Hello, this is my first time posting here so here goes. I have a full time job (been there 3 years) but need help getting by these next 2 weeks until payday. Long story short my car was involved in a hit and run. It was parked outside of my parents house on Super Bowl weekend and someone hit it from behind and 2:30am and fled the scene. The cameras didn’t catch the license plate because they went in reverse but it looked look like 2 intoxicated minors. They hit the back so hard that it damaged the frame and was deemed a total loss!! 🥺 I’ve been taking a Lyft to and from work and walk to the grocery stores and really haven’t gone out beyond that. I pay about $50 - $65 per day on Lyft (I even get to work 2 hours earlier because it’s $10-$20 cheaper). My cell phone payment ($213.07) was also due yesterday and that’s with the extension. I really need my service because without service I’m not able to order Lyfts for work. In addition to that I have a small secured credit card that’s past due $60 and I’m really trying to avoid a negative impact on my credit especially because I need to buy a car soon. That being said the $1000+ Lyft cost and todays paid rent is what’s led me here with a $0 balance. Any support with my cell phone bill, credit card payment or towards Lyft rides for the next 2 weeks until payday would be greatly appreciated!! 🙏🏻 This period has been extremely humbling for me but has also taught me a lot about my strength and determination to get through things with a positive attitude!! I appreciate any of you that took the time to read this and sorry if it’s a bit long. I just wanted to provide insight into my financial situation. I look forward to getting back on me feet (or car lol) and being able to help someone in need by paying it forward!! 💕 If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to let me know!

The point of asset purchasing by central banks is to increase asset prices, which drags yields down, leading to an increase in borrowing, decrease in borrowing costs, which ultimately boosts consumption and investment, supporting higher economic growth and job creation.
My questionning here is in regards of the notional amounts purchased by central banks. ECB has a corporate sector purchase program, where it buys outright eurozone corporate bonds. We can easily access the corporate bonds that have been part of the program and that are currently in ECB's balance sheet. However, if i'm not mistaken, we don't have the exact exposure of ECB in each bond.
To me, knowing in advance what bonds ECB is going to buy (or stop buying, since they decided this year to cut their Asset purchase programme) or sell, could be an important material information allowing me to make profits by going long/short those securities. That's from a micro perspective (as a market agent).
From a macro perspective, i guess if the whole market knows in advance the exact orders, there will be a huge momentum effect where everyone rushes to buy the corporate bonds targeted by CBs in an attempt to sell them to CBs, which will lead to an increase in the price of these bonds higher than if the information wasn't known by the markets. This improves the effectiveness of the bond purchase programme from a quantitative easing perspective (higher valuation of programme eligible bonds, lower credit spread on these bonds).
So should central banks publically show their exact bond holdings ? And communicate their next planned securities orders ?

In the world of coworking, privacy is a crucial factor that can affect the productivity and satisfaction of members. However, designing for privacy can be a challenge for coworking office interior designers because they need to balance the need for privacy without creating a closed-off atmosphere. In this blog post, we will discuss some tips and tricks for coworking office interior designers to design for privacy without creating a closed-off atmosphere.
Firstly, it is important to understand the different types of privacy needs that members may have. Some members may need visual privacy, which can be achieved by providing partitions or dividers between workstations. Others may require acoustic privacy, which can be accomplished by using soundproofing materials such as acoustic panels or carpeting.
Another way to design for privacy without creating a closed-off atmosphere is by using transparent materials. For example, glass partitions can provide visual privacy without completely blocking off space. This can create a sense of openness while still allowing members to feel secure and focused.
In addition to using transparent materials, coworking office interior designers can also incorporate natural elements into their designs. Plants, for example, can act as natural dividers and provide visual and acoustic privacy while creating a more inviting and relaxed atmosphere.
One of the most effective ways to design for privacy without creating a closed-off atmosphere is by using a variety of seating arrangements. Instead of providing only traditional workstations, consider incorporating different types of seating such as booths, couches, and even standing desks. This can create a sense of privacy and ownership over a workspace without making members feel trapped or isolated.
Finally, it is important to consider the use of color and lighting in coworking office interior design. By using warm colors and natural lighting, designers can create a welcoming and inviting atmosphere that encourages collaboration and creativity while still providing the necessary privacy.
In conclusion, coworking office interior designers such as Flipspaces can design for privacy without creating a closed-off atmosphere by understanding the different types of privacy needs, using transparent materials, incorporating natural elements, providing a variety of seating arrangements, and considering the use of color and lighting. By balancing the need for privacy with the desire for openness and collaboration, designers can create a space that meets the needs of all members and fosters a sense of community and productivity. As a coworking office interior designer, it is crucial to prioritize the needs of members while still adhering to the principles of good design.

Just logged back in after many years of not playing and I did the starter deck duel event, am I only allowed to use 1 deck? ive won my 3 matches with the 'Balancing Act' deck and I cannot choose another deck.. and I dont see the deck in my collection?

Background

To understand some concepts I'm going to use, I would invite everyone to listen to this video. It's a reading of "Feeling Is The Secret" by Neville Goddard. You can obviously just get the book as well. It's only 44 pages. I think it happens to be something that works well as listening material for a 30 minute walk or drive. This is introductory material for self-initiation into the mysteries of the ancients. It outlines how one develops intent, after which the subconscious turns this intent into reality (internal reality), after which the self more or less acts automatically (still with conscious choice but an inherent limited capacity) to turn the internal reality into external reality. You may recognize its argument as being similar to popular book "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne, but Goddard's treatment is far more profound and detailed, and it's only getting started!
I also suggest studying archetypes, which is really just symbolic/abstract psychology. A few avenues: Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson, Tarot cards, ancient pantheons from Scandinavia to Rome to Sumer, "tree of life" myths from Scandinavia to the Jewish Kabbalah, and other similar systems. Also useful are the dualistic concepts of the Chinese Yijing (philosophy of change).
I'm going to try to put all of these together and arrive back at the original question of masculinity and the damage currently done.

The Mind

At a very early stage in one's life, the mind is whole. There are no separate archetypes — just one thing. Over time, the mind divides. At a physical level, the more obvious and significant division is the left/right hemisphere divide. At an archetypal level, it is the father / mother (or simply masculine/feminine) figures and the hero / adversary figures. I believe you can keep going with no real end. Every "figure" or archetype in the mind can be divided into two more, allowing for an infinite variety of models that the self is developed from. Within the father, you can develop the good father, the bad father, the strict but fair father, the hippie but wise father, etc. Same with the variations on the mother. I won't list out all of these variations but instead focus on the first level to really illustrate how this works.
What's actually happening here? I believe the fathemother divide isn't truly based on gender, but the genders do have a typical expertise in one or the other. Based on Goddard's description of the process from visualization to physical reality, there are two major steps: the creation of want (deciding what you want and visualizing it before bed) and the realization of want (the dream-state where the subconscious is trained on the feelings produced before bed). The creation step is the "masculine" part, which "impregnates" the subconscious with feelings to be realized. The realization step is the "feminine" part, which "births" a "new mind" (or "new life", if we are using reincarnation terminology) when you wake up. Roughly speaking, this implies the conscious part of the mind is "masculine" and the subconscious part of the mind is "feminine". I'll just say this one last time: the genderization of these parts of the mind are firstly symbolic of their role in the creation of the self, and secondly may or may not contain some truth as to how the two genders' minds work slightly differently.
The other dualistic concept is the hero / adversary. As in the Egyptian Osirian tradition, Horus (the hero) is merely a reincarnation of his father (Osiris, the father figure). Thus, the hero is merely the "newborn" conscious mind upon waking up. Given that the conscious self (the ego) can adhere to its predetermined code (from prior training in the subconscious), or it can go against that code, you naturally have a hero vs adversary contrast within the conscious mind. The adversary is simply the self which denies all assumptions, all ideals, all past truths. This is not strictly "bad", although it could be bad in some situations. More commonly, this is merely depicted as mischievousness in myth, and it is very useful, important for things like creativity.
Now, it's time to discuss where we are at as a society and what the real meaning of the memetic trends are.

The Change

The primary symbolic change in western culture is the "bad father" (or toxic masculinity). This has created a dialectic:

• Some people reject the father entirely. The participation trophies, the overprotective parenting, etc — that is acceptance of only the mother.
• Some people embrace the bad father. The "greed is good" ideology, the promoters of the Dark Triad, the growth of criminal and corrupt mindsets — that is acceptance of the bad father.
• Some people don't necessarily embrace the bad father concept, but they take a reactionary stance and reject the mother entirely. If you only embrace the father, you're creating want, but you don't know how to realize it. If you can't dream, the only thing you can do is see physical/existing reality. Thus, you have a sort of physical materialism. This is where materialism comes from: acceptance of only the father (and only the senses which are consciously registered).

This leads to a diminishing amount of people who:

• Still love the father (see masculinity in a good light). This is the idea of positive masculinity, is an expression of the ideal evolutionary game theory solution, which is protective altruism colloquially called "Tit for Tat". This is an expression of a system of thought which has the capacity for forgiveness and punishment, in order to limit the tragedy of the commons in repeated games scenarios (an accurate description of human interaction).
• Embrace the mother as the father (not love the mother as the mother, but who use fatherly love to love the mother). This is the masculine idea of guidance, is a preference for outcome-based morality rather than intent-based morality. This is founded on a belief of reason — actually living according to rational thought rather than the emotional creations of the subconscious. It is the idea that you "walk the dog" rather than letting the dog walk you. You're not really adding anything to the situation if you just love the mother as the mother; randomness + randomness = more randomness.

What all of this really means is our thought processes are fundamentally limited. The "masculine" is the conscious self, the "feminine" is the subconscious. In preferring the subconscious and in turning the conscious into an anti-social beast, we are a ship lost at sea. The conscious self isn't directing the ship towards its rightful destination (truth, virtue, human goodness), and the subconscious isn't able to steer the ship alone. A full human needs both of these parts. Without both, were are in some way inhumane. Barbaric, partial humans.

Historical Origins

It's beyond the scope of this to fully describe the origins of such a cultural shift. However, I will outline a few places to look and draw a loose connection through time. This isn't meant to be a proof, but a roadmap to guide the reader for further research (with personal verification).
There were two distinct types of attacks on authority in the past 500 years.

• One was republican (I will only say this once: "republican" does not mean the Republican political party) in nature, spawning humanist and republican ideals from the Italian renaissance to the American revolution and constitution.
• The other was collectivist in nature, spawning the Reformation, Marxism, and later "cultural Marxism" (or nearly everything you identify with modernist and post-modernist thought, including its latest spawn, wokeism).

These two groups claim to have a common enemy, an authoritarian elite, but their actual philosophies differ greatly.

• Individualism is a core (but not the core) philosophy within republicanism, which is in stark contrast to collectivism. The republicans (from Plato to George Washington) believed in a natural order that must be encouraged through freedoms but tempered by the state, which must be stronger than the strongest cartels in private that would otherwise "rule" the people in a de facto sense (like we have now with state corporatism).
• Collectivism denies any inherent goodness of a natural order (insofar as it is described as a hierarchy), striving for a sort of created equality. It argues the true natural order is equality, and this is only tainted by essentially the inherent "evilness" of humanity, or at bare minimum the negligence of humanity.

As you can see, these two views are diametrically opposed. One views the creative power of humanity as essentially good, albeit flawed. The other views the creative power of humanity as essentially bad. You can see this thoroughly in modern and post-modern art, which acts as a parody to the human condition. It is consumed as the contrived, vain laugh by the very bourgeois that it claims to oppose. This self-hating (or completely out of touch, if they don't realize their own hypocrisy) class of people rules our current society as "the establishment", "the cathedral", "the regime". They are more directly left wing, but they are thoroughly within the right wing and thus represent both choices in our false dialectic of not only our political process, but the morals of our society as a whole.
To return to our cultural shift, the "bad father" arises from an attack by the collectivist schools of thought on all of society for the sins of a small minority. One way of elucidating this is: a few men at the top did some bad things, so all men are bad. It wasn't immediately like this, however. It started with the idea of: "if some Catholic leaders are bad, then all Catholic leaders are" (Reformation). Then, "if some men are unfairly attaining higher status after birth than other men, then all men are essentially cheating themselves from this theoretical 'blank slate' of existence" (Lockean philosophy). Then, "if some corporations (or owners of capital) are out of control, then all of them are" (Marxism). On and on, into the 20th century where we saw arguments by people such as Marcuse to return to a state of primitive sexuality and by feminists to return to a state without even a concept of gender to the latest thoughts, which outright make the claim that men are the enemy of all people, particularly any men which cling to any of the older modalities.
This is a war on human reason, which is a war on human nature itself. Nietzsche saw this as a fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. There are two equivalent ways of breaking down that terminology, but the intent is the same. Perhaps the Dionysian is the good and pure masculine figure, whereas the Apollonian is the adversary figure, thus making the preference for the Apollonian a sort of highly masculine, bad father-esque philosophy. Perhaps the Apollonian is masculinity as a whole, and Dionysian is the femininity as a whole (albeit depicted as a male Dionysus because, ya know, Greeks). Either way, the point is that you need a balance of these figures. And so, to return to the original quote I used as theme "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.", the gist is that an imbalance was created, either by killing a holistic concept of a unified "god" in the self (creating the male vs female dialectic), or by assigning this "god" concept to either the conscious or subconscious part of the mind. As stated above, the clear meaning of Nietzsche's arguments is the creation of the dialectic, the splitting of the whole, and the imbalancing of the the bicameral mind in everyone.

Background

To understand some concepts I'm going to use, I would invite everyone to listen to this video. It's a reading of "Feeling Is The Secret" by Neville Goddard. You can obviously just get the book as well. It's only 44 pages. I think it happens to be something that works well as listening material for a 30 minute walk or drive. This is introductory material for self-initiation into the mysteries of the ancients. It outlines how one develops intent, after which the subconscious turns this intent into reality (internal reality), after which the self more or less acts automatically (still with conscious choice but an inherent limited capacity) to turn the internal reality into external reality. You may recognize its argument as being similar to popular book "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne, but Goddard's treatment is far more profound and detailed, and it's only getting started!
I also suggest studying archetypes, which is really just symbolic/abstract psychology. A few avenues: Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson, Tarot cards, ancient pantheons from Scandinavia to Rome to Sumer, "tree of life" myths from Scandinavia to the Jewish Kabbalah, and other similar systems. Also useful are the dualistic concepts of the Chinese Yijing (philosophy of change).
I'm going to try to put all of these together and arrive back at the original question of masculinity and the damage currently done.

The Mind

At a very early stage in one's life, the mind is whole. There are no separate archetypes — just one thing. Over time, the mind divides. At a physical level, the more obvious and significant division is the left/right hemisphere divide. At an archetypal level, it is the father / mother (or simply masculine/feminine) figures and the hero / adversary figures. I believe you can keep going with no real end. Every "figure" or archetype in the mind can be divided into two more, allowing for an infinite variety of models that the self is developed from. Within the father, you can develop the good father, the bad father, the strict but fair father, the hippie but wise father, etc. Same with the variations on the mother. I won't list out all of these variations but instead focus on the first level to really illustrate how this works.
What's actually happening here? I believe the fathemother divide isn't truly based on gender, but the genders do have a typical expertise in one or the other. Based on Goddard's description of the process from visualization to physical reality, there are two major steps: the creation of want (deciding what you want and visualizing it before bed) and the realization of want (the dream-state where the subconscious is trained on the feelings produced before bed). The creation step is the "masculine" part, which "impregnates" the subconscious with feelings to be realized. The realization step is the "feminine" part, which "births" a "new mind" (or "new life", if we are using reincarnation terminology) when you wake up. Roughly speaking, this implies the conscious part of the mind is "masculine" and the subconscious part of the mind is "feminine". I'll just say this one last time: the genderization of these parts of the mind are firstly symbolic of their role in the creation of the self, and secondly may or may not contain some truth as to how the two genders' minds work slightly differently.
The other dualistic concept is the hero / adversary. As in the Egyptian Osirian tradition, Horus (the hero) is merely a reincarnation of his father (Osiris, the father figure). Thus, the hero is merely the "newborn" conscious mind upon waking up. Given that the conscious self (the ego) can adhere to its predetermined code (from prior training in the subconscious), or it can go against that code, you naturally have a hero vs adversary contrast within the conscious mind. The adversary is simply the self which denies all assumptions, all ideals, all past truths. This is not strictly "bad", although it could be bad in some situations. More commonly, this is merely depicted as mischievousness in myth, and it is very useful, important for things like creativity.
Now, it's time to discuss where we are at as a society and what the real meaning of the memetic trends are.

The Change

The primary symbolic change in western culture is the "bad father" (or toxic masculinity). This has created a dialectic:

• Some people reject the father entirely. The participation trophies, the overprotective parenting, etc — that is acceptance of only the mother.
• Some people embrace the bad father. The "greed is good" ideology, the promoters of the Dark Triad, the growth of criminal and corrupt mindsets — that is acceptance of the bad father.
• Some people don't necessarily embrace the bad father concept, but they take a reactionary stance and reject the mother entirely. If you only embrace the father, you're creating want, but you don't know how to realize it. If you can't dream, the only thing you can do is see physical/existing reality. Thus, you have a sort of physical materialism. This is where materialism comes from: acceptance of only the father (and only the senses which are consciously registered).

This leads to a diminishing amount of people who:

• Still love the father (see masculinity in a good light). This is the idea of positive masculinity, is an expression of the ideal evolutionary game theory solution, which is protective altruism colloquially called "Tit for Tat". This is an expression of a system of thought which has the capacity for forgiveness and punishment, in order to limit the tragedy of the commons in repeated games scenarios (an accurate description of human interaction).
• Embrace the mother as the father (not love the mother as the mother, but who use fatherly love to love the mother). This is the masculine idea of guidance, is a preference for outcome-based morality rather than intent-based morality. This is founded on a belief of reason — actually living according to rational thought rather than the emotional creations of the subconscious. It is the idea that you "walk the dog" rather than letting the dog walk you. You're not really adding anything to the situation if you just love the mother as the mother; randomness + randomness = more randomness.

What all of this really means is our thought processes are fundamentally limited. The "masculine" is the conscious self, the "feminine" is the subconscious. In preferring the subconscious and in turning the conscious into an anti-social beast, we are a ship lost at sea. The conscious self isn't directing the ship towards its rightful destination (truth, virtue, human goodness), and the subconscious isn't able to steer the ship alone. A full human needs both of these parts. Without both, were are in some way inhumane. Barbaric, partial humans.

Historical Origins

It's beyond the scope of this to fully describe the origins of such a cultural shift. However, I will outline a few places to look and draw a loose connection through time. This isn't meant to be a proof, but a roadmap to guide the reader for further research (with personal verification).
There were two distinct types of attacks on authority in the past 500 years.

• One was republican (I will only say this once: "republican" does not mean the Republican political party) in nature, spawning humanist and republican ideals from the Italian renaissance to the American revolution and constitution.
• The other was collectivist in nature, spawning the Reformation, Marxism, and later "cultural Marxism" (or nearly everything you identify with modernist and post-modernist thought, including its latest spawn, wokeism).

These two groups claim to have a common enemy, an authoritarian elite, but their actual philosophies differ greatly.

• Individualism is a core (but not the core) philosophy within republicanism, which is in stark contrast to collectivism. The republicans (from Plato to George Washington) believed in a natural order that must be encouraged through freedoms but tempered by the state, which must be stronger than the strongest cartels in private that would otherwise "rule" the people in a de facto sense (like we have now with state corporatism).
• Collectivism denies any inherent goodness of a natural order (insofar as it is described as a hierarchy), striving for a sort of created equality. It argues the true natural order is equality, and this is only tainted by essentially the inherent "evilness" of humanity, or at bare minimum the negligence of humanity.

As you can see, these two views are diametrically opposed. One views the creative power of humanity as essentially good, albeit flawed. The other views the creative power of humanity as essentially bad. You can see this thoroughly in modern and post-modern art, which acts as a parody to the human condition. It is consumed as the contrived, vain laugh by the very bourgeois that it claims to oppose. This self-hating (or completely out of touch, if they don't realize their own hypocrisy) class of people rules our current society as "the establishment", "the cathedral", "the regime". They are more directly left wing, but they are thoroughly within the right wing and thus represent both choices in our false dialectic of not only our political process, but the morals of our society as a whole.
To return to our cultural shift, the "bad father" arises from an attack by the collectivist schools of thought on all of society for the sins of a small minority. One way of elucidating this is: a few men at the top did some bad things, so all men are bad. It wasn't immediately like this, however. It started with the idea of: "if some Catholic leaders are bad, then all Catholic leaders are" (Reformation). Then, "if some men are unfairly attaining higher status after birth than other men, then all men are essentially cheating themselves from this theoretical 'blank slate' of existence" (Lockean philosophy). Then, "if some corporations (or owners of capital) are out of control, then all of them are" (Marxism). On and on, into the 20th century where we saw arguments by people such as Marcuse to return to a state of primitive sexuality and by feminists to return to a state without even a concept of gender to the latest thoughts, which outright make the claim that men are the enemy of all people, particularly any men which cling to any of the older modalities.
This is a war on human reason, which is a war on human nature itself. Nietzsche saw this as a fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. There are two equivalent ways of breaking down that terminology, but the intent is the same. Perhaps the Dionysian is the good and pure masculine figure, whereas the Apollonian is the adversary figure, thus making the preference for the Apollonian a sort of highly masculine, bad father-esque philosophy. Perhaps the Apollonian is masculinity as a whole, and Dionysian is the femininity as a whole (albeit depicted as a male Dionysus because, ya know, Greeks). Either way, the point is that you need a balance of these figures. And so, to return to the original quote I used as theme "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.", the gist is that an imbalance was created, either by killing a holistic concept of a unified "god" in the self (creating the male vs female dialectic), or by assigning this "god" concept to either the conscious or subconscious part of the mind. As stated above, the clear meaning of Nietzsche's arguments is the creation of the dialectic, the splitting of the whole, and the imbalancing of the the bicameral mind in everyone.

This is not a rant. Please be civilized and convey your opinions in a mature manner that promotes thought, not division.
I haven't really seen what I'm about to talk about in (hopefully) enough detail. I really hope this post gets good engagement for myself and anyone else with thoughts, questions, etc about the subject.
Let's get to it. I hate this update. I understand the "balancing" that came with the HUGE healing nerfs but some of them just don't make sense. I think healing was nerfed way. too. hard. Did healing need changes? Maybe. Did antiheal need changes? Maybe. But I don't think the majority of the changes were warranted. For example: Chaac can only heal for a maximum of 436.8 (max lvl on his 3 with Cad) over a 6 second period. That's 72.8 health a second. Oh, NOT counting debuffed with antiheal. Late game. It's legitimately negligible. In a game of assault, around levels 8-12. Let's estimate you have 2000 max health. If you use med at 500 health, you will only gain 152 health. 8+2% of missing (1500). 2%1500= 30+8=384=152. Well, actually *less because %missing decreases every pulse. This is virtually nothing when a hunter can delete that with ONE basic or you will lose double that from ONE enemy ability. Lifesteal is almost useless in many situations. A friend of mine wanted to record how hard the nerf was. He played a game of slash, max lifesteal AMC. He dealt 52k dmg. His (self)heal from LS was 3,900. This is laughable.
I have never understood the hatred for healing in this game. Was it annoying that a built Hades or Anubis could heal full from half health off of 1 minion wave? (Exaggerated). Sure. Did it need changes? Maybe. But I can't recall losing some mind boggling amount of games because of it. I think the problem is that, now, very few characters are actually incentivezed to purchase the new items from the healing bolstering trees. The past few weeks, I had been learning Terra and really enjoying her. It was great being able to dive, tank and provide great heals to my teammates - encouraging them to take advantage of me tanking and attack. Yes I understand the "amazing mitigation buff". But if Terra is utilizing her ult to Frontline, a power scaled heal will do more for the backline.. Honestly, I saw VERY little difference in sustain with the new mitigations- having much more success with the heals.
I really don't like the changes and sincerely hope that power scaling heals returns. What is the point of having healers if they can't control and manipulate their own heals (with the exception of one item [which patch notes said that they will only affect self anyways]).
I think Smite should take a page out of LoL's book and create their own rune system. This update talked about promoting creativity with builds etc. But why not allow players decide how their favorite god should be played? Example: healer class (Aphro, Guan, Hel, Horus, Chang'e, Yem, Baron,) could trade damage or CDR for increased heals or vice versa. That way, not only are players more creative with their own selection, but must find new counters to how enemy players utilize the system. This could go into much greater development, support class trading mvmt speed for CC or warrior trading CDR for CCR, etc.
What do you all think? I'd love insight on why you like the changes and what you would think about a system similar to LoL's rune system.
GLHF

Hello, I'm an American (26) currently working in my home state as an Operations Manager (roughly 1 year experience). My area of study was International Business and Spanish, as well as a minor in German. Currently, I'm accepting that hard truth that I detest my current line of work. I find the work-life balance non-existent, the job demands to be high pressure, and find myself working within a lot of ethically grey areas.
My passion is and always has been cross-cultural communication, and cultural research. I have some long-term goals that I want to achieve, but a prerequisite is international experience. Between two study abroad programs, I've spent about 6 months total overseas, and I want to up that amount significantly.
​
Additionally, I like to help and connect with people. I attempted to join the Peace Corps last year, but was denied due to my medical history.
​
Without getting a graduate degree, are you aware of any opportunities that would allow me work overseas for anywhere from 1-4 years? Income is less important as long as it's sufficient to pay any monthly expenses (electric, water, and Internet/phone service, and those can be compromised on if the infrastructure does not exist in the host country) and save a small amount in the host country. Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Naturalized Kitsune

You descend from a line of Kitsune who have lived for a long time with people of another ancestry, far longer than most other Kitsunes and have lost some powers as a result.
Choose a common, Medium humanoid ancestry. Your alternate form is a form that matches this choice called a tailless form. You also gain the Adopted Ancestry feat for your chosen humanoid ancestry.
Your true Kitsune form is equivalent in appearance to the 5th level feat Hybrid Form Kitsune (think the white kimono woman used in the official 2e Kitsune art)
Due to how distant you've become, even in your true form, you can't use unarmed attacks from a Kitsune ancestry feat, and you can't use an ability that requires your tails, and you only gain half the amount of tails as you level that other Kitsune would normally get, you can use these abilities again in your true form if you take the Hybrid Form feat at level 5

Balance Concerns:

I'm basing this of the Adaptive Anadi Heritage, sure their a rare Ancestry but I don't think that rarity makes the Adaptive Anadi heritage OP, but would doing the same & giving adopted ancestry and loosing some Kitsune abilities in return make it balanced?
Should also loosing the ability to use tails and unarmed attack make this Heritage bad? I mean it doesn't seem bad right now, you just lose Foxfire and Retractable Claws, but seeing as the Tian Xia books for 2e are coming up and they might add more Kitsune feats, this could be extremely debilitating, but well remains to be seen, but if I remove this restriction, it makes Hybrid Form useless, so it's either I invalidate currently 2 level 1 feats right now with this, or just 1 level 5 feat
But other than that pretty much all other feats still work, so you can still cast spells from Kitsune feats just as well as other heritages
​

Reasoning for making this Heritage

I think its weird to me based on Kitsune lore that Kitsune cant get Adopted Ancestry until level 3 but the Anadi who they share some similarities with, can through the Adaptive Anadi heritage
The lore similarities I'm talking about are (on the Archive of Nethys 2e page)
Kitsune wrote:

"Though all-kitsune settlements exist, most live among people of other ancestries, granting them a degree of external insight into social rules or dynamics that others process only subconsciously. Kitsune enjoy subverting expectations as much as they do going along with them. Their fondness for jokes, stories, and wordplay, especially when the twist of a riddle hinges on the listener's assumptions, reinforces their reputation as tricksters."

Anadi wrote:

"As a communal and peaceful people, anadi ancestors endeavored to establish trade with the neighbors of their homeland. However, these anadi soon learned that most others found their appearance to be extremely objectionable. Wishing to avoid conflict, ancient anadi retreated into isolation until they could find a solution. The answer came when their greatest scholars innovated a fusion of transmutation and illusion magic that allowed them to assume a humanoid form. The technique was developed, perfected, and eventually taught to the overwhelming majority of anadi."

It's weird to me that Anadi have a heritage that's because their lineage wanted to explicitly blend into Common Medium size Humanoid ancestries, but not also Kitsune
Sure the Kitsune are prolly more distant in a sense to the people they mingle with than the Anadi but, idk like wouldn't it be sensible that you would also find a Heritage type of Kitsune who are like the Adaptive Anadi more, they found that they love being apart of X ancestry and want to become closer to it? They want to not just trick anymore, but actually be almost one with their chosen ancestry?

I made some edits to Zariel's backstory/character to give the whole thing a more "intrigue" feel and to make Zariel more redeemable, with clues handed out at appropriate moments for players to piece this whole narrative together, and the final hints appearing in the Idyllglen sequence. Having now completed the module with these tweaks and getting a good response from players, I'm curious to see what people think of what I did and what they'd change/keep!
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

• A big part of my adventure emphasised that the continuation of the Blood War is a good thing - it keeps both these awful powers occupied and stops them turning their full attention on the rest of the multiverse. If either side won, it might spell the end for all the planes.
• A hundred years ago, the Demon Lord Yeenoghu is getting annoyed at the constant lack of victory, and comes up with a plan. It specifically tries to bait Zariel by attacking Idyllglen and other towns associated with her, gets her real angry, and then lures her through the portal with Lulu and the Hellriders. Zariel, blinded with rage and pain at the death of innocents, charges through, despite the fact that something is clearly wrong here.
• Expecting a confrontation in the Abyss, Zariel and the Hellriders appear in Avernus, where Yeenoghu has specifically led them. The army of Hell, waiting for the next Demonic push, see a sudden angel-led army and assume they're under attack. Chaos erupts, and the few traitors slink away, closing the portal to keep themselves safe and trapping the rest of the Hellriders to die.
• The Hellriders and Hell's army annihilate each other, a mutual loss, while Zariel, panicking and uncertain, sends Lulu away to hide the Sword. She ends up as the last survivor - even as Yeenoghu's full army appears, now with no real obstacles to taking Avernus and potentially having a real chance at winning the Blood War.
• Despairing and realising she might have doomed reality, Zariel sees Yeenoghu has tricked both sides, who underestimated the intelligence and cunning of the monstrous predator. Asmodeus himself appears to Zariel, along with Bel, and preys on her guilt and pain, telling her she's failed as an angel and protector - and deserves nothing more than to spend the rest of her existence in Hell.
• Zariel surrenders, and allows Asmodeus to knight her with the chain-mace, making her General of Avernus and supplanting Bel. Now empowered with infernal magic, Zariel holds off the Demonic army on her own until reinforcements from the other Hells can arrive and regain balance. She's no longer a being fuelled by rage, but miserable and broken, here because she thinks it's what she deserves.
• Asmodeus also hides a secret, a special spell on her mace that can take back all that Infernal power if she ever steps out of line, and gives the trigger words to Bel, who is authorised to overtake her if she ever openly defies orders - but never otherwise (hence why Bel is so willing to help the players find the Sword of Zariel, he wants her to rebel so he's allowed to execute her).
• After allowing Lulu to escape, nearly giving Bel the chance he wants, Asmodeus decides that an extra layer of control is needed to keep her in line (he doesn't want her to rebel). He has Bel kidnap Nascius, who Zariel in my game saw as a younger brother, and use the angel as a hostage, threatening Zariel to kill Nascius if she considers traitorous behaviour again. Bel, who does want her to rebel so he can retake the throne of Avernus, puts Nascius in the Companion and gives it to Zariel, unable to directly admit he's in there but hoping she'll find him inside (she doesn't, see below).
• Zariel's arc of redemption (should the players pursue that) is therefore more about Zariel coming to terms with her guilt and no longer pointlessly punishing herself, ending her 100-year exile. Admittedly, there are characters like Olanthius who just don't think she deserves redemption - she did make those mistakes, and is keeping the Blood War stable.
• Speaking of which, Olanthius was Zariel's first honest attempt to do good after her promotion to Avernus, attempting to revive him and the fallen Hellriders to undo her mistake. However, because Infernal magic is inherently evil, it ends up bringing them back as agonised, suffering undead. Olanthius begs Zariel to end the spell and put them out of their misery, but Zariel, already pushed to breaking point, can't bring herself to kill her friend again. Furious that she's effectively trapped him and the others in Hell, Olanthius leads the Hellriders away.
• The last point of issue to iron out is Haruman. Haruman was a devout loyalist, and never really a good person - he blindly follows Zariel, no matter what she does. When she joined Hell, he didn't even blink, following her without really considering the ethical implications. He will always prioritise her first, sacrifice himself for her without question, but here's where things get tricky - Zariel being a broken, beaten figure is something that Haruman can't deal with, unable to see this powerful, venerated figure in that way, or even see her as fallible at all. Consequently, as her second-in-command, he has been running most of Avernus, trying to interpret her dead-eyed stares and self-destructive behaviour, waiting for her real self to come back. He was the one that tortured Jander and even the one who set up the deal with Elturel in her name, thinking incorrectly that it was what she would or should want. The whole thing has the tone of a dark, depressing joke, but it does mean that Haruman can be turned if the players can persuade him to actually see what's in Zariel's best interest (which my players managed to do near the end of the campaign).

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

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

​
Demographics

• Gender: Male
• Race/Ethnicity: Asian
• Residence: US
• Income Bracket: 100-200k
• Type of School: Competitive Public (sends multiple ppl to T-20s every year, already had 3 people get into Stanford REA...)
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): none.

Intended Major(s): Political Science, International Affairs (depending on school), maybe double major with Econ
Academics

• GPA (UW/W): 3.92 UW (school doesn't do weighted)
• Rank (or percentile): N/A, school doesn't rank
• # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.:
  • did full IB Diploma and a total of 10 APs across high school, all other classes were "honors" classes.
• Senior Year Course Load: APES, Senior English, Orchestra, AP Micro and Macroeconomics, AP Stats (school allows us to do IB Diploma a year early so I completed it by junior year, and I'm mostly just taking filler classes this year).

Standardized Testing
List the highest scores earned and all scores that were reported.

• SAT I: 1520 (780RW, 740M)
• ACT: didn't take
• SAT II: none
• AP/IB:
  • Full IB Diploma, 41/45. (HL in English, Music, History).
  • 6 AP Exams taken: World History (5), Chinese (5), APUSH (5), French (4), English Lang/Comp (5), AP Gov (5)
• Other (ex. IELTS, TOEFL, etc.): none

Extracurriculars/Activities
Details are edited to avoid doxxing lmfao:

1. Secretariat for largest Model UN Conference in my state. Ran conferences' outreach (researched contacts/wrote emails), supervised registration process for 600+ attendees, managed PR and hotel rooming.
2. President of my school's Model UN Club. Trained 50+ club members with weekly public speaking/debate lessons, oversaw members' conference attendance/logistics & club advertising/fundraisers.
3. Committee Director for 3 local Model UN Conferences. Oversaw 3 member dais team, spearheaded research into committees' topic, revised background guide research paper, lead debate on conference day.
4. President of local organization's Teen Board. Created board subcommittees to improve efficiency. Relay teen feedback to staff, run community bonding/service events, train new volunteers.
5. Internship at local law firm. Schedule consultations, contact old clients/close cases, assemble exhibit binders for trials, file case documents, act as receptionist.
6. Member of cultural organization. Volunteered at multi-cultural festivals (ran culture/game booths), created programming (videos, presentations, etc) to educate others about [my ethnicity's] culture.
7. Camp Counselor for special-needs kids. Organized arts/sports related activities for special needs campers aged 10-13, provide one-on-one guidance with them.
8. Pianist for 10 years. earned Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music Grade 8 Piano Performance Exam Distinction score (highest possible score).
9. Violinist. Been playing for 7 years, auditioned into and entered local youth symphony's top group in freshman year - present day, also a violinist in high school's top orchestral group.
10. Boba Barista (job!!). Worked like 8 hrs a week.

Awards/Honors (also edited to prevent doxxing)
List all awards and honors submitted on your application.

1. Presidential Volunteer Service Award Gold (Teen, 2020) Bronze (Young Adult, 2021 & 2022)
2. Nationwide Music Competition- 2nd Prize Winner, Piano (state-level)
3. All-State Symphonic Orchestra participant (11th and 12th grade)
4. Best Position Paper from local MUN conference

Letters of Recommendation
I waived my rights via FERPA so I’m just guessing here.
English Teacher (7/10): Had her for both junior and senior year, had a pretty good relationship with her in class and always did my work- nothing extraordinary. She's a good writer though, so I trust her letter!
Bio Teacher (6/10): TBH only really chose her because I thought you needed one STEM and one humanities rec for every school. She definitely saw my academic side (I pestered her a lot about my Bio IA...) but beyond that I'm not sure...
Counselor (7/10): Didn't really know counselor too well, but I filled out her worksheet pretty thoroughly. She also asked for some of my other teachers to give her insight, so I had my IB Music and my orchestra director give her more info about me from a different point of view. She has lots of experience writing letters so I'm sure she was able to put together a good letter from all of the info she got from me and other teachers.
Interviews
Georgetown (6/10): my first interview, it was in-person and in the interviewer's office. Needless to say, I was terrified and spent 5 minutes in my parent's car just doing last-minute rehearsing before actually getting out. It went OK- it was decent for a first interview, but I think I rambled a bit too much about my academic self and didn't really get into my personality/hobbies and what really made me, me. Interviewer's interests didn't really line up with mine beyond academics so thats what we naturally focused about. It was a solid hour, but very chill in the end (I shouldn't have been that stressed lol).
Princeton (7/10): Was much more prepared for this interview. It was virtual, and lasted like 40 minutes. She asked me a few questions- I think I was definitely able to express and articulate myself a lot better compared to my Georgetown one, but I'm afraid I was thrown a bit off guard about the "Why Princeton/major" question she asked me and so my answer for that wasn't as perfect. Otherwise, I spent the last like 10-15 minutes asking her about Princeton stuff. It was a standard interview.
Columbia/Sciences Po Dual Degree Program (9/10): this interview was definitely my best interview by far because I was hella stressed for it, so I researched as much as I could about it- I really demonstrated my interest in Asian politics through specific examples, and I was well-articulated about why I wanted to attend not one, but two prestigious schools in the span of 4 years (and like, why France specifically). The Sciences Po admissions officer was having some connectivity issues but besides that it was a very solid interview.
Franklin and Marshall (9/10): It was with a current, international student, and we basically bonded over wanting new experiences in college and like this idea of college in general. He said that I was one of his favorite interviewees so that was nice?? Got to ask him a lot about the school and I was very passionate in my answers, much more chill than Georgetown/Princeton ones (tbh those top-schools kinda psyched me out...)
Wesleyan (7/10): I can't really remember what went down in this one tbh. At this point senioritis was kicking in and everything was mostly a blur LMFAO.
Essays
My CommonApp essay was... probably not the best. Topic was kind of basic, and the writing was meh. Unfortunately, I didn't really have time to edit it, because I got super busy with MUN things in the fall + senioritis hit early... so I really tried to perfect my supps. It was still a solid essay overall and I liked it, but I wish I started brainstorming about it earlier so I could've found a more niche idea/used some of the ideas I had in my supps for this main essay. Definitely should've done my dream school applications (ie, Georgetown) last instead of first since I naturally got so much better over time. Don't underestimate how your writing ability can skyrocket in the span of 5 months!!
Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD)
Acceptances:

• COLUMBIA/SCIENCES PO DUAL-DEGREE PROGRAM!! (RD)
• WashU in St. Louis (RD) (holy shit this one spooked me, I only applied bc I got a fee waiver, I did submit the video though but didn't do an interview)
• George Washington University (20k/year Presidential Scholarship) (RD)
• William and Mary (RD) (got a likely too!)
• UC Irvine (RD)
• Franklin and Marshall College (15k/year Leadership Scholarship + Program) (RD)
• University of Wisconsin-Madison (EA)
• Whitman College (RD)
• UW Seattle (RD)
• Temple University (Honors Program/Scholarship) (Rolling)
• Arizona State University (Rolling)

Waitlists:

• Wesleyan University (RD Waitlist)
• Boston University (RD Waitlist)
• American University (RD Waitlist) (this one stung ;-;)
• UC Berkeley (RD —> Waitlist)
• UMich (EA —> Defer —> Waitlist)

Rejections:

• Northeastern University (EA Deferred Rejected)
• UCLA (RD Rejected)
• Georgetown (EA —> defer —> rejected)
• Princeton (RD —> rejected)
• University of Maryland (RD —> Rejected)

Additional Information:
This whole journey has definitely been a process. I came into the college app process thinking I had a solid chance at schools like Georgetown, Boston U, and Northeastern, with UPenn as a hard reach. I ended up not even applying to UPenn and getting rejected from Georgetown, BU, and NEU, but got some amazing acceptances that came really out of the blue (still reeling over WashU.... like I applied on a whim???).
I do really regret applying to all of the OOS public schools that I did- especially the UCs- since I can't afford OOS tuition, but I think overall my list was rather balanced. Seeing all of those reaches reject me stung (Georgetown sent me on an emotional rollercoaster and my heart dropped when I found out that BU had a 10% acceptance rate this year) but all it takes is one reach for there to be success! I'm most likely going to end up committing to Columbia/Science Po (top school in France AND in US??? Hell yeah!), but all in all I'm so glad that this process is finally over <3 going to take a long fucking nap.

Spoilertag for the Mandalorian and Clone Wars/Rebels.
In Clone Wars, we saw Anakin meet "The Ones", the father, the son and the daughter. Star Wars is filled with recurring mythology and we know that Filoni loves the animated series.
I feel that the trio Din, Grogu and Bo Katan resemble the ones. Din being the father, Grogu the son and Bo Katan the daughter. Bo Katan has often strayed from the "light side path" but has always tried to do what's best for her people. Grogu has a definite feeling for the Darkside, but has been kept in check by Din. Din is the father who keeps his people 'in line' and tries to show then balance between what's right and wrong, never really deciding between the Light Side (saving innocents) and the dark side (killing people when deemed necessary, even if it can be avoided).
I feel that they all represent different tribes for what is to become "the one tribe".
Grogu is a Mandalorian with a knack for war. He will most definitely become their strongest warrior and in the future lead people into battle, like Anakin did.
Bo Katan represents the Mandalorians that are on a singular path, but realise that in order to survive they need to work together. Her mission to find Mandalorians and bring them back to their home will make her a leader that gathers all those with differences, in order to succeed for their 'higher good' - even if it means putting aside her personal goals.
Din represents the father. As a foundling himself and a savior of foundlings twice over already, he will most likely act as a Sheppard of sorts, rescuing young ones and allowing them the status of foundling. He will thus keep the tribes in check, by dividing the foundlings, bringing 'balance' between tribes.
I also don't believe any of them will be a new Mandalore. All seasons of the Mandalorian are about growth and working together, showing that no one person is strong enough to do everything on it's own. Din wields the darksaber, Bo saw the mythosaur, but Grogu is (or well, will be) the strongest warrior. In the past, Mandalore would combine all of this. The Mandalorian is about growth and about adapting to survive. The new Mandalorian culture will be about how working together is "The Way".

New player here, haven't played yet but currently preparing teams. So the Compendium rules for the Imperial Guardsmen/Tempestus Scions team allows a Guardsmen Sergeant to take a Chainsword, but it is strictly worse than the Power Sword option: Worse stats all around, and no keywords while Power Sword gets Lethal 5+.
However, the Veteran Guardsmen from the Octarius set can equip a Sergeant or Confidant with a Chainsword, and while it has the same inferior numbers, it has the Balanced keyword! I would still take the Power Sword and Plasma Pistol (also strictly better than any other pistol) for my Sergeant, but knowing there is some advantage to choosing Chainsword is a plus, and if makes the Confidant feel a little more empowered since he is cut off from both the Power Sword and Plasma Pistol.
Is this an oversight? Would it be reasonable to propose to my opponent that I play Guardsmen & Scions with a Sergeant wielding a Chainsword that has Balanced?

Background

I want to write a response and correction to a previous thread of mine on this sub. I think that, in trying to emphasize a particular aspect of this phenomenon, I completely misrepresented the facts.
To understand some concepts I'm going to use, I would invite everyone to listen to this video. It's a reading of "Feeling Is The Secret" by Neville Goddard. You can obviously just get the book as well. It's only 44 pages. I think it happens to be something that works well as listening material for a 30 minute walk or drive. This is introductory material for self-initiation into the mysteries of the ancients. It outlines how one develops intent, after which the subconscious turns this intent into reality (internal reality), after which the self more or less acts automatically (still with conscious choice but an inherent limited capacity) to turn the internal reality into external reality. You may recognize its argument as being similar to popular book "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne, but Goddard's treatment is far more profound and detailed, and it's only getting started!
I also suggest studying archetypes, which is really just symbolic/abstract psychology. A few avenues: Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson, Tarot cards, ancient pantheons from Scandinavia to Rome to Sumer, "tree of life" myths from Scandinavia to the Jewish Kabbalah, and other similar systems. Also useful are the dualistic concepts of the Chinese Yijing (philosophy of change).
I'm going to try to put all of these together and arrive back at the original question of masculinity and the damage currently done.

The Mind

At a very early stage in one's life, the mind is whole. There are no separate archetypes — just one thing. Over time, the mind divides. At a physical level, the more obvious and significant division is the left/right hemisphere divide. At an archetypal level, it is the father / mother (or simply masculine/feminine) figures and the hero / adversary figures. I believe you can keep going with no real end. Every "figure" or archetype in the mind can be divided into two more, allowing for an infinite variety of models that the self is developed from. Within the father, you can develop the good father, the bad father, the strict but fair father, the hippie but wise father, etc. Same with the variations on the mother. I won't list out all of these variations but instead focus on the first level to really illustrate how this works.
What's actually happening here? I believe the fathemother divide isn't truly based on gender, but the genders do have a typical expertise in one or the other. Based on Goddard's description of the process from visualization to physical reality, there are two major steps: the creation of want (deciding what you want and visualizing it before bed) and the realization of want (the dream-state where the subconscious is trained on the feelings produced before bed). The creation step is the "masculine" part, which "impregnates" the subconscious with feelings to be realized. The realization step is the "feminine" part, which "births" a "new mind" (or "new life", if we are using reincarnation terminology) when you wake up. Roughly speaking, this implies the conscious part of the mind is "masculine" and the subconscious part of the mind is "feminine". I'll just say this one last time: the genderization of these parts of the mind are firstly symbolic of their role in the creation of the self, and secondly may or may not contain some truth as to how the two genders' minds work slightly differently.
The other dualistic concept is the hero / adversary. As in the Egyptian Osirian tradition, Horus (the hero) is merely a reincarnation of his father (Osiris, the father figure). Thus, the hero is merely the "newborn" conscious mind upon waking up. Given that the conscious self (the ego) can adhere to its predetermined code (from prior training in the subconscious), or it can go against that code, you naturally have a hero vs adversary contrast within the conscious mind. The adversary is simply the self which denies all assumptions, all ideals, all past truths. This is not strictly "bad", although it could be bad in some situations. More commonly, this is merely depicted as mischievousness in myth, and it is very useful, important for things like creativity.
Now, it's time to discuss where we are at as a society and what the real meaning of the memetic trends are.

The Change

The primary symbolic change in western culture is the "bad father" (or toxic masculinity). This has created a dialectic:

• Some people reject the father entirely. The participation trophies, the overprotective parenting, etc — that is acceptance of only the mother.
• Some people embrace the bad father. The "greed is good" ideology, the promoters of the Dark Triad, the growth of criminal and corrupt mindsets — that is acceptance of the bad father.
• Some people don't necessarily embrace the bad father concept, but they take a reactionary stance and reject the mother entirely. If you only embrace the father, you're creating want, but you don't know how to realize it. If you can't dream, the only thing you can do is see physical/existing reality. Thus, you have a sort of physical materialism. This is where materialism comes from: acceptance of only the father (and only the senses which are consciously registered).

This leads to a diminishing amount of people who:

• Still love the father (see masculinity in a good light). This is the idea of positive masculinity, is an expression of the ideal evolutionary game theory solution, which is protective altruism colloquially called "Tit for Tat". This is an expression of a system of thought which has the capacity for forgiveness and punishment, in order to limit the tragedy of the commons in repeated games scenarios (an accurate description of human interaction).
• Embrace the mother as the father (not love the mother as the mother, but who use fatherly love to love the mother). This is the masculine idea of guidance, is a preference for outcome-based morality rather than intent-based morality. This is founded on a belief of reason — actually living according to rational thought rather than the emotional creations of the subconscious. It is the idea that you "walk the dog" rather than letting the dog walk you. You're not really adding anything to the situation if you just love the mother as the mother; randomness + randomness = more randomness.

What all of this really means is our thought processes are fundamentally limited. The "masculine" is the conscious self, the "feminine" is the subconscious. In preferring the subconscious and in turning the conscious into an anti-social beast, we are a ship lost at sea. The conscious self isn't directing the ship towards its rightful destination (truth, virtue, human goodness), and the subconscious isn't able to steer the ship alone. A full human needs both of these parts. Without both, were are in some way inhumane. Barbaric, partial humans.

Historical Origins

It's beyond the scope of this to fully describe the origins of such a cultural shift. However, I will outline a few places to look and draw a loose connection through time. This isn't meant to be a proof, but a roadmap to guide the reader for further research (with personal verification).
There were two distinct types of attacks on authority in the past 500 years.

• One was republican (I will only say this once: "republican" does not mean the Republican political party) in nature, spawning humanist and republican ideals from the Italian renaissance to the American revolution and constitution.
• The other was collectivist in nature, spawning the Reformation, Marxism, and later "cultural Marxism" (or nearly everything you identify with modernist and post-modernist thought, including its latest spawn, wokeism).

These two groups claim to have a common enemy, an authoritarian elite, but their actual philosophies differ greatly.

• Individualism is a core (but not the core) philosophy within republicanism, which is in stark contrast to collectivism. The republicans (from Plato to George Washington) believed in a natural order that must be encouraged through freedoms but tempered by the state, which must be stronger than the strongest cartels in private that would otherwise "rule" the people in a de facto sense (like we have now with state corporatism).
• Collectivism denies any inherent goodness of a natural order (insofar as it is described as a hierarchy), striving for a sort of created equality. It argues the true natural order is equality, and this is only tainted by essentially the inherent "evilness" of humanity, or at bare minimum the negligence of humanity.

As you can see, these two views are diametrically opposed. One views the creative power of humanity as essentially good, albeit flawed. The other views the creative power of humanity as essentially bad. You can see this thoroughly in modern and post-modern art, which acts as a parody to the human condition. It is consumed as the contrived, vain laugh by the very bourgeois that it claims to oppose. This self-hating (or completely out of touch, if they don't realize their own hypocrisy) class of people rules our current society as "the establishment", "the cathedral", "the regime". They are more directly left wing, but they are thoroughly within the right wing and thus represent both choices in our false dialectic of not only our political process, but the morals of our society as a whole.
To return to our cultural shift, the "bad father" arises from an attack by the collectivist schools of thought on all of society for the sins of a small minority. One way of elucidating this is: a few men at the top did some bad things, so all men are bad. It wasn't immediately like this, however. It started with the idea of: "if some Catholic leaders are bad, then all Catholic leaders are" (Reformation). Then, "if some men are unfairly attaining higher status after birth than other men, then all men are essentially cheating themselves from this theoretical 'blank slate' of existence" (Lockean philosophy). Then, "if some corporations (or owners of capital) are out of control, then all of them are" (Marxism). On and on, into the 20th century where we saw arguments by people such as Marcuse to return to a state of primitive sexuality and by feminists to return to a state without even a concept of gender to the latest thoughts, which outright make the claim that men are the enemy of all people, particularly any men which cling to any of the older modalities.
This is a war on human reason, which is a war on human nature itself. Nietzsche saw this as a fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. There are two equivalent ways of breaking down that terminology, but the intent is the same. Perhaps the Dionysian is the good and pure masculine figure, whereas the Apollonian is the adversary figure, thus making the preference for the Apollonian a sort of highly masculine, bad father-esque philosophy. Perhaps the Apollonian is masculinity as a whole, and Dionysian is the femininity as a whole (albeit depicted as a male Dionysus because, ya know, Greeks). Either way, the point is that you need a balance of these figures. And so, to return to the original quote I used as theme "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.", the gist is that an imbalance was created, either by killing a holistic concept of a unified "god" in the self (creating the male vs female dialectic), or by assigning this "god" concept to either the conscious or subconscious part of the mind. As stated above, the clear meaning of Nietzsche's arguments is the creation of the dialectic, the splitting of the whole, and the imbalancing of the the bicameral mind in everyone.

I'm interested in adding another card to my wallet.

• Current cards: (list cards, limits, opening date)
  
  • PNC Points visa, $1,000 limit, February 2023
  • CreditOne, $1,000 limit, July 2022
• FICO Score: 666 (Yea.. maybe it's a sign...)
  
• Chase 5/24 status: 0
  
• Income: $4,600 monthly
  
• Average monthly spend and categories:
  
  • dining: $ a lot. I'm working on it and hope to budget about 500 or less a month.
  • groceries: $200-300
  • gas: $150
  • travel: $0
  • other: $3000 utilities/rent/bills/car payment.
• Open to Business Cards: No
  
• What's the purpose of your next card? Building credit, Cashback General
  
• Do you have any cards you've been looking at? No
  
• Are you OK with category spending or do you want a general spending card? General
  

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Over the past 3 years I have taken control of my accounts again and started paying off Citi, Citi Best Buy, and Discover. These three were closed in 2019 due to a move out of state and job change that didn't pay me enough to survive so I racked up my cards paying for groceries and such. In the past 3 years I've paid off almost $15k and the Citi Best Buy will be paid off this month completely. So I have 2 cards now helping me bring my scores back up, and I don't carry a balance on them.
In June I will be traveling out of state for work and was looking for a no interest card to put those expenses on before I get my reimbursements back. But I don't travel for work. This is a once in a lifetime training opportunity I am taking and would also like to benefit from the points/rewards/no interest/no AF after the trip. I would also like to build my wallet up and get rid of that CreditOne as well.
I'm willing to look into all options for a long term benefit.