Optum primary care st cloud fl

[SELL] [US] Morphe, NYX, elf, Colour Pop, Makeup Revolution, bh Cosmetics, MAC, Urban Decay

2023.03.22 17:12 laughayetteoutloud [SELL] [US] Morphe, NYX, elf, Colour Pop, Makeup Revolution, bh Cosmetics, MAC, Urban Decay

Most items either NEVER USED or only used a few times! Condition specified for each. They are coming from a smoke-free and pet-free home. Open to bundling!
After you express interest in an item, I will hold something for you for 6 hours and move on if I don’t hear from you within that time. Please don’t ghost! Just let me know if you have changed your mind. No hard feelings! :)
Shipping starts at $5, and may increase based on weight - more accurate shipping estimate can be provided with your zip code or state. Following receipt of payment, I will ship within one week and will PM you the tracking info.
Payment Info: Paypal G&S only - I will invoice and include a packing list in your package!
Verification Album
And now, the good stuff!

PALETTES:
Morphe - 35V Stunning Vibes (2nd pic) - never used - $25
Morphe - 35M Boss Mood (2nd pic) - never used - $25
NYX - Ultimate Utopia (2nd pic) - BNNO - $25
NYX - Swear By It (2nd pic) - used once - $22
NYX - Sex Education Magic Maker - used once - $3
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please! Mega Palette - never used - $15
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please! Diamond Delirious - never used - $5
NYX - Perfect Filter Rustic Antique - 1-3 uses - $5
NYX - Mystic Petals Dark Mystic - 1-3 uses - $5
NYX - Ultimate Smokey & Highlight - 1-3 uses - $5
NYX - Ultimate Brights - 1-3 uses - $5
NYX - Ultimate Phoenix - 1-3 uses - $5
NYX - Ultimate Cool Neutrals - never used - $6
NYX - Ultimate Multi Finish Sugar High - 1-3 uses - $5
NYX - Glitter Goals Cream Pro Palette - used once - $5
NYX - Glitter Goals Love on Top - used once - $5
NYX - Glitter Goals Glacier - used once - $5
NYX - SFX Creme Colour Brights - BNNO - $8
NYX - SFX Creme Colour Primary - BNNO - $8
e.l.f. - Opposites Attract - never used - $10
e.l.f. - Rose Gold Sunset - never used - $7
e.l.f. - Rose Gold Nude - never used - $7
e.l.f. - Mad for Matte Jewel Pop - 1-3 uses - $5
e.l.f. - Mad for Matte Nude Mood - used once - $5
e.l.f. - MYSTERY 15-PIECE PALETTE (2nd pic) (I cannot for the life of me figure out or find the name of this palette anywhere lmao, here is the sticker on the back) - used once - $7
e.l.f. - Mintmelt Mint to Be - 1-3 uses - $2
e.l.f. - Mintmelt Chocolate Mint - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Truffles - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Berry Bad - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Cream & Sugar - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Carnival Candy - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Pumpkin Pie - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Acai You - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Bite Size Hot Jalapeno - never used - $3
Makeup Revolution - Neon Up All Night - never used - $10
Makeup Revolution - Tammi X Tropical Carnival (2nd pic) - used once - $12
Makeup Revolution - Reloaded Deep Dive - used once - $10
Makeup Revolution - Reloaded Marvelous Mattes - used once - $10
bh Cosmetics - Smitten in Switzerland - never used - $15
bh Cosmetics - Summer in St. Tropez - never used - $15

EYES:
NYX - Eye Gloss Dirty Talk - used once - $3
NYX - Eye Gloss Toxic - 1-3 uses - $3
NYX - Matte Single Eyeshadow Frisky - 1-3 uses - $2
NYX - Matte Single Eyeshadow Cougar - 1-3 uses - $2
NYX - Matte Single Eyeshadow Leather & Lace - 1-3 uses - $2
NYX - Pigments Vegas Baby/Viva Las Vegas - never used - $3
NYX - Cream Eyeliner Killing It - BNNO - $4
NYX - Faux Whites Pencil Mintcream - 1-3 uses - $2
NYX - Eye Pencil Auburn - 4-5 uses - $2
e.l.f. - No Budge Eyeshadow Stick Mint for You - used once - $2
e.l.f. - Eyeshadow Topper Duo Tsuki to My Heart - never used - $4
e.l.f. - Cream Eyeliner Coffee - never used - $3
Colour Pop - Creme Gel Liner Joy Ride - 1-3 uses - $2
bh Cosmetics - Loose Foil Pigment Diamond Dazzlers - never used - $4

GLITTER:
e.l.f. - Stardust Glitter Gold Galaxy - never used - $2
bh Cosmetics - Glitter Collection Spiced Pumpkin - never used - $4

JEWELS:
Colour Pop - Crystal Face Jewels Individual - never used - $3
Colour Pop - Crystal Face Jewels Mixed - never used - $3
bh Cosmetics - Gem On Pearly - never used - $3
bh Cosmetics - Drop Dead Gorgeous Get Stunned - never used - $3

FACE:
NYX - Born to Glow! Foundation Fair - approx. 75% full - $4
NYX - Highlighter & Bronzer Palette (2 of these - 2nd pic) - both 4-5 uses - each $3
NYX - Away We Glow Liquid Booster Glazed Donuts - never used - $5
NYX - Away We Go Strobing Cream Glow-tini - never used - $5
NYX - Sweet Cheeks Powder Blush Citrine Rose - 4-5 uses - $3
NYX - Matte Finish Setting Spray 0.60 fl oz - never used - $2
NYX - Radiant Finish Setting Spray 0.60 fl oz - never used - $2
e.l.f. - Jelly Pop Dew Primer - 1-3 uses - $8
e.l.f. - Jelly Pop Dew Primer - never used - $10
e.l.f. - Poreless Putty Primer Sheer - never used - $10
e.l.f. - Contour Palette Light/Medium - 5-10 uses - $3
e.l.f. - Monochromatic Multi-Stick Glistening Peach - 4-5 uses - $3
e.l.f. - Dewy Coconut Long Lasting Setting Mist 2.7 fl oz - never used - $8
e.l.f. - Post-Workout Cool Down Mist - approx. 95% full - $8
Makeup Revolution - Liquid Highlighter Unicorn's Glow - never used - $5

BODY OIL/HIGHLIGHTER:
NYX - California Beamin' Pink Frost - never used - $10
NYX - California Beamin' Pearl Necklace - never used - $10
NYX - California Beamin' Beach Babe - never used - $10
NYX - California Beamin' Golden Glow - never used - $10

BRUSH:
e.l.f. - Retro Paradise Glow Up Body Brush - never used - $3

LIPS:
NYX - Suede Matte Lip Liner Ace - never used - $2
NYX - Suede Matte Lip Liner Sway - never used - $2
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lip Topper Gloss Power Trip - never used - $4
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lip Topper Gloss That's Fire - never used - $4
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lip Topper Gloss Left on Read - never used - $4
NYX - Soft Matte Lip Cream Milan - used once - $2
NYX - Liquid Suede Cream Lipstick Orange County - used once - $3
NYX - Liquid Suede Cream Lipstick Sway - used once - $3
NYX - Liquid Suede Cream Lipstick Downtown Beauty - used once - $3
NYX - Glitter Goals Liquid Lipstick X Infinity - used once - $3
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lipstick Gem Storm - used once - $3
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lipstick Highkey - never used - $3
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lipstick Good Look - never used - $3
NYX - Diamonds & Ice Please Lipstick On the Rocks - never used - $3
NYX - Suede Matte Lipstick Cherry Skies - never used - $3
NYX - Pin-Up Pout Lipstick Almost Famous - never used - $3
NYX - Lingerie Push-Up Longlasting Lipstick Dusk to Dawn - never used - $3
NYX - Butter Lipstick Root Beer Float - used once - $3
NYX - Filler Instinct Plumping Lip Color Juicy Pout - used once - $3
NYX - Powder Puff Lippie Lip Cream Teacher's Pet - used once - $3
NYX - Powder Puff Lippie Lip Cream Bby - used once - $3
NYX - Powder Puff Lippie Lip Cream Boys Tears - never used - $4
NYX - Powder Puff Lippie Lip Cream Teenage Dream - never used - $4
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Full Size Dexter - never used - $3
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Full Size Karma Suit Ya - never used - $3
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Mini Dexter - never used - $2
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Mini Voodoo Lily - never used - $2
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Mini Grind - never used - $2
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Mini On the Hunt - never used - $2
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Mini Last Frontier - never used - $2
NYX - Slip Tease Lip Lacquer Mini Brick Road - never used - $2
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick The Best - never used - $3
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick Exclusive - never used - $3
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick Into the Night - never used - $3
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick Dirty Talk - never used - $3
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick Emotion - used once - $3
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick Everyone Lies - used once - $3
NYX - Shout Loud Satin Lipstick Cactus Dreams - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Lip Liner x Tiana Major9 - never used - $2
e.l.f. - Prismatic Lip Gloss Rose Quartz - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Lip Plumping Gloss Pink Sugar - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Lip Plumping Gloss Champagne Glam - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Lip Gloss Electric Mood x Tiana Major9 Affair - never used - $4
e.l.f. - Srsly Satin Lipstick Creme - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Srsly Satin Lipstick Raspberry - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Srsly Satin Lipstick Pepper - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Srsly Satin Lipstick Taffy - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Sheer Slick Lipstick Golden Pear - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Sheer Slick Lipstick Black Cherry - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Sheer Slick Lipstick Orange Crush - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Sheer Slick Lipstick Wild Peach - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Sheer Slick Lipstick Cherry Slush - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Sheer Slick Lipstick Grapefruit - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Moisturizing Lipstick Pink Mink - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Moisturizing Lipstick Flirty & Fabulous - used once - $3
e.l.f. - Moisturizing Lipstick Red Carpet - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Lipstick Duos Need It Nudes - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Lipstick Duos Red Hot Reds - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Lipstick Duos I Love Pinks - never used - $3
e.l.f. - Matte Lip Color Rowdy Rouge - never used - $3
Colour Pop - Lippie Pencil I Heart This - never used - $3
Colour Pop - Lippie Stix Wet (Pearlized) - never used - $3
Colour Pop - Lippie Stix Raw (Satin) - never used - $3
Urban Decay - 24/7 Glide-On Lip Pencil Blackmail - 1-3 uses - $2
MAC - Lip Glass Clear - never used - $4
submitted by laughayetteoutloud to makeupexchange [link] [comments]


2023.03.22 12:09 burraqengineering Revit Training in Pakistan-Burraq Engineering solutions

The Autodesk product Revit is a commercial BIM (building information modelling) programme. A wide variety of professionals, including architects, civil engineers, MEP engineers, designers, and contractors, rely on it often. If you want to learn Revit Training courses, Burraq Engineering solutions is an Engineering institute that provides the best online and physical Revit Training in Pakistan. You can learn more Engineering courses from Burraq Engineering solutions. Revit Training in Lahore is best for Pakistani Engineering students. Online and physical classes are available. Using Autodesk Revit, users can make very accurate 3D models and then modify and examine them in great depth. Architects, landscape architects, civil engineers, MEP engineers, designers, and contractors all benefit from using Autodesk Revit, an information modelling software application.

Charles River Software

Charles River Software, which had been around since 1997 but had changed its name to Revit Technology Company in 2000 and had been acquired by Autodesk by 2002, was responsible for creating the original software. Users can create a 3D model of a building and its components, annotate it with a 2D element drawing, and then look up relevant information about the structure in the program’s built-in database. Revit is a 4D Building Information Modelling programme that may be used to plan and track a building’s lifecycle, from its inception until its eventual demolition.

BIM models Development

The BIM model’s development has facilitated progress in several disciplines beyond architecture. Revit’s primary features have also contributed to the development of structural engineering. In reality, without at least some familiarity with Revit, it is quite difficult to further one’s career as a civil engineer. While working on a building project, you can use Revit to do cloud-based structural analysis. Your Revit model can undergo either a partial or comprehensive analysis, and you can run many analyses simultaneously. Finally, Revit gives you control over how and where you view analysis data. Improved productivity and efficiency for MEP design and construction teams have resulted from the use of BIM 3D modelling.

Revit features and capabilities

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) planning and design teams may work more efficiently and effectively with Revit MEP. See below for a rundown of Revit’s features and capabilities, tailored specifically to the needs of MEP professionals. Last but not least, Revit allows MEP engineers to make models that are ready for mass production. As a result, the MEP contractors will be updated right away on what tools and supplies are required for production. This results in a more efficient workflow since fewer people need to be involved in the chain of communication. Revit relies heavily on the connection between your 2D and 3D designs. If you want to use other digital design software, you’ll have to draw these schematics by hand.

Revit 2D and 3D Design

The information in your 2D drawings will often serve as the foundation for your 3D models. This method has been around for a while, but it’s inefficient. Consistency problems are something that must be addressed. The integrity of the 3D model will suffer if details cannot be transferred from the 2D drawings. The difficulty is addressed by Revit BIM software because of the connection it makes between your 2D and 3D designs. You now have a model from which to create new drawings. Make a tweak to a 3D model, and the corresponding 2D drawings will update automatically. Even if you alter one of the 2D images, everything else will remain the same.

Revit BIM software

The Revit programme is predicated on this kind of automation. It remembers information and modifies itself accordingly. So, your team can avoid spending excessive time on the drawings to guarantee accuracy. BIM software like Revit takes care of that for you. When it comes to producing lifelike renderings, Revit BIM software really shines. All the information you feed into the model will be your primary focus. The end product is complete models that may be used to design realistic buildings.

Structural Design

The use of BIM tools has completely changed the way buildings are designed and built. The majority of Revit’s users are probably employed in this industry. Some of the many use for Revit among architects are listed below. Tools for structural design, MEP design, architectural details, engineering, and construction are all included in Revit. Job sharing is a way for teams working on a common project to divide up tasks and divide up the workload.

Building information modelling Technology

With Autodesk Revit, architects and engineers have access to comprehensive building information modelling (BIM) technology. Revit’s many features allow for early design, visualisation, engineering, analysis, manufacturing, construction, and more. Exact 3D modelling. You can save time and effort by automating mundane processes in Revit and then focusing on more essential projects. Integrating Revit’s development with other programmes allows you to tailor the programme to your own requirements. It also has the capability to interact with other products in the Autodesk AEC Collection. Connecting Revit to other programmes like Civil 3D and AutoCAD Navisworks, among others, expands the software’s usefulness.
submitted by burraqengineering to u/burraqengineering [link] [comments]


2023.03.22 07:27 floridadentalfl Florida Dental Care of Miller : Certified Dentist in Miami, FL : 305-596-0104

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submitted by floridadentalfl to u/floridadentalfl [link] [comments]


2023.03.21 23:24 One_Dragonfruit_8342 Tending the Garden

This is my first post here, so let me know how I did and what I could do better in the future.
I watched the ship take off and disappear into the starry sky and sighed as I knew it’d be another six months before it came back. I turned and began making my way back to the tree. I strode across vast fields the size of hab blocks, waded through a marsh the size of a city, and across a mountain range that reached so high it scraped the edge of the void.
I scarcely noticed as I was lost in thought at the monumental task of running the Garden, my mind linked with the massive atmospheric generators, continent-ringing terraforming engines, and the clouds and rivers of nanites that drifted across the land. With these technologies at my beck and call, I ensured the Garden flourished and was a venerable paradise.
It took me twenty-eight days of ceaseless travel to reach the tree. I unlinked and returned to my body, taking it the beautiful sight that brought tears to every visitor I had brought here.
A massive meadow with golden grass, and in the center rose a low hill that was crested with an enormous tree with leaves of gold that was always laden with silver apples. I made my way to the tree and found my seat, a large dark river stone I had cut and polished til it shone like a mirror. I had nestled it amongst the tree's roots and used it as a seat to rest, from which I taught my yearly visitors everything they needed to know.
I leaned my crook against the tree and rested my bulk on the stone, now long worn smooth by the passage of millennia. I rested my arms on my knees, cast my mind through the link, and ran primary through tertiary diagnostics on every system and function in the garden.
When the diagnostics were done, the grass had wrapped around my feet and grown up my legs to just shy of my knees, and a thick coating of pollen and dust had settled onto my body. I looked down at my dirty robes and skin and decided I needed a bath. I grabbed my crook and headed south.
I passed through jungles and shrublands til I came out onto a savannah that stretched far beyond what even my prodigious sight could see. I made my way toward its heart, and after another thirteen days of travel, I came to a lake so large it could technically be classified as an inland ocean.
I stropped from my robes and began to scrub them in the water until they shimmered white again. Then I took handfuls of the fine sand of the shore and scrubbed every inch of myself til my silver skin was spotless, then I kneeled and washed my golden hair, and when I was fairly sure I was clean as I could get, I dressed and made my way back across the savannah.
After two days of walking, I heard a sound that made me smile, the trumpeting of elephants. I picked up the pace and climbed a boulder ahead of me, and there I saw a herd of them lumbering across the savannah.
There were probably around eighty of them in the herd. I smiled and cracked the butt of my crook against the boulder, and a low note rolled out over the savannah. When it reached the herd, they halted, and I saw the matriarch turn towards me and let loose a trumpet and begin to thunder towards me with the rest of the herd hot on her heels.
I laughed as they reached me, and soon I was swamped by dozens of trunks running through my hair and tugging on my robes I smiled as I patted their heads and scratched ears as I walked through the herd. I stopped at the matriarch and used a nail on my left hand to scratch a mark on her tusk, similar to the dozens of others running up her tusks. I scratched her ears and smiled as I walked off.
It took another ten days until I reached the edge and stood in the wall's shadow. I linked with the wall and could sense the intricate machinery in the three kilometer thick wall at work. I adjusted the wind patterns in the vicinity and ended up dialing the rain back by seven percent.
After that, I traveled back to the tree, but instead of running diagnostics, I accessed the archives and began constructing a new lesson plan. I decided that since it had been over five hundred years since the last time, I would cover the origins of the Garden and how I came to care for it.
Project Garden was created as a last-ditch effort to preserve humanity's history. With the civil war raging and weapons of mass destruction being used as freely as soldiers' lives were spent, a group of scientists began a number of tremendous undertakings.
Project Elysium would create a series of extra-dimensional archives holding every fact of human knowledge. In the end, thirty-seven such archives were created and placed in a dimension unaccessable but through a single data link. The project was a success, and the knowledge of humanity was forever preserved.
Project Tir Na Nog would give birth to the most sophisticated terraforming technologies ever before seen. The power to crack planets and reshape the land like clay, swarms of nanites that could strip things down on an atomic level and assemble it as something new, engines that could create an atmosphere from the most toxic air and able to rebuild one from nothing,
Project Eden was to gather a single cell from every living thing on the planet, from microorganisms to common lichen. These cells would be stored alongside the archives from Project Elysium, and cloning technologies would allow the plants and animals to be reborn and seeded around the world from those single cells.
Project Valhalla was perhaps the one the second most attention was given. Every form of weapon and defensive technology was pooled together, and new and bizarre ones were conceived in the rush to ensure that Project Garden would be safely defended. The main items to come from the project were void shields of a caliber unseen anywhere else and graviton weapons capable of pulling destroyer-class ships in orbit apart at the seams.
Project Du’at was perhaps the most critical of all the sub-projects in that its task was to create a being who would be capable of using all the projects to their fullest in their areas. The being would be unaging, unlike anything the galaxy had seen before. It would never leave the planet and would be tasked with the construction of a “garden” that it would tend to for all of time. At the last second, it was decided that it would also be a teacher so that, hopefully, the ongoing tragedies would never happen again.
I ended up spending four months building the curriculum for the next batch of visitors. When I had finished, I decided to spend the last two months doing a full walkabout around the Garden.
I traveled to the north and checked on the pack ice and the populations of the various seal species. Next, I dove into the water and spent two weeks swimming with the narwhals, belugas, and grey whales.
When I was sure everything in the cold waters of the north was in order, I headed east and came to a great desert and, for the next three weeks, shifted through the sands, checking on every species that crawled through the sand. I ended up having to exterminate a large part of the rodent population due to a virus and replace it with fresh stock from the gene chamber.
After that, I decided that I’d spend the last week wandering the plains and steppes of the southwest. The great herds of bison, wild mustangs, and elk cut vast swathes across the land, always followed by the packs of wolves that preyed upon them.
I realized the week had already passed by when one night, the security system alerted me that a ship was approaching. Instantaneously dozens of passcodes and security checks flew from the Garden to the ship as I turned my gaze skyward and sought out the approaching vessel.
I quickly found it approaching on the same flight vector it had used for the past six millennia. The words Guardian of Terra on the prow caught the light of the sun, and I lowered the void shields. When everything was cleared, I gave the signal to begin the approach for landing.
Being halfway across the Garden, I would never reach the landing pad in time to meet them, so I quickly linked with the Garden’s subgeo array of locators, and with the use of the Fold Gate Array and single step, I was at the landing pad as the Guardian of Terra was beginning to touch down.
When the bay doors opened, I was greeted by a sight that always warmed my heart, five dozen human children, all between the ages of fourteen and fifteen. They were ushered outside by the crew, and the captain, like always, was leading them to take what was probably their first step on a planet.
I stepped forward with a smile, and the captain gave me a small bow. He stepped aside and, with a flourish of his arm, made a grand gesture of showing me the children.
“These lads and lasses are from the Stella Nomade fleet. As the captain of the Guardian of Terra, I hereby hand them over to your care for the next six months. They have all sworn by their names and their fleet to be true and honest in their ways while in the Garden. Do you, the Caretaker accept them and swear to teach them their history and open their eyes to the past so that it may guide them to a better future?”
I looked over the children and saw a mixture of skin tones and styles of clothes show, casing that they were from all walks of life on the fleet. I smiled and gave them a low bow.
“I, the Caretaker, accept them and swear to teach them all I have to offer so that the mistakes of the past may never be repeated. They will come to no harm in my care and will have full access to the Garden. They shall be respected and be treated fair so long as they return it in kind.”
I held up my crook and, with a wide sweep, made the nanites clouds above us generate light like it was noon, and as I turned back to them, I could see every child's face was filled with awe.
“I welcome every one of you and hope that in the coming days, we all can become fast friends. Welcome to the Garden of Terra.”
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2023.03.21 21:50 TheDrungeonBlaster Street Dreams #7: Keep it Quiet

“Alright, shitheads, before we drop, we’re running our way through the plan: our first step entails high tailing it to the center of the building; by my count that means we’re going to have to crack two separate high security gates to enter. The second step will be the simplest—get into the Supervisor’s office; two guards will be outside door, with another pair of patrols in the hallway at all times. We gas the joint, put ‘em out, then use their fingerprints to crack into the office. Finally, we’ll nab the plutonium and jet towards the windows. And remember: above all else, we keep it quiet, I don’t want to have to kill anyone tonight,” I explained.
“Sounds good, boss,” Krieg said, sarcastically.
“One more thing: while we’re inside, I’m in charge. I won’t repeat myself; if I have to say something twice, the second time I’ll say it through a barrel. We clear?”
Whitney rolled her eyes.
“Crystal,” Krieg snarled.
Rain hammered the plascrete, as storm clouds rolled in above Satellite Valley. Every inch of space not consumed by buildings, or the road had been converted into solar panel storage. Thousands of new cameras had been installed throughout the district a month ago, after a heist turned into arson and threatened the entire of the district. The skyway was surveyed by a veritable net of bulky, square combat drones, each of which possessing full access to the security network. I hated working in Satellite Valley.
Locust’s corporate tower was a mighty sentinel of automated aggression, eagerly overlooking the city, waiting to its payload of robotic death upon whoever was foolish enough to be made an example out of. The obsidian spire was framed with lines of streaming neon lights. An immense sign read, ‘Locust Munitions and Automotive,’ perched atop the building like a ridiculous square hat. I glanced to the security monitors atop the enviro-dome: no threat level increase. That in itself was a damned miracle; anytime a vehicle entered from outside the district, the threat prediction algorithm would do a routine threat level increase. Marcel and Maggy must have figured out a way around it, but how?
Finally, we reached the parking garage. The doors opened, but Marcel and Maggy never said a word. I left a credstick on my seat, nothing much, only a couple thousand; it was the least I could do—they’d seen me through so many hard times.
The garage was quiet. I compressed the button on a localized jammer as we all stepped out. The cameras sputtered for a moment before continuing their rotations. Marcel had dropped us at the bottom of the garage, a block away from the maintenance entrance. Krieg and Carol fell into formation, flanking me on either side; Whitney followed a few feet back, with Ursa and Monitor taking up the rear. With a thought my HALO readied my guns. I selected non-lethal rounds, watched the drums spin and clicked on my norepinephrine regulator. This was it; chances like this came along once in a career. This much plutonium would be enough to fund a retirement—if I ever decided to retire.
“Alright, team, load up non-lethal rounds, keep it quiet and stay in formation; on my mark!” I said, drawing both guns.
Whitney’s cufflinks cast sparks to the ground; tasers. Figures, she’d never had a stomach for murder, not outside of the man in her basement who she apparently intended to torture to death. I suppose the world had changed both of us. I could see it in the way she moved: she was leagues above were she’d been before we’d all went our separate ways. She was a professional now.
We wove through the shadows, careful to avoid stepping out of line. The cameras wouldn’t give us away, everything organic in a ten foot radius of the jammer would be masked, refracted like it was never there. Unfortunately, even with the best gadgets the risk of human intervention was still present. I slipped on my rebreather as we crested the garage’s slope. A small door situated between two separate webs of piping and wires sat across the room. The maintenance entrance. I flashed a fabricated security pass and the door slid open.
I emerged into a narrow corridor, the walls lined with hissing pipes and loose valves. We shifted into single file. Humidity drenched the room, accruing on the walls like hackers on an open HALO channel. The heat was nearly unbearable. I couldn’t help but think of how vulnerable we were. I let out a short, crisp whistle and started hustling forward in a quiet jog. All we could do was move fast and hope none of the staff had to leave mid-shift. Finally, we reached our destination: an automated door that chirped a synthetic sounding, “Good morning!” as I flashed the fake security pass.
Immense glass frames were laced throughout the metallic black hallway. The scent of industrial cleaner hung in the air, and the walls were decorated with surrealist art depicting melting faces, distorted objects and psychedelic landscapes. The group slid to a halt as something robotic whirred into the distance.
Carol’s eyes flashed to me, begging for permission.
Unsure, I slowly nodded back. Her cyber-shell tensed up, assuming a crouched position with her head covered by her arms. Her eyes were empty. I’d never seen anything like it; what the hell was she up to?
I waited with bated breath as the whirring slowly drew closer. I pointed my SMGs, but Krieg glanced at me, shaking his head. Finally, a security droid rounded the corner, taking point beside Carol. Whitney rolled her eyes.
The stairs were impossibly wide, apparently designed as the workers primary avenue of transportation, despite the intricate elevator system present; Locust reserved luxuries like elevators, breaks and days off for the higher ups. We clung to the shadows as we ascended the stairwell.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing here?” a guard called out, rapidly levelling a hand cannon towards the group.
Krieg’s finger reconfigured itself, firing a pair of darts into the guard’s neck. He hit the ground almost instantly.
“Poor bastard should have just pretended like he never saw anything and went about his—” Ursa started, before a rocket pierced his chest, detonating from within.
A hail of gore rained down upon the crew. We were helpless; there was no cover, no tactical advantage to be found. I clicked the guns over to lethal, enabling explosive rounds. Whitney dove forward. The shooter launched another missile, landing square in Krieg’s chest. Despite the obvious damage, the cyborg endured, his arms reshaping into miniguns as he bellowed a war cry.
And just like that, the run went loud.
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2023.03.21 19:29 MirkWorks City & Soul by James Hillman

5
From Mirror to Window: Curing Psychoanalysis of its Narcissism
The apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch. Neurosis is thus nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem. - C.G. Jung (1912)
Narcissism is now the rage, the universal diagnosis. In Freud's world, the new attention was on conversion hysteria; in Bleuler's, on dementia praecox. Earlier we find all ills attributed to the English malady, to the spleen, to hypochondriasis, to melancholia, to chlorosis; in Paris, a myriad of phobies and délires. Different time and places, different syndromes.
Narcissism has its theoreticians - Kohut, Kernberg, Lacan - and modern Jungians are following the rage. The collective consciousness of psychology makes us collectively unconscious, much as Jung said when writing about the collective ideas in his day. Being "with it" also means being in it. The epidemic diagnosis Narcissism states that the condition is already endemic to the psychology that makes the diagnosis. It sees narcissism because it sees narcissistically. So let us not take this diagnosis so literally, but place it within the historical parade of Western diagnoses.
Eminent cultural critics - Karl Krauss, Thomas Szasz, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Paul Zweig, and the notorious Dr. Jeffrey Masson - have each seen that psychoanalysis breeds a narcissistic subjectivism inflicting on the culture an iatrogenic disorder, that is, a disease brought by the methods of the doctors who would cure it.
I shall continue their line of thought, but I shall use a method that Wolfgang Giegerich has so brilliantly exposed in many of his papers. If depth psychology itself suffers from a narcissistic disorder, then what we analysts need first to probe is the unconscious narcissism in analysis itself. Our first patient is neither the patient nor ourselves, but the phenomenon called "analysis" that has brought us both to the consulting room.
The term "Narcissism" is probably British . Havelock Ellis is credited with its invention, though Freud gave us its psychoanalytic meaning. What did Freud say? As I go through some of his descriptions, let us hear them narcissistically, as self-referents, descriptive of psychology and of ourselves in psychology.
1917: "We employ the term narcissism in relation to little children and it is to excessive narcissism of primitive man that we ascribe his belief in the omnipotence of his thoughts and consequent attempts to influence the course of events in the other world by magical practices." Does not analysis have this primitive omnipotence fantasy of influencing events in the outer world by its magical practices? The omnipotence of subjective reflection is attested to by many classic Jungians like Harding, Bernard, Meier, von Franz, Baumann, etc. As Jung himself says, we are each "the makeweight that tips the scales" that determine the outcome of world history." The rituals of self-engagement remove projections from the world so that, supposedly, the world itself is transformed by psychoanalysis.
1922: "... narcissistic disorders are characterized by a withdrawal of the libido from objects." The withdrawal of the libido from from objects - I ask you to remember this statement. We shall come back to it.
1925: Freud describes three historic blows to humankind's narcissism. These, he says, are the cosmological blow of Copernicus, the blow of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the psychoanalytic blow (of Freud) which wounded the omnipotence fantasy, or narcissism, of the ego as sole self-willed ruler. Here, psychoanalysis becomes itself a giant omnipotence fantasy, a creation myth of our culture equivalent with astronomy and biology, promulgating itself with narcissistic grandeur.
This pronouncement appears in Freud's discussion on resistance to psychoanalysis. By means of this idea resistance, analysis brilliantly maintains its invulnerability to criticism. Questioning the validity of analysis is impugned as resistance to it. Even more: the very attacks demonstrate resistance and therefore help to validate analytical theory. As Freud says, "The triumph of narcissism, the ego's victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality ... It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world."
Later Freud considered narcissism not to be rooted in love at all, i.e., as self-love, but to be rather a defense against aggressive impulses. Let us consider for a moment the value of "aggressive impulses," at least and at best they take the object, the world out there, into account: I feel enraged about societal injustice, nuclear danger, media crap, industrial callousness, the corporate mind, political ideologues, hideous architecture, etc. But, owing to my narcissistic defenses against the involving call of aggression, I go to the spa, work out, meditate, jog, diet, reduce stress, relax my body armor, improve my orgasms, get a new hairstyle, and take a vacation. And see my therapist: very expensive, very good for me, because he or she devotes complete attention to my problems, especially our transferential frame. Instead of the world and my outrage, I work on my analysis, myself, the Self. This Self, too, fits a narcissistic definition: "the incorporation of grandiose object images as defense against anxiety and guilt" or, as Fenichel puts it, one feels oneself in "reunion with an omnipotent force, be that force an archetype, a god or goddess, the unus mundus, or the numinosity of analysis itself.
Freud's paper "On Narcissism" states that both introspection and conscience or "being watched" derive from and serve narcissism. Yet, psychotherapy practices self-scrutiny as the principal method in its treatment and "being watched" or supervision as the principal component of its training. A candidate goes to hour after hour of institutionalized narcissism of watching and being watched.
The institutionalization of narcissism in our profession - the idea of resistance, the idealization of the Self, the practices of introspection and supervision, the omnipotence fantasies about its own importance in world history, its technique of referring all events back to itself as the vessel, the mirror, the temenos, the frame - bears immediately upon that central obsession of analysis today, transference.
*
By transference, here, I mean that self-gratifying analytical habit which refers the emotions of life to the analysis. Transference habitually deflects object libido, that is, love for anything outside analysis, into a narcissistic reflection upon analysis. We feed analysis with life. The mirror that walks down the road of life (Flaubert) replaces the actual road, and the mirror no longer reflects the world, only the walking companions. They may as well have stayed indoors, less distracted by the trees and the traffic.
The principal content of analytical reflection as transference is the child we once were, a fact which accords with Freud's observation that the object choice of the narcissist is "someone he once was.” This helps account for the faddish popularity of Alice Miller’s writings. Her idealized children exhibit what Freud said: the narcissist is “not willing to forego his narcissistic perfection in his childhood” and “seeks to recover the early perfection.” The focus on childhood traps the libido only further into subjectivity, and therefore we must recognize that erotic compulsions in analysis are produced primarily by the analysis, rather than by the persons. Analysis acts itself out through them quite impersonally so that they often feel betrayed and ashamed by the impersonality of the emotions they undergo and are unable to recognize that what they are suffering is the object libido trying to find a way out of analysis. Instead, the narcissistic viciousness of our theory says that transference emotions are compelling the persons to go deeper into analysis.
Let us recognize that the other person - patient or analyst - embodies the only possibility within an analysis to whom object libido can flow. The person in the other chair represents cure of analytical narcissism simply by being there as an Other. Moreover, the patient for the analyst and the analyst for the patient become such numinous objects because they have also been tabooed as libidinal possibilities. Analyst and patient may not act their desire for each other. The narcissism of the situation makes them absolutely necessary to each other, while the taboo sets them absolutely outside of each other. This outside object however, is also inside the analysis. So, patient for doctor and doctor for patient become the symbolic mode of ending analysis by means of love.
Of course, the persons are often torn by what Freud calls the love dilemma of the narcissistic patient: “the cure by love,” which he generally refers to as cure by analysis. We must ask whether this neurotic choice, as Freud calls it, arises from the narcissisms of the patient or from the narcissism of the analytical system in which the patient is situated. After all, the fantasy of an opposition between love and analysis occurs within the prior fantasy of cure which has brought the persons together in the first place.
By elaborating ethical codes, malpractice insurance, investigations, and expulsions that blame the participants, analysis protects itself from wounding insights about its own narcissism. The vulnerability of analysis - that its effectiveness is always in question, that it is neither science nor medicine, that it is aging into professional mediocrity and may have lost its soul to power years ago despite its idealized language by growth and creativity (a language by the way, never used by its founders) - this vulnerability is overcome by idealizing the transference.
As well as transference love, there is also hatred. Perhaps the client’s hatred of the analyst and the hatred of the analyst for the client are also not personal. Perhaps, these intense oppressive feelings against each other arise in both to present both with the fact that they are in a hateful situation: the object libido hates the attachment of transference. Analysis hates itself in order to break the narcissistic vessel imprisoning the libido that would go out into the soul in the world.
The horned dilemmas of transference, including the analyst’s stare into the mirror of his own counter-transference, the feelings of love and hatred, this agony and ecstasy and romantic torture convince the participants that what is going on is of intense importance: first, because these phenomena are expected by the theory and provide proof of it, and second, because these phenomena re-enact what analysis once was in its own childhood in Vienna and Zurich, analysis in primary fusion with its origins in Breuer and Freud and Jung, in Dora and Anna and Sabina. The feelings are cast in therapeutic guise because this is the healing fiction of the analytic situation. In other words, transference is less necessary to the doctor and the patient than it is to analysis by means of which it intensifies its narcissistic idealization, staying in love with itself. We therapists do not sit in our chambers so many hours a day only for the money, or the power, but because we are addicted to analytical narcissism. Our individual narcissism is both obscured and reinforced by the approved narcissism of the analytical profession.
When one partner imagines a tryst or the other imagines resisting a seduction, or when either imagines that love is a solution to misery, then they are framed in the romantic conflicts of Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights, and Anna Karenina, reconstituting the Romanticisms of the nineteenth century and the origins of psychoanalysis, not in your or my personal childhoods, but in its own cultural childhood. This means we have to locate the narcissism of contemporary analysis within a much wider narcissism: the Romantic movement.
*
Literary tradition differentiates at least four principal traits of this genre. We have already spoken of one, “idealization of the love object.” And indeed analysis idealizes the patient as an “interesting case,” “difficult patient,” “good patient,” “borderline personality.” Or consider all the literary fabulations that have made patients into eternal literary figures - Dora, Ellen West, Babette, Miss Miller, Wolfman, Ratman, Little Hands, all the way to Freud and Jung themselves in the novels The White Hotel and The House of Glass. Think of the Romanticism of our theoretical constructs: Love and Death, Empathy, Transformation, Growth, The Child, The Great Mother, The Mirror, Desire and Jouissance, and the Transitional Object. In the patient there takes place such idealized events as a hieros gamos, a quest for self-discovery and a journey into wholeness. Synchronicities outside of causal laws, transcendent functions, integration of the shadow and the realization of the Self on whom the future of civilization depends. We record our idealization of the love object, i.e., analysis, in taped and filmed analytic sessions, paying meticulous and expensive attention to trivial conversations and gestures. Analysis is in love with its idealized image.
A second essential trait of Romanticism is said to be the opposition between bourgeois society and the inner self that, with its dreams, desires and inspirations, tends to oppose, even contradict, the outer world of usual things. Psychoanalysis from its beginnings imagines itself fundamentally opposed to the civilization and its institutions of religion, family, medicine, and the political community disdained as “the collective.” Freud’s emphasis on himself as Jew and hence marginal, as well as Jung’s favorite position as heretical old hermit (despite the bourgeois lives they led and values they held) still shapes the imagination of the profession and distorts its relation to the ordinary world.
Third, imprisonment another basic theme in Romanticism, especially French and Russian. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Maria’s song says: “This tiny cell suffices me, there I will dwell my soul to save.” The consulting room provides the confining physical place for the psychic imprisonment of analysis as such its devotion to the secret nooks and crannies of the private world, decorating with reconstructive rococo (i.e., psycho-dynamic intricacies) the narcissistic cell of personality.
Fourth, the Romantic genre has been defined as one that simultaneously seeks and postpones a particular end. This fits therapy. Its entire procedure seeks to restore the person to the world, yet postpones this return indefinitely. (Meanwhile, do not make major changes in your actual life. Don’t act out. The cure of analysis becomes more analysis-another analyst, another school - and the improvement of training becomes ever more hours.) The simultaneity of seeking and postponing an end occurs in the basic conundrum of every analysis, its contradictory two commandments: encourage the desires of the unconscious (Thou Shall Not Repress) and forbid gratification (Thou Shall Not Act Out). Our work is with the libidinous and our method is by way of abstention. The end is unforeseeable; there is no completion. Analysis interminable, as Freud said. This is the Romanticism of eternal longing.
There is no way out of Romanticism’s consulting room and the subjectivism of its eros, unless we turn to what is beyond its purview, turn to what narcissism and romanticism leave out: the objects, the unidealized, immediately given, actual world of dull and urban things . By turning psychological attention from the mirror of self-reflection to the world through the window, we release “object libido” to seek its goal beyond narcissistic confinement in analysis. For “object libido” is but a psychoanalytic name for the drive which loves the world, the erotic desire for Anima Mundi, for Soul in the World.
Perhaps it becomes clearer why I have been emphasizing John Keats’s remarkable phrase; “Call the world … The vale of Soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world.” Also, you will understand why I have held myself back from that side of Jung which expounds upon meaning, Self, individuation, unus mundus, wholeness, mandalas, etc. . These large and introverted ideas envelop me and usually my patients with a grandiose, invulnerable aura. As well, I keep a distance from the current Kohut craze and Lacanian mystique. Although recognizing narcissism as the syndrome of the times (even if the groundwork for this was prepared long ago in the metaphysical catastrophe of Augustinian and Cartesian subjectivism); yet, Kohut attempts its cure by the same means of narcissistic obsession: an ever more detailed observation of subjectivity. And a subjectivity within the oppressive confines of a negatively reconstructed childhood. The child archetype dominates contemporary therapy, keeping patients (and analysts) safe from the world. For this archetype feels always endangered by the actual world, lives not in the present but in futurity, and is addicted to its own powerless infantilism. By so focusing on the child, analysis disenfranchises itself from wider realm of soul-making in the adult community of polis.
Nevertheless I must confess to a serious long-standing error on my part regarding Keats’s phrase. I always considered the world out there to be useful for making one’s own soul. Narcissism again. My soul, your soul - not its soul. For the Romantics, however, ensouling the world was a crucial part of their program. They recognized the traps of narcissistic subjectivity in their vision. Hence, they sought the spirit in physical nature, the brotherhood of all mankind or Gemeinschaftsgefühl, political revolution, and a return to the classic gods and goddesses, attempting to revivify the soul of the world with pantheism.
We must therefore read Keats as saying we go through the world for the sake of its soul-making, thereby our own. This reading suggests a true object libido, beyond narcissism, in keeping with Otto Fenichel’s definition of love. Love can only be called such when “one’s own satisfaction is impossible without satisfying the object too. If the world is not satisfied by our going through it, no matter how much beauty and pleasure our souls may receive from it, then we live in its vale without love.
There is a way out, or I wouldn’t be standing here. For my specific style of narcissism, my pose before the mirror, today is heroic. My style insists on resolution of the issues raised. The method I shall be using here follows the method which I usually empty for resolving issues. First, we look back into the history of psychoanalysis for a model; second, we turn to some peculiar bit of pathologizing for a clue; and third, we resolve problems by dissolving them into images and metaphors.
So, let us turn back to the first psychoanalytic case, Anna O., and her doctor, Josef Breuer, who, with Freud, wrote Studies in Hysteria. As you recall, after a year of almost daily sessions often of several hours, he suddenly terminated. You recall also the intensity of her transference, that she developed a hysterical pregnancy and childbirth, after Breuer tried to end the treatment. He, according to Jones, after a final visit to her “fled the house in a cold sweat. The next day he and his wife left for Venice to spend a second honeymoon which resulted in the conception of a daughter.” Whether fact or not, and Ellenberger says not, the fantasy shows a founding patron of our work escaping both cure by analysis and cure by love for the beauty of Venice and the conception of a daughter. His object libido returns from the oppressive narcissism of psychoanalysis to the Romanticism of the wider world.
This wide world remains merely that, merely a place of escape or acting out, so long as the world “out the window” is imagined only in the Cartesian model as sheer res extensa, only dead matter. To show more vividly how that world is, as Keats said, a place of soul, let us go straight through the window into the world. Let us take a walk in a Japanese garden, in particular the strolling garden, the one with water, hills, trees, and stones. While we walk, let us imagine the garden as an emblem for the peripatetic teacher or the therapeutic guide (psychopompos), the world itself as psychoanalyst showing us soul, showing us how to be in it soulfully.
I turn to the garden and to Japan because of insights given while in Kyoto gardens several years ago, and also because the garden as metaphor expresses some of the deepest longings - from Hesperides, to Eden’s paradise, and Maria’s hortus inclusus - for the world as home of the soul. So by entering into the Japanese garden now we shall be stepping through the window into the anima mundi.
First we notice that the garden has no central place to stand and view it all. We can but scrutinize a part at a time. Instead of overview and wholeness, there is perspective and eachness. The world changes as we move. Here a clump of iris, there a mossy rock. Instead of a center (with its etymological roots in the Greek kentron, “goad” or “prick,” and being compelled toward a goal by means of abstract geometric distancing), there are shifts of focus relative to the body’s location and attitude.
Second: as one strolls, each vista is seen again from a different perspective. The maple branching down to the pond edge, the floating leaves appear less melancholic after the path bends. These shifts of seeing again are precisely what the word “respect” means. To look again is to “respect.” Each time we look at the same thing again, we gain respect for it and add respect to it, curiously discovering the innate relation of “looks” - of regarding and being regarded, words in English that refer to dignity.
Third: when the garden, rather than the dream or the symptom or the unconscious, becomes the via regia of psyche, then we are forced to think anew about the word “in.” “In” is the dominant preposition of all psychoanalysis - not with, not from, not for, but “in.” We look in our souls, we look in a mirror. "In” has been utterly literally, as an invisible, spacelesss psychic stuff inside our skins, or meanings inside our dreams and symptoms, or the memories locked in the past. Interiority of the garden, however, is wholly present and wholly displayed. “In” holds the meanings of included, engaged, involved, embraced. Or, as Jung said, the psyche is not in us; we are in the psyche. This feeling of being in the psyche becomes most palpable when inside the ruins of a Greek temple, in an Egyptian tomb of a king, in a dance or a ritual, and in a Japanese garden. Jung’s phrase “esse in anima” takes on concreteness then, as it does in a clear-cut forest, a bombed city, a cancer ward, a cemetery. Ecology, architecture, interior design are other modes of feeling the anima mundi. Instead of the usual notion of psyche in body, the body strolling through the garden is in the psyche. The world itself is a psychic body; and our bodies as we move, stand, look, pause, turn, and sit are performing an activity of psychic reflection, an activity we formerly considered only mentally possible in the mirror of introspection.
Fourth: the idea of individuality also changes, for in the Japanese garden trees are trimmed at the top and encouraged to grow sideways. Rather than an individuality of the lone tree, towering (and Jung said the single tree is a major symbol of the individuating Self), these trees stretch their branches toward others. Individuality is within community and, takes its definition from community. Furthermore, each tuft in the soft branches of the pine trees is plucked by gardeners. They pull out needles, allowing emptiness to individualize the shape of each twig. It is as if nothing can be individualized unless it is surrounded by emptiness and yet also very, very close to what it is most like. Individuality is therefore more visible within the estrange separateness and close similarity, for instance, of family than in trying to be “different” from family.
Fifth: not only are aged trees supported with crutches and encouraged to flower - blossoming belonging therefore not only to youth - but also the garden includes dead trees. What more wounds our narcissism than these images of old age, these crutched, dependent, twisted and dead trees? < “At least Aurora didn’t reject Tithonus, old, didn’t allow him to lie there lonely in the House of Dawn. She often fondled him, descending into her waters, before she bathed her yoked horses with care. She, when she rested in his arms, by neighbouring India, lamented that day returned too soon.”>
Sixth: the Karesanui gardens, or Zen-inspired gardens, present mainly white sand and found stones, rarely trees. In this bare place the mind watches itself making interpretations. The nine rocks in the raked sand are a tiger family swimming through the sea; the nine rocks are mountain tops peaking through white mist and clouds; the nine rocks are simply rocks, aesthetically placed with genius. One legend after another, one philosophy, theory or literary criticism, or psychological interpretation rises to the mind and falls back into the white sand. The garden becomes wholly metaphor, both what it is and what it is not, presence and absence at once. The concrete koan of the rock garden transforms the mind itself into metaphor, its thought transient while image endures, so that the mind cannot identify with its own subjectivism - narcissism overcome.
“This Open happens in the midst of beings. It exhibits an essential feature which we have already mentioned. To the Open there belong a world and the earth. But the world is not simply the Open that corresponds to clearing, and the earth is not simply the Closed that corresponds to concealment. Rather, the world is the clearing of the paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies. Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision. The earth is not simply the Closed but rather that which rises up as self-closing. World and earth are always intrinsically and essentially in conflict, belligerent by nature. Only as such do they enter into the conflict of clearing and concealing.” - Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art.
‘“Hegel introduces this notion of ‘oppositional determination” in his logic of essence, when he discusses the relationship between identity and difference; his point there is not only that identity is always the identity of identity and difference, but that difference itself is also always the difference between itself and identity; in the same way, it is not only necessity that encompasses both itself and contingency, but also - and more fundamentally - it is contingency itself which encompasses both itself and necessity. Or, with regard to the tension between essence and appearance, the fact that essence has to appear within the domain of appearances, as a hint that “appearances are not all” but are “merely appearances.”’ - Zizek, Less than Nothing>
*
Finally, I shall insist that the garden is not natural; nor is psyche natural. The garden was designed and is tended to maintain an artificiality that imitates nature . In Fort Worth, Texas, a large and marvelous Japanese garden was constructed years ago. But since adequate funds were not set aside for gardeners from Japan, nature slowly destroys that garden. Without the pruners’ perverted twist to each inch of nature, the garden declines into merely another part of the forest. A garden’s elaborate display of soul-in-the-world is an opus contra naturam, like alchemy. Like alchemy, the garden is a work of intense culture. Unlike alchemy, its matter, its body, is out there, rather than inside the glass vessel.
Because the garden is artificial, as the alchemist was called artifex, all conceptions of soul must be plucked of naturalistic fallacies. The soul as opus contra naturam will not be served adequately by fallacious comparisons with organic growth, cyclical process, and myths of nature goddesses. Nor does the garden shelter the child from which grows the creative person as psychotherapy is found to believe. By insisting upon the artificiality of our work with soul, I am trying to keep us from the Romantic error of confusing the ideal (Eden and the Elysian fields; Horaiko, in Japanese) with the natural. The garden as metaphor offers a romantic vision that saves us from Naturalistic Romanticism by twisting and sophisticating nature through art.
This twist to nature that wounds idealizations of garden is presented in our culture, as in Roman culture, by our ancient god of gardens and gardeners, Priapus. Priapus is neither young nor beautiful. Unlike lovely Narcissus, unlike the semi-divine figures of Adam and Eve, Priapus is mature, bald and paunchy, and so distorted that his mother, Venus, deserted him at birth. His very presence repels romantic idealizations and the gaze into the mirror of Venusian vanity as well as Narcissus’s rapt reflection. Priapic reflection starts the other way around; his preposterous swollen condition reflects the vitality of the world. The same force displays in him as in the buds and germinating pods. By means of distortion which deceptively seems “only natural,” Priapus invites the grotesque pathologized disproportions of imagination - and imagination, says Bachelard, works by deformation.
So, when I invoke Priapus, I am not speaking of priapismus; I am not speaking of machismo; and I am not anti-feminine. Let me be quite clear. I am speaking of the generative artificiality that is the essence of the garden and of the psyche. Each dream, each fantasy, and each symptomatic complication of natural health and normative humanity bears witness to the psyche’s libidinal pleasure in exaggeration, its fertile genius for imaginative distortion. If this god of gardens is also a god of psychoanalysis - and from Charcot through Lacan the priapic has been invoked - he brings to its work an archaic reflex beyond the romantic or baroque, a rousing urgency forward and outward. (Priapus was not permitted indoors in Hestia’s closed rooms where his presence becomes only violent and obscene.)
Moreover, this god needs no mirror to know himself, for his self is wholly displayed. His nature cannot be concealed within, so he is quite free of hidden meanings and subtle innuendos that keep psychoanalysis hopefully addicted to one more revelation, one more transformation, interminable. Priapus knows no metamorphosis, no transfigurations. Priapus is without ambiguity; metaphor is forbidden to him; he displays all, reveals nothing. Like the garden, all there. The rocks are the rocks.
<"And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." - Matthew 16:18>
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2023.03.21 17:20 keithplacer S16 The Action House: The Ravages of Age

S16 The Action House: The Ravages of Age


100 Martin St. before any work began
The major project of season 16 was The Acton House, a 1710 former farmhouse that was the oldest house in Acton, once part of a large farm most of which had been sold off over the years, and which now sat on 5 acres of quite attractive property at 100 Martin Street. The homeowners were Terry Maitland, trained as a journalist and historian, now a broker of high-dollar luxury homes, and Sima Maitland, a schoolteacher. Their house was largely original and while it looked large from the outside, the interior spaces were cramped and dated, with low ceilings and inadequate space for them and their three children, thanks in part due to the intrusion of the massive central chimney stack. A new addition off the east side was deemed the answer, and the Maitlands were prepared to contribute $150,000 to the project. A preliminary examination of the house by Norm and Tom revealed some dubious structure but they vowed not to try to fix every problem and only deal with what was necessary to accommodate the new addition. Ah, dreams…

Homeowners Terry and Sima Maitland in a very '90s-looking shot
The first order of business was getting a set of plans, so Chris Dallmus of Jock Gifford's Design Associates firm was called in and after numerous iterations, came up with plans for a 2-storey addition off the east side of the old place with a master suite, new kitchen, mud room, and family room. The old milk shed that currently occupied the site needed to be relocated, and proved to be an entertaining use of the Silva's creativity in sliding it out of the way using skids and a dump truck. Herb Brockert of Construction Services Co. arrived with his big excavator to dig the large hole the new addition required as Norm and Tom began to realize the existing house was so crooked that it was going to be a challenge to mate with the new structure. Meanwhile another big hole was dug for the new septic system that was also deemed necessary for the project.

The Silvas slide the milk shed to its temporary location
Tom and Norm assessed the scope of the demolition needed in the old house. The amount of slope in some of the floors was extreme, and the carpenters were against trying to fix very much of it at risk of blowing the budget. But as excavation continued, the issues involved with the old stone foundation and terribly compromised structure made those vows weaken. Many of the original beams and sills were rotted, and alterations over the years resulted in what Norm called a “terrifying” situation with the entire building slowly sliding towards the backyard. Tom devised a support structure to allow the house to be jacked up enough to replace the rotted sills that they originally weren’t going to repair. With the house so supported, the old stone foundation adjacent to the new addition was pretty much demolished in short order by hand with just a bit of help from the heavy equipment.
Mel Zimmerman of Superior Walls supplied his precast concrete foundation sections for the new crawl space and the team was amazed at how quickly it all came together. Before they could celebrate too much, they had to deal with more of the old house’s structural issues. A trip to Concord showed what could be done if you had deep enough pockets with the mind-blowing reconstruction of the old Stratton Tavern originally in Northfield, MA and relocated piece by piece to the new Concord site. The owner was only identified as Anna, but Brian Cooper was the remarkable restoration contractor who took great pains to make the new look old. While the cost must have been astronomical, for me this was one of the more memorable places ever shown on TOH, and I would love to learn more about it, but information about it is remarkably elusive.

The mysterious Anna and contractor Brian
New addition off the back attached to a reconstructed 18th century addition
The reconstructed Stratton Tavern and new additions in Concord
The original Stratton Tavern before relocation
Framing of the new addition moved quickly even with a gigantic steel beam needing to go down the center of the first floor ceiling, and soon the new spaces began to take shape. A bit of a cloud appeared when one of the Maitland children showed an elevated level of lead in the blood, leading to an analysis of lead paint in the old house. Isolated sections inside were found to have elevated levels of lead although most did not, but all of the windows on the exterior were far above limits. Meanwhile more good intentions vanished as Tom decided to demolish the back corner of the old house, saying correctly that there was nothing to save. Quickly, new Andersen windows went in, the new stairs to the second floor were built, and rotted beams in the second floor ceiling were replaced with more new structure. In what must have been a slow period for the project, Norm took a lengthy visit to the Porter-Cable tool factory in Tennessee, which must have paid for a lot of biscuit joiners. Tom even made use of one of those in trimming windows.
The heretofore largely mute Charlie Silva made one of his first on-screen speaking performances on this project, still sounding exactly like he does today. Tom demonstrated his famous swinging story pole trick to get the clapboard spacing correct, an early example of his ingenuity in construction. An tour of the new MBR space showed an area that didn’t seem overly generous and had the typical TOH phone booth shower stall, but it was certainly an upgrade over what the Maitlands had previously. Because of the lead paint issues, the homeowners decided to replace all 27 windows in the old parts of the house with new modern replacements, a decision that would have budget implications far beyond the windows themselves. Meanwhile the apparently accidental discovery of an old well led to that being recommissioned for irrigation purposes. Glenn Berger returned as kitchen designer, this time dealing with high-end Kennebec Company cabinetry for the new kitchen. Sima insisted on cherry.
When replacement of the old windows began, all good budget intentions quickly went out the windows. The installation of them was expensive in itself, with the original clapboards needing to be laboriously trimmed to fit the new exterior trim. On the front of the house, Norm found the clapboards there in such bad shape thanks to their southern exposure that the decision was made to scrap them all and replace with new. When that was begun, more major structural problems were discovered, with rotted sills and posts galore, which explained the bulge in that wall that was noted in the first episode. The old sheathing under the clapboards was stripped off to reveal problems with rot and damage in the wall structure along with very questionable building methods, all of which required more jacking of the house to fix. Bee nests were found in the blown-in cellulose insulation which would also need to be replaced, something I found odd given that cellulose is usually treated to resist insects. Even with the repairs being done, the front wall would continue to lean back about 4”, something that they just could not fix, and they had to stop short of replacing all the sills due to cost. Tom noted that at this stage the budget had increased to $195,000 given all the changes and surprises. At least the TOH requisite central vacuum system was donated by Vacuflo, saving the homeowners $1000.
Meanwhile the Maitlands wanted a new exterior paint scheme, so Steve visited Deerfield MA with architectural conservator Bill Flynt to look at various preserved examples of 18th-century homes, along with providing some history of the community in those times, an interesting segment. In the end, the Maitlands decided upon a pumpkin color that they saw on a house in a nearby town, with trim in a straw shade. Roger Cook and his crew arrived to install some drainage around the perimeter of the house, build a walkway to the mud room entrance, and re-do the lawn using a hydroseeding contractor. The homeowners also decided to replace the roof shingles on the original part of the house to match those used on the addition, which Tom said required lots of work to repair the rot in the roof sheathing first. Stephen Roy, a preservation stonemason, declared the existing fireplaces to be in mostly good shape aside from the one in the old kitchen needing some repair, but found that the exposed part of the chimney stack above the roof needed to be rebuilt as it had been subject to improper repairs some time earlier, a job he estimated at $5000. Lenny Belliveau built an elaborate staging to take down the old 5-flue chimney to a level just below the roofline and then reconstruct it with new brick.

Lenny Belliveau and his staging (below)
https://preview.redd.it/2pzmvx8o64pa1.jpg?width=1415&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=60b2d5cc734c1bfe28587b045b6fa48c60397619
Electrician Paul Kennedy was back on the project, and he was not a big fan of the steel studs Tom used in some of the new portions of the house. The costs were adding up fast, but luckily the Maitlands got a break on the then-new type of spray foam insulation from Insealators which was featured as a donation. Architect Chris Dallmus enlisted Norm and his workshop to build a new, though now mostly ceremonial, front entrance inspired by examples found in the area. Sima wanted old-style wood floors in her new kitchen, and Norm visited North Fields Restorations in New Hampshire, a recycler of old buildings and their materials, to see what they could supply and found the perfect old pine for the job. Once Lenny was finished rebuilding the chimney top, Rich, Steve, and Bobby from Trethewey Bros. installed a stainless flexible flue liner to solve condensation problems and provide for safe operation of the furnace.
Sima selected slate bathroom floor tile sourced from the now-defunct Shep Brown Associates and Mark, Joe and Chuck of Ferrante Bros. did the installation. Joe was frustrated with the time involved in grouting the uneven slates, which looked like a pain. Jeff Hosking was back to install the antique (and magnificent-looking) antique pine floors in the new addition, at a staggering 1994 cost of about $20 per sq. ft. A boo-boo occurred when Terry, following a tip from Norm, visited a twin to his house that had its dining room ceiling exposed to the upstairs floor and beams by its owners, which not only added some much-needed headroom but also gave a look he envied. He decided to do the same at his house, but when they removed the ceiling, they found a bit of a mess with hacked-up joists and a disfigured summer beam, so it was back to the drawing board and another budget hit.
The new entry door built by Norm and Tom encountered problems upon installation since the front wall of the house was leaning back so severely, leading them to build a subframe behind it that partly compensated for the angle. The Kennebec Company cherry cabinets were beautiful with a satin finish, and the Glenn Berger layout seemed ideal, although they used an unusual mix of stone and laminate for the counters. Steve visited the cabinet factory in Bath, ME for a tour in return for their donation. As finishes began to be revealed, the requisite TOH phone booth shower was seen in the MBR bathroom and we saw Rich install yet another toilet. Tom replaced the DR ceiling that was torn down and it looked good, but he did sound a note of caution about the costs of everything – each of the 27 original windows that were replaced cost about $800 once new trim and wall repairs were taken into account, and Terry revealed that when counting the $120,000 in donations, the total cost of the project was over $300,000, a sum that would be more than double that today. Hopefully he had a good tax accountant to minimize his tax liability on that donation amount. Thankfully the expensive brass Baldwin door hardware was part of those donations thanks to a factory visit feature.
The last 2 of the total 18 episodes of the project felt a little strange, with the usual somewhat dragged-out pieces with interior designers and decorative painters, but also some somewhat jarring segments. After not seeing them for the entire project, both landscape designer Tom Wirth and lighting expert Melissa Guenet showed up in the final episode to play catch-up. Even more jarring was an exterior walkaround with Tommy and Norm that was all about what was left undone. Major (and according to the way they delivered the message, urgent) work was needed on the rest of the sills and bearing structures below the old house to keep it from continuing to sag and twist, and the old cow barn, which we had only seen from a distance previously, was deemed by Tom to be dangerously unsupported and so unsafe that it shouldn’t even be walked into, and needed to be taken down. All in all, a bit of a down note. A walkthough of the finished spaces was more upbeat, with the remains of the old kitchen now being a rather cozy sitting area, the old upstairs bath now brought up to date, the surprisingly small-looking MBR space being pleasant enough albeit over-decorated, and the new kitchen and family room being apparently what was asked for, though it was hard to tell given the crush of people occupying it during the wrap party. We did not see what happened to some of the other old spaces in the original house, likely because that had not been determined at that point.

The finished project circa 1995
The Maitlands have continued to live in the house ever since, and hopefully those urgent needs have been taken care of. I liked them as homeowners, and I enjoyed the project for the most part, particularly for seeing the repair work that Tom and Norm undertook on the horrible structural problems. It’s the kind of thing we generally don’t see on the show these days, and the project helped illustrate the money pit that a very old house can become.
submitted by keithplacer to Thisoldhouse [link] [comments]


2023.03.21 17:01 WreckageHothHead A New plot Hole thread 7B): left-over points not covered in the previous ones (Lando System suddenly pops into existence?; Emperor retcon; and 2 unprecedented Obiwan/Leia problems?!!!)

2)
In addition to making a trip between 3 different "(star) systems" without FTL within at most a few months, and clearly having the ability to pick between all kinds of systems to choose to go to without FTL (even if limited by "somewhere around here", of course), as highlighted in this earlier thread:
https://old.reddit.com/MauLecomments/11hki5e/ot_discontinuity_thread_number_3_schroedingers/ ""OT discontinuity" thread number 3: Schroedinger's gigantic space distances"
, an additional aspect of this scene here:
"With the rest of the garbage... Then what?"
"Then we gotta find a safe port somewhere around here... Any ideas?"
"No, where are we?"
"The Anoat system."
"Anoat system, there's not much there..."
"No...
Oh, wait - this is interesting... Lando!"
"Lando system?"
"Lando's not a system, he's a man; Lando Calrissian. Card player, gambler - scoundrel, you'd like him."
"Thanks..."
"Bespin, it's pretty far, but I think we can make it..."
"... A mining colony?"
"Yeah, a tibanna gas mine. Lando conned somebody out of it... We go back a long way, Lando and me."
is that this is the 1st time traveling to Lando ever occurs to Han - does he just pop into existence (with a fully (or partially) formed past) in that very moment?
They're looking for a place "somewhere around here", a place they could reach without hyperspace within a reasonable amount of time or something (or perhaps without losing their fuel) - and the place they've found themselves at here, the "Anoat system", also isn't that far away from Hoth;
so if all it took Han to learn / be reminded of the fact that Lando is residing "nearby", was to spend like 10 seconds looking at his blue display screen, why hadn't they looked around who was residing near their new rebel base all this time - and learned that Lando was among them?
This would've certainly been some kind of potential fact of interest, given the Rebels' as well as Han's unstable position and possible need for refuge or assistance or who knows what, if particular situations were to arise.
And that's provided Han did learn new things from that screen, as opposed to just being reminded of what he already "knew" - in which case his years-long obliviousness would be even less explicable, since now all he would've had to do was just think of Lando, without even having to go through space charts for 20 seconds.
That's whom he got his current spaceship from... something one would think ought to have been closer to the surface of his mind this whole time.
(And it's really quite impossible to tell from the scene which parts of what he tells Leia about are his own additional knowledge, or new information he's seeing on the screen - which may or may not be reminding him of further knowledge that he already has - but Leia is struggling to catch for some unclear reason.
Is the text on the screen encrypted / in a different language/alphabet?
Or is it no text and just graphics/maps/images that Han for some reason gets more information out of than Leia is able to?
She manages to see that it's a "mining colony" - but he clarifies that it's a "tibanna gas mine"; is that also explained on the screen but only comprehensible for him, or is he already familiar with this mine? Or this "type" of mine?
He says "this is interesting" as if he did just see something that was news to him - but what could that be? The fact that Lando happens to be nearby running this mine that he's already familiar with somehow?
Or did he see something that made him indirectly recognize that Lando's involved? But how would that work?
It's rather clear that there are no words on this screen that Leia can read, because:
Han: "Then we gotta find a safe port somewhere around here... [blue light...] Any ideas?"
Leia: "No, where are we?"
Han: "The Anoat system." [.../blue light]
Leia: "Anoat system, there's not much there..." [blue light...]
Han: "No..." [.../blue light]
Somehow they have no idea which system they're in (just how many star systems did they cross on their way from Hoth to the asteroid field to now?), and need the information from that blue viewing screen to learn that they're in the "Anoat system";
and Leia is apparently unable to read this information from the screen despite looking at it intently, since she asks "where are we" while it's beaming blue light into their faces - however Han can read it and learns that it's the Anoat system. (Which she then turns out to already have been familiar with, enough to know "there's not much there.)
All in all it's not entirely clear why Leia is lagging behind him in reading that screen - while Han is seemingly getting some kind of unclear combination of new information, things he recognizes, and/or things he's being reminded of.)
Although more precisely, he doesn't mention he got the ship from him either (only saying "they go way back"), that's only "revealed" in their subsequent meeting when Han tells him the ship is damaged - so does THAT piece of history also pop into existence at that very moment?
Just like Lando hadn't existed before Han opened that particular slide on his blue viewing screen?
Can an old friend with a history + a gas mine pop into existence in the middle of a scene, the way a man can pop into existence inside a casino's prison cell?
"We go back a long way, Lando and me."
"D-d-don't let the wrapper fool you, friend... Me and the First Order codage... - go way back. And-t-t-t-the.... ..If the price is right... - I can break you into old man Snoke's boudoire."
And there are two additional questions arising from this pivotal scene:
2a)
Aside from the question what would happen to the Falcon if their Stardestroyer had gone into hyperspace with them on the hull (without warning, and without having dumped the garbage first in accordance with their protocol, giving them the opportunity to detach unnoticed) - what makes Han think the Stardestroyers are gonna go into lightspeed?
And why are they going into lightspeed?
"Lord Vader - our ships have completed their scan of the area and found nothing. If the Millennium Falcon went into lightspeed, it'll be on the other side of the galaxy by now."
"Alert all commands. Calculate every possible destination along their last known trajectory."
"Yes, my Lord. We'll find them." "Don't fail me again - Admiral."
"Alert all commands. Deploy the fleet."
Does "deploy the fleet" mean go into hyperspace, and why would the do that? Either the Falcon had jumped into hyperspace and could now literally be anywhere, or it didn't and is still somewhere around here.
And Vader said to calculate their trajectories.
So why are they jumping into lightspeed, where are they going?
"The fleet's beginning to break up.
Does that necessarily mean they're gonna go into hyperspace? As opposed to splitting to go search for the Falcon in the surrounding area?
"Well, if they follow standard Imperial procedure, they'll dump their garbage before they go to lightspeed, and then we'll just float away."
Well, if it was just a guess and then it turned out they weren't jumping to lightspeed, at least nothing bad would've happened - however Han seems really sure that it'll happen, and then it does. How and why again?
2b)
"Transfer circuits aren't working."
Has anyone confirmed that this means they now definitely can't fix their hyperdrive on their own, and need external help now?
They noticed that while in the middle of a desperate situation:
"One more direct hit on the back quarter and we're done for."
, but no one said they had no options left if they got out of that hairy situation and could calmly take a look at those transfer circuits?
So now that they've found themselves in this lucky situation with all the Imperial ships having zipped away from the area (for reasons about as inexplicable as the Falcon's success at hiding from them on the hull of the Stardestroyer and no one managing to think of it aside from Boba Fett) - why have they seemingly completely abandoned that line, instead of resuming their work as they're floating among the garbage, or after flying away from it?
If they succeeded, they wouldn't have to rely on "finding a safe port", or Lando fixing it, or any of that, and could head directly to the rebel base....
So why even look through all those charts of space ports when their Plan A should've been
"Well, if they follow standard Imperial procedure, they'll dump their garbage before they go to lightspeed, and then we'll just float away."
"With the rest of the garbage... Then what?"
"Then we gotta find a safe port somewhere around here...
to float away and then start working on their hyperdrive; and then maybe contemplate other options if that completely failed and turned out to be hopeless?
3)
So the Emperor is a "plain man" in Ep4, but is then Vader's Force Master in Ep5 - not much more needs to be said here?
Alongside with this drastic retcon, there's also a general subgenre shift that takes place between ANH and ESB:
in the first, the Empire is primarily a "space fascist" government, militaristic technocracts that have one high-ranking sorcerer-knight among their ranks - he's the last remnant of the magician order that they wiped out in order to get into power;
however in the second, the Empire is Space Mordor led by a Dark Lord and his right-hand Dark Lord Knight, the latter of whom operates from a demonic-looking fortress ship with red lights - and all the admirals and officers are no longer individuals with their own ambitions, agendas and views, but rather glorified minions doing their masters' bidding on the pain of death.
The Ep7-9 trilogy is seen playing around with the juxtaposition between these 2 paradigms, when Kylo takes over as Supreme Leader and now starts pushing all those previously confident and autonomous fascist higher-ups with their own views and voices around and forcing them to follow along.
4-5 don't show such a "development" however - even if one can be assumed to have taken place off-screen.
(Just as it's possible to suggest that the Emperor has revealed himself as a Dark Lord at some point between 4 and 6, after having kept it secret initially - and that this is therefore not a real retcon.
However that's just an interpretation that relies on an huge assumption.)
So then when the ST presents another "subgenre shift" by having lightsabers act more like Excalibur, or the Sith having a forbidden Black Speech language (or having Rey instantly instinctively download new Force powers like the Matrix or Marvel mutants), then yes, that's what's going on here - however it's also true that the OT has pulled this sort of thing before, reinventing its genre and continuity in the very 1st sequel.
4a)
"To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did - if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him.
That is the reason why your sister remains safely anonymous."
Aside from the most obvious question of "why then NOT have Luke also anonymous and instead have him live with his real family, under all their real names, with "Ben" living right next to them also under his real surname" - which of course would've already been the way to go even in ANH's "Luke's father was killed by Vader" continuity - the slightly less obvious question arising from this piece of information is:
If Luke was "hidden" "after he was born", does that mean he was initially born way elsewhere, and then given (as in ""hidden"") to Owen and Beru?
In which case the obvious next question is (which still applies to the RotS ending, even with all its altered continuity issues), why not hide him with Obi-Wan instead - so he can raise him into a Jedi hero from the get go, all in secret and properly anonymous and far away from his family's known home at that?
In addition to properly taking care of the world's "only hope (or one of 2, anyway)", it would've also freed up Obi-Wan to do all kinds of useful things throughout the galaxy, trying to influence things in a positive direction, and available as an asset to the nascent and eventually fully emerged Rebellion;
this way however, he's now stuck on Tatooine, seemingly completely inactive in all of this until Leia's message, because he now has to guard Luke all the time whom his family is emphatically keeping close to home and away from the cause?
Before this line, and within ANH, it seemed like Luke had simply been already born into his family, and Obi-Wan simply didn't want to forcibly take him away from them or even go against Owen's wishes to keep him away from his father's light saber, all the relevant truths, and so on (plus, hey, maybe that was even literally impossible cause it would've "led to the Dark Side" or something - like Gandalf forcibly taking the Ring to do good, or something) - so he had no choice but to stay on Tatooine and prevent himself from being a great asset to the emerging Rebellion.
But now it turns out they apparently voluntarily gave Luke to his family, leading to this outcome? Well, maybe Owen started out with a different attitude but then soured on the idea of exposing Luke to the truth - although he had already been against his brothecousin leaving and getting involved, so wouldn't really much seem that way.
(Of course, the "in order to watch over Luke" reason for Obi-Wan living there as a hermit wasn't ever explicitly stated in 4 or 5-6 - it could be very reasonably concluded to have been the reason, but it still wasn't stated; and certainly didn't have to be the only reason for this choice.
What could some of the other reasons have been? Intending to hide as much as possible from the Empire, lest some kind of "not absolutely crucial and most desperate hour" involvement with the Rebellion compromised him and endangered his potential role in some, well, absolutely-crucial-and-most-desperate-hour task down the line - i.e. like the Death Star destruction? As well as his role as Luke's protector?
Not absurd, except a lot of his behavior in ANH of course isn't consistent with that mindset - from the "real surname" thing, to not thinking about the Empire searching for these droids until seeing the destroyed Sandcrawler, to displaying his lightsaber in a bar with Stormtroopers looking for them outside on the streets;
however those behaviors "inconsistent with the imperative to lead a hidden life" don't automatically disprove the presence of such an imperative outside of these inexplicable deviations.
Some yet entirely different reason for living as a quiet hermit and having cut himself off from the cause? Even having forgotten details from his past active life, like "having owned R2", or seemingly not having even thought about his real name for a long time, in addition to not having heard it?
And of course a related question is why no one had contact him until this moment - was he only known as a potential asset to Leia and her father, and really no one else? Or they knew not to contact him unless absolutely necessary?
"I'm getting too old for this sort of thing..."
Well there certainly was a period where he wasn't too old and would've been of much more help than baby Luke, right? So why was LUKE the "only hope" and not Obi-Wan while he was alive and not too old?
Loads of unresolved questions here.
4b)
So albeit "safely anonymous", Leia was then given to an adoptive father (let's call him "Organa Sr.") whom "Obi-Wan had served during the Clone Wars";
a possibly prominent figure from the Clone Wars, that shouldn't have been unknown to the Empire or Vader (who now is the Skywalker Sr. who fought in the same (Clone) wars as Organa Sr. and Obi-Wan), and someone who'd go on to become an active Rebel (and possibly had been a proto-Rebel from the get go, analogously to Bail) - and Leia then also joins, either raised to do so from the start, or autonomously perhaps even despite her "father's" efforts, who knows.
So was this whole outcome in accordance with the original intention to "protect the children from Vader and the Emperor" (while also having them as the "only hope" to topple them)? Like, Leia remains anonymous, but as a prominent figure of the Rebellion, not "safe from Vader" in any way - except from getting pulled into the Dark Side that is - and in fact almost gets executed.
How much worse would it have been to start training her in the Force, if she was already a prominent Rebel with a huge target on her back?
Or would Organa Sr. also have been against this somehow? No indications for that.
Or was this outcome not in accordance with their intentions, and Leia was supposed to keep a low profile before quietly being recruited into the Only-Hope apprenticeship?
Did Obi-Wan only find out about all this now, having had no clue what's going with that other sibling? Or was he fully aware and up to date (despite having such a buried recollection of his name and active life)?
Questions here as well.
HOWEVER - this is firmly "well duh, of course the Leia=sister reveal was invented on the fly and makes no sense if you go back to 4 - RotJ has big issues after all" territory now, so there's less of a need to keep covering this "a lot more obvious" ground here now;
and I've been told that EFAP are in fact "RotJ skeptics" to at least some extent - so until I know more about that extent, going through more points (and there are quite a few) and potentially getting increasingly redundant might be a bit pointless.
However one further thing probably worth highlighting here, given its high relevance to the ST:
4b.1)
Has anyone noticed how there's essentially 3 different Leias in RotJ?
It's kinda of very similar to Padme/Amidala, who switches between several personas/personalities/attitudes depending on dress/appearance or the chapter in the story - though not quite as extreme, one might think.
There's the almost Blues Brothers like version that shows up to free Han (not quite counting the "bounty hunter role" and "slave" phases of that chapter), there's the "normal" friendly-but-sarcastic-and-assertive Rebel General version, and then there's the emphatically diminutive and vulnerable "Ewok princess" one - before she changes back to the "General" personality in the final act following this scene here:
"If I don't make it back, you're the only hope for the Alliance."
"Don't talk that way - you have a power I don't understand... and could never have."
"You're wrong, Leia - you have that power, too. In time, you'll learn to use it as I have. The Force is strong in my family. My father has it. I have it. And... my sister has it."
So the obvious question here is, is it "RotJ Leia" who's suddenly never had any hint of Force powers and sensed Luke hanging on below Cloud City, or is it just this particular version of her within RotJ?
"Yes. It's you, Leia."
"I know. Somehow... I've always known."
This sounds like a semi-psychic intuition of some sort, or at least it makes one think of psychic abilities since she's supposed to have dormant talent in that area - however since it's described as having been a subconscious kind of thing that she's only realized now, it doesn't really contradict the "I could never have these powers, since I'm definitely not related to your wizard bloodline" from seconds ago.
However this "somehow known that Luke is her brother" is clearly not taking place in the same continuity as "somehow known that Luke is in trouble under Cloud City", just to highlight this point an additional time.
So in TFA, Leia appears to be a "regular" person, knowing much about the Force just like Han but showing no signs of having access to it herself, or seen talking about it in any way distinct from how Han talks about it - except the moment where she senses a disturbance when Han is killed.
Then in TLJ, there are no psychic moments before or after, except the part where she shows powers while frozen in space and floats inside a ship, while an emphatic version of her leitmotif is played - almost as if the movie suddenly remembers how this side of her character has been neglected too much and at least 1 epic moment like this was needed;
at the very end, she and Rey talk about they've sensed Luke's death.
And finally in TroS (but using archive footage, originally intended for the earlier movies I think?) Leia turns out to be a full Jedi Master now training super-Rey, and is also shown in a lightsaber flashback with Luke;
in the movies the way they were released, where was all of that in TFA, or even TLJ? Leia seemed to be slightly psychic there, someone who's never really worked on or developed these sklls after all, but shows being tuned into it at the very least in the most dramatic moments - but who could've guessed she was a full ultra-Master who could've been giving lessons and instructions that whole time, incl. when interacting with Rey?
Lots of off-screen development between these 2 happened at some unspecified point.
However... it'd be prudent to remember that this confusion and cognitive dissonance about just how magical Leia was supposed to be after showing emerging powers in Ep5, started right then and there in 1983, and the Sequels merely inherited this already schizophrenic and contradictory legacy and naturally only continued the confusion, forgetfulness and cognitive dissonance instead of successfully "fixing" it in some way.
(One could say the same also applies to most every other aspect of 7-9 and 4-6, in fact.)
And fittingly enough, the film with the least cohesive seeming vision, TLJ that is, is the one that pulls the bizarre "oh f, we need Leia to be magical, completely forgot that!" moment - while the other 2 movies with the much more coherent tone and approaches are the ones that at least committed to 1 interpretation/version of her character each, respectively, in mostly convincing ways:
TFA to the "almost non-psychic" one, and TRoS to the "full-on Jedi Master" - amounting to a splintered narrative, just like RotJ was, and the 1st 2 films as well (even if not necessarily with Leia's character in particular - although even then, it's clear that ESB decided to leave the whole "princess trope" emphasized so much in the 1st movie behind, in all but name - somewhat justified in-universe by them having been chased off Yavin where they had some kinda old culture and huge throne rooms going on; then again them having been chased out into a cold outpost goes against ANH's sequel set-up, see 1st thread).
submitted by WreckageHothHead to MauLer [link] [comments]


2023.03.21 16:08 FlyWithSeedyL Release Notes - Sim Update 12 [1.31.22.0] Available Now

RELEASE NOTES 1.31.22.0

If you are playing on PC, outdated packages in your community folder may have an unexpected impact on the title’s performance and behavior.
If you suffer from stability issues or long loading times, move your community package(s) to another folder before relaunching the title.
[All Versions] How to Install a New Update Safely

NEW CONTENT/FEATURES

  • Optimized the “Checking for updates” phase to reduce the booting time of the simulator; improved the download speed in the installation manager; improved loading time before booting to the main menu
  • Added a new assistance option to customize the intensity of turbulence experienced during flight (based on current altitude, environment, and weather conditions).
  • Turkish and Korean languages have been added into the sim
  • Added an input key to toggle Flight Assistant Panel
  • Spotlight Event Pack: a pack of activities is now available in the Marketplace, which contains a curated selection of 13 Spotlight Events from the past. Please note: completing these activities will not count towards Spotlight Event related achievements.

General Bug Fixes

  • Several crashes have been fixed across the title
  • Fixed a bug in the purchase flow of MSFS Marketplace
  • Keyboard shortcut to toggle Screen Narrator on/off has been added
  • Control Options menu stops reset to top when assigning a button.
  • “Set Departure”, “Set arrival” & “Zoom to Details” are now appearing when Airport Icon is clicked
  • Fixed aircraft visibility issues with their interior and exterior model
  • Corrected an issue that caused some multiplayer planes to display a purple texture on their Glass cockpits.
  • Fixed Engine Governor being incorrectly labeled
  • Fixed game freeze during boot
  • Added parameter to cfg that allows to fix the legacy flight model integration of the accelerations that was causing wrong accelerations and g-force calculations in the legacy flight model. Integrated collision constraint response into the force calculation for g force estimation when on ground. This allows to have 1.0 when still on ground even with some suspension systems that don’t have enough force to counter gravity.
  • Fixed issues in the building generation that could caused crashes
  • Various localization improvements

Menu

  • Fixed airport considered as water if runways have undefined surface type
  • Added Weight & Balance visualization for rotorcraft.

Navigation/Traffic

  • [Partially Fixed] Glass cockpit externalization has been reworked. There’s no intermediate window anymore; each glass cockpit opens a distinct window with the glass cockpit name. Window position and size is saved when ending a flight.
  • With multi-layout screens cockpits, mouse collision for glass cockpit externalization is now received only by the current active glass cockpit.
  • Navlog timer no longer resets when user closes and reopens it
  • Fixed SimConnect injected traffic planes not following the assigned flight plan
  • Fixed live traffic planes incorrectly following departure procedures
  • Fixed live traffic planes staying stuck at hold short in some airports
  • Fixed live traffic planes staying at low altitude after takeoff
  • Fixed SimConnect injected traffic being often unable to depart from the departure gate
  • Fixed traffic planes causing performance issue in the world map
  • Fixed live traffic planes sometimes not showing nameplate
  • Fixed live traffic planes sometimes spawning at an incorrect location and unable to move
  • Fixed live traffic planes staying at low altitude during go around
  • Fixed a crash where ATC uses an invalid runway number
  • Glass cockpit: Waypoint with no associated city now show an empty city field instead of random characters.
  • Glass cockpit: NavigationData expiration year is now properly displayed when date range extends over two years.

Weather

  • [Partially Fixed] Heat only thermals are limited in height up to the cloud base (except under clouds)
  • Limited and tuned negative thermals around clouds and hot ground.
  • Reduced thermals close to ground.
  • [Partially Fixed] Improved thermal slanting and cloud alignment.
  • Reduced “blue” hot ground thermals in rain, with altitude and with high winds
  • Reduced mountain turbulence with altitude
  • Maximum vertical wind speed in storm clouds / TCU has been increased
  • Fixed a cloud popping issue when updating Live Weather data
  • Fixed a problem where in water presets, water would be iced for the physics but displayed as water in the rendering.
  • General Live Weather improvements
    • Live Weather now uses server time instead of local time to avoid inconsistent or no live weather
    • Date of METAR files is now checked before ingesting the data to avoid replacing current METARs with out-of-date METARs in case of CDN issues; this also reduces bandwidth usage
    • Fixed an issue that would potentially stop the game from retrieving clouds
    • Fixed an issue where incorrect weather was injected while retrieving new data, potentially causing abrupt wind and pressure changes as well as cloud popping
  • Fixed a Rendering issue where clouds were ghosting into the sky at horizon

Activity

  • Fixed various issues on leg start in bushtrips
  • Training activities are now recorded in logbook
  • Fixed an issue that caused the P-51 to run out of fuel too early in Reno races
  • Fixed an issue that could cause the engines to shut down when first starting a mission.
  • In Bushtrips, the Description Box displays incorrect values for the Flight Length, Flight Duration, and Number of Legs

Glass Cockpits

Garmin G3000 / G5000

  • Fixed incorrectly rendered lists when the number of items in the list was very large.
  • Fixed various instances where FMS would not automatically tune the primary approach frequency when loading or activating ILS/LOC/LDA/SDF/VOR approaches.
  • The GTC Airport Information page will now display the primary approach frequencies for all ILS/LOC/LDA/SDF approaches at the airport in the Freq tab.
  • The PFD traffic inset map’s range labels are now always displayed in the bottom left to avoid conflicts with other map elements.
  • Fixed long approach names from overflowing the approach button on the GTC Select Approach page.
  • Miscellaneous map memory optimizations.
  • Fixed a bug where on-route direct-tos incorrectly inherited the turn direction of their target legs.
  • Fixed a bug where the initial course of an on-route direct-to was set in true degrees instead of the expected magnetic degrees.
  • Fixed a bug where the flight plan would become corrupted when syncing a world map flight plan with an approach and at least one enroute waypoint but no departure or arrival.
  • Advanced VNAV no longer tries to capture descent altitude constraints during climb phase.
  • Added aural alerts for TIS/TAS/TCAS traffic and resolution advisories.
  • Added support for choosing aural alert voice type (male/female).
  • Enabled the Direct-To buttons in the GTC Waypoint Information and NRST pages.
  • Most aural alerts that trigger at the same time will now be played back in a queue instead of overlapping each other. Note that some alerts are still allowed to overlap others.
  • New CAS warning and caution messages are now accompanied by an aural chime.
  • The active NAV source is now reset to FMS when the system is power cycled.
  • Fixed a bug where the VSR navigation data bar field always displayed dashes (‘––––’).
  • Selecting a waypoint in the GTC Direct-To page (either via the keyboard or the Nearest tab) that matches the current Direct-To target will now load the appropriate existing Direct-To information.
  • Selecting a waypoint in the GTC Direct-To page (either via the keyboard or the Nearest tab) that is in the primary flight plan will now cause an on-route direct-to to be created when the Activate button is pressed.

G1000 Nxi

  • Fixed an issue that caused the G1000Nxi to pan very slowly in Legacy interaction mode

Garmin GNS430W / GNS530W

  • Fixed some page navigation issues where the right knob push would not close dialogs

VFR Map

  • Fixed an issue where the plane’s CDI source would change when opening the VFR Map
  • Optimizations for reducing memory usage
  • Added support for VR in-game panel zoom axis

Aircraft

General

  • FLO mode transition now takes into account density altitude
  • Fixed Load % to display the correct individual engine power.
  • Fixed a bug on WASM & TS glass cockpits using the zero pitch line of the PFD. The line now represents the 0° of the aircraft
  • Fixed contrail effects on some planes
  • Corrected an issue that caused the P-51 Bunny to display a white screen instead of the radio.
  • [Partially Fixed] an issue that caused some lights on the B747 and A320 to incorrectly react to interaction with their controls.
  • Corrected an issue that caused LEFT/RIGHT_AXIS_BRAKE_SET to incorrectly affect both brakes.
  • [P-51 Mrs Virginia] Landing gear doors animations are now working correctly
  • External HUD : Variometer is no longer displayed on external HUD when not relevant to the aircraft.
  • [Checklists] Fixed inconsistent XML parsing behavior between PC and consoles
  • [Known Issue] LS8 can be pushed towards the ground when using winch launch method

Helicopters

  • Engine power jump was reduced during the governor activation.
  • Added an engine trimmer. If the helicopter has this feature, it is now possible to slightly change the nominal engine/rotor RPM that a governor is trying to maintain. Please, refer to the new input commands in the Control Options menu: “ENGINE TRIM RPM INCREASE” and “ENGINE TRIM RPM DECREASE”
  • The throttle control logic for multi-engine helicopters has become more consistent.
  • Fixed Tail rotor increment for better controllability with gamepad Helicopter profile (without tail rotor assistance)

Airbus 310-300

  • Significant sound improvements in all areas of the aircraft (numerous reports are covered in this).
  • External lights adjusted for a more realistic experience.
  • Pressure system bug resolved.
  • Improvements to T/D logic.
  • Flight deck door resolution improved on Base version.
  • FMS symbol tweaked to be more realistic.
  • VOR* to VOR transition in capture bug resolved.
  • Landing weight calculations on FMC for imperial fixed.
  • Sliders added in EFB.
  • VOR1 RMI disappears when overlapping VOR 2 needle bug fixed.
  • SPD LIM mode premature bug fixed.
  • Galley latches repositioned to closed position.
  • Console unit flood light moveable.
  • Trim wheel integral light now added.
  • Glass added on outstanding cockpit gauges.
  • Added magnetic variation to navaids.
  • Autobrake commands added for hardware.
  • INIT B & LW bugs fixed.
  • RSK a waypoint to VERT REV bug fixed.
  • Loading co-route character removal bug fixed.
  • Custom PBD can now be added on new waypoint page and entering directly into F-PLN.
  • When selecting INHG in options, perf calc bug fixed.
  • Negative temperatures in EFB, now inserting correctly.
  • vPilot COM 2 bug fixed.
  • Sticker on door bug fixed.
  • Cargo doors now use brake accumulator.
  • Chrono bug fixed.
  • SEC FPLN crashes fixed.
  • CG prompt in FUEL PRED adjusted to ZFWCG.
  • Some light leaking fixed.
  • ATC/AI audio bug fixed.
  • Triggering secondary approach more than once crash fixed.
  • VHF2 and 3 now audible in cockpit.
  • Volume knob pull to mute working in A310.
  • Players voice now heard when talking to ATC.
  • Fuel page line amber when it should be green.
  • EFB checklist upon scrolling bug fixed.
  • Brake accumulator logic improved.
  • LBS when over 100,000 clipping fixed.
  • Extra fuel/time now gets calculated when an ALTN is selected.
  • EMER LTs state in Cold and Dark bug fixed.
  • ATHR to GA keybind bug fixed.
  • INIT B selecting values bug fixed.
  • Stab trim movement during different HYD pressure bug fixed.
  • Overall hardware compatibility improved with HoneyComb Bravo, Saitek panels.
  • APU fire test conditions logic improved.
  • Ailerons position bug fixed in 15/0 state.
  • VONavaid Identifier Sound not working fixed.
  • Unable to query sim waypoint database from REF page fixed.
  • Fixed HSI changes on selector in flight deck.
  • Wiper no longer moves with no power.
  • Fixed loudspeaker not making sound.
  • Fixed issue where aircraft systems freeze mid-flight.
  • Entered temps not appearing on weather page of f-plan fixed.
  • Expose current altimeter reference value fixed.
  • Fire Loop lights on switched to AC ESS instead of AC EMER bus.
  • ADF needles now point to true bearing not magnetic.
  • Fixed abnormal behavior when choosing NONE STAR approach and transition.
  • WASM API nav data waypoint structure adjusted.
  • Updated translation files.

Bell 407

  • Engine performance increased to match more closely the real-world behavior.
  • Now it is easier to overstress the rotor RPM and torque under heavy load.
  • The helicopter is easier to stabilize now in cruise flight with trim and assistances turned off.
  • Low rotor warning sound now sounds when the battery is switched on.
  • Annunciators illumination is stronger now in DIM mode.
  • Altimeter barometric scale values now match up with the simulator values.
  • Gauge illumination is toned down preventing it to being overblown on maximum brightness settings.
  • Auto-trim switch has been removed.
  • Force trim switch has been removed.
  • Pedal stop functionality added (limits left pedal movement during flight) above 50 kts.
  • Rotor rotation animation in multiplayer is now functioning.
  • Rotor brake is functional again.
  • Used fuel type in the weight and balance settings is JET fuel.
  • Added Turkish language translation.
  • Added Korean language translation.
  • Pedal animation on the connecting rod is fixed.
  • Interior collider adjustments. The camera doesn’t clip into the main panel anymore.
  • VR support adjustments. Full VR support.
  • Reference cruise speed now shows the correct value on the aircraft selection screen.

Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental

  • Fixed an issue that could prevent part of the speed brakes from properly triggering on the 747.

Guimbal Cabri G2

  • START mode behavior improved on EPM
  • Better synchronization between engine RPM and rotor RPM
  • In Direct To Page, magnetic bearing is displayed instead of true bearing
  • Throttle handle animation is now working correctly
  • Fixed miro drift on ground contact with helicopters. Fixed Cabri skid suspension settings; Cabri now stable on ground.

Cessna 172 Skyhawk G1000

  • Fixed ground steering during takeoff to compensate for crosswind

Cessna Citation CJ4

  • MFD: Fixed battery electrical indications always showing 0
  • AP: Fixed altitude capture not engaging in TO vertical mode
  • Disabled unused COM3 radio receiver
  • Adjusted brightness of Standby Indicator
  • Fixed the AoA indexer not indicating the correct AoA
  • Fixed sim checklist stuck in After Starting Engines checklist
  • Fixed wrong state indication on APPR button tooltip
  • FMC: Fixed ARRIVALS page not working when airport features approaches not tied to a specific runway
  • FMC: Fixed discontinuities piling up when editing procedures
  • YD/AP DISC Bar now disables the Yaw Damper
  • Fixed Overspeed Warning audio not always working
  • Fixed an issue with the Direct To initial Course being incorrect
  • Fixed an issue where the FMA would always show LOC1/VOR1 even when nav source is NAV2
  • TOGA button on the Thrust Lever is now active
  • Added automatic VOR tuning functionality
  • Added the FLT LOG page to the FMC and flight tracking
  • The FLT LOG page will show on the FMC after landing based on the setting in DEFAULTS
  • Added ability to ident the transponder on the FMC ATC CONTROL page
  • Fixed an issue where fuel used tracking on FUEL MGMT page 2 was not correct
  • Reduced pitch instability and adjusted elevator authority, tweaked roll rates at various speeds to keep light control feel but reduce excess performance
  • Adjusted flaps to achieve a better compromise between approach angle and flaps pitch/lift moments, reduced flaps drag at both flaps levels
  • Slightly increased top end engine thrust to address a few reports of insufficient climb power
  • Increased gear down drag
  • Increased gyro stability to reduce excessive turbulence impact
  • Adjusted load stations to be more in line with real loadout
  • Added additional groundwheel friction to avoid skidding during moderate crosswind landings
  • ILS data is now loaded from the approach FAF origin facility to allow for nav-to-nav and auto-tune even when scenery runway data does not have the appropriate ILS reference information
  • Fixed bugs related to visual approach loading and visual approach vnav guidance
  • Fixed missing basic aural alerts
  • COM input now allows to enter 136.xxx frequencies
  • Limit types of airports displayed on the map to show only suitable ones

Cessna Citation Longitude

  • Fixed incorrect pitot heat logic.
  • Fixed the AILERON(S)_LEFT/RIGHT key events commanding ailerons in the opposite direction as intended.
  • The engine auto-start and auto-shutdown procedures (Ctrl-E and Ctrl-Shift-E) now function correctly.
  • The standby instrument now automatically adjusts its backlight levels.
  • Autothrottle no longer requires gear and flaps to be retracted to change from TO mode to SPD/CLIMB/DESC modes.
  • Taxi auto-tests now require engines running to begin evaluating.
  • Fixed broken external animations for non-default liveries.
  • Fixed incorrect load station count in cfg, and adjusted passenger load positions to match standard 8-seat configuration.
  • Increased ND elevator trim limit to prevent AP from running out of trim authority at low altitudes and high speeds.
  • Fixed AFCS control panel APR button tooltip.
  • Added BRAKE FAIL and GENS OFF aural alerts.
  • The G5000’s active NAV source now defaults to FMS when starting a flight.
  • The AFCS control panel UP/DN wheel now changes pitch reference when the AP is in PIT mode.
  • Fixed broken rotate animations on the CRS knobs.
  • The 500-foot touchdown callout will now sound as appropriate. Also added other touchdown callouts from 450 to 50 feet.

Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny”

  • Fixed in VR elevator not moving.
  • Fixed engine audio from nearby Jenny aircraft can be heard within cockpit.
  • Added Phone EFB with Compass, Indicated Air Speed, Radio and XPDR functionality tied to core sim.
  • Added electrical system for the EFB.
  • Added EFB section to the Flight Manual.
  • Added right bracket in cockpit to Show/Hide EFB.

Daher TBM 930

  • Increased maximum nose wheel steering angle to 28 degrees, and increased speed at which nose wheel steering starts becoming less effective to 10 knots.
  • [Partially Fixed Increased brightness of taxi and landing lights.
  • Pulse lights no longer draw additional power when landing lights are on.
  • Fixed broken door animations for non-default liveries
  • Fixed handling of electrical battery key events.
  • Improved compatibility with hardware that send electrical battery and external power key events every frame.
  • Fixed AFCS control panel APR button tooltip.
  • The overspeed, stall, and landing gear aural alerts will now sound as appropriate.
  • The G3000’s active NAV source now defaults to FMS when starting a flight.
  • Fixed broken rotate animations on the CRS knobs.

Darkstar

  • Fixed several issues related to entering a frequency on the transponder of the Darkstar
  • External Camera display now rotates without stretching the view.

DG-1001E

  • Improved adverse yaw, balance, handling qualities and spoiler drag
  • Improved stall to match stalling characteristics as described in the flight manual (wing drop)
  • Winch launch now requires the technique as described in the DG-1001E flight manual: "During ground roll and initial take-off push the control stick to a forward position to prevent excessive nose-up pitching rotation during initial take-off. After reaching safety altitude gradually pull back on the stick, so that the glider will not pick up excessive speed. Don’t pull too hard. After reaching release altitude pull the tow release knob. Recommended winch launch airspeed 110-130 km/h (60-70 kts.).

Douglas DC-3

  • Upside down illegible writing on rear door stairs in Blue stripe Livery.
  • Landing light switches are no longer reversed.
  • Underside beacon light illuminates correctly.
  • Multiple items can now be manually completed with evaluation mode.
  • Landing gear text decal is no longer obstructed by open passenger door switch.
  • DC-3 Aux tanks correctly feed the engine.
  • HUD correctly indicates state of flaps.
  • DC-3 cockpit model - Nose rivets remade.
  • With the propellers feathered moving the prop control affects all the propellers.
  • DC-3 cockpit model - Screws no longer clip through window frame.
  • Beacon Light switch is targetable.
  • Instrument texture no longer disappears when zooming out in external/showcase view.
  • The user can’t hear the wind on takeoff even if all audio is turned off.
  • Red yellow cargo image in liveries selection is consistent with livery in free flight.
  • Blue stripe image in liveries selection is consistent with livery in free flight.
  • Image for ole dusty livery in selection screen does match the livery in free flight.
  • Mesh switch turns off and now the state of the switch correctly indicates it is off.
  • Carb Air temperature correctly matches sim.
  • Beacon light underneath fuselage can now be turned on.
  • There is now a switch in cockpit to toggle on/off beacon light.
  • Quickview 3 in cockpit camera is positioned correctly.
  • Tooltip indicates correct state of Master Ignition switch.
  • Off position on the right fuel selector now fixed.
  • Cold dark switch use failing to show fuel pressure is fixed.
  • Checklist for starting engine now says to wait 2 seconds.
  • Scroll wheel issue with Desired Heading knob has been recoded.
  • Spawning at night on runway, Cockpit lights now are on.
  • Typo present in Hangar Description has been rectified.
  • DC-3 Thumbnails now match the model.
  • AUX Fuel gauge needles are fixed.
  • Incorrect string on AUX fuel weight and balance fixed.
  • Hole in cargo doors from inside cargo bay hold fixed.
  • Various light leaks fixed.
  • Texture improvements throughout the model(s).

Grumman G-21 Goose

  • Fixed duplicate key name errors.
  • Fixed cockpit camera clipping through floor.
  • Fixed typo in cockpit placard.
  • Fixed typo in loading screen trivia.
  • Fixed engine audio from nearby Goose aircraft can be heard within cockpit.
  • Added Phone EFB with Radio and XPDR functionality tied to core sim.
  • Added Switches to Show/Hide EFB and Turn ON/OFF Avionics (including switch audio and decals).
  • Added EFB section to the Flight Manual.
  • Updated translation files.

H-4 Hercules “Spruce Goose”

  • Yoke interaction with VR controllers simulate a yoke instead of a flight stick.
  • Weight and Balance screen no longer contains debug text.
  • Flying very far past Vne now triggers a crash.
  • Modern avionics added.
  • Clipboard updated with new features.
  • Auto-pilot added.
  • Green navigation light orientation.
  • ATC/ICAO params.
  • Prop animation issue on one side.
  • Clipboard items missing check once clicked.
  • CHT, Oil, Radiator temperatures have been adjusted.
  • The blurred propellers no longer cast shadows.

LS8

  • Improved adverse yaw, stall and spoiler drag

Ryan NYP “Spirit of St. Louis”

  • VR controller interaction influence fixed.
  • Multiplayer Art issue fixed (the front was hidden on other Ryan).

Wright Flyer

  • VR users can launch the aircraft properly now, the throttle is automatically set to 100% once the catapult is triggered.
  • Cockpit collision added.

World

  • Fixed Statue of Liberty standing in water

Airport

  • Fix terraforming issue on taxiway at HECA
  • [Partially Fixed] Fix taxiway bridge issue at RJTT causing aircraft crashes
  • Fixed Queenstown airport not updated with World Update 12
  • Fix taxiway bridge issue at SBGL causing aircraft crashes
  • [Partially Fixed] Fix taxiway bridge issue at LFPG causing aircraft crashes
  • Fixed wrong airport names in Australia (Coober Pedy)
  • Fixed terraforming issues include the crack on runway 26 at ESSA
  • Fixed the possibility to set a seaplane base as departure without a seaplane

World Update 1 – Japan

* POIs:

  • Fixed Rainbow Bridge night texture.
  • Nagasaki Airport RJFU:
    • Fixed Control Tower LOD transition.
    • Added collisions for few missing objects.
  • Hachijojima Airport RJTH:
    • Fixed windsock direction behavior.
    • Fixed multiple objects LOD transition.
    • Added collisions for few missing objects.

World Update 2 – USA

* POIs:

  • Fixed Alcatraz Water Tower LOD transition.
  • Fixed the satellite imagery cab be seen on the terrain below New River Gorge Bridge.
  • Added marker to Lowry Avenue Bridge.
  • Fixed Rainbow Bridge Niagara Falls texture.
  • Fixed Haystack Rock position over terrain.
  • Fixed US Grant Bridge textures and blend with the aerial imagery.
  • Fixed Yosemite El Capitan terraforming clipping.
  • Fixed terrain and imagery blending of the Lewis and Clark Bridge.
  • Fixed Navajo Bridge terrain blending.
  • Fixed collisions size of the Monument Valley.
  • Fixed Rainbow Bridge Niagara Falls LODs transition.
  • Added collisions to the US Air Force planes on the Airport Graveyard.
  • Fixed United States National Arboretum is missing textures near the top of the pillars.
  • Fixed Glen Canyon Dam ground textures clipping through the Dam.
  • Added missing building to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
  • Added collision to Bixby Creek Bridge.
  • Fixed United States Capitol LOD transition.
  • the Las Vegas Strip is now searchable by name.
  • The Rainbow Bridge, Niagara Falls.
  • Fixed Fort Knox LOD popping.
  • Added collisions to Sunshine Skyway Bridge buildings.
  • Fixed missing texture on Lowry Avenue Bridge.
  • Atlanta Airport KTAL:
    • Fixed the Ground services clipping at parking RAMP 312 CARGO, parking spot N ramp 312 and airliners gate H-4.
    • Fixed flipped textures of Delta hangar and Atlanta Fire Rescue buildings.
    • Added collisions to all buildings.
    • Fixed Bridge on a taxiway.
    • Fixed night lighting disappears at short distances.
  • Friday Harbor Airport KFHR:
    • Fixed few terraforming issues.

World Update 3 – UK & Ireland

* POIs:

  • Fixed Goodison Park LOD popping.
  • Added and improved collisions for the following POIs: 100 Bishopsgate, Wembley Stadium, Blackpool Tower, Durham Cathedral, Floors Castle, The Blair Castle, Blenheim Palace, The Royal Botanical Gardens, Goodison Park, The Eden Project.
  • Fixed St James Park missing texture.
  • Fixed Emirates Stadium model and textures (include misspelling billboards).
  • Fixed Eilean Donan Castle Vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Canterbury Cathedral LOD pops.
  • Fixed Stamford Bridge LOD 1 and LOD 2 switched.
  • Fixed Blackpool Tower texture clipping.
  • Fixed Kew Garden floating bespoke building.
  • Removed TIN spikes around St. James Park stadium.
  • Fixed Windsor Castle LOD popping.
  • Fixed Pontcysyllte Aqueduct LOD popping.
  • Fixed Glass Pod on British Airways I360 position popping at different distances.
  • Fixed Goodison Park missing textures under Sunroofs.
  • Fixed Floors Castle texture and Added missing texture.
  • Fixed Scotland flag display on Edinburgh Castle.
  • Fixed Archbishop’s Palace Maidstone texture and LOD popping.
  • Fixed Villa Park Stadium LOD popping.
  • Fixed Kew Garden alignment with the satellite imagery footprint.
  • Fixed Anfield Stadium LOD popping.
  • Fixed Glamis Castle Grass vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Caernarfon Castle displaying.
  • Fixed Wales Millennium Centre LOD transition.
  • Fixed Forth Rail Bridge’s Northside pillar missing textures.
  • Fixed Forth Rail Bridge displays Cars climbing.
  • Fixed Twickenham Stadium and York Minster LOD popping.
  • Liverpool John Lennon Airport EGGP:
    • Removed Light pole in middle of a taxiway.
    • Added missing collisions to multiple buildings.
  • Barra Airport EGPR:
    • Fixed few taxi path issues.

World Update 4 – France &Benelux

* POIs

  • Fixed the Mont Aiguille collision. It is now possible to land at its top.
  • Fixed Stade Jean-Bouin collision.
  • Fixed Stade Vélodrome LOD transition.
  • Nice Cote Airport LFMN
    • Fixed runways center lines missing in both runways.
    • Fixed waypoints and nav procedures issues occurred.
    • Added collision to multiple buildings.

World Update 5 – Nordics

* POIs:

  • Fixed Viking Stadion / SR-Bank LOD popping.
  • Fixed Road traffic driving underneath Storseisundet Bridge and Svinesund Bridge.
  • Fixed Petäjävesi Old Church and Uddevalla Bridge displays double markings.
  • Fixed Cars driving through Copenhagen Opera House.
  • Fixed Copenhagen Opera House LOD popping.
  • Added collisions to the Tjörn Bridge.
  • Fixed Kullen Lighthouse vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Øresund Bridge terraforming issue.
  • Fixed Brøndby Stadium spawning.
  • Fixed the Bolt Arena missing collision.
  • Fixed Roskilde Cathedral Cars driving up the building.
  • Fixed Helsinki Ice Hall LOD popping.
  • Fixed Blue Water Arena missing collision.
  • Fixed Arctic Cathedral LOD popping.
  • Fixed Aalborg Stadium missing collision.
  • Fixed Tromsø Bridge Road traffic under and beside the Bridge.
  • Fixed floating TIN artifacts/crane near Helsinki Olympic stadium.
  • Fixed Hallgrímskirkja Church missing collision.
  • Fixed Eleda Stadion LOD popping.
  • Fixed Ullevaal Stadion LOD transition.
  • Added collisions to the Ylisto Bridge beams.
  • Fixed Sparebanken Sør Arena LOD popping.
  • Fixed Sölvesborg Bridge vegetation clipping.
  • Stockholm Arlanda Airport ESSA:
    • improved LOD transition of several buildings.
    • Added collisions to all buildings.
    • Fixed terraforming issues include the crack on runway 26.
    • Fixed big crack in runway 26.
  • Svalbard Airport ENSB:
    • Added missing collision to Airport hangar.

World Update 7 – Australia

* POIs:

  • Fixed occasional displacement of dynamic flags on Sydney Harbour Bridge.
  • Fixed vegetation clipping and placement issues at Anzac Bridge, Sydney.
  • Fixed vegetation clipping at Mooney Mooney Bridge.
  • Fixed flashing geometry on Tasman Bridge, Hobart.
  • Adjusted photogrammetry exclusions at 568 Collins Street, Melbourne.
  • Minor enhancements at several other locations, e.g., clipping vegetation or water exclusions.
  • YSHL Shellharbour Airport:
    • Minimized visible LOD changes of hangars and other buildings.

World Update 8 – Iberia

* POIs:

  • Fixed location of Fort of Sao Joao Baptista and Covão dos Conchos.
  • Fixed or adding collisions:
    • Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre.
    • Royal Palace of Madrid.
    • the Museu Nacional d Art de Catalunya.
    • the Estádio Algarve.
    • Bom Jesus do Monte.
    • Alqueva Dam.
    • Aldeadavila Dam.
    • the Museum of Art Architecture and Technology.
    • Estadio Jose Alvalade.
  • Fixed LOD popping:
    • Montjuic Castle.
    • Estadio Da Luz.
    • Episcopal Palace of Astorga.
    • Covão dos Conchos.
    • San Pablo Bridge.
    • Torre Mapfre.
    • Basilica de La Sagrada Familia.
    • Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre.
    • Puente Nuevo.
    • Fort of Sao Joao Baptista.
    • Estádio Municipal de Aveiro.
    • Estádio do Dragão.
    • Hotel Arts.
    • Observatorio Roque de los Muchachos.
    • El Monumento Natural de los Mallos de Riglos.
    • Palacio de Deportes de Santander.
    • Catedral de Leon.
    • the Alamillo Bridge.
  • Fixed Montjuic Castle vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Z-fighting in front of the Museum of Art Architecture and Technology.
  • Fixed Estádio Cidade de Coimbra double markers.
  • Fixed Puente Nuevo Cars path.
  • Fixed Guadiana International Bridge 2D footprints over the satellite imagery.
  • Fixed Freixo Bridge- car traffic driving up below the Bridge.
  • Fixed Third Millennium Bridge Cars traffic issue.
  • Fixed Maria Pia Bridge- Cars climbing up to top of Bridge.
  • Fixed Luís I Bridge displays Cars traffic path.
  • Fixed Santiago Bernabeu Stadium seats texture.
  • Fixed Castillo de Santa Barbara texture gaps.
  • Fixed the animation of the Gondola on the Vizcaya Bridge.
  • Fixed Bom Jesus do Monte trees clipping into the building.
  • Fixed Alqueva Dam texture.
  • Fixed Alcázar de Segovia terrain clipping.
  • Fixed Pena Palace trees clipping into the POI.
  • Fixed El Flysch Zumaya and El Capricho Villa POIs name spelling.
  • Fixed Rande Bridge Cars path and trees clipping into the POI.
  • Fixed Aldeadvila Dam vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Alcázar de Segovia trees clipping into the POI.
  • Fixed El Monasterio de El Escorial Z-fighting.
  • Fixed Monumento a Alfonso XII Z-fighting.
  • Fixed 516 Arouca bridge vegetation clipping.
  • Pico Airport LPPI:
    • Fixed double windsocks.

World Update 9 – Italy & Malta

* POIs

  • Fixed Duomo Di Orvieto LOD popping.
  • Added missing collisions to Basilica San Francesco.
  • Fixed Torri Di San Marino LOD popping.
  • Fixed Diga Di Santa Giustina terrain LOD popping.
  • Added missing collision to Torri Di San Marino.
  • Fixed Faro Di Capo Caccia cliffs collision.
  • Fixed Castle of Corigliano Calabro vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Fort Manoel collision.
  • Fixed Castello Di Graines collision.
  • Fixed Caserta Royal Palace collision.
  • Fixed Place Moulin Dam vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Fénis Castle textures issues.
  • Fixed Potola Palace bridges terrain blending.
  • Fixed Fort St Angelo vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Castelsardo invisible terrain issues.
  • Fixed Palazzo Pitti Z-fighting and LOD popping.
  • Fixed Fort St Angelo vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed National Stadium Ta’Qali collisions.
  • Fixed Fénis Castle vegetation clipping and Added collisions.
  • Fixed Parish Church of Mellieha missing textures.
  • Fixed Mi.Co. Gate 2 vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Basilica San Francesco vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Maxxi the National Museum collisions.
  • Fixed Lighthouse Of Genoa powerlines, DEM and generic buildings clipping.
  • Fixed Allianz Stadium vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Viadotto Sfalassa vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Basilica Di San Pietro vegetation and TIN clipping.
  • Fixed Basilica Di San Petronio TIN clipping.
  • Added missing collisions to Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi.
  • Fixed Castelsardo Z-fighting and vegetation clipping.
  • Fixed Grotta Di Nettuno vegetation clipping.
  • Marina Di Campo Airport LIRJ:
    • Fixed double windsocks.

World Update 10 – USA

* POIs:

  • Fixed Mount Washington Hotel terraforming.
  • Fixed National Park of American Samoa’s Marker position.
  • Fixed textures stretched in Royal Gorge Bridge & Park’s Rock.
  • Fixed Z-fighting on the roof of the Getty Museum.
  • Fixed the Smithsonian National Museum of American History display name.
  • Fixed the Cabo Rojo Lighthouse marker position and windows textures issues.
  • Fixed the vegetation clipping into the Independence Temple.
  • Fixed the New Orleans bridges collisions.
  • Fixed the US flag in Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
  • Fixed the Longaberger Company headquarters and Fort Massachusetts collision.
  • Fixed LODs transitions for the following POIs:
    • Split Rock Lighthouse.
    • Kentucky State Capitol.
    • Indian River Inlet Bridge.
    • World War II Memorial.
    • Cabo Rojo Lighthouse.
    • Yerkes Observatory.
    • Montana State.
    • Mount Washington.
    • Theodore Roosevelt Dam.
    • the Independence Temple.
    • Fort Massachusetts.
    • National Gallery of Art.
  • Lake Tahoe Airport KTVL:
    • Added collisions for few missing buildings.
  • Block Island Airport KBID:
    • Added collisions for few missing buildings.
  • Dallas Forth Worth Airport KDFW:
    • Fixed few terraforming issues in the airport.
    • Runways types are now defined.
  • Others:
    • Fixed the Water cracks present at Seven Seas Lagoon near.

World Update 11 – Canada

* POIs:

  • Fixed TIN buildings exclusion near Hatley Park National Historic Site.
  • Fixed blend of Samuel de Champlain Bridge surrounding terrain.
  • Fixed the double markers of the One on the World map.
  • Fixed Cars floating above Pierre-Laporte Bridge.
  • Fixed Cars flow over Jacques Cartier Bridge and Angus L. Macdonald Bridge.
  • Fixed big Nickel POI name.
  • Fixed the vegetation clipping through Burrard Street Bridge.
  • Fixed Z fighting on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
  • Fixed LOD popping of Cape Bonavista Lighthouse cliffs and Cape Spear Lighthouse National Historic cliffs.
  • Fixed the vegetation clipping into the zipline at the Cape Enrage Lighthouse.
  • Fixes Pierre-Laporte Bridge terrain alignment.
  • Fixed the vegetation clipping into the A. Murray MacKay Bridge and Thousand Islands Bridge.
  • Fixed Lions Gate Bridge alignment with tterrain and road.
  • Fixed terrain spikes going through Jacques Cartier Bridge.
  • Fixed Holes in terrain all around Citadel Hill (Fort George).
  • Fixed terrain LOD popping around Parliament of Canada.
  • Fixed terraforming at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
  • Fixed TIN data displays next to Fisgard Lighthouse.
  • Added missing building on the Canadian High Arctic Research Station.
  • Added missing building for the Cambridge Bay Radar Station.
  • Fixed collisions of Jacques Cartier Bridge, The Lions Gate Bridge and The Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

40th Anniversary Edition / Sim Update 11

  • Meigs Field KCGX:
    • Fixed Z-fighting in runway and tarmac.
    • Fixed taxi to parking after landing.
    • Starting in KCGX helipad while helicopter is selected is now available.
    • ATIS is now available.
  • Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport VHHX:
    • Added collisions to multiple buildings.
    • Fixed the too low glideslope.
    • Fixed the ILS range for runway 13.
    • ATIS is now available.
  • Princess Juliana Airport TNCM:
    • Added collisions to few missing buildings.
    • Fixed the LOD transitions.
  • First Flight Airport KFFA:
    • Fixed Z fighting on pathway.
  • Helipads/Heliports:
    • Lingotto Building LIBH:
      • Fixed the too High collision preventing smooth landing.
      • Fixed Z- fighting on the roof of the building.
    • NYC Heliport KJRB – Added collisions for few missing items.
    • Tokyo Heliport – Added collisions for few buildings.
    • US Bank Tower Helipad:
      • marker is now centered over the helipad.
      • Fixed LOD transition.
    • Heliponto Mirante Dona Marta SMDH:
      • Heliport collisions has been fixed.
      • Fixed LOD transition.
    • Menara Telekom Tower Helipad:
      • marker is now centered over the helipad.
      • Fixed Z-fighting on Water near the tower.
    • Bitexco Financial Tower – Fixed LOD transition.
    • London Heliport EGLW – Removed building appeared inside the Airport perimeter while photogrammetry is off.
    • Needles Lighthouse – Lighthouse Light is now spinning.
    • Issy-Les-Moulineaux Heliport:
      • marker is now centered over the helipad.
  • Glider Airports:
    • Itakura Gliderport RJT1 – Fixed ground and runway textures.

Game of the Year Edition

  • Voloport:
    • All Voloports are now possible to use as helipads.
    • Issy-Les-Moulineaux Heliport- Voloport is now available as helipad.
    • La Defense Voloport is is now available as helipad.
    • Fixed LOD transition for all Voloports.
    • Fixed Le Bourget Voloport name spelling.
  • Lugano Airport LSZA:
    • Collision has been Added to multiple objects.
    • Fixed floating lights around the airport.
    • Fixed Z-fighting on airports’ tennis courts.

Top Gun Maverick

  • Fixed the clipping through the rocks at Seneca Rocks Peak.
  • Fixed Haines Knob collision is size.
  • Fixed collisions in Germany Valley Quarry.
  • Fixed French Gulf Marina has LOD transition.
  • Fixed LOD popping in Riffle Lake Dam.
submitted by FlyWithSeedyL to MicrosoftFlightSim [link] [comments]


2023.03.21 14:02 Recent-Development10 [A Terran Space Story: Lieutenant Saga] - Chapter 98

The second arc of the final Lieutenant Saga book begins. The mission parameters have changed dramatically. I hope you enjoy!
The next chapter will be out Saturday!
A Terran Space Story: The Lieutenant Saga
Academy Days First Previous Next

Chapter 98: Time Passes

1 year later. October 27th, 2266. 12:00 St. Mary’s Station – Military Docking Ring
John was the last of the crew to walk down the umbilical to the Waukesha. It was a very productive three months. The shipyard had worked some sort of voodoo or magic, very likely both, to get her back to combat-ready as quickly as they had. Despite missing two deployments John’s task force had claimed the most pirate kills since the beginning of the campaign.
Going out was great for John’s mental health. While he was exceptionally adept at processing data and directing squadrons around, he had no passion for that kind of work. Ironic since his career aspirations weren’t that different from that line of work.
Their last deployment was a bit different. Lieutenant Cohen and his ship were replaced with another. Though that was to the surprise of no one. John was heartened to hear that Brady seemingly had learned a bit of humility after the fact. But their shared history meant the two officers would never work with one another again.
John paused halfway down the umbilical and looked out the viewports to see his large ship. He smiled before turning back and heading to the security checkpoint. ‘A job well done,’ he thought as he continued to walk onto the station’s docking ring. He wondered what their next mission would be. That could wait though, it was time to get home and see his wife whom he so adored.
The security checkpoint was a formality, as it usually is. His gear was scanned and then handed back to him. John always grinned both at the scans and how much swag the security officers had confiscated. Every time they docked here there’d be two tables full of random shit the crew tried to smuggle home. Thankfully none of it was harmful, but that did raise many questions. Questions that would gnaw in his psyche for weeks at a time. ‘Why the hell would anyone want a meal tray from the mess?’ was the current question bugging him.
John’s destination was his condo. He walked with an increased pace and focus than he normally had. He so desperately wanted Alice in his arms. To kiss and do other consenting adult things with her. His excitement would be dampened when he arrived home to a quiet and very Alice-less condo. She left a note on the digital whiteboard.
‘Love you and welcome home, John. I got called in for an unexpected shift. Should be back by 16:00-17:00.’
“Fuck me,” John sighed as he dropped his backpack and seabag in the entryway, “That’s disappointing.”
John then walked into the living room, but as soon as he did so the primary display screen turned on and displayed an incoming message. He shrugged and found one of the many remotes for it and accepted it. He was surprised to see Kristin in it.
“Hey First Lieutenant,” Kristin smiled, “Kill a bunch of pirates?”
John rolled his eyes, “You know I’ve told all of y’all that off hours it’s OK to just call me John. We’re running low on the availability of targets.”
“The military says otherwise. We learned that lesson well in the academy,” Kristin grinned, “Well, some of us did at least. Pirates seem to be bugging out of our systems too.”
“Touché.”
“Did you hear what happened to my former captain?”
John shook his head.
“Seriously? You don’t know?”
“After I had a conversation with his dad, I let it go. To be blunt, I didn’t really give a rat’s ass what NI did with the guy. Plus, I literally just got back home after being gone for three months. Was too busy killing pirates and time to notice anything really.”
“Well, he ultimately accepted the separation agreement NI was offering,” Kristin rolled her eyes, “What Dwayne relayed to me was that the only thing changing his mind were drafts of criminal charges that they were prepared to bring against him.”
John nodded, “Don’t roll your eyes at that, the degree of arrogance exhibited doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.”
Kristin did in fact roll her eyes, “Well, he’s now being charged with four counts of sexual harassment. It seems that he didn’t learn his lesson in the civilian world. Those ladies have brought a civil case against him too. Daddy’s going to be spending a pretty penny.”
John grinned as he pulled up his tablet and scanned for news. Laughter erupted shortly thereafter by him. He sat down on his recliner and shared the news.
“As of twenty minutes ago, his dad has been removed as CEO and chairman of the board. The board and he agreed to a massive reduction in his golden parachute. He won’t be ruined but his kid will cost him literally a billion dollars over the remainder of his lifetime. Since he took his company public there ain’t much he can do but whine and complain about it.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. Jacob says hi. He told me this morning that he wishes he didn’t have to work today. The big lug also says we need to meet up someplace again soon.”
John smiled, “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me at all that he’d say something like that. But I agree, that is something we ought to do. The problem is that I’m off for a week, then it’s prepping for another deployment in three weeks.”
“So, in other words, not anytime soon.”
“You know how it is,” John sighed as he shook his head, “I will be basically deployed for three months at a time no less than three times a year, and probably start a fourth deployment in the coming year. When I am home I have effectively no social life since Alice has a ton of honey-do things around the condo.”
“I do not trust Jacob to hang a picture without making a hole in the wall.”
John laughed, “I don’t think he’s ever been called handy. Hey, how were the pirate ops for you lot?”
“Our pirate hunting was pretty routine. We didn’t get anything heavy like you got. Four hundred pirate ships though? Good lord, you were busy,” Kristin could hardly believe the number.
“Four hundred eighty-three, we were one engagement away from cracking five hundred,” John smiled as he leaned back in his recliner, “Pirate reports in our systems have effectively been eliminated. The same holds true for our part of the inner core.”
“Only two of our squadrons crossed the century mark in Second Fleet. Could that have been because the pirates had migrated so deep into the core worlds?”
“More than likely, they go where the money is. Void traffic in the core worlds is substantially higher than in the more distant colonies. That means the demand for illicit goods is higher as well. I can’t really blame the pirates for wanting to make a dime that way, but they really should find honest work.”
“They are bugging out to a more accepting place now. That is presuming our intelligence reports are accurate,” Kristin said, “But we’re due for another anti-pirate hunt during my next time out. I think the other fleets are gearing up for a focus on that too.”
“I had heard the outer fleets are starting early next year,” John grinned, “It’s a shitty time to be a pirate. Just as they find a safe haven the military begins to move in fresher systems. Though if they are smart, they might get overlooked.”
The two continued to talk about their pirate-hunting escapades. Kristin was very eager to understand the hows and why John made the decisions he did. She was fascinated with how overly aggressive his squadron was, which given their kill tally shouldn’t have come to her as much surprise. She was eager to estimate how many pirate vessels they were leaving behind.
John changed the subject after a while, “When are getting a captain’s seat?”
“Well, it should have been before my last deployment. A better-connected lieutenant got the nod instead. I’m next up for the big seat.”
“Sorry to hear about the delay. You’ll do well when you get the opportunity.”
“Thanks. Well, I’ve taken enough time of yours. Thanks for the assistance.”
“It’s all good, you and Andern take care.”
John waived as he shut the display off. He crossed his legs and shut his eyes. He fell asleep quickly in that comfortable chair of his. It was good to be home, even if it was for a brief time. John didn’t know what kind of mission would come next. It was unlikely to have anything to do with pirates. That was fine with him, something new couldn’t hurt to experience.
One day later. October 28th, 2266. 09:06 St. Mary’s Station – First Fleet Auditorium
John walked into the auditorium for a last-minute meeting. Alice wasn’t wrong, he looked dashing in his Navy whites. Despite that, the timing of it was piss poor, his beautiful wife was sadly accustomed to last-second changes to their schedules. John hated being the last one to arrive for a meeting, it never felt good. All those eyes stared at him when he entered the room.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Admiral Dufresne said politely, “Once again, apologies are due to you for the last-second nature of this meeting.”
“Thank you, sir. My wife wanted to visit a museum and go shopping on the coast down on the surface. I’m not exactly opposed to missing that part of our itinerary.”
The bespectacled man sitting across from him chuckled quietly. Admiral Dickinson and Dufresne grinned at the sarcasm. The pair of admirals understood immediately that John was both cautious and curious about why he was brought here. It didn’t escape him that the noticed John size up the man across from him.
“This is Doctor Frank Hamelin,” Admiral Dickinson, “And you will be escorting him on your next mission. We don’t expect it to last a standard deployment, but that’s alright given the current situation. Besides, your squadron killed all the bloody pirates, so we don’t have that much real work for you at the moment.”
John grinned when he heard that. He never took his eyes off the scholar. In fact, he was counting the number of ways he could kill or beat the man up. That number was incredibly high as he didn’t give off any vibes that he had ever been in a fight.
“You had best show him what you’d like to do. He’s not going to stop doing whatever it is that he’s doing now,” Admiral Dufresne said dismissively to the scientist.
“I find it fascinating that I’d ever interact, much less put my life in the hands of someone so bloodthirsty. That gaze of yours is just frightening,” Dr. Hamelin said with the utmost sincerity and honesty, “But yes, where are my manners? To put it briefly and frankly, we have discovered evidence of intelligent life, though it seems that the race has since gone extinct.”
Dr. Hamelin activated the holographic display from his terminal. A black orb with a sickeningly green light is shown. Alien characters could be easily seen in the piece of rubble. Characters that John was acquainted with.
“You don’t seem surprised by this?” Dr. Hamelin noticed John’s reaction and was taken aback by it, “This was not the reaction I’d expected from you, in fact, I’d say you were nonplused about such a momentous discovery.”
“It’s foolhardy to believe that we’re the only intelligent life in the universe. Or that there weren’t precursor races.”
“We’re calling them the Predecessors.”
John looked like he was in pain hearing that name.
“You don’t agree with the name we gave them?”
John shook his head, “Why not something cooler? Forerunners, Ancients, Old Ones, Engineers, galaxy seeders?”
“Clever as some of those names, many are trademarked and rooted in science fiction. We are dealing with science fact.”
“That’s a…” John stopped and paused for a moment, “An acceptable, but dumb, reason for eschewing a cooler name. So, what’s the mission?”
“We’re going to Apus Minor. There’s an Earth-sized moon orbiting the gas giant. The specific ruins we’re heading to are here.”
The picture in the holographic display changed. John closed his eyes quickly and sighed. The doctor wanted to explore alien ruins that were under a mountain. Ruins that had a tendency to just disappear on a whim, at least according to the data John had kept well hidden. John didn’t know whether or not the doctor knew that fact, but he had to presume he was aware of that.
“Alien ruins in a mountain. What could go wrong?” John said sarcastically.
“A lot. Which is why we’re bringing you on board,” Admiral Dickinson answered, “The scientists will do as you order.”
“That means I’ll be going into the ruins with them then, or am I mistaken on that assumption?”
Admiral Dufresne leaned forward and rested his arms on the table, “Why would the captain of our starship go with them?”
“You said the scientists will do as I order. Even with relays our communication devices don’t work great under that much earth. How else am I to order them to not do something without being physically there?”
“It’s not normal, but far from the first time, a captain’s prerogative was used during a mission. If you see fit to need to be there with the scientific team then that is acceptable to me,” Admiral Dickinson said, “I’d not simply urge you but order you to utilize a significant amount of caution to be exhibited. Anything and everything that is seen is classified beyond top secret. We are not prepared at this time to publicly disclose this information at this time.”
“When do we leave?”
“Your shore leave’s been cut short, along with your crew’s,” Admiral Dufresne said, “The recall order has already been sent to the crew. You’ll leave in five days. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the interruption.”
“Congrats doctor, you and your team aren’t going to be making many friends on the ship,” John’s quip dripped in resentment, “Where are going to house them?”
“The starboard hangar is being used to house their gear and the teams. Technicians are installing the temporary barracks structure in there as we speak,” Admiral Dufresne said, “Lieutenant, why don’t you take the time to get to know your new crewmate? We have another crew to disappoint.”
“The Waukesha is going out by her lonesome?”
Admiral Dickinson nodded, “Apus Minor is firmly in the core world region. The moon itself is sparsely populated aside from some agricultural startups in the northern continent. Apus Major has nearly a billion people living there now.”
“Understood, we’ll be up to the task.”
John stood and saluted the admirals. He quickly sat back down and stared down at the doctor. It was highly annoying that his leave was being canceled as suddenly as it was. He not only wanted but needed some proper downtime.
“You needn’t give me this death glare. I’m not at fault for this.”
“Oh, I’m aware. I’m just annoyed that this meeting got me out of looking at some art pieces painted or built by some dead artists that I have no clue who they were. Now I’m being asked to play babysitter to a bunch of eggheads under a fucking mountain.”
“This is a momentous occasion. We’ve discovered…”
“Tell me, doctor, what happened to this relic after it was activated,” John stared at the doctor.
“What? How…” Doctor Hamelin cocked his head and stared at the cocky officer, “What do you mean?”
“Where is that relic now? Do you have a chipping of the material?”
“No, but why would you ask that? How would you know the device disappeared upon activation? No one’s been told that. You couldn’t possibly know that.”
“Unless I do. You didn’t discover that device. Someone else did. If I’m not mistaken, the uncut video shows a green scanning pulse before the device atomized itself. And left a stadium-sized depression in prime farmland. Indicating that something much larger existed there at one time.”
“A dear colleague and friend of mine discovered it. He had an unnamed benefactor that was bankrolling his research. He found dozens of locations. He died in an attack on his campsite by bandits. This site was one he had wanted to go to but he was hesitant to go there because of the aforementioned disappearing act they performed.”
“That benefactor of your friend was a madman. He made me look like a fucking boy scout,” John’s face wore a puzzled look, “I am not a boy scout.”
“Sometimes in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, we have to ally ourselves, however temporarily, with an unsavory cast. That is the price of progress some of us are willing to pay.”
“And what if that price involves doing immoral or unethical things? Such as transforming a portion of the population or annihilating some of it? What then?”
“This discovery is so much more valuable than you can think. Our level of technology could increase exponentially. The risks are worth it. Especially now, since we believe we now know why the structures disappear.”
“What makes you think you’ve cracked that code?” John asked dismissively.
“I’m looking at him.”
John sighed loudly before closing his eyes, “You cannot be fucking serious.”
Dr. Hamelin then began typing at his terminal before showing a repeating pattern, “This is what the scanner was looking for. We’ve been able to translate part of the flash of data. When we extrapolate what those numbers mean we find out they are grid coordinates. To this.”
He then changed the screen to display a portion of a human’s genetic code, “Wouldn’t you be surprised that this portion of the code is an exact match to you? What’s absolutely fascinating is how your genetic code shifted into this. Genetic adjustments, on the scale you went through, are incredibly deadly for adults.”
“It almost killed me. That it didn’t remains a mystery for me as well. So you think if I’m in the presence of the team then when the scanning beam goes out it’ll delay or otherwise stop this atomization program the alien tech has?”
“That’s my running theory.”
“Do you have any other sites besides this one?”
“Why do you ask?” Dr. Hamelin asked curiously.
“I’d rather you not be wrong and then be buried under a fucking mountain due to scientific malfeasance,” John said sarcastically.
“There’s a small structure on the moon a few miles away that we can test your theory.”
“Very well,” John said, “What else do you know about these aliens?”
Dr. Hamelin smiled as he leaned forward. The two men continued their conversation. Five hours had flashed in but a blink of an eye. John had learned a great deal from the doctor. The new information he was eager to plug into Eve and see if their translations and assumptions from Dr. Norman’s stash had proven accurate.
John was still treading cautiously. His desire to learn more was obviously there, but this whole situation wreaked of something. Something that he couldn’t quite put a finger on. He didn’t trust this scientist, and it was likely that the rest of his team would be just as untrustworthy, but orders were orders. He had to follow through with them, but John was bound and determined to do so while not allowing these foreigners to get him and his crew killed.
A Terran Space Story: The Lieutenant Saga
Academy Days First Previous Next
submitted by Recent-Development10 to HFY [link] [comments]


2023.03.21 07:39 ForSacredRussia1 Putin body-doubles theories. What will happen if something happens to a Putin while visiting a Putin-unfriendly zone?

Putin body-doubles theories. What will happen if something happens to a Putin while visiting a Putin-unfriendly zone?
Putin body-doubles theories
Attack of the cloneZ
Reading the reactions to the recent "Putin" visit to Mariupol, it is apparent that hardly anyone believes the 'visitor' to be the real Putin. So he uses body-doubles to wage a media campaign, designed to counter other world-events such as Biden visiting Kyiv, etc.
As it stands, it's much safer for heads of state to visit Kyiv, on the Ukrainian side - while visiting pro-Russian occupied territories is bound to be rife with catastrophe including car bombings, drone explosions, super-long-range missile strikes and networks of elite sleeper-cell partisans who endured an unspeakable year without unleashing their highest of potential until just the right moment.. all hazardous to a Putin - or a Putin-double!

The Sevastopol one, it's like they didn't even try, that looks like Al Bundy.
The media campaign
Putin uses his clones to go deliver messages of hope to his people - as in, literally, his hired people who are paid crowds and paid actors who are also carefully security-screened, lest a segment of the ever increasing restless populace find their way too close to the tzar.
The special messages of hope and peace and love are taped and televised, after being doctored and fancied-up so they don't contain things that could make Putin look bad or weak.
https://preview.redd.it/kr7zw30b11pa1.png?width=512&format=png&auto=webp&s=30356cc5698c11790327893abec91db2199705e1
Brainwashed citizens of the RF, the target audience eats these photo-ops right up, and they don't even feel the need to verify whether they are seeing a real Putin on TV. This is like a romance or a cult-following, which means that the viewers need barely a suggestion of "Putin" to believe 110% that he is definitely there.
The more far-away and dangerous places he visits, the higher his ratings will go.

https://preview.redd.it/jpe9a2rd11pa1.png?width=512&format=png&auto=webp&s=a390f3b839b3ead58fe0f82f85ca134cc2592327
What would happen if a Putin clone was in an 'incident'?
So this is where we dive a bit deeper and imagine this scenario where something happens to a Putin double. Maybe it could be an explosion or a drone bomb, or a sniper, but he's taken out.

https://preview.redd.it/zfeidco751pa1.png?width=512&format=png&auto=webp&s=78f70394c9428f929f97e4a74b217cf3603fff06
What would likely happen is they would put into effect their special plan for exactly this scenario, which is to proclaim that "Putin" LIVED (oh Hallelujah, right 🙄) and escaped a narrow assassination attempt, but also fought them off and killed them all and protected a family of babies. Meaning, while the clone would be exploded, the real Putin will say that he heroically survived and that all should support him and his war.

Hey guys, I lived and I'm still your tzar.
Therefore is something happens to a Putin double on dangerous territory, for Putin this would still be a win-win because his followers will think highly of him as a living martyr. Wherever a Putin travels is under extreme control, for minimal witnesses. Even if something happened that fragged the Putin clone on the streets, nobody would hear about it.
Hi, I'm tzar and you are slave.
The only chance is for somebody to be hidden and filming the action. However even this will have no effect on the brainwashed Z population because the RF info ministry will issue a statement that any such action video is a western deep-fake, totally concocted footage.
They would not be below rinse and repeating with sending more than one clone to his death or negative consequences. But, it hasn't happened yet.
Will it ever happen? If a Freedom-Russian or Ukrainian is within a shot of a Putin double, and they know it's a double, and they can think through the consequences, will they pull the trigger?
Could even eliminating a Putin body double have bad outcomes for the fight against the RF army, will there be a full mobilization? Certainly if this is the case that sending clones to dangerous zones is in Putin's playbook, he could be looking for an opportunity to trigger a full-scale mobilization.
Well, it certainly could be that him sending his doubles to the war zone is indeed looking to invite an opportunity to mobilize, but it's not likely, in my opinion. That's because if he declared mobilization, it would be on a set date, not arbitrarily in even of his clone getting hurt or killed.
However..
Proactive clone sacrifice
So this is the deepest level of my theory, which is that one way Putin can control the narrative is by proactively bombing one of his own clones and proceeding with the getting well/hospital story and rallying the troops for the full-scale mobilization.
This would be a real event with many witnesses, including some who are not 100% FSB employees, but are FSB-plants. The scenario will be a real violent display, firearm discharge or shrapnel, or even a stab wound. Then the clone would be put into the ambulance helicopter, and then knocked out cold and packaged up in a barrel of flesh-dissolving acid, never to be seen again or be found by anyone ever.
And, then the real Putin will do a couple of hospital photo-ops, with a couple more performed by yet some other clone that Putin would put into the role while he low-key gets on with his own business.
Thoughts on mobilization
While it seemed Putin would declare mobilization earlier on, he has abstained from doing so. He is still holding out on this final play. His other option is a nuclear strike, which will end up with his loss for sure. So he will not go for the nuclear option, and he hasn't gone for full mobilization - why?
They believe the partial mobilization has provided enough guys to go kill and be killed, while also at the same time realizing that sending a horde of inexperienced conscripts with weapons will simply transfer weapons out of the RF, to Ukraine, to be used against the RF.
Finally, the tension of RF army vs Wagner is at an all-time high. Prigozhin has made a political bid for St Petersburg mayor, which is probably in Russia like automatically winning a major party primary. Putin knows that he may have to save his full-mobilization trump card for when its time to fight Wagner.
All in all, there could be several reasons why Putin hasn't declared the full mobilization. Some of these reasons would also contradict the theory that Putin may be using his clones to attract an attempt on one of them, to help trigger the full mobilization.
So, should someone pull the trigger on a Putin double, if there's an opportunity?
Yes! Absolutely, if within a range of a fake or real Putin, some soldier or partisan should pull the trigger if they have an opportunity. This will have a different effect than the Kremlin would hope for due to the current situation, which wasn't the case when all their plans were being crafted. The new situation being the power of Prigozhin (Kadyrov, seems to have been poisoned and sidelined off the competition for the Kremlin last couple of months), the popularly-supporter and politically ambitious private mercenary businessman who single-handedly offers to the average RF citizen what entire battalions of generals and ministers can't: a man with experience serving real prison time, combat experience - so he's like a general, except he can do actual fighting. He can do so many things, in contrast with those who are in the regime government. So he'll want to replace them with himself and his buddies.

WWPD: What Would Prigozhin Do?
The moment a Putin clone is offed, Prigozhin may elect to go down one of these two extreme paths:
1) He confronts Putin in the popular sphere: he exposes the entire clone scheme and takes over national TV in a coup, to rant about how Putin is no longer a worthy leader for Russians because he's been just a fake, and it's time to trust Prigozhin as the new leader of the federation who will set things right.
2) He goes a little more extreme: using all his prison experience, he creates a set of plans to enact in the event of a Putin-clone assassination and Putin's counter-propaganda. He actually cuts off all communications and kills the real Putin. 💀
When the dust settles, he takes over as king of the RF. But Prigozhin will be smart and he will want to actually call off all the troops and make a big bargain with the planet in order to avoid personal criminal responsibility, and turn in all the Kremlin brass as an exchange for certain benefits.
So, after the pacifies the RF populace with crowning himself as new president, Prigozhin will tie the loose end of 'why we shouldn't keep invading Ukraine and try to hang on to it' by enacting the strategy from variant #1 where he tells everyone that while the real Putin was killed while touring occupied Ukraine, it was actually not done by Ukrainians - it was done by...
...and he can name any specific group or individual who is his current enemy or future enemy. He can easily just make something up and blame it on Shoigu or Gerasimov, or anyone - about how they infiltrated Putin's personal guard, his inner-circle, set up an assassination, etc.
WGFWPD
But really, Prigozhin isn't going to win and any extra chaos within the RF will hasten an end to this war. So, what should happen is someone should definitely shoot the Putin clone, take him out and cause an internal RF dog-fight with Prigozhin and Gerasimov. And while they trade punches, they can be sucker-punched by the other forces that nobody really considers (but they will): the Freedom Russia Legion and the RVC!
After a weakened RF is bleeding, and its cannibalized elites are trying to make sense of things, these revolutionary groups could swoop in and clean house. Of course, what happens after this is going to be a huge mystery until that time comes. And so we wait.
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2023.03.21 01:14 Liath-Luachra [Discussion] Babel by RF Kuang – Book 2, Chapters 5-8

Hello everybody,
Welcome to the second discussion of Babel by RF Kuang! Sorry that this discussion has been posted a day late, there was a family crisis at my end. A few of our questions from last week’s discussion have been answered in this part of the book, but as we learn more about this world I think it’s fair to say that everyone will have a lot more questions they’d like answered.
Summary
Chapter 5
Robin goes to the Twisted Root with his doppelgänger, who upon closer inspection doesn’t appear to be an exact copy of Robin after all – he is older than Robin, slightly taller and thinner, and has darker hair and paler skin [so that probably puts an end to the hypothesis that future Robin has travelled back in time, although I greatly enjoyed that part of last week’s discussion].
He tells Robin that his name is Griffin Lovell, and that not only are they half brothers but Professor Lovell actually has a wife and two (acknowledged) children living on an estate in Yorkshire. The professor married his wife Johanna for her money; she is terribly rich with five hundred pounds a year [maybe I’ve read too much Jane Austen but that doesn’t seem like a lot?] and he uses her money to fund his travels abroad. Griffin doesn’t think Johanna knows about him and Robin, but doubts she would care apart from any potential scandal. He points out that ironically, the professor spends more time with his unacknowledged children than his acknowledged ones, who he sees maybe twice a year.
Griffin tells Robin that he’s part of a criminal group called The Hermes Society that steals silver, manuscripts and engraving materials from Babel, adding that Robin’s help the previous night was technically treason and if anyone found out he would be tortured and thrown into Newgate prison.
Griffin also asks Robin why his mother died – not how, but why.
They walk around Oxford to avoid being overheard as they continue their conversation, and Robin buys pastries to back up the lie he told Ramy about going to see Professor Lovell. Griffin tells him he is from Macau. He asks Robin to help The Hermes Society steal, as he has access to Babel. He can’t, or won’t, tell Robin more details about the headquarters or members, but says they redistribute silver to people who need it more than wealthy Londoners. Griffin tells him what most silver is actually used for - not for healing people, but for more frivolous uses like alarm clocks and colour-changing curtains
He also says the second and third largest sources of Babel’s income are militaries and slave traders. Babel collects foreign languages and uses them for translation magic that benefits England and the empire. The new powerful bars use Chinese, Sanskrit and Arabic. Griffin calls it a deliberate exploitation of foreign cultures and foreign resources that is intricately tied to the business of colonialism. The British empire amasses silver and it cajoles, manipulates and threatens other countries into trade deals that benefit them. The silver allows the British to make their ships faster, soldiers hardier and guns more deadly.
However, Hermes aids slave revolts and resistance movements, melting down silver made for cleaning doilies and using them to cure disease instead, Robin thinks it’s a compelling argument but implicates everything he holds dear. He realises his hesitation boils down to fear. He is reluctant to say yes as he still doesn’t know much about Hermes, but Griffin tells him this is real life which is messy, scary and uncertain and asks Robin to take a chance.
Robin asks for time to think, and Griffin gives him five days. He instructs him to carve an X on a birch tree in the Merton College gardens if he wants to join them. Griffin tells Robin he can’t reach him directly, which is for his safety in case Robin turns out to be an informer. In the meantime, he should act like a Babel student and try not to be suspicious.
Robin asks Griffin if Professor Lovell knows about him, but he doesn’t know; he left Babel after his third year when it was no longer safe to continue his double life. He tells Robin not to mention his name to the professor. He also reveals that Robin’s room on Magpie Lane used to be his room.
Chapter 6
Professor Playfair’s class on Translation Theory talks about the difficulty of translation, as there is no one to one correlation between words or concepts. As he talks, Robin thinks about how Griffin’s conspiracies sound ridiculous in the light of day.
The professor says the dilemma of translation is do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text? Translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original, as things like syntax, grammar, morphology and orthography get in the way. Victoire speaks confidently and precisely in class as if reading from the textbook, and Robin feels intimidated.
Professor Playfair talks about The Tower of Babel parable from the Book of Genesis, and how nobody knows what the original, Adamic language is. Some people think its Hebrew, another language lost to time, a new language that we should invent, or even French or English. Ramy suggests it is Syriac, and the professor laughs at his joke, although Robin isn’t sure if it was supposed to be a joke.
Professor Playfair says it doesn’t matter what the Adamic language was as we’ve clearly lost access to it, but Babel can collect all the world’s languages under one roof and by perfecting the arts of translation they can achieve what humanity lost. He gets emotional with tears in his eyes.
Robin asks if Babel’s purpose is to bring mankind back together, and everyone else is confused by his question. Professor Playfair finally answers that it is; “Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.”
Latin taught by Professor Margaret Craft, who is severe and doesn’t refer to them by name. Robin doesn’t like her. Letty is rapt, however, and gazes at the professor with shining admiration. After class, Letty tries to speak to her privately and get advice about being a woman at Oxford, but she dismisses Letty, saying class is over and that she is infringing on her time.
The students have solo tutorials in their languages of study. Robin’s Chinese instructor is not Professor Lovell, but Professor Anand Chakravarti, who speaks English with a posh London accent. The professor doesn’t lecture, but converses with Robin to dismantle and understand Chinese.
He and Lovell are trying to answer various questions, and since Robin is useful as a rare native speaker capable of expanding the bounds of Babel’s scant existing knowledge (or a silver mine to be plundered). But Robin is excited to contribute to the Grammaticas.
Robin can’t answer everything, especially regarding Classical Chinese which is to vernacular Mandarin as Latin is to English. He asks Professor Chakravarti if they could just take a research trip to Peking and talk to other people who might know. However, the Qing Emperor has made it punishable by death to teach a foreigner Chinese.
Robin asks if there are other students who speak Chinese, and the professor gives him a funny look. He tells him there was another student called Griffin Harvey who was nice but not as diligent as Robin, but he died of an illness on a research trip. Robin asks if they could get more Chinese students at Babel, or set up an exchange programme, but the professor brings up national loyalties and that Professor Lovell thinks they require a certain upbringing because the Chinese tend towards certain natural inclinations. But of course, they don’t mean Robin as he was raised ‘properly’.
Robin goes for dinner with Professor Lovell. His Oxford house is smaller than his Hampstead one but is still fancy. The trees have cherries even though the fruit is not in season, and Robin thinks there is probably silver in the soil. Mrs Piper is excited to see him and is shocked at his stories about the college food.
At dinner, they talk about Robin’s studies and Professor Lovell tells him another story about Psammetichus isolating two infants from language to see what the original language was, and concluding that it was Phrygian. Professor Lovell says it’s a pretty story, and muses about how it might be interesting to buy a child and try it.
Professor Lovell derides the idea of an Adamic language. He talks about dominant languages, and throws some shade at Portuguese. Robin is drinking, and feels the conversation is getting away from him so tries to pull it back to familiar territory. The professor says European languages are dwindling in importance, and that they need eastern languages to innovate. He thinks Chinese is the future.
There are some departmental politics among the academics at Babel, and some people are hurt that only one of the new students is a classicist and that she’s a woman. However Professor Lovell says the classicists will have trouble getting jobs when they graduate.
Robin asks who buys the silver bars. The professor says its people who can afford them, which is simple economics. People in other countries can’t always afford the export fees. Robin asks why they don’t use them for healing abroad, but the professor says they can’t expend energy researching any frivolous applications. Robin thinks it’s only fair to have an exchange since they’re using foreign languages and give nothing in return, but the professor says language isn’t a commercial good but an infinite resource.
The professor says the Qing Emperor has one of the largest silver reserves in the world, so why don’t they have their own grammars and silver bars – why should the British just hand them to them? Robin says they are hoarding knowledge, because if languages are free, then why are the Grammaticas locked up in the tower?
Professor Lovell coldly asks if Robin believes what they do is fundamentally unjust, and Robin says he just wants to know why silver couldn’t save his mother. The professor is flustered, and says it was Canton’s poor public hygiene that led to the cholera outbreak that killed his mother, not the unequal distribution of silver bars. Robin is drunk and continues to argue, and the professor says “She was only just a woman”.
They are interrupted by the doorbell ringing – it is Sterling Jones, the nephew of the famous William Jones. He stares at Robin and acts weird and rude. He and the professor start their own conversation about translation and ignore Robin, who feels out of place and dismissed, especially as they hadn’t finished discussing his mother. He leaves the professor’s house and goes to Merton College, where he carves an X on the tree Griffin told him about.
Chapter 7
The following Monday, Robin finds a note under his windowsill. It’s in Chinese characters and also a code. Robin cracks the code and it says “The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after. Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn.”
Wednesday evening brings heavy rain, and Robin feels mounting dread all day as the sky darkens. At 11:45pm he starts to head towards Babel, but Ramy sees him, and Robin has to lie again and pretend he forgot something in the stacks. Ramy seems to accept the lie.
At midnight, Robin approaches the entrance to Babel and two people in black appear. He lets them in, and waits as instructed. He never sees their faces. It seems to go smoothly but he sleeps badly that night and is late for his Latin study group. Ramy says he knocked twice on Robin’s door but there was no response, so he had assumed Robin had already left. Robin says he slept badly due to nightmares, and Victoire is sympathetic. Letty is annoyed though, because Ramy wouldn’t let them start until Robin arrived.
The students have drastically different translation styles and engage in lively debate. Letty likes to stick to Latin grammatical structures as much as possible even if it makes sentences awkward, Ramy prefers to abandon technical accuracy for rhetorical flourishes that he thinks better deliver the point, while Victoire is frustrated by the limits of English. Robin feels better sinking into the refuge of Latin, but still feels some dread. The anxiety really hits him that afternoon and he is distracted in Latin class, but nobody comes to arrest him. That night he has a new note under his windowsill saying to await further contact from Hermes. He is disappointed despite all the anxiety and dread of the day, and hopes for more missions.
Weeks pass and he acts like a normal student, and falls in love with Oxford and its people. He’s constantly tired from the coursework but is forming close friendships with the other three students. He and Victoire share a love of literature, and even Letty becomes more tolerable. Her insights into the British class system are a source of great amusement, especially when she trashes Colin Thornhill as “the sort of bottom-feeding middle-class leech who likes to pretend he’s got connections because his family knows a mathematics tutor at Cambridge.”
The four students need each other because they have no one else. The older students at Babel are unfriendly; one of the second years, Philip Wright, tells Robin he got into Oxford because Babel is ‘overcorrecting’ and taking spots away from equally qualified (presumably white British) candidates. Robin starts to see things through his friends’ eyes, although the four of them do argue; Robin and Victoire disagree on the superiority of English vs French literature, and Letty and Victoire get snippy around issues of money. Letty and Ramy bicker the most, usually about British colonialism in India. Even still, they spend all their time together and Robin realises it’s the first time since he left Canton that he feels he has a family, a circle of people he loves so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them. He feels guilty for loving Oxford as much as he does, despite the daily slights. He feels like he’s not ready to fully commit to Hermes, and that he would kill for his friends. By the end of Michaelmas term he would trust them with his life.
Robin later wonders why he never told his friends about Hermes, and was only tempted once during argument between Ramy and Letty about British presence in India, including the Battle of Plassey in 1757 [which marked the beginning of British rule in India]. Robin almost said something, but stops himself because he “could not bear how this confession would shatter the life they’d built for themselves.” He can’t resolve the contradiction of loving being at Babel despite it becoming clearer that its foundations were unjust.
Chapter 8
Robin assists Hermes in three more thefts, but never found out what they stole or what it was used for. He is almost caught during the fourth robbery, when a chatty third year student called Cathy O’Nell comes into the building while he’s there. When she leaves and the two Hermes thieves reappear, one of them asks Robin what Cathy said to him. Robin thinks his voice seems strangely familiar but he can’t place it. He continues to help Hermes and convinces himself he’s not doing anything dangerous.
A week into the Hilary term, after Robin assists in his seventh theft, Griffin meets him again in person for what feels like a progress report. Griffin says the Hermes thieves like working with Robin because he sticks to the instructions, and that he’s pleased. He won’t tell Robin more about Hermes. Robin asks how the arrangement will end up because it seems unsustainable, and Griffin says very few stay in Babel so it’s likely he’ll either get caught or have to fake his own death and go underground, like Griffin did five years ago. Robin hesitates at the idea of being cut off from Babel.
Griffin tells him how the Romans fattened up dormice – by using a glirarium, a jar with breathing holes with surfaces so polished that the mice couldn’t escape. They provided food, and the jars had ledges and walkways to keep them occupied, and they were kept dark so the dormice would think it’s time to hibernate and fatten up. But Babel represented more than material comforts for Robin; it was also about belonging and recognition of his talents. As Griffin leaves, he says “Enjoy your glirarium, little dormouse.”
Robin feels conflicted, like he has two hearts. Babblers were privileged in some ways in Oxford, such as getting special treatment in the libraries. Their living expenses were paid for and they received a generous stipend and access to a discretionary fund, unlike other servitors who had to serve food or clean tutors’ rooms. One night he finds Bill Jameson struggling with his bills, and Robin lends him money.
Babel is rich and respected, and the students enjoy being fawned over by visiting scholars. Letty and Victoire realise that they can get away with looking more feminine, despite the university telling them to wear men’s clothes; they start growing out their hair, and Letty even wears a skirt to dinner. However, Ramy can’t get served in pubs, and the girls can’t get books out of library without a male student. Victoire is sometimes mistaken for a maid.
The students develop Oxford English and all the words and phrases that entails. However there are many social rules and unspoken conventions to struggle with, which Letty understands the best because she is from a posh background. Ramy wonders why they are never invited to parties, and Letty explains calling cards to them. She ridicules rich boys studying on their fathers’ money, like Elton Pendennis, a second year gentleman-commoner. However, Robin envies them and imagines what it would be like to be part of their circle, and the belonging that would come with it.
One night, Robin receives a calling card from Elton Pendennis, inviting him to drinks the following Friday. Ramy doesn’t understand why Robin would want to go, and thinks he’s invited because he passes as white. He asks Robin if he’s hoping they’ll invite him to join the Bullingdon Club. Letty also opposes Robin going, saying that those boys are bad influences, and Robin is surprised to see that she looks like she’s about to cry.
That Friday, Robin puts on his one nice jacket and goes to Elton’s flat. A guy called Milton St Cloud answers the door and is rude, although he lets him in. Three other boys are inside smoking cigars. Robin thinks about how Elton is really handsome up close, a “Byronic hero incarnate”. Elton is telling a weird story about his dad’s friend inviting homeless people to a fancy dinner party, and how he wished he’d been there because he thinks it sounded hilarious. Robin recognises Colin Thornhill, and Elton introduces to Robin to Vincy Woolcombe. Colin is eager to say he knows Robin.
The boys ask Robin ignorant questions about China. Robin asks what they’re planning to do with their degrees and they laugh, and Elton calls it proletarian to ‘do’ something. Vincy says Elton will live off his estate and subject his guests to grand philosophical observations. Elton reveals that he writes, and reads some of his bad poetry to Robin – a reply to Shelley’s Ozymandias. [The author shits on Percy Shelley again and I’m honestly starting to wonder if RF Kuang is u/Amanda39’s pen name?]
Elton scoffs at translation as being for those without creative fire, but Robin disagrees; he says it’s harder than original composition as you’re constrained by the original. He says the translator dances in shackles, which impresses the other boys.
Robin no longer cares if they like him, and feels pity for them. He also realises that no one ever talks back to Elton Pendennis. They talk a bit about silver-working, and Robin explains that not everyone can do it as you have to live and breathe a language for the magic to work. He decides to leave and put the other boys out of their misery.
The next morning, Ramy and Victoire laugh at Robin’s story about the party, and he recites bits of Elton’s terrible poem for them. Letty doesn’t laugh though, and storms off. After she leaves, Victoire tells them that Letty’s brother Lincoln died the previous year. He came to Oxford and acted like Elton Pendennis does. One night he went out drinking and was run over by a cart. Letty came to Oxford a few months later, and Babel was the only faculty that would take women [sidenote – in real life, women could attend the University of Oxford from the late 1870s (although not all colleges), and could receive actual degrees for the first time in 1920].
Victoire tells them they don’t understand how hard it is being a woman at Oxford – “Every weakness we display is a testament to the worst theories about us, which is that we’re fragile, we’re hysterical, and we’re too naturally weak-minded to handle the kind of work we’re set to do.” She adds that much of Letty’s behaviour is dictated by fear, such as her fear she isn’t meant to be at Oxford, her fear that she’ll be sent home, and her fear that Ramy or Robin will follow in her brother’s footsteps.
The next day Letty is better and even smiles at Robin. Professor Playfair’s classes that term focus on the idea of fidelity, who the translation should be faithful to – the text, the audience, the author? They discuss it, but the professor says there is no correct answer and it’s an ongoing debate in the field. He tells them that the opposite of fidelity is betrayal, and that translation means doing violence on the original. Robin feels a squirm of guilt in his gut.
Bookclub Bingo 2023 categories: POC author or story, fantasy, big read, historical fiction
Other potentially useful links (although beware of spoilers):
The discussion questions are in the comments below.
Join us for the next discussion on Sunday 26th March, when we talk about Book 2, Chapters 9-12 [approx. 60 pages].
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2023.03.21 00:29 tikudz trinidad’s medical reform in doable steps

Any nation bests TT.
SHORT TERM, enacted in one year -
  1. Make health a right, be it public AND private, in the constitution. Currently only public catered to.
  2. Adopt the UNIVERSAL HEALTH SYSTEM – defined as the state covering medical cost. Barbados, Canada, France, UK, Mexico among the adoptors.
  3. UHS application to TT –* private doctors and private pharmacy are heavily subsidized to affordable level. Out of pocket is $100 and $20 respectively for citizens.* Remainder, once out of pocket paid by citizens, is given to the doctor and pharmacy quickly by the state.
* FREE - $0 dollars up to age 18; are certain categories: ANY chronic medical condition or disabled; retirement age and up; if pregnant or ex inmate.
* Trinidad’s “two tier” PRIVATE AND PUBLIC system retained - meantime PUBLIC institutions improved by way of better services and more hospitals and specialized centers.
* Cost management - Government negotiated costs for medicine and procedures – no one place or doctor will charge different from another as government pays fees for citizens. Fees are STRICTLY regulated to keep them affordable and halt overbilling. Fees for all health care services and medicine are set every two years by negotiations between the health ministry and physicians.
* Adopt ideas from number one ranked FRANCE health system.
* Commission a study of foreign health systems and adopt where feasible – such as UK, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Barbados, Canada, Italy, Israel.
  1. Open a MENTAL HEALTH AND LONLINESS MINISTRY – treating school violence, assessing military and police cadets as well as serving officers and serving the public among its missions.
  2. Priority surgery - all citizens in need of life saving surgery gets all bills paid by government. The state will begin a drive to speed up their care, as in immediately they are found and aided. Should the care not be available locally, expenses for overseas all state borne.
  3. Establish local medical school for SPECIALIZATION – to be opened in Trinidad to supply a pool of local professionals, SPECIALIZED DOCTORS above GP with little to no need to go abroad, FREE OF CHARGE. Will expand to include other medical and paramedical training.
  4. Free medical school – for doctors and staff. Any debt is cleared.
  5. Adopt South Korean national physical examination – every two years citizens AND foreigners travel to a PHYSICAL EXAMINATION CENTER and undergo a series of ROUTINE EXAMINATIONS: blood work, pap smear, x ray, lung function, ECG, kidney and liver function, blood sugar, stomach cancer screen, dental screen, urine and more.
  6. CDAP & Children’s Life Fund removed – supplanted by Universal Health – state covered cost for ALL citizens of PRIVATE doctors, facilities and pharmacies, so that free or near nil. (CDAP doesn’t cover all medicine and when government supplied medicine is short, private sources can provide)
  7. Mercy program - Food delivery for those too ill to shop and cook themselves. The state will deliver nutritionist supervised food free of charge.
  8. Parental aide program – no matter the economic background a new-born’s parents may apply for an assistant from the government, sent to their residence.
  9. Healthy eating at state institutions – low fat, sugar, cholesterol, diabetic food and drink are only what permitted at ministries and other government institutions extending to vending machines.
  10. Food, soda and juice tax – a high tax, designed to reduce consumption of SWEETENED BEVERAGES and food of HIGH SUGAR, FAT, CHOLESTEROL, SALT. This policy intervention is an effort to decrease obesity and the health impacts related to being overweight.
  11. Subsidized low and zero fat, cholesterol and sugar consumption – a preventative medicine measure, foods, drinks and snacks example: chia, almond butter, sourdough bread, Splenda, versions of chocolate and ice cream, Glucerna, whole wheat, so to healthy processed foods are government subsidized 30% thirty percent to help encourage good health - including foreign brands. Trinidad has very high heart disease rate.
  12. Ban trans fats restaurants fry food in oil raising health risk from consumed foodstuff. Business will be mandated to use alternatives.
  13. 30 minutes tops - Prompt care mandatory. Trinidad doctors right now have patients wait HOURS. Must (keep patients waiting not above half an hour) before patients are seen to under pain of automatic suspension.
  14. DISSOLVED Medical Board - replaced by a more toothy organization – rather separate to ensure independence. Are led by FOREIGNERS not locals. Responsible for investigating and punishing staff and DOCTORS who are rude, deliver service outside 30 minutes, malpractice.

LONG TERM –
  1. Second and third cancer treatment centers established – the St. James one added to. A larger, public facility able to support medical tourism and the next in Tobago.
  2. Ratio – look into increasing doctor to citizen ratio such that doctors are more numerous than present.

  1. Digital medicine –
* Electronic health record. Health information in a digital format. EHRs can be shared across networks.
* Like France’s VITALE, a DIGITAL SMART CARD replacing paper medical cards.
* Electronic prescribing – defined is the computer-based electronic generation, transmission, and filling of a medical prescription, taking the place of paper prescriptions.

  1. MULTIPLE hospitals and specilized facilities – only 7 main general hospitals for 1.3 million. Top priority more are constructed.22. Additional medical services and medical tourism - Introduction locally of SPECIALIZED medical health procedures currently sourced abroad, by constructing relevant facilities. Serving locals and for low price, tourists. A source of foreign exchange.
  2. Medical contruction speed – haste a priority to build facilities and infrastructure. To this end foreign construction workers and architects hired for numbers.
  3. Establishment of a National Primary Angioplasty Network – treats better with heart conditions backed up by CARDIAC CATH devices installed across the nation, a specialized heart treatment facility and public education.
  4. Medication delivery - for elderly and those too sickly to reach hospital or pharmacy, a medically certified nurse drops it off at their residence.
  5. Elderly care nursing homes - a series of free STATE OF THE ART nursing homes constructed both islands, complete with internet and dietician. Are physician operated. Care costs 100 percent state borne - including food, lodging, and medical costs. JAPAN’S geriatric home model will be emulated such as Azalee care centers. Mexico also examined. Private existing facilities are from now state covered.
  6. Elderly housing – any living in rundown conditions can have their abode fixed or granted a new one if fixing the original impractical. State covered.
  7. Elderly living communities – are communities government builds to house the elderly (infirm younger people additionally).
  8. Local medicine and equipment made locally – goal a PERCENTAGE of both, so too herbal medicine included, prioritizing the crucial. Factories built for the purpose.
  9. Diabetes treatment and research hospital - The Diabetic Wellness Center replaced if needed, the new facility staffed by SPECIALIZED diabetic treatment personnel.
  10. Medical science institutes and labs – Trinidad shall swiftly establish its own MEDICAL RESEARCH arm.
_________________

French health care: Best in the world? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGqiNplU2m4

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2023.03.20 21:28 Longjumping-Motor-10 Some tips and tricks to get you through Contagion Mode

One of the most intense achivements I’ve been through. I just want to share my experience and some tips and tricks that you may not know and can give an extra hand if you're trying to get this.
Regarding weapons and upgrades:
Upgrades Fast Forward: - get Stun Baton 3rd tree first 2 upgrades, get Grp 2nd tree with first 2 upgrades. Hand Gun 100% by chapter 7, riot gun 100% before ending, the rest is at your choice but forget about Stun Baton 2nd tree and last 1 expensive upgrade, GRP 1st tree and last 2 expensive upgrades and the other guns.
A. Stun Baton
  • 3rd tree – get the first 2 upgrades as soon as possible - Increased Velocity Alloy Sheath and Block Break. Block Break will get you easily past by many enemies as they start to block quite fast.
  • 1st tree – get the first 2 upgrades depending on your playstyle - Riot Control Swing and Damage Upgrade Level 1 (if you are a more melee style – get it on chapter 2 or 3, more stealth and guns approach - then do it later. I think I did it at starting chapter 7 - Colony)
  • didn’t touch 2nd tree and didn't bother with damage upgrade level 3.
B. GRP
  • 2nd tree - Energy – Get the first 2 upgrades as soon as possible (will help to have more energy)
  • 3rd tree - Velocity – I just got the first upgrade and was enough for me.
  • didn’t touch 1st tree, nor the last 2 velocity upgrades.
C. Hand Gun – I had it upgraded 100% at the the start of chapter 7. Prioritise ammo capacity and magnum rounds. I breezed through chapter 8 with alt fire and 80ish ammo capacity before final boss.
D. Riot Gun – I had it upgraded 100% by the end of chapter 8 before final boss / Ferris & SuperBiophage Ferris. Prioritise ammo capacity and magnum rounds.
General tips and chapter threats:
  • use cloud save
  • if you experience crashes, I never had any before I tried this mode, and if you're using headphones, be sure to put all audio off before the part where you had your crash. I had one crash on chapter 4 - Habitat, the one with the FANS, and 3 in the last chapter. You may also try to get online just for that part and then get back offline, I also did this and it worked.
  • restart checkpoint if you’re about to die or use the cloud save if you died. You still have NG+ so you can give it another shot then.
  • you may have auto-dodge activated but I don't recommend. The quick time events button can also be out to auto but I found myself pressing Y or A so don’t know what to say about this. Aim assist on the 3rd level may help with hitting targets but you move harder the aim as it auto-hard-locks. Probably 2 or 1 is better.
  • don’t get too close to FANS or other dangerous environments as it can get you instakilled. Two Head and SuperBiophage Ferris will also do that to you.
  • loot everything in the first chapters and run back to the store and try to sell as much as you can. Try not to sell ammo, better to use it on the mf biophages. It will be easier after chapter 5 - Lost, as you know you'll have more space.
  • use grp on big mouths (spitters), corruptors (invisible enemies) and on the basic ones if you still have energy or batteries. Single basic biophage or even mutated? Then show him the love of your baton. Not having checkpoints it's harder than any mode because grp becomes more important than ever. I found out that after some cutscenes you may get a refill on your grp, but don’t count on that, consider it a bonus.
  • sell injectors or drop them for more valuable loot. (energy converter, decoder, cpu printer)
  • maintain a green healthbar, even by using injectors. Their cost is cut down to 33 callisto credits so you don’t lose too much if you use them from time to time.
  • if you get surrounded, stay focused on the enemy that is about to attack and keep right or left for dodging. After his attack, shoot, grp or hit him and move to the next one. I got crowded on chapter 6 - Below when trying to get to the 2nd breaker, ran out of grp when pushing a blind to the wall and alerted the others. What fun I had with my heart pumping and all the sweating but I managed to get past them.
  • get all blue chests, except the one with alternate path at the beginning of chapter 6 – Below. It’s too risky for this mode. Don’t open any in chapter 8, they have a parasite in it like the first blue chest in chapter 1.
  • having hand gun upgraded to magnum will be helpful on sections where you fight them and when they start mutating with 2 bullets they are totally dead.
  • be careful with your upgrading, if you focus too much on stun baton or grp you may not have enough credits to upgrade your weapons and get softlocked.
  • if possible kill bloodworms without using ammo. There's one in chapter 6 after descending some stairs and a blind will be sleeping in front of you. I shot him down, waited for another blind to come and also shot him down and then I shot the bloodworm. Not big of a deal if it harms you, usually there's an injector near by.
  • I didn't test if some enemies despawn after reaching different cutscenes. I played it safe and cleared most of them.
  • if you go berserk in chapter 8 and kill most of the enemies with the hand gun's alt fire be sure to stomp them quickly as they may mutate. This is available everytime you use the alt fire.
Regarding chapters:
  1. Cargo – nothing mentionable.
  2. Outbreak – just don’t rush the stealth part with the Security Unit/Robot. Prioritise grp on spitters.
  3. Aftermath – take your time with the robot by having a box in your left, take two shots then cover and then take another 2 and cover. Repeat until it falls. I had the magnum rounds so it only took 4 bullets.
  4. Habitat – well, ladies and gents here you have the hardest part of the game. Water slide. With. FANS. I’ll get back to them. After the FANS you have another security robot. Wait for him to pass by then go and take cover after a box, I used the one at the entrance where your next objective is and also he turns around and continues his loop. At the end you have a video that I tried to use with the water slide part. Getting back to FANS. I knew this would be something that will blow me over as they go random. So my first attempt went smoothly without dying but I had my first crash after 3.5 playthroughs at the cutscene where Ferris appears at the end of the level. Started again, and this time I died. Started again and died again. On my next attempt I used the xbox button – pause/dashboard when I was approaching the FANS and you can somewhat make an idea of where the FANS are going. You may have some seconds to move but it will be enough. It may help to raise brightness and contrast at maximum. Not a 100% bulletproof option but I did it on my first attempt with the xbox button. Luckily, I didn't have another crash and I didn't do anything at this point.
  5. Lost – just keep an eye for combusters (explosive crawling ones) and use your 1 shot hand gun. After getting the riot gun you’ll have a spitter that will come from an elevator. Just shoot his leg, shoot again or stomp him. The next room has an instadeath spinner, don’t get too close but it’s very helpful to grp enemies in it. At the end you'll fly where you can get a instadeath if you're not paying attention. This part is easy - left, right, left, right, left then A.
  6. Below – stealth all the way. I mean crouch on almost every part of it. Silently kill every blind one, almost all. With 3-4 you'll need to pull out your gun or baton. You don’t want to get ambushed here, especially when they can mutate. There’s a section with a spitter that is walking so be crouched as if you alert him he’ll bring more blind ones. Grp him as soon as you see him. You'll get through a next section where you're on top of a collapsed floor and many blind enemies are sleeping, run for the exit and in the next room you'll have 2 spitters. Shoot their legs and they will instantly die. And next you'll have 2 crawling enemies coming to you - grp the explosive tank at them and grp or shoot the other one that will spawn. For the tram ride have at least 2 grp batteries, 3 is best and with the upgrades I wrote about you'll get by quite easily. With the Two Head I used CarcinogenSDA's strategy and pushed him down the drill.
  7. Colony - Stealth where you have blind ones and get aggresive with the others grp/gun. Before 2nd Two Head buy ammo, I had the alt fire for the hand gun (40-50 ammo) and used like 4 shots before he fell and another 2 and I switched to riot gun (magnum upgrade - 30 ammo) as I noticed in hardcore that is does more damage in his second phase. Well, just run around and shoot him on the long side of the box. If you by any chance get cornered and can't run, just dodge and shoot his heads/head. If a biophage appears, prioritise to get him killed and focus again on the Two Head. Don’t fight both of them, in hardcore as I was dodging the basic biophage, Two Head pinned me down. At the end you'll fight Ferris, dodge all the way 3, 4, 5 times as many as it takes and only when you see him retreat then beat the crap out of him. Dodge => Beat.
  8. Tower - I mostly used my hand gun's alt fire on all enemies where I didn't use grp. Those all saved credits made life easier on this chapter. Before the 3rd Two Head stock up on ammo like on Colony and you know the drill, run in a circle and shoot when you are far away. If you're cocky you can put one shot on the turn side but don’t get too cocky. Before the 4th Two Head you will have 1 spitter and another biophage sleeping. Run near the first fan on the left, wait for the spitter to jump in front of you and grp him into the FANS, next shoot the sleeping one that's in your left, he'll pop in front of you and again, grp him. If you just walk a little you'll hear a combustor and the last Two Head will come to salute you. I usually run to FANS in front of me and walk a little to make him come through the last hallway and I'm waiting him in the corner next to the FANS. Stay where you are, but if you want the alt fire for the riot gun I suggest doing what I did, and push him to the FANS. Else shoot that mf. And when I was riding the lift with Dani to get to Ferris, guess what? I had my 2nd crash. Then my 3rd crash. Then my 4th crash and also my 2nd death as I was pushing the Two Head to the FANS he lost one head and when his animation stopped and attacked me, somehow he went to my left and I dodged directly in to the FANS. Did I tell how much I love FANS? On my 4th attempt I found out that putting audio to off may help with the crashes as I'm playing with headphones and I also went online just to get by this part. It worked. Looted everything, upgraded my riot gun's alt fire and it was not quite a walk in the park as Ferris may give you 7-8 hits to dodge and when he transforms you need to look after the combusters to throw at him or just kill them. After 2 alt fires the first 2 appeared and I just had to keep him walking and not letting him run. The alt fire of hand gun or riot gun will stop him when he gets running. I also threw at him the explosive barrel, because why not?
Helpful videos:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QrPR5WTSr-M&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE Water slide section. With FANS. Even though it's random, it may help you get an idea of where to position yourself.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aI30iVavBsc&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE CarcinogenSDA's video is on maximum security and he uses checkpoints for his grp recharge. You won't use the grp as he does and won't upgrade it either to max. But he has sections that will help you if you're struggling. You also can see how to deal with 1st and 4th Two Heads.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=StNS0wvRS78&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE I didn't try this but if it helps, why not?
So that's it, you'll probably win one of the hardest achievements. Probably.
If I may, when you finish, play Survivor - The Eye of The Tyger. You'll get it.
Don’t worry. You've got this. FANS.
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