swallowed hard before following him to the cockpit. Oh, planets, why did these things always happen to her?
—
The trip to planet Theta-7 was quiet. Aldrick occasionally tried to engage her in conversation, but Vr'ocria pretended to be engrossed in her file pad. Guilt prodded her spine with every one-word answer and noncommittal grunt, but she was determined to keep her distance. Aldrick eventually fell quiet, and her scales nearly curled in on themselves in shame.
She avoided looking in his direction, but she still heard the sound of his canteen unscrewing and the slosh of liquid as he took a sip. Her nostrils flared at the odd, bitter-sable scent.
When she realized she recognized the smell, her eyes blew wide and she whirled to face him, dropping her pad. "What are you doing?" She nearly shrieked.
Aldrick lowered the canteen from his lips, looking startled. "Uh…drinking my coffee?"
"Coffee?" Another foreign word. "That's remfrylie! It's a deadly poison!" Her blood was rushing through her veins so fast she feared her scales would start to swell.
Aldrick laughed.
Laughed?
Her scales turned yellow and stood on end. "What is this?" She asked indignantly.
"I'm so sorry, Vr'ocria," he rubbed his eyes, still chortling. "I forgot, I should've warned you–humans call remfrylie 'coffee.' It's a beverage, we drink it. The caffeine in it gives us a boost of energy."
She stared at him.
As if making a point, he took another big gulp from the canteen, and smiled at her. "See? Totally fine."
Slowly, her blood slowed and her scales laid back down. But there was still a thrill of fear deep inside her–she'd become so enamored with him that she'd forgotten how dangerous he was. Drinking pure poison? Just for a boost of energy?
She turned away, embarrassed, a little afraid, and a little angry at him for scaring her like that. She bent over to pick up her pad from where it fell at her feet and went back to mindlessly flicking through her files.
Fabric rustled as Aldrick shifted in the seat next to her. "Hey," he said softly, "I really am sorry for scaring you. I didn't mean to do that."
"It's okay." Her voice was clipped and short.
Aldrick was quiet for a moment. "Is everything okay?" He asked slowly. "Have I…I mean, have I done something to offend you? I'm really sorry if–"
Guilt washed over her again. "No, no you haven't done anything." She finally looked over and tried for a weak smile. Now that she was actually looking at him, she could see the way he'd turned his whole body to face her, his fingers fidgeting at the edge of his seat and his warm brown eyes filled with worry.
Oh, that's right, humans had color in their eyes. Her people only had large black pupils, but humans had pupils with–what's the word–an "iris." She'd seen humans with brightly colored irises before, and while she found them beautiful, they also freaked her out. It was just so very strange.
But Aldrick's eyes…
The brown was a little closer to her own black, making them feel more familiar. In the tiny, cramped cabin, she realized that this was the first time she'd ever gotten a chance to really study his eyes up close. The brown seemed to swirl, and she noticed that there were layers of shades and colors floating around his pupils. And when natural light from a sun shining through the window hit them just right–
Aldrick cleared his throat awkwardly and turned to face forwards again. "Looks like we're here."
Vr'ocria looked forward and saw Theta-7's solar system quickly approaching. Oh, right. They had a mission to do.
—
Theta-7 was warm, just how she liked it. The sand, not so much. She tightened her boot laces twice to keep sand from finding its way inside.
The mission, thankfully, went smoothly. Walk, scan, record. Walk, scan, record. Being out in the field was different from working aboard the ship like she usually did, but she found she enjoyed it. With the agreeable weather, she quite liked the peaceful repetitiveness of the work.
Although, things were still awkward between her and Aldrick. She fought the urge to make excuses to drift away from him–since it was just the two of them, they needed to remain within eyesight of each other in case anything happened. As a result, she had a front row seat to Aldrick’s human antics. He climbed trees like it was nothing, crossed a stream by easily hopping from boulder to boulder, nibbled on plants he claimed were edible but that still made Vr’ocria’s scales ripple with unease, and even insisted on approaching a ferocious, furry creature with his hand outstretched and cooing “Hi kitty! Hi baby! Come here, let me give you scritchies, come on–”
Vr’ocria didn’t know what a “kitty” was, but a baby it definitely wasn’t. “Aldrick, please,” she called weakly.
“But she’s so cute!”
“It’s got claws! And look at its big teeth!”
Aldrick grinned as the creature crept closer. Its head came to Aldrick’s hip from where he knelt, still reaching out with his fingers and making a scratching motion in the air. “Naw, she’s just a little baby, aren’t you sweetie? Come ‘ere!”
Vr’ocria trembled on the spot as the creature was finally within arm’s reach of Aldrick. He began scratching its sandy-colored head, and to her disbelief, the creature closed its big eyes and leaned into his touch. “Oh, yes,” Aldrick positively giggled, “you’re such a sweet little baby, aren’t you?”
Vr’ocria could only stare, stunned, as he continued scratching the creature’s head, then its cheek and chin–extremely close to its massive fangs.
“All kitties like scritchies, huh?” he cooed at the…kitty.
Okay, they were kind of cute.
It, she corrected herself. The ”kitty” was cute. Not him. Definitely not.
She didn’t notice her scales flushing a soft pink as she watched him nearly pull the “kitty” into his lap, beaming and petting it. A gentle smile crossed her lips.
Aldrick glanced over at her and tilted his head. “You’re pink. That’s new, I haven’t seen that color on you before.”
Vr’ocria’s blood froze and her scales immediately flashed to purple. Blast. Shit. Fuck. Great, now she was picking up human curse words.
He blinked at the sudden change in color.
"Oh it’s–” she coughed, “it’s nothing. Just the heat, I think.”
“Are you okay?” He eased away from the creature as he stood, and it darted off into a hole in the rocks. “Do we need to take a break?”
Stop being so NICE, she growled inwardly. “No no,” she squeaked instead. “I’m fine. Let’s keep going.” She buried her head in her scanner and walked briskly towards the next scanning zone.
When night fell, the two of them made their way back to the shuttle pod. They still had scanning to do, but it wasn’t safe to work through the night, so they agreed it was best for them to take rest inside the pod.
Once they were safely inside, Aldrick laid out what he called a “bedroll” on the floor of the cockpit, between the two pilot seats. Still dressed in his uniform, he laid down and shifted until he appeared as comfortable as he could get. Tugging a blanket over himself, he glanced toward Vr’ocria. “Well...good night.”
“Sleep well,” she murmured. She stood in the short aisle in front of him, facing the door, and began to enter stasis. Despite how much she’d come to struggle with her feelings for him, she was still determined to protect him while he slept.
It was in the middle of the night when Vr’ocria snapped back to full awareness.
Thud.
There it was again.
Shuffle shuffle.
She whirled around and threw herself on top of Aldrick, clapping a hand over his mouth as he jerked awake with a muffled shout.
“Shh!” she hissed. “Something’s out there.”
He stared up at her with wide eyes as she slowly removed her hand. She didn’t move from her position on top of him as she looked up and around the cabin, trying to discern where the sound was coming from.
Thud.
“The door,” Aldrick whispered, looking over her shoulder.
There was one last thud, then a beeping sound.
”Shit!”
Without warning, Aldrick was grabbing her shoulders and flipping them so that he was on top, and before she could even react, there was a core-rattling BOOM.
She couldn’t hear herself scream as a shockwave blew fire and debris over them, and then everything went dark.
Vr’ocria groaned as she came to, her head pounding. She found herself sprawled in the sand, looking up at the night sky. She slowly pushed herself into a sitting position, her limbs heavy. “What…” when her eyes focused, she gasped in horror.
The side of the shuttle pod where the door used to be now had a big hole blasted through it. Debris and supplies were strewn out across the ground, and judging by the drag marks, it looked like someone had dragged her body out and thrown her haphazardly into the sand.
She leapt to her feet, stumbled, fell, and jumped up again. Forcing her legs to steady under her, she stormed into the pod, and came face-to-face with a Norvidian pirate.
“Fucking pirate,” she roared, drawing her fist back and punching him right in the face. He yelped and dropped the thing he was dragging, and with horror, she realized it was Aldrick.
Something deep and primal flooded through her veins, and she grabbed the Norvidian's head. She slammed it against the wall, once, twice, three times, before dropping him to the ground, where he oozed yellow blood.
“Well that was fucking scary.”
Vr’ocria snapped out of her haze.
Aldrick was struggling to climb to his feet, and she darted forward to catch him before his face hit the floor. “Oh planets, oh my–Aldrick, are you alright?”
He rubbed a hand over his face, still looking dazed. “Yeah, I think–I think I’m okay.” He laughed, and it sounded a little hysterical. “Did you kill that guy?”
She looked over at the pirate, and somehow, she felt no remorse. “I hope so,” she growled. Logically, she knew the pirate was probably just tossing the two of them outside so he could raid their supplies. But the sight of him dragging a limp and pale Aldrick was burned into her memory, and her bright yellow scales rippled with rage.
“Jesus, you’re fucking scary when you’re angry.” He laughed again. “It’s kinda hot.” He turned pink and his face twisted in an expression she didn’t recognize. “Uh, pretend I didn’t say that.”
Vr’ocria didn’t know what it meant for something to be “hot,” so she played along and pretended she didn’t hear that. “We need to get you cleaned up,” she said instead. “Can you stand?”
Aldrick started to shift his legs, then went tense and dropped his head to her shoulder with a groan, fingers gripping her arms. It was then that Vr’ocria was able to lean forward enough to see his back, and she gasped.
The back of his shirt was in tatters, stained red with blood. Cuts and burns raced across his skin, and Vr’ocria knew that if she had taken the blast like that, she would be dead.
“Aldrick–” her throat felt thick, “Your back…shit–”
His breathing was ragged against her shoulder. “Hurts like a bitch,” he ground out, “but it won’t kill me. Just need to disinfect and bandage it.”
She laid him down on his stomach as gently as possible and rushed to the cockpit, praying that the first aid kit was undamaged. “Thank the planets,” she breathed as her fingers closed around the handle of an intact box.
She tried to steady her shaking fingers as she gingerly cut his shirt away and began dressing the wounds according to the kit’s instructions for treating humans. She also dressed the few injuries that ran down the back of his legs. Luckily–or unluckily–the damage was concentrated on his back. While she worked, she could see his muscles tense tight enough to crack, his teeth grinding and his hands clenched into fists so tight that his knuckles were white. She knew there had to be painkillers in the first aid kit, but she wanted to get his wounds dressed as fast as possible to prevent him from bleeding anymore. All she could do in the meantime was whisper quiet apologies.
Once she’d gotten him bandaged up, she finally dug through the kit. “Here,” she said as she fumbled with a bottle, “I found some pain killers, they’re supposed to be fast acting. You just let them dissolve in your mouth.”
She could tell he was in too much pain to move, so she held two of the pills up to his lips. He let her feed them to him, and after a few moments, he visibly began to relax. “Oh, that’s good shit,” he slurred into the floor.
“Feel better?” Vr’ocria asked hopefully.
“Yeah.” His voice was still crackly and weak. “Still aches a bit, but I don’t wanna scream about it anymore.”
“Good.” She stood and draped a blanket over him. “Now, stay put and don’t try to move. I need to figure out how to get us out of here.”
The shuttle pod wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. When she investigated the control panel, she found that the blast had knocked out communications, and their personal communicators were wrecked as well. “Great,” she mumbled.
Making her way back outside, she glanced around until she saw the pirate’s tiny craft a distance away. He must’ve landed out there so we wouldn’t hear him, she mused. She was reluctant to leave Aldrick alone, but she jogged the distance and pried the door open. The thing was a rust bucket, stinky and creaky, and she quickly decided she didn’t want to risk loading Aldrick up in that thing.
What to do, what to do…
Then she remembered: There was a survey outpost a few kilometers from here. She could take him there for professional treatment, rest, and to contact their ship.
When she got back to the pod, Aldrick was standing, leaning against the wall.
"How are you feeling?" She asked as she approached.
His eyes seemed clearer now as he met her gaze. "I've been worse," he said with a crooked smile.
Vr'ocria thanked the planets for human durability.
She let out a breath. "There's a survey outpost near here, due east. It's a few hours' walk. Do you think you can make it?"
Rather than answering, he stooped to pick up a blanket from the floor, shook out the dirt and debris, and threw it around his shoulders to cover his naked torso. "Let's go." He hopped easily out of the pod, and Vr'ocria could only shake her head in disbelief as she followed him. Humans truly were unbreakable.
It was still nighttime, but the clouds in the sky had cleared to reveal two big, bright moons that illuminated their way. Vr'ocria kept a close eye on Aldrick as they walked. While at first he seemed totally unaffected by his wounds now that they'd been dressed, she was beginning to notice the tight lines around his eyes, his white knuckles where he fisted the blanket, and the way each step he took was just a little shaky.
After walking in silence for nearly an hour, she finally found her voice. "Thank you," she said quietly, "for saving me back there."
He looked at her with those warm brown eyes and she thought she would melt. "Anytime."
Stupid purple scales.
They were halfway to the outpost when Aldrick collapsed. His knees hit the ground and Vr'ocria darted forward with a yelp to catch him before he went all the way down.
"Aldrick!" She shook him. "Look at me! Hey, hey…"
But all he could do was groan as his head lolled in her hands, slumping forward so that he sagged against her. Vr'ocria tried not to panic, but her scales stood on end anyway. "Aldrick!" This time her voice cracked.
Okay, okay, calm down, he's gonna be fine, he's human, it's gonna be okay… But doubt still twinged in her spine.
She ruffled her scales. Snap out of it.
"Okay. Aldrick," she took his face in her hands, "I need to put you on my back, but you'll have to help me."
He didn't respond.
She slapped him.
"Ow!" His eyes shot open. "Jesus, woman–"
"Look at me. I need to put you on my back, and you have to help me."
He blinked, eyes still cloudy, but finally nodded. It took some maneuvering, but Vr'ocria finally got him situated on her back–"piggy back style," he called it. She held his legs around her waist, and used the blanket to tie him to her. She could feel his warmth and heartbeat from where he was pressed against her back. His breath ghosted across the nape of her neck, sending tingles over her scales.
She tightened her grip around his knees as she walked. My human.
"You're pink again," Aldrick mumbled behind her ear.
Vr'ocria pressed on.
—
By the time they reached the outpost, her back was aching and her feet were sore, but she didn't care. She waved down the watchmen, and within minutes they were being swarmed by a med team. Aldrick was now fully unconscious and much too pale, and the medics wasted no time loading him up on a stretcher and carrying him to the med bay. When they tried to insist that Vr'ocria go to a separate room for evaluation, she snarled and snapped her yellow scales until they backed off.
She wasn't leaving Aldrick's side for a minute.
By the next morning, the med team had worked their magic and Aldrick was sleeping peacefully. He was curled on his side like he usually did, his face free of lines, lips parted, softly sighing with each breath.
Stupid human and his stupid cute sleeping.
She brushed his hair from his face, gently trailing her fingers across his cheek. Human skin was much softer compared to her scales, and warmer too. Aldrick had once explained that humans are "mammals," creatures that were "warm blooded." Her people were "cold blooded." Maybe that explained why she always wanted to touch him, hold him, feel his warmth…
Aldrick shifted and sighed, and her breath caught as he leaned into her hand. His eyes cracked open and he gazed blearily up at her. "Hi," he croaked.
She smiled. "Hi."
"You're still pink," he observed. "Are you okay? Did you get checked out?"
Blast all the planets. "I'm okay," she assured him. "My people turn pink when…when, um…I-I'll tell you another time," she stuttered. Galek was going to kill her.
Aldrick reached up to take her hand from where it still rested on his cheek. "Thank you for taking care of me."
She squeezed his hand. "Anytime."
This got so much longer than I thought it would 😂 How do we feel about one more part where these two idiots finally admit their feelings for one another?

Hello all. First off, let me be clear. I’m not attempting myself, I’m trying to get some insight before calling an electrician. I find my self in need of a windows unit air conditioner due to system failure of the central unit, and budgetary constraints that dictate I must consider an alternative.
So I’ve purchased the windows unit. It is s 220 volt, 20 amp unit. 20 is what it says the outlet must be, but not what it requires. With a service panel already maxed out, in addition to a sun panel that is maxed out (space wise not electrically), I’m wondering this.
There is not a 220v outlet in the area of the where the unit will be installed. But in the room next door (less than 12’), there is, that out key is a 30 amp 4 prong plug for my tanning bed. Which gets used 20 minutes every other day.
The AC unit is three prong. And will be used 24/7. Would it be possible to have them extend the tanning bed writing over to the window to power the AC, or will it require a whole new line? Second question is what about a space for the breaker? Would I have to have another sub panel installed? The existing sub panel has the following installed. 100amp sub, 4 spaces. 1) Hvac unit 60amp, . 2) welder 30 amp 3) 5kw heat strip (hvac strip to equal 15kw) 4) tanning bed. Commercial unit, 32 bulbs, 30 amps per label requirement’s.
While posting this the welder outlet comes into play as an option to. That is got my husbands welder which is used 2 hours a year maybe.
But could the tanning bed outlet be extended over and the neutral bypass the outlet and attach directly to the chassis of the ac? Im trying to brace myself on what the estimate will be as well as know if there are potential options for me to save some money?

Hello, I have issues with launching the F4 on W11 with 2560x1440 screen, it always launches in window mode. I have tried to chenge prefs in Documents folder, use Nvidia GeForce optimazer (with full screen, 1440p settings), but all same result. Dous anyone could help me? Thank you in advance.

Hi!
New homeowner here. My husband and I bought a house about 9 months ago and have been doing some much-needed updates. After inheriting a mice infestation, we had our attic insulation redone. It had never been redone (70 yr. old house) and was pretty sparse. The attic was also the home of a mouse colony, and there were a lot of dead mice in the existing insulation.
We had pest-resistant insulation blown in. No complaints - the mice are gone and our house stayed warm all winter. We’ve run into an AC issue when we had a guy out to give a quote, though. We have no AC as of now (just window units) and when he saw our insulation he said we’d need to have all of it removed before we could install an AC. We called up the guy that did our insulation, just asking how much that would cost and if it were possible, and he was super confused - he said no one had ever asked him to remove it before. We’ve paused the project until we can figure out more information.
Is this a real thing? Do any air conditioner installers (sorry for the un-technical term) do AC units in attics with blown-in insulation?
Thanks so much!

Ge window air conditioner eco mode

Is it worth 515