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The return trip to Madhyam somehow felt a great deal faster than the initial voyage to Rājadhānī. Tristan chalked it up to a combination of things—Encroachers seemed to stay out of their way, the winds and sands moving in their favor, and everyone received at least one full night’s rest. With so many bodies, it was easier to split the night watch between all of them.
Tristan shared his gigashank with Zahra, and they filled the time with idle chatter. His thoughts were consumed by the immense amount of work that lay before him, not allowing for anything deeper than brief observations and inquiries.
Cailu had asked him to essentially resolve the same issues on San Island that plagued San Francisco; homelessness and orphaned kittens. Battling Encroachers and Defiled were one thing, but resurrecting a broken economy? That was a task that could take years of designing and implementing. Just how long did Cailu want him to stay on San?
When they did reach Madhyam, the group made a point to visit Ishani at Tristan’s suggestion. It was the least he could do for Zahra after all of her help. They were welcomed just as warmly as their first visit with Zahra’s mother.
“Three men in my house! What an honor!” Ishani fussed between them, her eyes glittering with wonder. “Please, allow me to serve you a small meal before you continue on.” She rested her hands over her stomach and performed the traditional bow.
Tristan returned it, and Cailu was nearly in sync with his movements. Tristan cleared his throat to catch Matt’s attention and was glad when he followed suit.
“It would be our pleasure,” Cailu replied. “Your daughter has been a tremendous help.”
Ishani straightened her back and clutched her hands to her chest. “You bless us both. Sands walk with you, sir.”
There was an unspoken rule on Ichi when someone invited you to stay. The guests were meant to relax and let the members of the household do all the work. But even with Zahra’s help, preparing anything for thirteen people would be no easy feat.
“Ishani, if you’d permit me to, I’d love to help you prepare everything.” Tristan smiled. “I know there are a lot of us.”
“Oh! Me, too!” Cannoli said. She’d been far more chipper during their journey back than Tristan had seen her in a long time. He hoped it was a good sign.
Ishani studied them for a time, eyes flickering to the full group as her tail rocked back and forth in thought. At last, she nodded. “Yes, I would be glad to have your assistance.”
“And mine, of course,” Zahra chimed in. “It is still my house after all.”
Ishani swept an arm over Zahra’s shoulders and hugged her daughter close. “Of course, my sweet. This will always be your home.”
They moved to the modest kitchen while the rest of the group made their way outside. Cannoli set to work on passing out drinks and preparing small plates while Ishani gave Tristan and Zahra instructions for cutting and seasoning meats. While they worked, Ishani’s questions began to roll in like the tide.
“We heard of Magni’s death a little over two days after it happened,” Ishani began. “An Ejderha arrived begging for Sanctuary. How did it happen?”
Zahra pursed her lips. “The Ejderha didn’t say?”
“It is best to hear a tale from a tongue you trust,” Ishani replied.
“Cailu challenged Magni to a sanctioned duel and won,” Tristan said. “He left the throne to Naeemah.”
“Then it is true. That is wonderful news!” Ishani stoked the flames at the stove, hooking a large pot over the coal. “And what of Sanrai?”
Tristan looked up from his diced onyans and over at Zahra.
Zahra’s expression softened. “Sanrai returned to the sands, Mother,” she said softly. “She refused to see reason.”
Ishani froze, her hand hovering over a ladle. A string of expressions passed over her face, her eyes searching into an abyss they could not see.
Even after the hell Sanrai had put them through, Tristan’s heart broke for her mother. He couldn’t imagine how receiving news like that felt, and he desperately searched for the right thing to say. Sanrai was powerful, intense, calculating. She’d driven them out of the city not once, but twice, and very nearly killed Ceres.
“Zahra did everything she could to bring her sister home.” Tristan was careful to keep his words even. “You raised two incredible daughters, Ishani.”
Ishani’s lower lip quivered, and a string of tears trickled from the corners of her eyes.
Zahra stepped forward and embraced her mother in a tight hug.
Tristan quietly set the knife down beside the cutting board and stepped into the hallway. He was surprised to find Cannoli on the other side of the threshold, hugging the doorframe and peeking inside.
Cannoli’s cheeks pinked, and she rapidly blinked her bright ruby eyes. “I-I just didn’t want to interrupt anything,” she whispered.
“I know. You’re not the type to eavesdrop.” Tristan grinned.
“Tristan… how do you do that?”
He blinked. “Do what?”
“You always know just what to say to make someone feel better,” Cannoli murmured. She looked into the kitchen and back at him. “Not just to me, but what you said to Ishani about Sanrai was so kind. Even though Sanrai was never nice to us. Not once.”
It was Tristan’s turn to blush. He ran a hand through his hair and crossed his arms, realizing only a second later that it was a gesture he’d picked up from Matt. He sighed and shook his head. “I just try to put myself in their shoes.”
Cannoli cocked her head to the side and touched her chin. “Why would you want to wear their shoes?”
“No, not actually wear their shoes.” Tristan covered a laugh behind his hand. “What I mean is, I think about what I would want to hear in their situation. Like finding you here. You wouldn’t want me to call you a spy, right?”
“No. I would have felt awful if you thought that.”
“Exactly. It’s important to see things from the other person’s perspective, I think. No real magic to it.”
Cannoli rocked on the balls of her feet. “You make it sound so easy.”
“It takes a lot of practice.” He leaned to the side, seeing if he could catch Zahra’s eye.
Zahra locked his gaze and waved him into the kitchen. Ishani dabbed at her eyes with a cloth and inhaled a deep breath.
“Back to work, then?” Tristan asked Cannoli.
“Yes.” She touched his shoulder and flashed him a brilliant smile. “Thank you, Tristan. For the advice.”
“You’re welcome.” He cupped a hand over hers. “Though, a smile like that will make anyone feel better, Cannoli.”
Cannoli giggled and ducked into the kitchen.
“Apologies for my poor manners, Tristan,” Ishani said as he returned.
“Please, you have nothing to apologize for.” He shook his head. “Besides, cutting onyans makes everyone cry, right?”
Ishani laughed, her mood brightened, and they continued to prepare the afternoon meal.
They were able to serve it in good time, and the conversation was light-hearted and cordial. Everyone seemed to be in high spirits and laughed easily. Tristan was happy to enjoy a meal outside of the citadel. The experience was a lot closer to an intimate family gathering rather than the battle strategy style meetings that every meal in Rājadhānī brought with it.
Tristan finished eating before the others and procured his sketchbook from his [Cat Pack]. With the enchanted pen, he sketched a smiling Zahra. Something about her had changed since they first met. She now carried herself with a grace Tristan recognized in Naeemah, and the determined spark in her eyes had changed to one of excitement. She’d succeeded in her mission, and it showed.
Flipping the page, he made one more drawing. A piercing, ruthless gaze. Lips slanted in a dry, knowing smile. Dark tattoos carved into umber skin. Sanrai looked as alive in his sketch as she did in the shadow of the citadel.
As the others readied to leave, he handed the sketches to Ishani. “These are for you.”
Ishani accepted both pieces of parchment, her lips parting in a silent ‘o.’ Eyes wide, she looked at Tristan. “You protected my daughter, and now you grant me such beautiful gifts. Tristan, I have no way of repaying you.”
“You already have, Ishani.” Tristan touched her wrist. “May the wind carry your desires—”
“And the sun warm your back,” she finished for him, clutching the drawings to her chest. “You are truly Saoirse’s gift to this world, child.”
As they departed Madhyam, Tristan let himself believe Ishani’s words, just a little. He knew he’d need them in the coming weeks.
​
Zahra Pro Tip: Thank you, Tristan, for all you have done for my mother and for me. I will pay your kindness forward.
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Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-7
Chapters 8-10
And we're back on everyone! May has certainly been a busy month so I haven't been able to get around to writing this until just now, but the run continues. Today I finally reap what I've sown & massively blunder while also recruiting two new essential ladies to this run. Without further ado, let's get started!
Chapter 11
This one was actually not the trickiest chapter in the entire series, but I certainly made it worse on myself because I have a need for door keys because I can't always depend on Lara to be around. I take a decent amount of time having Nanna & Karin capture some of these knights while Lara steals Door Keys where she can. Overall this was the slowest point of this streak of chapters where I just loaded up on lances/bows/keys just because I knew I wouldn't have a ton of time to slow down after this point. We kept moving, got to the doors where I burnt 1 key just to keep some of my squishier units out of ballista range & get to Kempf ASAP. Surprisingly Fred refused to be a fool and actually corner camped & used his vulnerary which gave me way more breathing room than I expected. I captured what I could with Big Mac in the throne room & tapped Kempf with Nanna to get him outta there. Overall a smooth chapter for how much I usually struggle with a full team & we're off to 11x!
Chapter 11x
Ok so this chapter was really finnicky because the top half of the map can't actually be cleared by Fred & I really really need to get to Olwen fast. She's my first mage & by god I need to use all these Thunder tomes I've been saving up. So Lara gets warped up & saves the now defenseless Fred with a Paragon Sword & Neir Scroll in hand to get more build levels. Otherwise I had Tanya & Karin in the main hallway because Machuya had to rest up. Selphina certainly chipped through the hallway, but otherwise it was a slow burn through the hallway because I couldn't heal without backing up to Safy. This whole ordeal took a few attempts because of Lara not being a combat unit, Tanya & Karin crawling through the melee, and me waiting out Meteor to make sure it didn't kill Olwen. Once I actually managed to save Olwen the chapter became far more consistent, but the amount of soldiers filing up in the top side meant the children couldn't make it out sadly. Olwen & Lara tried their hardest but with Fred constantly getting captured it was a struggle. Overall it was a difficult chapter, but we made it out with a decent haul of generic loot & a new cornerpiece to my army with a lot of training ahead of her.
I actually want to sidetrack for a minute and talk about how unique of a position Olwen is in. While she has generally bad ranks & pretty mediocre stats she's going to be among the most important units in the run. I've been saving wind & thunder tomes for a good reason, training Olwen is my fast track to getting a good magic unit. Out of all my options, Linoan is good but is stuck at 5 move until Chapter 21, Nanna only gets magic damage on Earth Sword, and frankly I don't know if I'll be getting Miranda. I very well may be stuck with Olwen being the best trained mage for most of the game, especially the more difficult outdoor chapters of the midgame. For as much as Olwen is such a weirdly balanced unit in a normal FE5 run, she's going to rapidly excel because of how rare magic damage is. I'm going to talk about this later, but keep in mind how important Olwen will be & how she grows.
Chapter 12
Hey so remember how I said my actions would bite me later? Yeah here it is, both Karin & Safy are exhausted in this chapter & I didn't kill Fred so I'm stuck with this. After much trial & error I simply fled to the top corridor with my army, let Fred get killed, and ran for the end. Also on a side note we get Mareeta, my 3rd sword unit and one with a really good promo. She's going to be used & hopefully end up decent. I managed to use Mareeta to capture Salem so only Machuya got slept. Captured the boss for a neat Vantage Manual & we made a clean getaway without any unique treasure. It was a surprisingly easier clear when I decided to not train Olwen nor capture more axes for Machuya. No arena grinding & no houses, but hey it was clean & quick.
Chapter 12x
So hey I'm continuing to reap what I sow, Lara is completely exhausted & unable to participate in this chapter! I now don't have a dancer, woo hoo! Otherwise I really don't have much to say, I warped Salem to get Perne out, Tina burned the Thief staff because I couldn't steal it with Perne, and all the treasures + 2 extra dancers were captured. Good loot all around & a terrible result with not getting a dancer. This will become a pretty massive problem later on, but for now I get a real Thief Fighter! I also get Tina, but there will be more words on her in later parts as she will eventually become important.
Thoughts
So with two somehow simple chapters & two more complex as normal chapters we leave behind our little journey & arrive at Tahra next time. Overall I'm getting to the point where max deploy via fatigue isn't an option so I'm going to have to space out my staff users between Tina, Safy, and Nanna. Overall the next few chapters will be a practice in roster management which will be "fun" as the Kaga fans would say. It's only going to get far harder, but overall from a mildly more analytical perspective we're moving our roster into a 2 side split of how I'm going to deploy & make some form of parity between actual units & training projects for lategame. Hopefully it won't be too long until the next part, but for now I'll leave you with the roster stats.
Tanya didn't change much, she's better than Selphina at least
Safy I am once again asking for 10 skill
Machuya my beloved meatwall
Karin isn't too different from the last post, she was out of commission for her important chapters
Level 20 Lara!
Nanna approaching 20/20 cap
Selphina literally didn't level up
Olwen's Minor Progress
On the next episode we'll get our 2nd mage, 2nd flier, and a bunch of Stam Drinks. Hope everyone enjoyed this & if you've got any questions please let me know & I'll try to answer the best I can. Thanks for reading through!

I have a lot of devices which appear on the wrong network, at least as far as FW's idea of network.
The devices actually do appear on the correct network, and do work (more or less) correctly -- more on that in subsequent.
For instance, I can delete a device entry, to try and get FW to fix the network field, and I will see an alert telling me that X-device just appeared on Y-network and was assigned a Y-appropriate address, and is in quarantine.
If I then go to examine the device record (usually to edit the device name) I will see that FW still thinks the device is on the Z-network (which, in many cases, is not possible, as they are WiFi devices and the Z-network is not on WiFi).
​
I have learned that sometimes I can just pull down the device record to refresh, and subsequently, it seems to move to the Y-network: IE, it corrects.
​
What does the "network" field signify in the device record? It seems not to signify the actual network the device is on in many cases. They remain consistently wrong even as the device in question remains for days on the one network it is actually capable of connecting to (mainly ioT, WiFi attached devices have this issue)
​
If certain rules can apply to a group of devices deemed (correctly or not) to be on a network, then should not one expect the network designation to actually reflect reality? Perhaps it does not matter as all network-specific rules will, by necessity, be subnet-specific, so moving between networks gets me the moving between network-specific rules I desire/deserve.
I am aware that unless DHCP is being used, FW will not necessarily see a wifi-attached device roaming (manually) amongst the WiFi networks. I suppose that once FW does observe a device move between networks, it will see a new IP address (natch: one matching the particular WiFi-LAN subnet) and update the device record's IP address, but why does it not fix the "network" field?
​
Just to clarify: this does assume that the MAC address of the device remains constant whenever it connects via WiFi. I am not sure what my expectations are if I cloned the hard-wired MAC address to the WiFi address. Not that I want to do that, but I would expect the FW to get somewhat confused. Perhaps there needs to be a per-network IP display in the device record.
IE:
{ name: made-up-device,
MAC:"00:11:22:33:44:55",
network: { net1: ip1, first-seen, last-seen, net2: ip2, first-seen, last-seen, ...} ,
...
}
​
I'd like to be able to create new network entries, as above, and pre-assign fixed-ip addresses.
Currently, I have to log in to the device, turn on fixed ip, reconnect, find the device record, click on the fixed-ip (in the browser-based app), and then turn DHCP back on.

Motivation — A Close Reading of Tea Time

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

Prelude to the Close Reading

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

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

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

A ringing of bells.

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

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

Existentialism.

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

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

Genre conventions as grammar.

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

What the fuck is happening?

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

Pre-TtH Context

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

Nimander 1

Rum-induced memories.

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

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

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

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

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

Dal Honese burial practices.

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

Finding a tower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts

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

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

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

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It took quite a few years to figure out how to teach nature-illiterate high school students introductory biology. Richard Louv's The Last Child in the Woods (2008, Algonquin Books) reinforced in me the notion that Biology as a subject was being taught backwards. Aldo Leopold said as much in 1938. For a ninth grader, the notion that submicroscopic biochemical processes such as the Calvin Cycle or protein synthesis are more basic than finding oneself at home in his or her biological community is simply incorrect. We’re teaching biology without context. We need to get kids into the field, seeing and hearing Nature, learning to observe, question, hypothesize, and design experiments. Later, we can ferret out the subtle processes that drive the organism. This book is a manual for biology teachers, beginning with nature-literacy. The chapters contain field experiments to address biodiversity measurement, population size estimation, community similarity, transect analysis, natural selection, interspecific competition, and landscape boundaries. I teach these concepts during the fall and spring, when the weather is favorable.The cold months can be spent in the lab to study enzyme activity, calorimetry, measurements of cellular respiration and photosynthesis, osmosis and diffusion, DNA extraction and electrophoresis, genetics, and modeling of molecular systems and processes. It’s also a good time for microscopy and drawing skills development.
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I've been trying to figure out how to install this mod for 3 hours now, and it's getting incredibly frustrating. I'm not the best when it comes to modding or computors, so most of the phrases used in this community fly over my head. I tried to learn but it's... slow going. Anyway, because of this, I do not understand how I'm supposed to install this mod.
These are the instructions.
- INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO INSTALL -

1. Download Vampiric Thirst - Dawnguard Edition
   
2. Open and Save Vampiric Thirst in the CK64 for Skyrim Special Edition
   
3. Extract the Oldrim BSA into Loose files (Oldrim BSA's do not work in SSE)
   
4. Download Vampiric Thirst Redone and Install it/load it after Vampiric Thirst
   
5. Play the Damn Thing Already... You can thank me later!!
   

First off, I don't know what CK64 is. I looked around in my Skyrim folders and couldn't find anything. I looked it up and google says that it's the creation kit, but I can't find that either. So I already failed on step two.
Second, I don't know how to extract BSA into loose files. I downloaded the mod manually and extracted it using 7zip, then I went inside the folder that showed up and tried to extract the BSA file too, but it would let me. So I'm not sure what to do there.
I understand everything else, but I just can't figure out those two things. I imagine it's pretty simple, since I've spent an hour and a half scouring the internet and reddit for a tutorial on at least one of these things and couldn't find anything, so I guess I'm missing something really obvious. I didn't want to ask for help since something so seemingly simple seems like it would be a waste of time, but I'm out of options, so here I am.
Can someone please provide an alternate explanation for this?
Thank you in advance.

For young biology teachers who are looking for inspiration and suggestions, I offer this free manual that addresses teaching methods that take today's high school students directly into Nature as an introduction to Biology. I developed it across 40 years of blissful teaching. Enjoy it! Have fun with it!
It took quite a few years to figure out how to teach nature-illiterate high school students introductory biology. Richard Louv's The Last Child in the Woods (2008, Algonquin Books) reinforced in me the notion that Biology as a subject was being taught backwards. Aldo Leopold said as much in 1938. For a ninth grader, the notion that submicroscopic biochemical processes such as the Calvin Cycle or protein synthesis are more basic than finding oneself at home in his or her biological community is simply incorrect. We’re teaching biology without context. We need to get kids into the field, seeing and hearing Nature, learning to observe, question, hypothesize, and design experiments. Later, we can ferret out the subtle processes that drive the organism. This book is a manual for biology teachers, beginning with nature-literacy. The chapters contain field experiments to address biodiversity measurement, population size estimation, community similarity, transect analysis, natural selection, interspecific competition, and landscape boundaries. I teach these concepts during the fall and spring, when the weather is favorable.The cold months can be spent in the lab to study enzyme activity, calorimetry, measurements of cellular respiration and photosynthesis, osmosis and diffusion, DNA extraction and electrophoresis, genetics, and modeling of molecular systems and processes. It’s also a good time for microscopy and drawing skills development.
It is free. Enjoy it, have fun with it.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/teaching-biology-to-nature-illiterate-students/id1447756384

Located in Canada. The routemodem combo supplied by my ISP is an xb7 gateway, and I cannot change the DNS. I bought a D-Link x1650 router to bridge it to, but I am having issues. The instructions for bridging a router included in the xb7 manual seems straightforward, but my wifi never works properly when I try to bridge it myself. I am not at all techy, and every time I try to troubleshoot myself I get more lost. If someone can DM me instructions to do this, or set up a call to help I would be really grateful.

Just received my kit but can't complete the initial setup. I'm only at the testing phase.
The instructions for when to start pairing to my phone are not clear. In some cases it says to wait for receiver light to flash blue, in others it says to start this just after powering on the receiver. I've tried pairing with flashing and steady white light. The only time I get blue lights is when I manually pair via my phone's blue tooth menu.
No matter what I've tried the Verizon app gets stuck at the pairing screen and eventually times out. Not sure if it should somehow auto-pair.
I stumped the people at phone support and am awaiting a follow up call.

https://imgur.com/a/VOGiWxJ
Hi game sale, looking to part ways with 2 of my preloved miyoo mini v2. I have reset everything and downloaded the latest onionos in the 64gb sandisk sd card.
Both set comes with the device, case, charging cable, instruction manual and sd card reader. Almost identical to getting it brand new, I will not be providing the stock sd card as it failed the first day I used it.
My asking price for it is $105 USD each excluding shipping fees. Shipping fee will be at your own cost.

I am going to use libre 3 for the first time. I freaked out seeing the needle size in the applicator. For now, I put the cover back ( screwed the cap back, although instruction manual says not to do so but I made sure the sensor needle is not broken/ damaged). Please share your first time experience so I get some courage ..lol

Today, Global Info Research, a publisher of global market research reports, released Market 2023 by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2029> .This report is a detailed and comprehensive analysis for global Commercial Edger market. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are presented by manufacturers, by region & country, by Type and by Application. As the market is constantly changing, this report explores the competition, supply and demand trends, as well as key factors that contribute to its changing demands across many markets. Company profiles and product examples of selected competitors, along with market share estimates of some of the selected leaders for the year 2023, are provided.
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The following are the reported product types, applications in major companies:
Market segment by Type Manual Electric
Market segment by Application Residential Garden Others
Major players covered Stihl RedMax ECHO Husqvarna McLane EGO Turf Teq CRAFTSMAN Shindaiwa Orbit MTD
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Chapter 1, to describe Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe product scope, market overview, market estimation caveats and base year. Chapter 2, to profile the top manufacturers of Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe, with price, sales, revenue and global market share of Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe from 2018 to 2023. Chapter 3, the Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe competitive situation, sales quantity, revenue and global market share of top manufacturers are analyzed emphatically by landscape contrast. Chapter 4, the Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe breakdown data are shown at the regional level, to show the sales quantity, consumption value and growth by regions, from 2018 to 2029. Chapter 5 and 6, to segment the sales by Type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2018 to 2029. Chapter 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, to break the sales data at the country level, with sales quantity, consumption value and market share for key countries in the world, from 2017 to 2022.and Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2024 to 2029. Chapter 12, market dynamics, drivers, restraints, trends, Porters Five Forces analysis, and Influence of COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine War. Chapter 13, the key raw materials and key suppliers, and industry chain of Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe. Chapter 14 and 15, to describe Large Diameter Seamless Steel Pipe sales channel, distributors, customers, research findings and conclusion.
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