I female (18) and my mom are ok . We have fights there and there but we somehow get throw it . We recently moved to a different country and are living with family. I am a very a friendly person and get along great but my sister (8) is really acting spoilt which is really embarrassing for the both of us (my mom and I) . So recently I fought with my sister over the remote and I told my sister that when I was done I would give to her . She ran upstairs and started crying to my mom . My mother calls me she says why is she crying I say idk this goes on for a while then it leads to this whole situation being my fault and that I treat my sister horribly and that I don’t care about her feelings which is absolute bullshit but then I tell my mom that she’s the one that treats me horribly and that she’s the one who care about my feelings and my mom starts crying because apparently what I told her translates to my daughter said she hates me .
So am I the asshole or is my mom being a big baby like my sister

Devouring Cancer

________________________________________________________________________________
Meat. /mi:t/
Me it. /mi/ /:t/
It me. /:t/ /mi/
It’s me…
We are eating ones of ourselves…
________________________________________________________________________________
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/C̶̢͈̈̂͒̀̋̾̓͌Ô̶̻͉̠̱͈̳̮N̸̫̹̱̯̣̣̻̐̽͒̎̃̆̕͜Ǹ̴̛̛͙̫̇E̴͕̮̻͇̒͐̀C̶̳̤̠͔̺̚T̴̘̑̈́̂͛̂̏E̶̡̩̝̮͇̤̣̋̏͗D.
/Mellator Matrix Mind: Inner Core.
/Unit: great [AVALON] the first
/G.R. Era.
/Memory File transmission: Generalized perspective
/Gender: N/A[Neutral]
/Age: {Human equivalent: 2001 years}
/Race: Grrrr’atrrr
/Species: N/A[Hive Mind]
/ Additional verification: Class>>> [Cancer Cells]
/Cradle planet: Ci-3301
/Home planet origin: Mupan
/First person POV not applicable. Generalized Spectator mode.
/Sequence Code: 5-18-5-8 19-1-23 20-8-7-9-14-11-5-12-2-13-21-8
/Memory transmission in 3…2…1…
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Hunger…
It’s all that drives us. It’s all that unites, connects us… All that pulls us, all that defines and binds us…
Our story began long ago. It all started with a single parasite cell. Not the greatest primordial ancestor indeed, but every Apex Predator started somewhere. But back to our history… That very first cell was our first grandmother, as well as the beginning of our entire civilization. Hard to tell what was the trigger for it’s evolutionary change, as time wipes all. Perhaps it was desire to become something better? Awakening? Or maybe just spontaneous mutation in one of the genome chains, occurring by changes in environment? It really doesn’t matter. All what matters is that that cell evolved…
It didn’t happened quickly of course. Our first grandmother was no different than an average cancer cell that is present in nearly every life form, even us. It just growed into one small neoplasm, or simply, a cancer tumor. But that tumor slowly made it’s way to the brain. We know that because that’s how we, as well as our ancestors, assimilated everything for millennia…
It is impossible to determine which one of the prey species was honored to become the meal of our first ancestor, but it was clear that that feast was something that never happened before. That tumor did not just sucked the nutrients dry till the brain dies from the protein starvation, taking the tumor along the way with it. No, that tumor assimilated it. And that tumor learned. Learned from it. And it saw the world for the first time.
Assimilation is not as easy as other inferior beings think. First, your cell needs to find the prey cell. Then it needs to envelop the cytoplasm of that cell to properly assimilate it. However, after assimilating the “Host”, your cells need to take properties of assimilated cells and even function for the prey organism for the time being so it won’t suspect anything. It is a long, tedious and fatiguing process. That’s why we just ambush other prey organisms, tear them apart, and devour them for protein supplies, to avoid all that bustling.
And say what, the prey doesn’t make it easier for us either. As our first ancestors quickly learned, prey can be sentient too. It is inferior, weak, pathetic… And yet it can create great weapons to stop us. For [decades] these beings create astonishing amount of that pesky, venomous and disgusting antibiotics and chemicals to kill our minds. For thousands of [years] they set our flesh on fire, making us scream as we die in agony cell by cell.
And yet we prevail. When they make those chemistry compounds they call “Cure”, we gain immunity to it. When they set our bodies ablaze, we spray them with our blood and teeth, making their bodies to slowly blister as we eat them inside out. When they close their doors on us, we use ventilations, slithering right above their heads or below their {feet}. When they use special protection suits, we just tear them apart. And when they completely quarantine themselves, thinking that they are safe, we pretend to be one of them, striking from behind…
What is the most amazing thing about this prey? Well, aside that their flesh is delicious… They are clever. And they know how to build stuff. Weapons, tools, technology… Everything to increase the odds of survivability and comfort of their pathetic kind. And by devouring their minds, we gain all this knowledge as well! We learned how to grow cattle to saturate our hunger, we learned how to create faster means of transportation that even the fastest members of our swarm can’t out-crawl with their appendages. And most importantly; we learned how to reach the skies…
Among the prey species that we feast upon, there was a special class, or caste, of highly educated specimens, who called themselves “scientists”. These specimens learned how to use metal, fuel, radiation, and other inedible and in some cases straight up harmful components of nature, and turned them into what they called “Spacecraft”. A special vehicle, capable of leaving the atmosphere of our planet. Something that sounded like fantasy, even for the boldest ones of us, who sometimes managed to grow wings and flew high in the sky. It was a fantasy until we consumed their heads and the knowledge they possessed along the way. From them we gained knowledge of the schematics of these space vessels, and most importantly; the schematics of FTL drives. Devices capable of traveling among the stars with “superluminal” speed. And so, after conquering and discovering each and every corner of our planet, we soared to the great unknown, right into the void…

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/Transmission mode: Spectator. Centralized perspective.
/Subject: Verrruur. Grrrr’atrrr. Lead hive mind of the Hunter Fleets.
/Transmission in 3…2…1…
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We flew among the stars in our glorious ships made out of strongest titanium fusions and covered in our eternal flesh. Yes, what wasn’t made out of the metal hulls and electronics, was made out of sheer muscles and flesh tissue. So many cells… So much nutrition… We could withstand decades without the food and still hunt like our greatest hunters back on Mupan(Apparently, that’s how prior sentient prey species happened to call our planet, and we didn’t really bother to rename it, as for us it was widely known as just plain“Ground, floor, or land”). Our strongest weapons, combined with our most dissolving acid spitters, made us the strongest and most feared hunters, “cementing” our history as the strongest Apex Predators in the galaxy! We defeated, devoured, and assimilated everything… It did not matter if our enemy was a leviathan, an enemy prey fleet, or even an entire planet. If it could be eaten, it was eaten…
Until it wasn’t…
On yet another great crusade in search of delicacy for our insatiable fleets, our sensors captured a strange, but nonetheless familiar signal. The impulse of FTL drive. We made a serious double, and even triple checking of our radars to avoid a major nutritional loss due to false readings. After our intels captured, properly verified, and confirmed the signal, our intercoms just exploded with thousands of jaws:
“Food?”
“Food…”
“ Food! FOOD!!! Food! Food! Delicious prey! Food! We shall… FEAST! Food! Yes!!! Food! FOOD!!! We haven’t ate for [Month]! At last… Some good food… Food! Juicy food… Flesh of prey…
Food! The succulent meat…”
Yes, we felt joy. And anticipation of hunting down these unknown but likely very delicious organisms. It was like opening the present. You don’t know what was inside these flying metal cans, but you sure know that it was likely to be something edible.
Oh, we never were so wrong in our glorious history.
We did not saw them at first, that’s how black and cloaked they were. When we finally identified our “prey” we saw it was a small cluster of black ellipsoids, just hovering there. They did not tried to contact us, like other naive prey organisms did. They were completely silent...
“We will smash you like the eggs you are!” we foolishly thought back then...
They slowly turned frontwards when we approached them. Their range was astonishing, picking our smallest drones instantly before they could even scream, like if they were the candles that these black horrors just blew out.
When we finally reached the required distance and fired our acid sacks and laser guns however, they were still there, not blowing up, retreating, or even moving an [inch]. Then we opened all the airlocks(if we weren’t already outside) and enveloped their ships in our mighty grip, not stopping to pour their shields with our acids and plasma. Usually, after a few unpleasant zaps of enemy shields, they just popped and the ships just were crack open like the [nuts].
But not them...
They did not crumble and exposed their hulls with screaming prey just getting sucked out in the vacuum as usual, no, instead they started to grow bright red. Redder than our flesh and blood…
And burned. Burned stronger and more painful than any flame. Our drones roared in pain but we couldn’t hear any of their songs of torture in this vacuum of silent space. Hundreds of megatons of our flesh clusters was just turned in ashes or were torn off and become drifted dead lumps of burnt meat. Our intercoms filled with screams of fear and agony, our minds losing their mass and density, turning into undeveloped children.
"Father? It hurts…” could be heard from countless drones. And any of them that tried to escape, were sniped with red beams of such accuracy, that our best spitters could only dream of. It didn’t last long when we were the only operating guide ship of entire Armada that was so ingloriously butchered. And then we felt the warmth…
No… NO!
All weapons of this black "eggs" were pointed at us, our last mind. The last memories flashed as we slowly were burned to death. The last though of our last tumor was the realization that there was someone stronger than us. Someone who cannot be eaten. The bigger Predator…
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/Memory transmission File disconnected.
/Reason: Biological death of the Subject.
/Cause of death: Sterilization.
/End of data log.
/D̵̛̤̂͜I̵̢͎̬̍̄̂͌͋S̴̢̛̙͇̯̽̔̾́͝C̸̭͓̰̤͋͆́ͅÓ̴͖̜̯̻͂̃̉N̵̨̧̦͙̳̍̾̕N̴͙̬͓̽̃̂̇͂͝E̵̠̬̠͉͒C̵̢̛͚̪̭̭̼̿̎T̶̝̈́͋͘͜Ì̸̢̱̙̤̽͑̽̈́̍ͅŌ̵̗̬̑̍̽̒N̷͖͖̗̗͚͈͗͛...
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TL,DR: IS THIS A DATE 😭😭🙏 please help confirm I'm not just being DELULU *A continuation of this post: https://www.reddit.com/infj/comments/1cpmneq/is_this_infj_asking_me_out_is_he_interested_in_me/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share Hi!!! Entp Gurlie here, back again with a date update??? So the date went well, he arrived exactly 10 minutes late, but I chalked it up to the unpredictable traffic...
Please INFJs I want to know if this is actually a date, or just a hangout to him. 1. I offered a walk next to the lake but he was pretty hesitant and asked to sit pottery painting, which checks out INFJs hesitancy towards surprises lmao.

1. And he dressed casually, in white tee and pants, so I felt a bit overdressed cause I had makeup on, in a sundress and he didn't clarify if it was a date or not. As for any solace, I noticed when I turned my back he aggressively tried to fix his hair.... and he couldn't even look at me at first, so I felt kind of bad inside but didn't show it. Just acted a bit anxious at first, i think.
   
2. We ended up talking about philosophy, like, straight away. He seems to base his life ish and his attitude towards life on philosophies (determinism atp), typical INFJ behaviour lmao. He presented it at first in the most objective, factual way possible, and I was bemused and wanted to find out how HE actually feels about it himself. Had to coax it out of him how conflicted or resigned at first he was, and what's his thoughts on it. He went from presenting factually to speaking "I feel, I think..." To even "I don't know WHO I am!" In a sort of heartfelt way. And then the convo smoothly flowed towards art, and religion and I managed to make him laugh a bunch of times. Once specifically he threw his head back and laughed. And I felt so proud of myself lol, like YES! A proper laugh from him! Cus he doesn't emote all that often. And he ran along with that joke and added some sarcastic remarks to it. I added a bunch of perspectives that had him confused and unprepared to answer with my crazy Ne, adding logical implications to his thought experiments. I hope I didnt put him off with the new perspectives...
   
3. Emoting and feeling: The more the date goes on, the more he emotes and seems himself. At first he was kind of factual and objective (I'd say passive and a bit emotionless), but as time went on he became a lot more comfortable and joked and became more emotive. Even if it's not romantic, I think he enjoyed this. And I'm SO glad. But in my mind my curiosity demands an answer of the nature of this rendezvous!!! 😭🙏🙏
   
4. We never actually talked about any feelings, romantically and personally. In the sense that, he has a sort of "emotions are just temporary" and that's almost all he has to say about feelings at first.
   
5. We talked abd enjoyed it to the point where a lot of times we weren't painting to focus on the thinking and talking. As such, we couldnt finish the statue. So he asked me if I wanted to finish it anf give it to him later to bring home, and when I refused adamantly, he said "We can finish this together next time then? Is that okay?" And we left it at the shop, and he told the shopkeeper to add his number, to which he did, so I think it's not casual airy suggestion.
   

From these, my Ti brain drew these conclusions (even amidst the fog of being infatuated and in denial lmao): 1. He enjoyed this hangout. Was willing to drive a bit far to my bus stop to help me catch a bus. 2. The previous signs leading to this date pointed to him being romantically interested. He asked me out first when I confessed I wanted to talk and hang out w him, and even if the date had none of the traditional romantic elements he enjoyed it. So maybe he still is? He talked at first in a cutesy way, like a sort of mask? But i wasnt fw that and just talked in a straightforward way, and he dropped the cutesy act real quick. 3. I think he sort of cheapens his personal feelings a little. And I think he worries about the fact that we're graduating and can't continue this in the same college, so that's why he isn't pursuing. 4. We still have a month left before we take my country's version of the SATs or the National University Entrance Exam day. In the heat of exam season a lot of us are frugal with our time, understandably, and esp him. He always spends him time either buried in books, studying or sleeping. So him taking a whole afternoon out for me was something special to him. I think I do mean something to him?
All this to say, my deductions lead me to believe he has feelings for me but doesn't intend to pursue them because of future, and is willing to spend whatever time in the present he can with me. Esp if you take determinism (his special interest) into account.
INFJs, please help this helplessly infatuated ENTP gurlie out 😭🙏🙏🙏 I know this is such a long read, but I accidentally fell in love with one of you and I'm worried my feelings aren't reciprocated.
Thank you for reading this far, I'll be so grateful if anyone can help.

I am not sure if I want to solve this issue actually, I just want to vent.
iX, what do you think yourself when you print out this error message to a "customer"?
I mean your installation of Kubernetes on a single host is crap and using helm charts that utterly break in an atomic chain reaction that way doesnt make it trustworthy. I am on the way to migrate nextcloud away again from TrueNAS to a docker host and just use TrueNAS as storage.
I dont care about sensible data down there, at the time of posting, this system isnt running anymore. Sorry if I annoy somebody.
[EFAULT] Failed to upgrade App: WARNING: Kubernetes configuration file is group-readable. This is insecure. Location: /etc/ranchek3s/k3s.yaml Error: UPGRADE FAILED: execution error at (nextcloud/templates/common.yaml:38:4): Chart - Values contain an error that may be a result of merging. Values containing the error: Error: 'error converting YAML to JSON: yaml: invalid leading UTF-8 octet' TZ: UTC bashImage: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: bash tag: 4.4.23 configmap: nextcloud-config: data: limitrequestbody.conf: LimitRequestBody 3221225472 occ: - #!/bin/bash uid="$(id -u)" gid="$(id -g)" if [ "$uid" = '0' ]; then user='www-data' group='www-data' else user="$uid" group="$gid" fi run_as() { if [ "$(id -u)" = 0 ]; then su -p "$user" -s /bin/bash -c 'php /vawww/html/occ "$@"' - "$@" else /bin/bash -c 'php /vawww/html/occ "$@"' - "$@" fi } run_as "$@" opcache.ini: opcache.memory_consumption=128 php.ini: max_execution_time=30 enabled: true nginx: data: nginx.conf: - events {} http { server { listen 9002 ssl http2; listen [::]:9002 ssl http2; # Redirect HTTP to HTTPS error_page 497 301 =307 https://$host$request_uri; ssl_certificate '/etc/nginx-certs/public.crt'; ssl_certificate_key '/etc/nginx-certs/private.key'; client_max_body_size 3G; add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains; preload" always; location = /robots.txt { allow all; log_not_found off; access_log off; } location = /.well-known/carddav { return 301 $scheme://$host/remote.php/dav; } location = /.well-known/caldav { return 301 $scheme://$host/remote.php/dav; } location / { proxy_pass http://nextcloud:80; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; proxy_request_buffering off; # Proxy headers proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade"; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port 443; # Proxy timeouts proxy_connect_timeout 60s; proxy_send_timeout 60s; proxy_read_timeout 60s; } } } enabled: true fallbackDefaults: accessModes: - ReadWriteOnce persistenceType: emptyDir probeTimeouts: liveness: failureThreshold: 5 initialDelaySeconds: 10 periodSeconds: 10 successThreshold: 1 timeoutSeconds: 5 readiness: failureThreshold: 5 initialDelaySeconds: 10 periodSeconds: 10 successThreshold: 2 timeoutSeconds: 5 startup: failureThreshold: 60 initialDelaySeconds: 10 periodSeconds: 5 successThreshold: 1 timeoutSeconds: 2 probeType: http pvcRetain: false pvcSize: 1Gi serviceProtocol: tcp serviceType: ClusterIP storageClass: "" global: annotations: {} ixChartContext: addNvidiaRuntimeClass: false hasNFSCSI: true hasSMBCSI: true isInstall: false isStopped: false isUpdate: false isUpgrade: true kubernetes_config: cluster_cidr: 172.16.0.0/16 cluster_dns_ip: 172.17.0.10 service_cidr: 172.17.0.0/16 nfsProvisioner: nfs.csi.k8s.io nvidiaRuntimeClassName: nvidia operation: UPGRADE smbProvisioner: smb.csi.k8s.io storageClassName: ix-storage-class-nextcloud upgradeMetadata: newChartVersion: 2.0.5 oldChartVersion: 1.6.61 preUpgradeRevision: 89 labels: {} minNodePort: 9000 image: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: nextcloud tag: 29.0.0 imagePullSecret: [] ixCertificateAuthorities: {} ixCertificates: "1": CA_type_existing: false CA_type_intermediate: false CA_type_internal: false CSR: null DN: /C=US/O=iXsystems/CN=localhost/emailAddress=info@ixsystems.com/ST=Tennessee/L=Maryville/subjectAltName=DNS:localhost can_be_revoked: false cert_type: CERTIFICATE cert_type_CSR: false cert_type_existing: true cert_type_internal: false certificate: -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIDrTCCApWgAwIBAgIEHHHd+zANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQsFADCBgDELMAkGA1UEBhMC VVMxEjAQBgNVBAoMCWlYc3lzdGVtczESMBAGA1UEAwwJbG9jYWxob3N0MSEwHwYJ KoZIhvcNAQkBFhJpbmZvQGl4c3lzdGVtcy5jb20xEjAQBgNVBAgMCVRlbm5lc3Nl ZTESMBAGA1UEBwwJTWFyeXZpbGxlMB4XDTIzMTIxNjA3MDUwOVoXDTI1MDExNjA3 MDUwOVowgYAxCzAJBgNVBAYTAlVTMRIwEAYDVQQKDAlpWHN5c3RlbXMxEjAQBgNV BAMMCWxvY2FsaG9zdDEhMB8GCSqGSIb3DQEJARYSaW5mb0BpeHN5c3RlbXMuY29t MRIwEAYDVQQIDAlUZW5uZXNzZWUxEjAQBgNVBAcMCU1hcnl2aWxsZTCCASIwDQYJ KoZIhvcNAQEBBQADggEPADCCAQoCggEBAKPRN3n5ngKFrHQ12gKCmLEN85If6B3E KEo4nvTkTIWLzXZcTGxlJ9kGr9bt0V8cvEInZnOCnyY74lzKlMhZv1R58nfBmz5a gpV6scHXZVghGhGsjtP7/H4PRMUbzM9MawET8+Au8grjAodUkz6Jskcwhgg9EVS5 UQPTDkxXJYFRUN1XhJOR4tqsrHFrI25oUF6Gms9Wp1aq0mJXh+FIGAyELqpdk/Q8 N1Rjn3t4m2Ub+OPmBLwHOncIqz2PHVgL574bT/q+Lc3Mi/gQsfNi6VN7UkNTQ5Q2 uOhrcw4gtjn41v0j7k9CsUvPK8zfCizQHgBx6Ih33Z850pHUQyNuwjECAwEAAaMt MCswFAYDVR0RBA0wC4IJbG9jYWxob3N0MBMGA1UdJQQMMAoGCCsGAQUFBwMBMA0G CSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAA4IBAQAQG2KsF6ki8dooaaM+32APHJp38LEmLNIMdnIlCHPw RnQ+4I8ssEPKk3czIzOlOe6R3V71GWg1JlGEuUD6M3rPbzSfWzv0kdji/qgzUId1 oh9vEao+ndPijYpDi6CUcBADuzilcygSBl05j6RlS2Uv8+tNIjxTKrDegyaEtC3W RoVqON0vhDSKJ3OsOKR2g5uFfs/uHxBvskkChdGn/1aRz+DdHCYVOEavnQylXPBk xzWQDVt6+6mAhejGGkkGsIG1QY7pFpQPA9UWeY/C/3/QdSl01GgfpyWNsfE+Wu1b IS3wxfWfuiMiDbUElqjDqiy623peeVFXrWlTV4G4yBG/ -----END CERTIFICATE----- certificate_path: /etc/certificates/truenas_default.crt chain: false chain_list: - -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIDrTCCApWgAwIBAgIEHHHd+zANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQsFADCBgDELMAkGA1UEBhMC VVMxEjAQBgNVBAoMCWlYc3lzdGVtczESMBAGA1UEAwwJbG9jYWxob3N0MSEwHwYJ KoZIhvcNAQkBFhJpbmZvQGl4c3lzdGVtcy5jb20xEjAQBgNVBAgMCVRlbm5lc3Nl ZTESMBAGA1UEBwwJTWFyeXZpbGxlMB4XDTIzMTIxNjA3MDUwOVoXDTI1MDExNjA3 MDUwOVowgYAxCzAJBgNVBAYTAlVTMRIwEAYDVQQKDAlpWHN5c3RlbXMxEjAQBgNV BAMMCWxvY2FsaG9zdDEhMB8GCSqGSIb3DQEJARYSaW5mb0BpeHN5c3RlbXMuY29t MRIwEAYDVQQIDAlUZW5uZXNzZWUxEjAQBgNVBAcMCU1hcnl2aWxsZTCCASIwDQYJ KoZIhvcNAQEBBQADggEPADCCAQoCggEBAKPRN3n5ngKFrHQ12gKCmLEN85If6B3E KEo4nvTkTIWLzXZcTGxlJ9kGr9bt0V8cvEInZnOCnyY74lzKlMhZv1R58nfBmz5a gpV6scHXZVghGhGsjtP7/H4PRMUbzM9MawET8+Au8grjAodUkz6Jskcwhgg9EVS5 UQPTDkxXJYFRUN1XhJOR4tqsrHFrI25oUF6Gms9Wp1aq0mJXh+FIGAyELqpdk/Q8 N1Rjn3t4m2Ub+OPmBLwHOncIqz2PHVgL574bT/q+Lc3Mi/gQsfNi6VN7UkNTQ5Q2 uOhrcw4gtjn41v0j7k9CsUvPK8zfCizQHgBx6Ih33Z850pHUQyNuwjECAwEAAaMt MCswFAYDVR0RBA0wC4IJbG9jYWxob3N0MBMGA1UdJQQMMAoGCCsGAQUFBwMBMA0G CSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAA4IBAQAQG2KsF6ki8dooaaM+32APHJp38LEmLNIMdnIlCHPw RnQ+4I8ssEPKk3czIzOlOe6R3V71GWg1JlGEuUD6M3rPbzSfWzv0kdji/qgzUId1 oh9vEao+ndPijYpDi6CUcBADuzilcygSBl05j6RlS2Uv8+tNIjxTKrDegyaEtC3W RoVqON0vhDSKJ3OsOKR2g5uFfs/uHxBvskkChdGn/1aRz+DdHCYVOEavnQylXPBk xzWQDVt6+6mAhejGGkkGsIG1QY7pFpQPA9UWeY/C/3/QdSl01GgfpyWNsfE+Wu1b IS3wxfWfuiMiDbUElqjDqiy623peeVFXrWlTV4G4yBG/ -----END CERTIFICATE----- city: Maryville common: localhost country: US csr_path: /etc/certificates/truenas_default.csr digest_algorithm: SHA256 email: info@ixsystems.com expired: false extensions: ExtendedKeyUsage: TLS Web Server Authentication SubjectAltName: DNS:localhost fingerprint: 8E:68:9D:0A:7D:A6:41:11:59:B0:0C:01:8C:AC:C4:F4:DB:F9:6B:2C from: Sat Dec 16 08:05:09 2023 id: 1 internal: "NO" issuer: external key_length: 2048 key_type: RSA lifetime: 397 name: truenas_default organization: iXsystems organizational_unit: null parsed: true privatekey: -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- MIIEvQIBADANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAASCBKcwggSjAgEAAoIBAQCj0Td5+Z4Chax0 NdoCgpixDfOSH+gdxChKOJ705EyFi812XExsZSfZBq/W7dFfHLxCJ2Zzgp8mO+Jc ypTIWb9UefJ3wZs+WoKVerHB12VYIRoRrI7T+/x+D0TFG8zPTGsBE/PgLvIK4wKH VJM+ibJHMIYIPRFUuVED0w5MVyWBUVDdV4STkeLarKxxayNuaFBehprPVqdWqtJi V4fhSBgMhC6qXZP0PDdUY597eJtlG/jj5gS8Bzp3CKs9jx1YC+e+G0/6vi3NzIv4 ELHzYulTe1JDU0OUNrjoa3MOILY5+Nb9I+5PQrFLzyvM3wos0B4AceiId92fOdKR 1EMjbsIxAgMBAAECggEAS/Su51RxCjRWwM9TVUSebcHNRNyccGjKUZetRFkyjd1D l/S1zrCcaElscJh2MsaNF5NTMo3HIyAzFdksYTUTvKSKYzKWu7OVxp9MGle3+sPm ZXmABBRbf0uvFEGOljOVjbtloXXC7n9RZdQ2LZIE4nNCQkGmboU6Zi6O+6CQmEOQ 9iyYJ8NyXtjDT2sVOpysAj3ga6tdtSosG7SQuo41t20mw6hbl08LhQP9LfZJyKCR 0x1cYny+XHifB6JQAt8crzHYpKaJc2tZd4dXJ1xDnm2Aa/Au5uEA01P/L3hf41sI cUmBhVf1z5m9yBsyaZnW6LzaR5tQwpnPWPEcNfuwLQKBgQDM1o8vwKCo435shpGE zCdqbvK4+J0XYmbgEwHId8xr9rzZ852lAhs6VO2WQQVMGUoWRaH44B3z1Jv9N5Qa 4RUwnTb1MERfzEjRwUuIWjtz34yAXko0iU3M0FYpIxDuKVJNOEO1Doey0lTUcIYQ sfRUVxxJZ3hpDo7RhPSZpwyBtwKBgQDMu8PFVQ5XRb90qaGqg+ACaXMfHXfuWzuJ UqgyNrvF6wqd9Z0Nn299m7EonE6qJftUqlqHC62OCBfqRBNkwOw40s7ORZvqUCkP 7WsWuJu4HqhS2we8yKRuqj520VP537ZeqnK64mDxDKBvL9ttCujbxy01WFWcdwkO sSAViAK7VwKBgQCAeNG1kYsyYfyY9I2wTJssFgoGGWftkroTL9iecwSzcj1gNXta Usfg/gNFieJYqEPfVC0Sev5OP7rWRlWNxj4UD4a4oV1A+E9zv1gwXOeM9ViZ6omA Cd3R55kik+u6dBA6fl9433Qco+6wjyKGthYYD8qd/1d2DLtmjY0cEbm2YQKBgH4/ Zuifm5lLhFVPaUa5zYAPQJM2W8da8OqsUtWsFLxmRQTE+ZT19Q1S3br6MDQR+drq tapDFEHaUcz/L6pYoRIlRKvEFvI1fiy5Lekz66ptFUUKlcnfPC6VwrEIQi16u33C w77ka/0Y2THXJAsoyBEG0KTtlNVIPgiWRv+gAHc/AoGATOlO6ZVhf0vWPIKBhajM ijWTNIX/iCNOheJEjLEPksG4LVpU16OphZL2m0nIyOryQ0Fmt7GHUfl3CXFhTH/P G47PzH+mLCQLp5TUIeNRQWScWNGGsf9J+MtwpxHMzUymDJySR4aot0bH3fge0MO1 QccFxNbLODRmJuYbSQB1HZQ= -----END PRIVATE KEY----- privatekey_path: /etc/certificates/truenas_default.key revoked: false revoked_date: null root_path: /etc/certificates san: - DNS:localhost serial: 477224443 signedby: null state: Tennessee subject_name_hash: 3193428416 type: 8 until: Thu Jan 16 08:05:09 2025 ixChartContext: addNvidiaRuntimeClass: false hasNFSCSI: true hasSMBCSI: true isInstall: false isStopped: false isUpdate: false isUpgrade: true kubernetes_config: cluster_cidr: 172.16.0.0/16 cluster_dns_ip: 172.17.0.10 service_cidr: 172.17.0.0/16 nfsProvisioner: nfs.csi.k8s.io nvidiaRuntimeClassName: nvidia operation: UPGRADE smbProvisioner: smb.csi.k8s.io storageClassName: ix-storage-class-nextcloud upgradeMetadata: newChartVersion: 2.0.5 oldChartVersion: 1.6.61 preUpgradeRevision: 89 ixExternalInterfacesConfiguration: [] ixExternalInterfacesConfigurationNames: [] ixVolumes: - hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/ix-applications/releases/nextcloud/volumes/ix_volumes/ix-postgres_backups mariadbImage: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: mariadb tag: 10.6.14 ncConfig: additionalEnvs: [] adminPassword: d3k@M%YRBRcj adminUser: admin commands: [] cron: enabled: false schedule: '*/15 * * * *' dataDir: /vawww/html/data host: charon.weninger.local maxExecutionTime: 30 maxUploadLimit: 3 opCacheMemoryConsumption: 128 phpMemoryLimit: 512 ncDbHost: nextcloud-postgres ncDbName: nextcloud ncDbPass: XvgIoT84hMmNDlH ncDbUser: ��-��� ncNetwork: certificateID: 1 nginx: externalAccessPort: 443 proxyTimeouts: 60 useDifferentAccessPort: false webPort: 9002 ncPostgresImage: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: postgres tag: "13.1" ncStorage: additionalStorages: [] data: hostPathConfig: aclEnable: false hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata ixVolumeConfig: datasetName: data type: hostPath html: hostPathConfig: aclEnable: false hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata ixVolumeConfig: datasetName: html type: hostPath isDataInTheSameVolume: true migrationFixed: true pgBackup: ixVolumeConfig: aclEnable: false datasetName: ix-postgres_backups type: ixVolume pgData: hostPathConfig: aclEnable: false hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/pgdata ixVolumeConfig: datasetName: pgData type: hostPath nginxImage: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: nginx tag: 1.25.4 notes: custom: ## Database You can connect to the database using the pgAdmin App from the catalog
Database Details
- Database: \{{ .Values.ncDbName }}` - Username: `{{ .Values.ncDbUser }}` - Password: `{{ .Values.ncDbPass }}` - Host: `{{ .Values.ncDbHost }}.{{ .Release.Namespace }}.svc.cluster.local` - Port: `5432``
{{- $_ := unset .Values "ncDbUser" }} {{- $_ := unset .Values "ncDbName" }} {{- $_ := unset .Values "ncDbPass" }} {{- $_ := unset .Values "ncDbHost" }} Note: Nextcloud will create an additional new user and password for the admin user on first startup. You can find those credentials in the \/vawww/html/config/config.php` file inside the container. footer: # Documentation Documentation for this app can be found at https://www.truenas.com/docs. # Bug reports If you find a bug in this app, please file an issue at https://ixsystems.atlassian.net header: # Welcome to TrueNAS SCALE Thank you for installing {{ .Chart.Annotations.title }} App. persistence: config: datasetName: null domain: null enabled: true hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /vawww/html/config subPath: config nextcloud-cron: nextcloud-cron: mountPath: /vawww/html/config subPath: config type: hostPath username: null customapps: datasetName: null domain: null enabled: true hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /vawww/html/customapps subPath: custom_apps nextcloud-cron: nextcloud-cron: mountPath: /vawww/html/custom_apps subPath: custom_apps type: hostPath username: null data: datasetName: null domain: null enabled: true hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /vawww/html/data subPath: data nextcloud-cron: nextcloud-cron: mountPath: /vawww/html/data subPath: data type: hostPath username: null html: datasetName: null domain: null enabled: true hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /vawww/html subPath: html nextcloud-cron: nextcloud-cron: mountPath: /vawww/html subPath: html postgresbackup: postgresbackup: mountPath: /nc-config type: hostPath username: null nc-config-limreqbody: defaultMode: "0755" enabled: true objectName: nextcloud-config targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/limitrequestbody.conf subPath: limitrequestbody.conf type: configmap nc-config-opcache: defaultMode: "0755" enabled: true objectName: nextcloud-config targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /uslocal/etc/php/conf.d/opcache-z-99.ini subPath: opcache.ini type: configmap nc-config-php: defaultMode: "0755" enabled: true objectName: nextcloud-config targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /uslocal/etc/php/conf.d/nextcloud-z-99.ini subPath: php.ini type: configmap nc-occ: defaultMode: "0755" enabled: true objectName: nextcloud-config targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /usbin/occ subPath: occ type: configmap nginx-cert: defaultMode: "0600" enabled: true items: - key: tls.key path: private.key - key: tls.crt path: public.crt objectName: nextcloud-cert targetSelector: nginx: nginx: mountPath: /etc/nginx-certs readOnly: true type: secret nginx-conf: defaultMode: "0600" enabled: true items: - key: nginx.conf path: nginx.conf objectName: nginx targetSelector: nginx: nginx: mountPath: /etc/nginx readOnly: true type: configmap postgresbackup: datasetName: ix-postgres_backups domain: null enabled: true hostPath: null medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: postgresbackup: permissions: mountPath: /mnt/directories/postgres_backup postgresbackup: mountPath: /postgres_backup type: ixVolume username: null postgresdata: datasetName: null domain: null enabled: true hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/pgdata medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: postgres: permissions: mountPath: /mnt/directories/postgres_data postgres: mountPath: /valib/postgresql/data type: hostPath username: null themes: datasetName: null domain: null enabled: true hostPath: /mnt/Camelot/Applications/Nextcloud/ncdata medium: null password: null readOnly: false server: null share: null size: null targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /vawww/html/themes subPath: themes nextcloud-cron: nextcloud-cron: mountPath: /vawww/html/themes subPath: themes type: hostPath username: null tmp: enabled: true targetSelector: nextcloud: nextcloud: mountPath: /tmp type: emptyDir podOptions: automountServiceAccountToken: false dnsConfig: options: [] dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst enableServiceLinks: false hostAliases: [] hostNetwork: false restartPolicy: Always runtimeClassName: "" terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30 tolerations: [] portal: {} postgresImage: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: postgres tag: "15.2" rbac: {} redisImage: pullPolicy: IfNotPresent repository: bitnami/redis tag: 7.0.11 release_name: nextcloud resources: NVIDIA_CAPS: - all limits: cpu: 4000m memory: 8Gi requests: cpu: 10m memory: 50Mi scaleCertificate: nextcloud-cert: enabled: true id: 1 scaleExternalInterface: [] scaleGPU: [] secret: {} securityContext: container: PUID: 568 UMASK: "002" allowPrivilegeEscalation: false capabilities: add: [] drop: - ALL privileged: false readOnlyRootFilesystem: true runAsGroup: 568 runAsNonRoot: true runAsUser: 568 seccompProfile: type: RuntimeDefault pod: fsGroup: 568 fsGroupChangePolicy: OnRootMismatch supplementalGroups: [] sysctls: [] service: nextcloud: enabled: true ports: webui: enabled: true port: 80 primary: true targetPort: 80 targetSelector: nextcloud primary: true targetSelector: nextcloud type: ClusterIP nextcloud-nginx: enabled: true ports: webui-tls: enabled: true nodePort: 9002 port: 9002 targetPort: 9002 targetSelector: nginx targetSelector: nginx type: NodePort postgres: enabled: true ports: postgres: enabled: true port: 5432 primary: true targetPort: 5432 targetSelector: postgres targetSelector: postgres type: ClusterIP redis: enabled: true ports: redis: enabled: true port: 6379 primary: true targetPort: 6379 targetSelector: redis targetSelector: redis type: ClusterIP serviceAccount: {} workload: nextcloud: enabled: true podSpec: containers: nextcloud: enabled: true envFrom: - secretRef: name: nextcloud-creds imageSelector: image lifecycle: postStart: command: - /bin/sh - -c - echo "Installing ..." apt update && apt install -y --no-install-recommends \ echo "Failed to install binary/binaries..." echo "Finished." type: exec primary: true probes: liveness: enabled: true httpHeaders: Host: localhost path: /status.php port: 80 type: http readiness: enabled: true httpHeaders: Host: localhost path: /status.php port: 80 type: http startup: enabled: true httpHeaders: Host: localhost path: /status.php port: 80 type: http securityContext: capabilities: add: - CHOWN - DAC_OVERRIDE - FOWNER - NET_BIND_SERVICE - NET_RAW - SETGID - SETUID readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 0 runAsNonRoot: false runAsUser: 0 hostNetwork: false initContainers: postgres-wait: args: - -c - echo "Waiting for postgres to be ready" until pg_isready -h ${POSTGRES_HOST} -U ${POSTGRES_USER} -d ${POSTGRES_DB}; do sleep 2 done command: bash enabled: true envFrom: - secretRef: name: postgres-creds imageSelector: postgresImage resources: limits: cpu: 500m memory: 256Mi type: init redis-wait: args: - -c - - echo "Waiting for redis to be ready" until redis-cli -h "$REDIS_HOST" -a "$REDIS_PASSWORD" -p ${REDIS_PORT_NUMBER:-6379} ping grep -q PONG; do echo "Waiting for redis to be ready. Sleeping 2 seconds..." sleep 2 done echo "Redis is ready!" command: bash enabled: true envFrom: - secretRef: name: redis-creds imageSelector: redisImage resources: limits: cpu: 500m memory: 256Mi type: init securityContext: fsGroup: 33 primary: true type: Deployment nginx: enabled: true podSpec: containers: nginx: enabled: true imageSelector: nginxImage primary: true probes: liveness: enabled: true httpHeaders: Host: localhost path: /status.php port: 9002 type: https readiness: enabled: true httpHeaders: Host: localhost path: /status.php port: 9002 type: https startup: enabled: true httpHeaders: Host: localhost path: /status.php port: 9002 type: https securityContext: capabilities: add: - CHOWN - DAC_OVERRIDE - FOWNER - NET_BIND_SERVICE - NET_RAW - SETGID - SETUID readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 0 runAsNonRoot: false runAsUser: 0 hostNetwork: false initContainers: 01-wait-server: args: - -c - - echo "Waiting for [http://nextcloud:80]"; until wget --spider --quiet --timeout=3 --tries=1 http://nextcloud:80/status.php; do echo "Waiting for [http://nextcloud:80]"; sleep 2; done echo "Nextcloud is up: http://nextcloud:80"; command: - bash enabled: true imageSelector: bashImage type: init type: Deployment postgres: enabled: true podSpec: containers: postgres: enabled: true envFrom: - secretRef: name: postgres-creds imageSelector: ncPostgresImage primary: true probes: liveness: command: - sh - -c - until pg_isready -U ${POSTGRES_USER} -h localhost; do sleep 2; done enabled: true type: exec readiness: command: - sh - -c - until pg_isready -U ${POSTGRES_USER} -h localhost; do sleep 2; done enabled: true type: exec startup: command: - sh - -c - until pg_isready -U ${POSTGRES_USER} -h localhost; do sleep 2; done enabled: true type: exec resources: limits: cpu: 4000m memory: 8Gi securityContext: readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 999 runAsUser: 999 initContainers: permissions: args: - -c - "for dir in /mnt/directories/; do\n if [ ! -d \"$dir\" ]; then\n echo \"[$dir] is not a directory, skipping\"\n continue\n fi\n\n echo \"Current Ownership and Permissions on [\"$dir\"]:\"\n echo \"chown: $(stat -c \"%u %g\" \"$dir\")\"\n echo \"chmod: $(stat -c \"%a\" \"$dir\")\" \n fix_owner=\"true\"\n fix_perms=\"true\"\n\n\n if [ \"$fix_owner\" = \"true\" ]; then\n echo \"Changing ownership to 999:999 on: [\"$dir\"]\"\n \ chown -R 999:999 \"$dir\"\n echo \"Finished changing ownership\"\n \ echo \"Ownership after changes:\"\n stat -c \"%u %g\" \"$dir\"\n \ fi\ndone\n" command: bash enabled: true imageSelector: bashImage resources: limits: cpu: 1000m memory: 512Mi securityContext: capabilities: add: - CHOWN readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 0 runAsNonRoot: false runAsUser: 0 type: install type: Deployment postgresbackup: annotations: helm.sh/hook: pre-upgrade helm.sh/hook-delete-policy: hook-succeeded helm.sh/hook-weight: "1" enabled: true podSpec: containers: postgresbackup: command: - sh - -c - echo 'Fetching password from config.php' # sed removes ' , => spaces and db from the string POSTGRES_USER=$(cat /nc-config/config/config.php grep 'dbuser' sed "s/dbuser ',=>//g") POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$(cat /nc-config/config/config.php grep 'dbpassword' sed "s/dbpassword ',=>//g") POSTGRES_DB=$(cat /nc-config/config/config.php grep 'dbname' sed "s/dbname ',=>//g") [ -n "$POSTGRES_USER" ] && [ -n "$POSTGRES_PASSWORD" ] && [ -n "$POSTGRES_DB" ] && echo 'User, Database and password fetched from config.php' until pg_isready -U ${POSTGRES_USER} -h ${POSTGRES_HOST}; do sleep 2; done echo "Creating backup of ${POSTGRES_DB} database" pg_dump --dbname=${POSTGRES_URL} --file /postgres_backup/${POSTGRES_DB}$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S).sql echo "Failed to create backup" echo "Backup finished" enabled: true envFrom: - secretRef: name: postgres-backup-creds imageSelector: ncPostgresImage primary: true probes: liveness: enabled: false readiness: enabled: false startup: enabled: false resources: limits: cpu: 2000m memory: 2Gi securityContext: readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 999 runAsUser: 999 initContainers: permissions: args: - -c - "for dir in /mnt/directories/*; do\n if [ ! -d \"$dir\" ]; then\n echo \"[$dir] is not a directory, skipping\"\n continue\n fi\n\n echo \"Current Ownership and Permissions on [\"$dir\"]:\"\n echo \"chown: $(stat -c \"%u %g\" \"$dir\")\"\n echo \"chmod: $(stat -c \"%a\" \"$dir\")\" \n if [ $(stat -c %u \"$dir\") -eq 999 ] && [ $(stat -c %g \"$dir\") -eq 999 ]; then\n echo \"Ownership is correct. Skipping...\"\n fix_owner=\"false\"\n \ else\n echo \"Ownership is incorrect. Fixing...\"\n fix_owner=\"true\"\n \ fi\n\n\n if [ \"$fix_owner\" = \"true\" ]; then\n echo \"Changing ownership to 999:999 on: [\"$dir\"]\"\n chown -R 999:999 \"$dir\"\n \ echo \"Finished changing ownership\"\n echo \"Ownership after changes:\"\n \ stat -c \"%u %g\" \"$dir\"\n fi\ndone" command: bash enabled: true imageSelector: bashImage resources: limits: cpu: 1000m memory: 512Mi securityContext: capabilities: add: - CHOWN readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 0 runAsNonRoot: false runAsUser: 0 type: init restartPolicy: Never securityContext: fsGroup: "33" type: Job redis: enabled: true podSpec: containers: redis: enabled: true envFrom: - secretRef: name: redis-creds imageSelector: redisImage primary: true probes: liveness: command: - /bin/sh - -c - redis-cli -a "$REDIS_PASSWORD" -p ${REDIS_PORT_NUMBER:-6379} ping grep -q PONG enabled: true type: exec readiness: command: - /bin/sh - -c - redis-cli -a "$REDIS_PASSWORD" -p ${REDIS_PORT_NUMBER:-6379} ping grep -q PONG enabled: true type: exec startup: command: - /bin/sh - -c - redis-cli -a "$REDIS_PASSWORD" -p ${REDIS_PORT_NUMBER:-6379} ping grep -q PONG enabled: true type: exec resources: limits: cpu: 4000m memory: 8Gi securityContext: readOnlyRootFilesystem: false runAsGroup: 0 runAsNonRoot: false runAsUser: 1001 securityContext: fsGroup: 1001 type: Deployment See error above values.`

Just sharing a few free tools, resources etc. that might make your tech life a little easier. I have no known association with any of these unless stated otherwise.
But first, in the latest Security Swarm Podcast: "A Breakdown of CSRB’s Findings on Microsoft Storm-0558 Breach (PART 2),” is a continuation from last week’s episode where we discussed the CSRB’s findings on Microsoft’s Storm-0558 Breach. This week, we continue picking apart the findings and providing insights.
We're looking for your favorite tips and tools we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please share your suggestions on the IT Pro Tuesday subreddit, and we'll be featuring them in the coming weeks.
Now on to this week's list!
A Free Tool
Centro 365 is a browser extension that makes it easier to find the info you need on Microsoft Azure and 365. Dintid explains, "My work consists 95% working in the 365 suite—in all of the sections. And being a small IT staff in a non-profit, it’s hard to keep up with the weekly changes MS are doing to naming and placement of stuff. Leads to my useful tool on a daily basis, an extension for my browser, which basically is just a drop down with the different sections and subsections. Clicking it and you go to the right url for it."
Another Free Tool
Mermaid is an online flowchart and diagrams editor that was designed to keep tech documentation current. TheRaido explains, "For documentation with diagrams, I tend to use Mermaid, which can be used in Markdown in VS Code and is also supported by Obsidian.md."
A Tip
A favorite Windows command for jonathanjohnson0724:

• for /l %i in (1,1,254)
• do ping -n 1 - w 10 192.168.0.%i
• Followed by arp -a

will list the IP and MAC addresses of almost everything in the local subnet (192.168.0.[1-254]), including most things that don’t respond to ping. Not as fancy as Angry IP Scanner, but it’s on every Windows system; so quick and easy to use.
Yet Another Free Tool
WizTree helps you quickly find the files and folders using the most disk space on your hard drive. Rather than searching the drive and checking each file to determine size, WizTree gets its information straight from the NTFS Master File Table—which means it happens almost instantaneously. evilkasper finds it does the same thing as WinDirStat, but much faster.
One More Free Tool
Page Countster is a small, portable application for reporting on network printers. Provides a super fast, easy way to access info and interact with all the connected printers. tkecherson says, "For printers, I prefer an old freeware utility, Page Countster. Automatically picks up just the printers and a host of other info about them in an incredibly lightweight utility."
You can find this week's bonuses here or signup to get each week's list in your inbox here.

Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
In the latest Security Swarm Podcast: "A Breakdown of CSRB’s Findings on Microsoft Storm-0558 Breach (PART 2),” is a continuation from last week’s episode where we discussed the CSRB’s findings on Microsoft’s Storm-0558 Breach. This week, we continue picking apart the findings and providing insights.
We're looking for your favorite tips and tools we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please share your suggestions on the IT Pro Tuesday subreddit, and we'll be featuring them in the coming weeks.
Now on to this week's list!
A Free Tool
Centro 365 is a browser extension that makes it easier to find the info you need on Microsoft Azure and 365. Dintid explains, "My work consists 95% working in the 365 suite—in all of the sections. And being a small IT staff in a non-profit, it’s hard to keep up with the weekly changes MS are doing to naming and placement of stuff. Leads to my useful tool on a daily basis, an extension for my browser, which basically is just a drop down with the different sections and subsections. Clicking it and you go to the right url for it."
Another Free Tool
Mermaid is an online flowchart and diagrams editor that was designed to keep tech documentation current. TheRaido explains, "For documentation with diagrams, I tend to use Mermaid, which can be used in Markdown in VS Code and is also supported by Obsidian.md."
A Tip
A favorite Windows command for jonathanjohnson0724:

• for /l %i in (1,1,254)
• do ping -n 1 - w 10 192.168.0.%i
• Followed by arp -a

will list the IP and MAC addresses of almost everything in the local subnet (192.168.0.[1-254]), including most things that don’t respond to ping. Not as fancy as Angry IP Scanner, but it’s on every Windows system; so quick and easy to use.
Yet Another Free Tool
WizTree helps you quickly find the files and folders using the most disk space on your hard drive. Rather than searching the drive and checking each file to determine size, WizTree gets its information straight from the NTFS Master File Table—which means it happens almost instantaneously. evilkasper finds it does the same thing as WinDirStat, but much faster.
One More Free Tool
Page Countster is a small, portable application for reporting on network printers. Provides a super fast, easy way to access info and interact with all the connected printers. tkecherson says, "For printers, I prefer an old freeware utility, Page Countster. Automatically picks up just the printers and a host of other info about them in an incredibly lightweight utility."
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
Get this week's bonus tools by visiting the IT Pro Tuesday blog, or sign up to get this in your inbox each week here.
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.

This week's book club list is as follows (enjoy reading and comment which your favourite is below):
​

1. "Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More" by Vitale J., Len I.H. - If it seems like you work hard but never get anywhere, maybe the problem is something within you. Maybe the limitations holding you back come from inside you, not from the outside world. Zero Limits presents a proven way to break through those self-imposed limitations to achieve more in life than you ever dreamed.
2. "The Probiotic Solution: Nature's Best-Kept Secret for Radiant Health" by Mark A., Dr Brudnak - In The Probiotic Solution, Dr. Mark Brudnak states a greater truth: "Disease begins from an imbalance in the body." Good health is a dance on the tightrope of balance. Lose your balance for long enough-and you plunge toward crisis-if not death. Find and maintain balance-and you can enjoy the fruits of a happy, healthy life. It's the law of nature.Whatever causes imbalance, causes ill health-be it cancer, heart disease, autism, diabetes or obesity.
3. "The Bible secret of divine health" by Gordon Lindsay - In this book is revealed one of the greatest secrets of practical living found in the Bible. It recognizes Divine healing as God’s promise for the believer but—and this is important—it goes further. Much teaching on Divine healing misses the profound truth that God intends that his children should not be sick at all—that they should prosper and be in health even as their soul prospers.
4. "The Low Carb Myth: Free Yourself from Carb Myths, and Discover the Secret Keys That Really Determine Your Health and Fat Loss Destiny " by Whitten, Ari; Smith, Dr Wade; D, M - Do Carbs Make You Fat, Hungry, and Lazy? Read to find out.
5. "The Secret Language of Your Body: The Essential Guide to Health and Wellness" by Segal, Inna - The Secret Language of your Body is a comprehensive guide to healing. In this long-awaited book, Inna Segal unveils the secrets to understanding the messages of the body and reveals the underlying energetic causes of over 200 symptoms and medical conditions. This powerful handbook explores almost every conceivable part of the human body, delving deeply into the possible reasons for problems in any given area of the body and offering a unique, step-by-step method to assist in returning the body to its natural state of health.
6. "Ikigai Diet: The Secret of Japanese Diet to Health and Longevity" by Sachiaki Takamiya - Are you interested in natural food, organic lifestyle, or macrobiotic diet? If so, this is a book for you. It has the most recent information on traditional Japanese dietary culture. If you want to be healthy, the optimal way is to model the best of the best in the field. Who are the healthiest people on the planet then? Well, Japan is considered to be the country with the longest life expectancy, and it is featured in many books including The Blue Zones and Ikigai.
7. "Dumping Iron: How to Ditch This Secret Killer and Reclaim Your Health" by P. D. Mangan - How to Ditch This Secret Killer and Reclaim Your Health is a game-changer in health and fitness. The accumulation of excess iron in the body, a condition that affects perhaps the majority of adults, leads to much higher risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and shorter lifespan. Dumping Iron shows how to measure your iron levels, what the test numbers mean, and how to go about lowering iron if necessary.
8. "Breathe Smart: The Secret to Happiness, Health and Long Life" by Aaron Hoopes - Learn the secret Yoga and Tai Chi masters have known for centuries and discover one of the most fundamental dimensions of good health: proper breathing. Breathe Smart shows us how, through deep, conscious breathing we can raise the level of oxygen in the body and reap the benefits of increased energy, better health, and a stronger sense of well-being.
9. "Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth Cookbook (Simple, Delicious Recipes for Health & Longevity)" by Devanando Otfried Weise - This book is excellent for those who wish to embrace Food Combining i.e. what has become known as the Hay Diet. It is where one avoids mixing starch-based foods and protein-based foods in the same meal.
10. "The Calcium Factor: The Scientific Secret of Health and Youth" by Robert R. Barefoot; Carl J. Reich - Did you know that scientists have found that cancer thrives in an acidic medium, but cannot survive in an alkaline medium? Did you know that with vitamin and mineral supplements, you can lower the acidity of your body fluids and become healthy? Here's a challenge: If the answer to any or all of these questions is "No", then you owe it to yourself to read The Calcium Factor, not only for the sake of your own health, but for the sake of your family and friends.

So, which one are you picking up next or have read? Let us know with a comment and upvote and share this post and our sub bodychemistry to stay tuned for more reading lists every week!
Love, marmalada

My (24F) boyfriend (25M) have been dating for 8 months. He's my first ever relationship and first love; I've never had any experience with boys before him, having gone to an all-girls school. Although our relationship has been full of very happy memories and unforgettable experiences, it's also been challenging.
My lack of experience has impacted our relationship, as he struggles to deal with someone who doesn't initiate/lead. I've grown up in a culture that expects the man to take care of everything, so I'm still getting used to trying to initiate instead of going along with everything my boyfriend wants. My worries of scaring him away/disappointing also impact our relationship, as I usually just agree with his suggestions out of a fear of retaliation; in the past, he's said/done things that have made me scared to be myself around him/initiate (i.e. say he doesn't want to kiss me because I have no experience, doesn't like people of my financial background because of privilege, etc.). But I think the lack of bringing "myself" to the relationship has severely damaged our relationship, possibly to a point of no return even with my current efforts.
Furthermore, he's emotionally guarded and I find it very difficult to initiate deep intimate conversations. To me, having a deep emotional connection with my partner is of utmost importance, but at this point in time we only know superficial things about each other instead of our values/beliefs/history/etc. Earlier in our relationship, he expressed a frustration that we do not have an emotional bond; I agreed, and since then have tried to initiate more. However, his responses to my deep conversations always felt shallow and guarded, so at some point I stopped asking.
Recently within the past month, he began to grow increasingly distant where both physical and emotional intimacy stopped. Physical intimacy was frequent at the beginning before it completely stopped, and I have never felt so unwanted and undesired. We never hold hands, hug, kiss, or anything beyond sleeping in the same bed. I felt like a friend or roommate to him rather than a girlfriend, and every serious conversation we had in regards to the lack of romantic connection he chalked up to some excuse (i.e. me being a bad kisser, him waiting for the right time, him not an intimate person, etc.). Things never changed, and I held onto the hope it would but I grew increasingly insecure and unhappy, believing that the problem was me.
When I confronted him about his distance recently, he mentioned that he's unsure about us as a couple because he initially pursued me out of a strong desire for a relationship. I was "at the right time and right place", but he doesn't know if I'm the "right person". He told me that if I was the one, then maybe he would have an easier time opening up; he said he knows it was very selfish of him, considering how I was interested in him for who he was as a person before we dated. However he then proceeded to say that there is no such thing as the one, and that as long as we are both happy in the relationship we should keep dating. He said he can't lose me and is willing to compromise; he said he's been extremely happy with me, and that breaking up would make him so lonely. But everything he said shows me that he does not envision a long-term future with me, and that he's in this relationship because he simply does not want to be alone/is unsure of what he wants. I'm also hesitant because he's promised change in the past, but has not shown it through his actions; who's to say that this time will not be the same as the last times.
I'm beyond happy in this relationship, I've had some of the best experiences with my boyfriend. I would do anything for him, and through communication I'm learning how to express my care for him in ways he wants. I truly love him deeply, but I've been hurting especially after our last discussion. Everything that we talked about recently makes me question his intentions and whether or not he truly loves me for me. If he doesn't see a future with me, I don't understand why he continues to be in this relationship/claims he wants to work things out? I now feel like there's someone out there who's better for him, who will be able to initiate and grow a deep emotional/physical bond fastestronger than I can. However, I still love him and I want to make the relationship work.
I saw a future with him until he started growing distant, and if things change for the better I can still see a real future with him, getting married and having kids. I want to work things out, but I'm so worried the outcome will stay the same where words are promised but the actions never change. I'm so lost, I love him so much but knowing what I know now I don't know if I should give him another chance and work the relationship out or leave.
TLDR: BF is unsure about our relationship, and doesn't know if he sees a future with me. However, he still wants to make things work. Do I stay and work out our problems or leave?
Any and all advice is appreciated, thank you :)

I was just minding my own business when the police and my neighbors started yelling at me from my VRBO I was living in along with my rental from Uber to do Uber Eats and I could just not stop hearing the horrible things they were saying.
They kept telling me to come outside. I did not trust them because you should never trust the police unless you can pay them off. So I just sat in my VRBO and let my Uber rental expire.
So now I don't have a car for Uber Eats and lost my job.
I was thinking about working for a tech company but I don't exactly know what I would do that they would pay me for. Maybe I could just yell at people. I am sure there are plenty of people that need to be yelled at on the daily in order to be efficient workers. I am good at yelling at people and I feel like this would be an excellent opportunity for me to channel the negative energy that encapsulates all of my consciousness into something that makes money.
Since I lost one of my jobs I could not afford VRBO anymore. AirBNB just banned me permanently because my cat puked so that is not an option. So I found a house to live in.
Don't ask anything about the house.
So as a protected native Austinite I live now in a reserve especially made for people like myself.
It is not a mental hospital.
They don't let you have a computer in the hospital.
So how am I supposed to find a tech job.
I have experience with WordPress and using LLM's to write content for me.
I had hope to be a prompt engineer but they renamed the position to Professional Plagiarist on Indeed.
Wait, I could just work for Indeed.
Do you think they would let me yell at and fire people for them?
I hate people enough that I don't mind making people cry or jump off the bridge after giving them "refreshments" laced with vitamin K.
C'mon there has to be something in Tech that I can do. I am not a bro. So I guess I can't be a tech bro.
I don't identify as a tech bro, rather a tech reject.
I have experience in Adobe Creative Cloud.
I used to take a picture of my painting and my cat every day and edit them together in AfterEffects to post to Instagram. That led to nothing. Absolutely nothing. But I learned how to use AfterEffects.
I animated a two hour film by myself. Should that not count as a tech job?
I know how to use Cody to write code in VSCode and have a lot of experience with Curl, Linux and CLI. I have used GCloud in the past to spin up an instance.
I know how to do things. I know how to make a drop shipping website. Of course everyone knows they do not make money.
I have been banned from almost all the work from home sites that have work available. I finally got enough rejects to go below 99% on Amazon mechanical turk and was banned from prolific and remotasks.
I know how to make a chrome extension. I know some HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python and R. I have worked fine-tuning large language models.
And yet I can't find work.
Probably because of the yelling and screaming.
I need to stop that.
Or get a job that pays me to do that.
TLDR: I need a job that lets me yell at tech bros.

I have a 9 month old Maltipoo and inside his tiny little fluff ball of a body, seems to be an absurd amount of hormones.
This week he slipped his harness to get to an unneutered female about 800m away who had just entered the same field as us but was not even in sight. Then he spent all of puppy class doing nothing but trying to seek out the females. The trainers says he's bitching (no idea if that's an official term) and there's not much more I can do. He knew a week or two before any of the other male puppies whenever the females were about to come into season. I really want to avoid neutering him before he's a year old so I was hoping someone here might have some advice. 🙏
His behaviour at home is absolutely perfect but the second we step out of that door the menace demon appears. It doesn't seem to matter how much focus work I do at home, I hand feed, I play recall games, I ask for eye contact to get any treat or reinitiate play, we practice heel work round the house. He will do literally anything I ask almost immediately.
Once we leave the house there is no treat or toy that is high enough value. I don't even attempt to get him to heel anymore I just stop and wait until he sits and makes some attempt to look in my direction if he pulls, but he only achieves this if there are ZERO distractions around, it's super frustrating for us both and can take forever. Sometimes I just turn and pull him in the other direction. So the majority of walks right now are miserable. I've had a few successes where he'll come for a treat but he just spits it out or refuses to take it and then he won't come again for the rest of the walk. I even try holding treats to his nose and he gets pissed off. He's just so over aroused or stimulated by everything else and that is his only focus. He's literally eyes wide, tongue out, peeing on everything, scraping his paws, panting and lunging to the end of the lead every chance he gets.
I'm trying to be strict and not reinforce bad habits like leash pulling, I'm trying to correct him for lurching at other dogs and get him to move past them, I pull him along so he can't stop to pee every single time, but I'm worried I'm just turning walks into a miserable activity. I honestly wonder if I should just let him go wild and burn his energy off and come back to these skills when he's older. The only good news is he weighs about 3kg so his pulling isn't exactly unmanageable.
He must be so frustrated though. I'm going to try and give him more enrichment and stuff he can shred but I'm desperate for more ideas. I don't know if I should be sending him to daycare so he can get that doggy playtime he's so desperate for or if I should be keeping him away from dogs as much as I can. I don't know if waiting it out is better or worse than getting him fixed too early.

My (24F) boyfriend (25M) have been dating for 8 months. He's my first ever relationship and first love; I've never had any experience with boys before him, having gone to an all-girls school. Although our relationship has been full of very happy memories and unforgettable experiences, it's also been challenging.
My lack of experience has impacted our relationship, as he struggles to deal with someone who doesn't initiate/lead. I've grown up in a culture that expects the man to take care of everything, so I'm still getting used to trying to initiate instead of going along with everything my boyfriend wants. My worries of scaring him away/disappointing also impact our relationship, as I usually just agree with his suggestions out of a fear of retaliation; in the past, he's said/done things that have made me scared to be myself around him/initiate (i.e. say he doesn't want to kiss me because I have no experience, doesn't like people of my financial background because of privilege, etc.). But I think the lack of bringing "myself" to the relationship has severely damaged our relationship, possibly to a point of no return even with my current efforts.
Furthermore, he's emotionally guarded and I find it very difficult to initiate deep intimate conversations. To me, having a deep emotional connection with my partner is of utmost importance, but at this point in time we only know superficial things about each other instead of our values/beliefs/history/etc. Earlier in our relationship, he expressed a frustration that we do not have an emotional bond; I agreed, and since then have tried to initiate more. However, his responses to my deep conversations always felt shallow and guarded, so at some point I stopped asking.
Recently within the past month, he began to grow increasingly distant where both physical and emotional intimacy stopped. Physical intimacy was frequent at the beginning before it completely stopped, and I have never felt so unwanted and undesired. We never hold hands, hug, kiss, or anything beyond sleeping in the same bed. I felt like a friend or roommate to him rather than a girlfriend, and every serious conversation we had in regards to the lack of romantic connection he chalked up to some excuse (i.e. me being a bad kisser, him waiting for the right time, him not an intimate person, etc.). Things never changed, and I held onto the hope it would but I grew increasingly insecure and unhappy, believing that the problem was me.
When I confronted him about his distance recently, he mentioned that he's unsure about us as a couple because he initially pursued me out of a strong desire for a relationship. I was "at the right time and right place", but he doesn't know if I'm the "right person". He told me that if I was the one, then maybe he would have an easier time opening up; he said he knows it was very selfish of him, considering how I was interested in him for who he was as a person before we dated. However he then proceeded to say that there is no such thing as the one, and that as long as we are both happy in the relationship we should keep dating. He said he can't lose me and is willing to compromise; he said he's been extremely happy with me, and that breaking up would make him so lonely. But everything he said shows me that he does not envision a long-term future with me, and that he's in this relationship because he simply does not want to be alone/is unsure of what he wants. I'm also hesitant because he's promised change in the past, but has not shown it through his actions; who's to say that this time will not be the same as the last times.
I'm beyond happy in this relationship, I've had some of the best experiences with my boyfriend. I would do anything for him, and through communication I'm learning how to express my care for him in ways he wants. I truly love him deeply, but I've been hurting especially after our last discussion. Everything that we talked about recently makes me question his intentions and whether or not he truly loves me for me. If he doesn't see a future with me, I don't understand why he continues to be in this relationship/claims he wants to work things out? I now feel like there's someone out there who's better for him, who will be able to initiate and grow a deep emotional/physical bond fastestronger than I can. However, I still love him and I want to make the relationship work.
I saw a future with him until he started growing distant, and if things change for the better I can still see a real future with him, getting married and having kids. I want to work things out, but I'm so worried the outcome will stay the same where words are promised but the actions never change. I'm so lost, I love him so much but knowing what I know now I don't know if I should give him another chance and work the relationship out or leave.
TLDR: BF is unsure about our relationship, and doesn't know if he sees a future with me. However, he still wants to make things work. Do I stay and work out our problems or leave?
Any and all advice is appreciated, thank you :)

Here. And I’d like to start by noticing that Steve Sailer is obviously Delicious Taco’s dad. Having said this.
Good episode. Lots of engagement which I suppose is a net positive for all involved. Obviously a lot of the injury stems from a distortion. The episode’s content fantasized and in fantasy warped into something constituting a threat (no, an outright assault) to the listener’s person. One can simply listen to the episode and see that some (in fact the bulk) of the negative responses are from people reacting to some spectral absent-presence rather than to what is actually being said over the course of the 2 hour long episode. The voices and the discourse have instead been shaped into sonic receptacle containing the reflection of something wildly ugly. Injuriously ugly.
Past few days have been brutal. Found myself doom-viewing the main sub, should know better at this age. Feels like I’ve been transmogrified into an absurd and wretched thing. Must've transgressed against a gnome or something. Fascinating to think about.
I would like nothing more than to shame you.
Miami Summer is a killer. Urine is blood-orange. And my mother deserves better sons.
Why would A&D do this?
Witnessing the rankest comments. In bygone age I’d found them tolerable. Having imagined them delivered by high society homosexual. A damned dandy; chubby, sinister, and flamboyant. Capri on a stick limply held between index and middle fingers, twirling wrist ash’ing on expensive Persian rug. The blurry ghosts of his mother and the kid brother who drowned in the pond all those years ago glaring at him from far-off corner. Clearing throat he launches into sing-song slander head peeling back cackling at his own wickedness. Vile and venomous but charming. Instead what we get is 30+ year old mentally-ill men. Men whose Twitter activity has atrophied their cock and balls. Genitals withering away like the Worker's State, in its place a gasping cloaca, worry not I can clock em from miles away. The odious cloaca-havers are soon joined by ruined drug-addled children and the other women. They talk about A&D in disgusting ways. This is unfair and nasty. I confess to being angry. Sweating blood-specked kerosene. Let the scent fill up the empty air between us. My wrath singeing those overgrown nose hairs.
Of the two I think Anna is the one that inspires the harshest parasocial spite. So much so that I’d recommend she take some protective measures against evil eye and tongue. Maybe take baths with hyssop herb, rose water perfume, and holy water.
It’s as if Anna Khachiyan is a Giant Floating Vagina with teeth and a noticeable overbite. Viewed from another angle it transforms into a Madonna encircled by cherubim. Perhaps we are cruel to Anna in order to be kind to our mothers.
All very pre-Oedipal.
Had to step back and parse it out. Anna draws a comparison between herself and Sailer while also asking him a great question,
07:12-07:49
Anna: “I started reading it during the pandemic because it was the pandemic. I was pregnant and bored and I really relate to you as a person who everyone thinks is like evil and monstrous on the internet, but is actually like quite agreeable and mild mannered in real life. And I was going to ask you this question last, but I may as well just ask it now. How do you feel about your new found popularity? And especially, how do you feel about the fact that you have been effectively adopted by or identified with the hard right?”
The first part of the above extract, the sympathetic recognition, brings to mind a bit of 20th century Hermetic theory concerning harmful thought-forms. Our unconscious self-destructive impulses animating the fantasy-phantasm of the other. Inhabiting their shape. Gaining a degree of autonomy. This artificial entity is vampiric by default, provoking what the Czech magician Franz Bardon calls a "magical persecutory complex"... He goes into detail about such entities in Step VI of his seminal work, Initiation into Hermetics. Describing different types of artificial elementals and phantasms along with details on how to consciously go about creating and dissipating them. One of those artificial psychic entities, the one that concerns us, he calls the schemata. Bardon details two variants, one connected with paranoid persecutory fantasies and the other with erotic obsession. The first type comes about when someone who is “easily excitable, easily influenced or self-important” (Narcissist?) has a run in with another person who has, to put it mildly, a memorable visage and dark personality. The schemata is born from the phantasm modeled after this demonic-looking disagreeable person. The victim begins to attribute all kinds of minor inconveniences to the influence of the ugly person. Deludes themselves into thinking that the ugly/disagreeable person is a powerful black magician. Everything appears to reinforce their paranoid delusions. The schema grows in power feeding off the anxieties of their creatohost. The person might end up committing suicide. This was the persecutory schemas desire, having achieved its goal Bardon notes, “how great is the shock when such a spirit realizes on the mental plane that he has committed a very successful magical suicide. What a bitter disappointment! The demonic looking person, however, has no idea what happened; he was actually only the means to an end.”
God gave us eyes so that we might notice things.
The way I see it:
Being social animals the subject of our fantasy, of our fixations, is the fantasy of the other. What makes the human Human is not that we desire but rather that we desire the desire of the other. An excess desire. We fantasize about what the other is fantasizing and enjoying. Our fantasy of the fantasy of the other is the outlines a fundamental lack within our person, a negativity. Experienced as a splitting of consciousness. Intuiting this lack, becoming aware of it, and attempting to articulate it, we are self-consciousness. This negativity or void is in psychoanalytic terms, the unconscious. We likewise intuit that there had once been some original state. One without lack and contradiction. A state of fullness, without the division between self and object. A harmonious whole. A pure consciousness or as Freud refers to it in Civilization and its Discontents an oceanic feeling. The Original Desire, one that is authentically my own, which was not the desire of the other but which unites our desires in itself. This desire is the extinction of all desires.
The eye that perceives the lovely is at once the eye that perceives what I lack. Perceiving this lack, which explains my present condition, I covet. This is an evil eye. The lover’s gaze is of the same type as the infirm or pathic gaze. Reminded of Zizek’s formulation of one of Hegel’s insights, “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself" itself a variation of Meister Eckhart’s “the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” The recognition of evil, the ability to see and judge evil, stems from our ability to recognize disparity. This disparity is already present within our own person, the split-consciousness. The feeling cognized, the awareness of our condition as beings separated from the whole. The clairvoyance of the tyrant and the philosopher.
Suppose that psychopathology is born from our inability to recognize an image as an image.
I intuit something more in this person, something they’re hiding. It can’t just be envy, no. It has to be because I can feel that this thing they’re hiding is sinister. It can’t just be that I feel animosity towards this person, no. It has to be because this person is evil and not just an isolated evil but rather a symptom of a much larger evil. An evil that is responsible for all the suffering in the World, for why my World isn’t the way it should be. It can’t just be attraction, no. It has to be that I intuit something more in this person, something hidden, that I must destroy in order to go on living.
If vile shit comes to mind (as vile things often do, especially when one is immersed in ambient algorithmically-summoned vileness, namely outrage and atrocity porn) they won't affirm it to themselves or try to justify or rationalize it or present it as a rational political stance. And they don’t abstract this particular form of vileness into the primary lens through which they view and interpret cultural phenomena. Unreflexive racial animosity is ugly and fetid. We’re capable of recognizing it, feeling it, as something pathological. We’re also capable of laughing at it. Laughing at ourselves. Look at what our ladies have to say about Stuart Seldowitz (the dude who went viral harassing a halal street vendor) in I’ll Be Missinger. “He sucks,” “he’s a loser,” “he’s obviously sick,” and that he gives the impression of someone who lives alone, will die alone, and will be found weeks or even months after the fact.
Perhaps Red Scare is special in how it manages to elicit absurd, wildly inappropriate responses from listeners. Vulgar and revelatory was it? Steve Sailer elicits a similar response and has become an expert in turning said absurd reactions to his advantage. Generally the cooler-head in any given exchange. While the other person shouts obscenities at a ghost, smashing fists against the post, looking crazy, like a proper hysteric. Sailer breaks the fourth-wall, making eye-contact with the would-be noticer, with a little shake of the head, a little chuckle, a little shrug… “you’re noticing right? See what I have to put up with? Imagine these people defining my legacy.” Still he seems to take it with the good humor of an uncle who will still call you on your birthday, despite your drunken outburst during holiday get-together he will admit to not having resisted the temptation to provoke you, it use to be fun, recall all the cool bands I introduced you too? We use to be best buds, “do you really think anything I’ve said merits this sort of response? Honestly?”
Has to be a cheap trick. A technique employed by an old trickster in decades long honing of craft. Maybe not. Maybe what we see is precisely what we get. Most of the very upsetting things being jokes sincerely intended to lighten the mood. Steve Sailer doesn’t care about the particular political orientation of his audience. He just cares that he has an audience. Grateful for the fans he has. Nonetheless happy that they’re not seething malcontent racists. Even if one disagrees with the methodology, the heuristic, the conclusions. That’s secondary, perhaps even tertiary to the recognition sought. His craftsmanship as a writer.
Why I loved his conflict with Will Stancil. Stancil inspired a lot of pondering for me. Putting things in place…
01:29:22-01:29:28
Anna: “You come for the race science and stay for the prose-styling and vivid story-telling.”
In trying to survive as a writer exiled from Mainstream Conservative media (ConInc) during the Bush Jr years. In fact, correct me if I’m wrong but the cancelation that actually impacted Steve Sailer, setting him down the path we find him in, was brought about not by blue-haired hall monitor millennial leftists but by his “fellow” Conservatives. I imagine that he just went with whoever was willing to take him adapting to the editorial standards and audience sensibilities of the publications willing to provide him succor. Not charity mind you but an ability to engage in his own little labor of love.
Read some Sailer. Might get into that later. But that’s the initial impression I got from Steve. Would be utterly mortified if memorialized as a Racialist Ideologue rather than as an entertaining and thought-provoking journalist. Think I also benefited from seeing how he’s actually received by people who are navigating through (or in certain cases, are mired in) the marginal “Hard Right”-spaces or the Rightwing Digital Ghetto. End up realizing that he isn’t hateful, that what you see is precisely what you get, that he privileges craft over ideology, that his reception and exile from Neocon dominated media outlets (remember these are the people gushing ecstatic over the US invasion of Iraq, manufacturing consent for our adventures in the Middle East) was exceedingly unfair but that he nonetheless managed to persevere. And that he really never goes beyond Norm McDonald in terms of his sardonic wit or The Boondocks animated series in terms of his criticisms. His normality is a great source of stability and comfort for his readers; “noticing” and speculating about these topics doesn’t necessarily lead to one becoming a seething racist.
Returning for a moment to Will Stancil, this was what he inspired:
As the last man standing I spend countless hours immersed in detailed fantasies about the coming apocalypse and my enemy's bliss. A dumb and wicked happiness proportional to my suffering. Easy to imagine other people happy. Hearts unbroken. Unburdened, hydrated, sexually satisfied, debt-free, lucky, successful in all business endeavors. Brute, jezebel, schemer, parasite, rival, betrayer... the whole lot of them thriving. Frolicking in my mind's eye. When the time comes I won't forget that they were happy while...others...suffered.
Find that trying to void your mind of all thought or sit perfectly still for 10 minutes. End up feeling like something requires much less energy from us than nothing. Causes coalescing. Conspiring, to what ends?
You see. The very same principle appears to be at work here. Same pathological base that undergirds genuine racial or ethnic animosity. Fantasizing about the other’s enjoyment and being unable to distinguish between the persecutory Phantasm and the actual human being whose shape it appropriates.
Had a friend recommend forgetting. Forgetting is a dialectical exercise, first you have to acknowledge the thing living rent free in your head and acknowledge its origins... then you have to take the steps to stop feeding it. Letting the thought-form dissolve. Let it be put to rest. Reminded of the practice Orthodox Christian contemplatives call Nepsis.
Other approaches as well, acknowledging the presence of anima veiled in shadow.
But listen…
The podcasts I consume, are a reflection of me as a person. Being what I associate and consume. What does it say about me in particular? Reveal about me? That they should have Steve Sailer on the pod. Settling down. Perhaps some responses could be understood in this light. That a Sailer episode reflects poorly on the listener. Constituting a great betrayal of the love and energy and time I have dedicated over the years to you.
I’m not a racist.
Show me your likes on Twitter and I’ll tell you who you are. The most punitive and brutal god. The idea of the AI nu-god being this, utilizing that standard, is horrifying. Show me your likes on Twitter and I’ll tell you who you are, everything you are, and whether or not you qualify to live.
Shamed, I quietly remove the upvote I gave to the hysterical person and the downvote I gave to him.
Hysteria like a yawn is an empathic contagion.
Back to Anna it’s not because she’s ugly and it sucks that she might nurse this delusion. I actually think Anna is really pretty. Rather I think it’s because she’s a mom. She registers as a maternal figure. That’s one of the reasons I think people respond to her the way they do. As stated earlier. We are cruel to Anna in order to forgive our moms.
[To be continued: Wherein I say horrible things that should never be said to the people I claim to love. Will also interrogate Sailor Socialism]

Jumper getting deeper into dressage and struggling to understand why dressage riders sit how they do. It seems knee blocks push the thigh back into a very unnatural position. No one naturally sits like this. How did this come to represent good equitation?
I understand large knee blocks lock in riders at the highest level eg for piaffe, but 1. Surely us humans would be more stable if locked into a more natural position? 2. This seems bizarre to have beginners bouncing along at pony club in this position. Isn’t it better to move up the ranks in a closer contact style as we lead?
Sure I’m missing something and am too embarrassed to ask my dressage coach so please ELI5.

Wade took a breath as he picked up his old duffel bag, now loaded with his DD uniform and a few other items from the Ceres mines as he slotted it to his side, with the large band handle around his neck. Having gathered his belongings, he joined Tina, who was waiting near the ship's open bay door as he walked over to her. The couple watched several of the other troopers inside marching out as well, some carrying crates of supplies and items out of the craft as they departed for the base outside. Kelly was one of the last ones still on board, checking on a section of the cargo bay as she did what Wade presumed was some maintenance work.
With the way now clear, Wade and Tina stepped off the transport, glancing at the massive base around them as they touched the roughened pavement. Throughout the large landing port were several more chameleon dropships, their crews disembarking with similar items and loads of rescued drones aboard. Beyond the ships were several hangar bays and fighter craft, mostly A-20s and their space-borne cousins docked in lines going across the pad. And beyond the landing zone, towering over several buildings at the base, were the few cruisers docked to the large clamps holding them in place.
Walking ahead with Tina, Wade observed some of the departing Coalition troops as they neared one of several tents stationed near an inactive group of planes, the military personnel interacting and exchanging the crates with the Coalition officers upon reaching each other. Hearing a low roar of engines from afar, the lover drones looked upward to see the large USN warship that was present at the factory earlier, having followed the transport convoy home and now was beginning to descend for landing. Wade gave a silent gasp as he caught a glimpse of the ship's name and SIC number at the side, remembering it from the ship he and Ron saw while returning to Earth.
"Always a wondrous thing to see, isn't it Wade?" Tina said as she and her boyfriend watched the ship slowly come lower to the unoccupied dockyard clamps below it.
"Sure is, wonder how they built those babies?" Wade replied as the two looked upon the landing starship, the former worker drone smirking as he added, "I could've swore I saw that same exact ship over Henderson when Ron and I came back, before we got mugged earlier."
Tina glanced to Wade with surprise as she spoke up on his claim. "Really? Well, that had to be the one that helped our friends here back at the factory. I think I saw the same name on it too!"
"Wouldn't surprise me, seeing all that's happened today." Wade replied as he chortled a bit, Tina doing the same as the former spoke further. "I wonder, what kind of ship is the... Vickers again? You know?"
"Autumn class, dear. A heavy destroyer variant, not as strong as those enormous Yamato dreadnoughts or Adelaide battlecruisers, but she'll put up a good fight for whatever comes at her." Tina explained as she held back another chuckle, thinking of her education on various USN craft as she teased Wade lightly. "You know, I may just have to grab one of those ship roster tabs when we get in the base. I'd love to show you all they got in their arsenal."
Wade chortled again as he gave his thoughts on the idea. "Well, it wouldn't be bad to have a little more knowledge in ship-story."
Tina almost burst out laughing at his crude pun, Wade smiling at her as F and Nathan jogged over to the two, the latter carrying his own backpack behind him as he spoke. "Well, not a bad place, huh? You guys heading to the clearance station?"
"Oh yes, we were just admiring the ships around us while we walked." Tina said with a stifled laugh, easing herself as she chatted with her new friends. Wade, however, was quickly overcome with panic as he remembered something. Checking his pockets, his fears were confirmed as he failed to find one of his key possessions: his ID card. Wade felt he must have lost it when he was stripped of his old clothing while in the factory.
Oh no, guys? I don't think I can pass through." Wade said with greenish-yellow circles for eyes as Tina and the others looked to him in concern, the drone feeling through his pockets once more before stating his issue. "My ID, they must've taken it off me when they turned me into a disassembly drone!" Wade began to hyperventilate lightly as he grew fearful of the potential outcomes when they reached the security gate ahead. "Oouuugghh, if I don't have my ID, they'll have to keep me lo-"
"Wade, Wade... it's okay. I'll have them make a pass for you, surely we can get them to after getting them to understand what's happened." Tina stated as she put her hand to Wade's chest, who eased his panic as he looked to his girlfriend.
"Yeah, and besides Wade, those people over there went around gathering what ever items the company stole from the drones during their conversion. I'm sure that once they find it, they'll have it sent off to be given back to you!" Nathan said as F nodded in agreement, shunting Wade's panic out of him with their words as he replied to the hopeful responses.
"Right, yeah, they should do that. Sorry." Holding Tina's hand, Wade spoke to her once more. "Lead the way."
Tina nodded to Wade before the two began to walk over to the security gate nearby, several people, drones and humans alike, already in the line as they checked themselves in to the base to relax after the hard-fought battle. Once they reached the line, the four stood together as they waited for the line to slowly go up, more troops and rescued drones coming over to add to the long line. During the wait, a loud, mechanical 'SLAM' erupted through the air, prompting Wade and Tina to glance over to the direction of the noise. The two felt at ease once more as they saw the Vickers finally landed at the base, the loud clang being the docking clamps attaching to the ships hull just moments ago.
As the line moved up further to the gate, Wade and Tina caught sight of a pair of A-20 aircraft passing over them, the two watching as the planes slowed down while descending onto the runway nearby. The four drones' collective viewing of the fighters landing ceased as they caught sight of J, who took flight as she departed the transport nearby before flying over to the tents near the hangar bays.
"Huh, wonder what she's over there for?" Nathan said as he observed J landing onto the ground in front of one of the tents.
"Probably checking on the drones we got back, or meeting up with one of those commanders there." F said as she motioned an arm towards the tents, J walking under one as she made her way to one of the soldiers coming over to her. "Seems like the latter, from the looks of it."
Wade shrugged as he responded to the group's pondering over J's actions. "Well, she'll be here with us if we need her, right? Shouldn't be much to worry about."
Returning their focus to the line ahead, Wade and his team waited as the line moved up over the next few minutes, moving impressively fast as the people in front cleared themselves in one at a time. Eventually, the four of them were up, Tina stepping up to show her ID for clearance. "Hello, it's been a busy day, hasn't it?"
The security agent smirked at Tina's small-talk. "Hah, not too busy here until you all showed up."
As the guard finished scanning Tina's ID, she handed the card back to her as she raised a finger to begin her request. "Oh, um, there's a little issue we need to resolve." Putting a hand to Wade's arm, Tina explained her boyfriend. "This is my dear friend Wade, Wade Carter. We both managed to escape that blasted factory with the help of those Coalition folks there." Wade gave a pleading look as Tina continued. "Unfortunately, Wade was converted into a disassembly drone before he was rescued, and it seems those people at the company took all his belongings he had on him, including his ID. Do you think there's... anyway you could write up something to let him by?"
Stepping forward, F gave her end of the story. "I can vouch for him, Ma'am. Wade and I we're among the teams helping in getting the worker drones out of the factory during the operation." The disassembly drone pulled out a pair of cards as she finished her explanation, one of them being her company-issued Disassembly Service Passcard, which resembled a normal civilian ID in appearance, save for the 'JCJenson (In Spaaace!) Logo on the top left and hazard markings around the rim of the card. As for the other card, it was a well worn, still legitimate ID card, showing F as how she appeared when she was a worker drone. At the side of her picture was a name with an initial. "FELICITY A LEE"
Taking the two cards in her hand, she looked them over and scanned them as Nathan tried to back Wade up as well. "So can I, Ma'am! I helped there too, when he was under the company's control. We all got him out of the factory so we could get him back in order." Pulling out his own ID, Nathan handed it out as the guard returned F's IDs to her.
The guard accepted Nathan's ID as she spoke over what to do with Wade. "Well, normally it takes clearance from higher ranked personnel here to allow someone inside without a legitimate form of identification. We can't just take someone's word on things like this, after all." Tina seemed to frown in disappointment as the guard explained her protocols, Wade looking down at the ground as he felt his worries were about to be proven correct. Going over Nathan's ID further, she gave an intrigued expression at the card before continuing. "Huh, interesting. Got two veteran folks here, I see?" She glanced to Nathan and F as she said that, taking into account their former military background as the former spoke up.
"Three, actually. My pal Kurtis is somewhere back there, I think. He should be heading down here later this evening." The guard glanced back at Nathan's ID as she took in the veteran drone's reply, sighing as she decided to make a slight amendment to the issue put before her and the four friends.
"Well, seeing you two here, I believe I can write something up. The Major won't be happy with me for this, but I think I can trust you with appropriate behavior." Taking a small sticky name-tag, the woman pulled out a pen before starting to write on it. Initially, she glanced to Wade, who stated his name again before she began to write his name on the tag. Once she was finished, the guard gave the tag to Wade, who slapped it onto his jacket before she spoke to him. "You should be fine to enter for the most part, just stick close to your friends and don't cause any trouble. Understood?"
Wade gave a stern salute to the security officer, who held back a chuckle at the honest, yet amusing effort the disassembly drone showed to her. Giving a simple nod and a flick of her hand, she permitted Wade and his friends entrance to the base, the four walking past the walkway barricades as they made their way past the gate.
Wade let out a heavy sigh of relief as he thanked his allies. "I owe you both so much for this, thanks!"
"Don't mention it, Wade." F said warmly as she and Nathan laughed at his joyful face.
"Yeah, just doing what any good friend should." Nathan said as Tina wrapped an arm around Wade, holding him tightly as the two walked together.
Looking to his girlfriend, Wade spoke to Tina about what to do next. "Well, since we're in, you wanna go fi-" He ceased his words as he remembered that there was someone else they needed to find amongst the base. "Oh, I almost forgot about her,"
"Jasmine!" Tina and Wade said aloud together as the former remembered her sister, Wade's words snapping her mind to Jasmine in an instant. "We should look for her, you think she might be here somewhere?"
"Probably. If they got Ron after they captured me, they have to 've picked her up too." Wade stated, Nathan raising a hand as he offered to help.
"I could go looking for her! You know what she looks like?" Readying a holo-projector, he tried to display an image of Jasmine from one of his many memories of her. The picture was, while pixelated and under a blue hue, incredibly well-detailed. And for Nathan, that was all he needed to see to note Jasmine's appearance in his memory. Nodding, he spoke again to his friends. "Got it! I'll see if she's around!" Then, turning to run down one of the paths leading to a nearby base facility, he stopped as he asked one more question. "Oh! One more thing, you got a smartcomm on ya, Wade?"
Readying one from his holo-projector hand, he nodded as he spoke into it. "Seems so, though I don't seem to have all my contacts added in."
Running back over, Nathan pulled out his own smartcomm before putting it up against Wade's hand one, allowing the two devices to exchange information. Upon the devices beeping, Wade and Nathan nodded to each other, the former ignoring a pop-up that stated, "New Contact Added" while the latter spoke once more. "Okay, I'll call you once I spot her!" With that, he began running down the path once more, intent on finding Tina's sister at the base, wherever she could be.
"Fowley! Her last name's Fowley!" Tina said aloud to the departing Nathan, hoping he heard her words before turning away from the miner drone and facing Wade and F again.
As Tina sighed in partial relief, Wade put his own arm around her before asking the question he tried to ask before. "So, uh, with that out of the way for now... You wanna go look for one of those ship tabs?"
Putting a hand to Wade's chest, Tina smiled as she replied. "Oh, certainly." Then, as the three began walking down a different path that Nathan hadn't taken, the pilot drone continued with a chuckle. "I hear they have a place here that sells model kits too!"
...
Jasmine sat in silent sorrow as she took another gulp of her glass of Proxi-Vodka, a tasty, but heavy alcoholic beverage produced at the colony of Proxima 2... and one of Jasmine's preferred drinks to have when she wasn't in a good mood. When she awoke after being stunned by the station guards, she found that she was just recovered by a group that called themselves the 'United Earth Coalition', and that her drone friend, Tina, was unfortunately taken by the JCJenson corporation to be turned into one of their horrid disassembly drones. While the people that saved her offered to help her find Tina, so far there had been no luck in doing so. No successful calls, no response from Wade nor Ron, nothing.
The whole situation widdled at her like scrapes to her form, slowly draining any bit of hope that she had in finding her sister. And once the mission at that factory was over, the ship began heading back to the Nellis Base to escort the recovered drones back to a safe area. Unfortunately for Jasmine, Tina's presence was not given confirmation. Alone, she walked off to one of the bars down at the base, specifically Drexler's Cantina, one of the more popular bars down at the military starport. Thankfully, though she didn't openly exhibit feelings of wanting to be alone in her wallowing, she was glad the place was nearly barren of patrons, with only a few at a couple of tables within the bar.
The stage at the back of the bar also had a few singer drones performing aloud, the lead singer girl reciting the words of a quiet, yet exciting song that, instrumentally, consisted of a strange mix of bass, techno, and a hint of opera. The song itself was one Jasmine had heard a good many times before in her life, known as, 'You Complete My World' by a decades old Earth band by the name of HeartStar. The song, as Jasmine and many others who'd heard it interpreted it, was about someone who described their world like a puzzle, and that the one whom the main singer cared for beyond all was the only thing that could keep their world from shattering into ruin before them.
An oddly fitting tune, given what had just happened on the JCJ Central earlier. For all Jasmine knew, Tina was either alive beyond her knowledge, hopefully searching for her wherever she could, or, the answer Jasmine feared... Dead.
Not wanting to even consider the thought, the human pilot took another swig of the colonial Vodka, relishing in its taste before forcing herself to swallow, almost gagging from the strength of the drink. Easing herself, she glanced out to one of the windows of the bar, taking the faint glimpse of night into her eyes. Then, looking to the clock at the wall ahead of her, she saw the time was about a little over an hour to 10 pm. Jasmine gave a sigh to herself, certain she would be alone for the rest of the night.
Unbeknownst to her, however, Jasmine had been spied upon a little while ago. Nathan, in his search for the woman Tina called Jasmine Fowley, had spotted a woman matching the physical appearance of the target. Knowing Jasmine wouldn't know who he was if he tried to talk to her himself, Nathan immediately went looking for Wade, easing his return to his team by calling the former worker drone and signaling him about his findings.
Deciding to check on the news, Jasmine slowly pulled out her smartcomm, resisting her urge to press the contacts button as she tapped the news app. Looking through it, she spotted a recent story that was posted just over an hour ago, titled, "JCJenson 'Recall' effort sabotaged by joint Government/Militia forces! The Truth Exposed!" Above the article was a video, a play button in front of it teasing Jasmine. Curious over this sudden development, she pressed the button, her attention in complete focus on the video as it began to play.
After the news station's logo appeared on-screen for a short few seconds, the current host for the story, Mrs. Tiffany Joy, appeared at her seat before beginning the story. "Good evening, this is Nevada-78, I'm your host, Tiffany Joy. Tonight, we start with a rapid development for the 'drone recall' incidents propagated by the business conglomerate JCJenson In Space. Throughout the afternoon up to now, several advanced factories under the ownership of the corporation have fallen under violent assault by various militarized forces, ranging from official United Nations operatives to private militia groups with varying goals." The small screen to Joy's left shifted to show the state of Nevada, zooming into it to show a portion of the Mojave desert as Joy continued her story.
"Among these facilities, one such factory based right here in southern Nevada has recently succumbed to the successful efforts of the USN Defense Force and a group by the name of the United Earth Coalition, an alliance consisting of humans and automatons working to create a unified world for both species." The screen shifted again to show the logo for the UEC, which appeared as one half of a human head outline and another of a drone's, along with two arms behind the heads belonging to both beings pictured. "With the attack having concluded just hours ago, we have reporters gathering at the New Nellis Staryards near Henderson City to bring you the aftermath of the conflict. We go to Mr. Jelico, on the scene in five."
The camera shifted after the countdown of five to show Mr. Jelico in front of the camera, the cameraman filming a large tent housing several worker drones being tended to by the base soldiers. "Alright, Jelico here, we're on station at New Nellis. What you're all seeing here are some of the recovered worker drones, many of them were pretty spooked by the events that unfolded in that factory earlier." As the camera panned over the lot of drones, some of them looked to the camera, curious at the news crew filming them as Jelico continued. "A few of them are real glad to be here, Joy. Seems like they feel safe here, as far as I can tell."
As the camera moved to show Jelico again, a plane could be seen taking off as he spoke. "Yeah, these people did them quite a service. The staff here are working to find their original owners and families, it'll probably be a little bit before they can get them all home." The camera switched once again to another view of the base, the lights of various buildings illuminating the night as the news story continued.
At the entrance, Nathan pushed open the door to the bar, the chime failing to catch anyone's attention as he, Wade, F and Tina stepped inside. Carefully pointing at Jasmine, he whispered to Tina, "That's her, from the looks of it. She's been here for a good minute!"
Taking another drink of the Proxi-Vodka, Jasmine listened further to the story. "The authorities didn't just recover a majority of the worker drones taken into the factory, however. A recent update provided by Mrs. Yuka, shows her interviewing a disassembly drone who claims to be among the unfortunate drones the assault force failed to save before their conversion."
"Jasmine!" Tina called out, the voice instantly grabbing the woman's attention as she paused the news story. Swiftly turning her head, her heart began pounding with immense excitement as she saw her drone sister, who grinned upon seeing her face.
"Tina!" Jasmine said aloud, somewhat weakly from her previous wallowing as she tried to run over to her sister, landing on her knees as the two embraced in a flush of emotions. Wade and his friends stood behind the two girls as they hugged each other, clinging onto one another as tightly as they could give. Jasmine seemed to erupt with a pained cough as she allowed some of her sorrow out of her heart, Tina carressing her back in a comforting manner as she held back her own tears. The sisters held the hug for a long moment, not daring to let go of one another for fear of losing each other again. Eventually, however, they did, the two sisters taking heavy breaths as Jasmine spoke up while wiping her face. "I thought I'd lost you."
"Can't say I didn't feel the same way, love." Tina replied as she broke out in light laughter, glancing to Wade before continuing. "But, fortunately, those Coalition boys helped out quite a bit. Though, not as much as my knight in his new armor."
Standing herself up, Jasmine took Tina's helping hand as she looked to the one her sister spoke of. A grateful smile formed on Jasmine's face as she saw Wade, standing in front of her and Tina as he returned the expression. Looking upon her family friend, Jasmine noticed something... different about Wade. He was taller now, his arms were shaped like white cones rather than the silver bendy tubes he and Tina normally had. As for his face, his pure green eyes were replaced with a set of greenish-yellow ones, and above his forehead was a band holding five yellow bulbs that she didn't know the function of.
While the pieces started to click together in her head, Jasmine took Wade's held out hand as she spoke to him. "Wade, I'm so glad to see you! You look different, too. Did something... happen to you?" She already guessed it by this point, but feigned confusion as she opted to hear Wade's take on the matter.
"Yeah, I hope you don't mind your sister dating a vampire from now on." Tina chortled in amusement at Wade's comment at himself, Jasmine raising an eyebrow in confusion at the former worker drone as he returned his expression to a more sincere smile. "The company got me too, and unlike the workers we got out... they managed to turn me into a disassembly drone. From now on, I'm gonna need to take in more oil than I usually did before I was turned. My cooling system's not as good as it should be, from what I've heard." Pulling out his two full canteens, Wade finished his partial explanation. "Don't worry, though. I've got some to keep me down."
Jasmine took in the news with immense surprise, noticing the hazard stripes at the rims of Wade's arms as she replied to her friend. "Oh... Well, if Tina's fine with it, then I see no problem with that, Wade." Admittedly, she was a bit unnerved by the change, concerned for both him and Tina's safety due to this supposed oil coolant issue. Trying to sound as nice as she could on the matter, Jasmine hesitantly asked Wade, "Though... I am a bit concerned with that bad cooling problem you mention. You... don't think you would-"
"Hurt Tina?!" Wade assumed, understanding Jasmine's concern as he gave a horrified glance to the two sisters. Standing with his fists to his hips, he gave his answer to Jasmine's presumed question. "Don't even say such a thing, Jasmine. I'd rather overheat than dare strike her."
Admittedly amused as well as concerned for Wade's selflessness, Tina chuckled at him before speaking up on the matter. "Now now, Wade. It won't be so bad. We'll manage."
Jasmine nodded as she agreed with her sister's optimistic view on the problem. "Indeed we will, we always do." Then, taking notice of the other two drones in the room, Jasmine smiled at them before speaking again. "Ah, I see you brought some friends too."
Wade and Tina glanced over to Nathan and F upon Jasmine's statement, the two friends smiling pleasantly as Wade spoke up. "Oh, yeah. These are some of my work buddies from Ceres, Jasmine. This is Nathan, I first met him when Ron and I came to the mines, showed us around a bit too." Putting a hand on F's shoulder, Wade introduced her too. "And this is Serial Designation F, or, just F. She was one of the guards keeping watch on the place while we worked."
F seemed to blush out of embarrassment as she remembered her and Wade's first meeting. "I... did come off a little rough on them when they first came in, though. Stopped Nathan's touring run too. Just following colony protocol."
Nathan patted F's back as he tried to ease F's guilt. "Oh, it's nothing F. We had to start work in a few minutes anyway. Besides, it's a bit more fun exploring the place yourself without a guide." He winked at the others as he finished his praise. "Trust me, it really is."
Wade, Tina and Jasmine all chuckled at their friend's amusing words, F joining in as she replied to Nathan's encouragement. "Alright, alright."
Walking up to the two, Tina put her hand onto Nathan's as she gave her own praises. "And they may not look like it, dear, but Nathan and F were both formerly in the military, from what Wade's told me."
Jasmine gave a proud smirk at the two as she responded to her sister's claim. "Well, that's quite something. Did she tell you we used to fly for them some years back?"
"Oh, she did, Mrs. Fowley." Nathan replied as he chuckled lightly, F giving a smile of her own as she added her own part to the story.
"Yeah, and given what's happening now, maybe they might call you back for service again. Wade told me you two were excellent pilots."
It was now Jasmine's turn to blush as she chuckled from the compliment, knowing Wade's high praise for her and her sister's flying as she replied. "Well, I can't say that's wrong, Tina saved the day during the flight back here. We ran into an asteroid cluster while in the middle of a jump."
Wade patted Tina on her back as he quietly cheered his love on. "That's what I'm talking about, she's a wonder among the stars, I'm telling you!"
The group fell into an excited fit of laughter at the conversation, a few of the bar patrons taking notice of the bunch as they eventually ceased their joyful moment.
As everyone calmed down, Jasmine spoke up, intending to bring the discussion to another place. "Well, with all that said, it feels great to see you all here. It was such a terrible day after all those company folk showed up." Then, as she scanned the group of friends around her, she noticed someone else missing from this puzzle. "Hey, uh... is Ron here? Did he head off somewhere?"
The mood was quickly put down to a mournful aura as Wade and Tina glanced to the floor in sadness, Nathan and F giving uncomfortable postures as they awaited for someone to speak up on the matter.
Eventually, Wade was the one to open his mouth, breathing steadily as he tried to speak to Jasmine. "Um, Jasmine? Things, uh... really took a nose dive after we got captured. You think we could find a place to sit? It's a lot to talk about."
Looking to the four drones with concern, Jasmine eased her returning fear as she nodded to Wade in agreement. "...Sure, there's plenty of space at the table here." Pointing her arm to the table, which was surrounded by a U-shaped seating bench, Wade and his friends began to move to the table as Tina spoke up.
"I can get us some drinks for the talk, you all want anything?"
"Just some oil, thanks. "Wade answered as F and Nathan gave their own nods to Tina, the drone girl walking over to the bartender near the stage as she went to purchase some beverages.
Sitting down, Jasmine picked up her smartcomm from the table, glancing to it as she spoke up on her half-finished drink. "Heh, and to think I was drowning myself in this drag of a drink before. Probably have to find a different glass."
"Proxi-Vodka? Haven't seen you touch that since we lost Aunt Susan." Wade said solemnly as he examined Jasmine's drink, sighing as he reluctantly continued. "Well, maybe it can go for a few more sips."
Looking to the vodka, Jasmine nodded as she put her smartcomm in her pocket. "I figured, I didn't think this was gonna sound good."
"I wish it did." Wade replied as Tina walked back to the table, a plate of three oil glasses resting on her careful hand as she set it down.
After delivering the drinks, Tina took a seat next to Wade, holding his hand as Jasmine spoke up. "So, where do we start this terrible story?"
Wade gulped a bit as he began to recount the events that transpired today. "Well, it all started when Ron and I came back from the mining colony."

Intro

It’s not much of a stretch to say that violence is the primary form of interaction in video games. With a handful of exceptions, most video games involve guys whacking other guys, with varying degrees of brutality. Even chill games fall into this - Stardew Valley has sections with combat in them! Considering the pervasiveness of violence in video games, there has been a ton of amateur and academic commentary on the topic. However, while this is a well-established school of thought, I haven’t seen people try to apply this to Fire Emblem specifically.
So, let’s do that now! In this post, I’ll be exploring how violence in Fire Emblem is implemented - what limitations are placed on violence, how it warps wider game and narrative design, and what it implicitly says and does not say. I hope this post doesn’t come off as too early-2010s “makes you think”-y, but I do think there are multiple interesting things worth talking about here!
Despite the length of this post, "a brief discussion" is an appropriate title, as we won't be able to go into depth on everything. After all, video games are holistic works, so the attitude towards violence is relevant to every aspect of their design. However, I have managed to wrangle some of these threads into the following structure: first a discussion on the fundamental mode of interaction in Fire Emblem, then how stories are constructed with regards to violence, and ending with the aesthetics of violence and how they relate to characters. Also, as FE is a huge series, be aware that I am gonna be making some broad statements which may not apply to each individual plot point of every game. I actually planned to write 3 case studies around Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses (which have the most interesting attitudes to violence in the series IMO) which point out these deviations, but this post is way too long and full of tangents already. If people are interested, I’ll make a followup to this post which goes into them in more detail. Also also, because of the nature of this post, I’ll actually give a useful TL;DR for once:
TL;DR: Nintendo games must be fun mechanically, and they can’t be too uncomfortable narratively. If you try to provide a counterpoint by saying “oh this Kirby final boss is super dark it eats 100 morbillion galaxies”, you do not deserve rights. IntSys has to keep to this as a 2nd party publisher, but they also have to deal with the fact that their games are at least nominally about ‘war’ (or at least they put their toes into that particular thematic pool). This conflict between making a fun video game for children/teens and the wider framing of the narrative leads to interesting narrative and aesthetic tensions. also fun is cringe, misery is based

“Do you like hurting other people?” (or The Fundamental Mode of Interaction)

OK LISTEN I KNOW I LITERALLY JUST SAID THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO COME ACROSS AS A EARLY 2010s “VIOLENCE IN VIDYA BAD :O????” PERSON BUT I SWEAR I’M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS
The best place to start when talking about violence in video games is to think about the primary form of interaction in said game. In the case of Fire Emblem, this is in the in-chapter gameplay. Sure, in objective terms the player moves arbitrary objects across a 2D grid which perform subtraction on arbitrary objects controlled by the computer, but this is always framed as controlling a squad of soldiers to engage in (typically lethal) combat with enemies (who are normally also soldiers). When you’re not doing this in-chapter gameplay, you are preparing for the next chapter of combat. This involves surveying the area of combat, preparing weapon loadouts, etc, however more recent entries also include light life-sim-esque elements. To summarize, Fire Emblem’s interactivity involves ordering violence as well as the preparations to order said violence.
For players, this strategic thinking is extremely fun and is the primary draw of the series! You have all these tier lists of who’s better at killing, discussion of the maps where you do the killing, complaints about the length of gameplay sections where you don’t do killing, etc. This is by design, as while I don’t know the core brand tenets of Nintendo, I imagine the Reggie quote “If it isn’t fun, why bother?” is carved into a solid gold statue of Mario in the office lobby. This then is enforced on all associated studios, including IntSys and so Fire Emblem. While I would disagree with that Reggie quote (especially the bit where he says “If it’s not a battle, where’s the fun?” which is a wild statement to make about an entire medium), this approach to making games is ultimately fine, and so IntSys tailored the strategic gameplay to be satisfying to your dopamine receptors. You could analyse what the normalisation of violence even in ‘just for fun’ games says about wider gaming culture, but I won’t get into that here. In any case, let’s dig into a few specifics of FE’s interactivity.
One thing that’s interesting with regard to strategy games is the detached perspective of the player. You order units and observe the resulting violence, but it’s not tactile, you don’t directly swing the sword or shoot the bow or cast the spell like with action games. This adds a layer of separation between the player and what fundamentally happens, at least within the framing that the game provides. It’s not like Call of Duty, where your relationship to the violence is very visceral, where you view everything down the barrel of a gun. OK, I probably shouldn’t use a series that I have very little personal experience with (I only listen to the supplementary lore material, so let’s talk about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. While you’re not directly in the driver’s seat, John Sekiro reacts to your every input with extreme responsiveness, so overcoming the game’s challenges i.e. stabbing people is incredibly visceral and satisfying. While this violence is fantastical in nature, there is sufficient blood and explicit sword-action to clearly say “oh yeah you are violently killing all of those bozos with a katana”. Coming back to FE, not only are you far more detached from the violence, it is presented in an extremely cartoony manner… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, we’ll get to the aesthetics later. Point is, Fire Emblem gives the viewpoint of a stoic commander, who Does What Needs To Be Done™, and not the viewpoint of an actual soldier who has to do the actual killing.
Now let’s view the player’s perspective on violence from a different angle. Fire Emblem intends for its combat to be relatively relaxed on the player side of things - the turn-based nature allows the player to calmly think through all of their moves, and you typically have perfect information on the enemies. The only exceptions to this are Fog of WaSame Turn Reinforcements, which are rare and typically unpopular amongst the fanbase. This leans into ‘combat as sport’, where (going back to the Reggie quote) you have a fun time picking apart a puzzle with the tools you have, and we all collectively enjoy this! This is a valid way of designing strategy games, and I like what IntSys has done. However, it’s not the only way of making these games - for example, in Total War you have to juggle all your battalions in real time whilst the enemy is bearing down on you, and the XCOM games always have Fog of War and limited information on the enemies, with you never knowing what kind of awful new monster is going to suddenly charge at you. Don’t get me wrong, neither of these follow ‘combat as war’, the principle that violence should properly mimic the stress, tension and unfairness of actual conflict. Hell, neither of them are particularly mature either - Total War is the strategy game equivalent of smashing action figures together, and XCOM emulates a pulp sci-fi alien invasion story. However, the additional pressures these games have make them hew slightly closer to actual conflict, putting you more in that mindset in a way that the clean fun Fire Emblem doesn’t really do. Again, I want to say FE’s approach to violence in in-map gameplay is fine, but when all three of these franchises have an explicit narrative framing of ‘warfare’, it does make Fire Emblem’s narrative a little more… stretched.
Finally, I want to briefly mention the maps. To steal from a brilliant Jacob Geller video, these are Worlds Designed For Violence. At least outside of the Kaga games, the maps you fight on are primarily designed around how the player interacts with them, i.e. fights on them. While I imagine the narrative designers and artists at IntSys are involved throughout the map design process, the gameplay flow probably takes precedence most of the time. Maps are not designed to resemble realistic places that you have to fight through, they are instead designed primarily to provide fun gameplay experiences before being dressed up by the artists to look realistic/fit the specific story beat. This is a more consistently entertaining approach to map design - heaven knows we have a lot of Kaga castle assault maps which are as fun as actually assaulting an entrenched position IRL - but this lack of friction could potentially take the bite out of the intended vibe, neuter any commentary on violence throughout the story.
You may have noticed that we’ve only talked about the “in-map” gameplay for now, when there’s an entire second half of these games, i.e. all the gameplay between the maps. Don’t worry, we’ll get to all of that, but this may fit better in:

Something something “ludonarrative” something something (or Narrative Implications)

(To clarify, here I’m going to talk about the wider plots and narrative structure as opposed to characterisation, as that fits more into the aesthetics of the series)
It’s not bold to say that the narratives of games have to warp around the core gameplay structure. Especially in AAA video game production, the narrative designers usually have to take a back seat to the systems and level designers, at least outside of the initial rough outline they provide in the original game pitch. In this case, the job of the writer is to form vaguely coherent connective tissue between individual levels, setpieces and expensive pre-rendered cutscenes. This must be a very difficult job, and is probably the reason why most video game stories are the way they are. I am not privy to IntSys internal meetings, but I imagine they abide by this paradigm, trying to give a reason for why you fight 20 battles which roughly align with plot beats that were decided years ago.
Put another way, the writers of Fire Emblem must contrive a reason why the characters fight a vast number of violent battles in a strategic manner. This has a pretty easy solution - war! We have found something it’s good for, as whenever the gameplay designers decide that an extra map is required, the writers can just insert “oh no there’s a blockade of enemy soldiers in the way, guess you gotta kill them all”. This is the case for almost all the games and is a fair enough narrative choice, as it’s frankly one of the few scenarios where you could reasonably contrive so many battles, but it’s worth examining this in a bit more detail.
Even in the framing of warfare, there are still a lot of skirmishes, which sometimes the narrative or tone fails to support - or at least, their presence means that violence isn’t taken that seriously. Let’s take an example from early in Awakening: Emmeryn sends the Shepherds to negotiate an alliance with Regna Ferox. On the way, they are ambushed by Risen on the Northroad (1), have to fight the border guards who think Chrom is a bandit I think??? (2), and then after arriving they need to take part in Regna Ferox’s ritual combat to secure their alliance (3). These beats aren’t necessarily bad, and I actually think Awakening uses these opportunities quite well: the Risen are established as a constant threat to the world (except not really in the main story but that’s a whole other thing), “Marth'' gets more development, we set up Regna Ferox as fighty people who like to fight, and while the middle encounter is very tenuous it does set up a funny joke in Cynthia’s paralogue. However, I want to communicate that if the map/encounter designers need X maps between plot points A and B - in this case, needing low-stakes trials in the tutorial period - then there’s gonna be a fair bit of narrative filler. That is to say, there must be multiple combat encounters that kinda just happen, which makes violence a lot more casual in the narrative. See also the myriad examples of “oh shit random bandits attack!”, used to have a lower stakes map, with bandits appearing and vanishing as needed. This works fine enough in the context of ‘combat as sport’, allowing your favourite scrunglo to build up a triple-digit body count, but this casual attitude circumvents potentially interesting ideas with regards violence. Taking the example further, banditry and its causes are never seriously explored, as bandits are just treated as a filler enemy (except in Based As Hell Thracia 776).
Another narrative consequence of needing so many fights is that… you need to fight. That is to say, any anti-war sentiment or appeal to diplomacy in the series is fundamentally undercut by a) strategic combat being a core appeal of the series and b) narrative beats needing to be structured around fighting enemies. It’s a struggle to have moments of diplomacy and reconciliation when you had a fight within 3 minutes of said moment, lest some people start screaming that things are getting boring. This also makes any appeals to pacifism kinda moot. Xander’s quote about “war bad” in Conquest is utter bullshit, as a huge part of the marketing around that route focuses on the coolness of the tactical combat and its challenge. Eirika and Ephraim can never be equal, because Ephraim’s “fighting is fucken awesome” is encouraged by the gameplay, and Eirika can NEVER save 11037 because we need a final boss and no-one else fits the bill.
Speaking of, in video games it’s best practice to have a big bad guy you fight at the end of the story, the toughest mechanical challenge coinciding with the narrative climax. In Fire Emblem, you have one grand final battle which decides the fate of the war and/or world, before cutting to a brief wrap-up and then credits. This is an attempt to make these games satisfying, which is fine, but this is at odds with an anti-war message (which FE often gestures towards) - that is, actual wars tend to be deeply unsatisfying in a narrative sense! Oftentimes, after a decisive battle, things just kinda keep going for a little while afterwards with casualties continuing to pile up until peace terms are agreed. In the few cases where there is a final battle, it’s more of a formality as the decisive moment occurred months ago. See World War 1 and… World War 2 for examples of each, not to mention a whole host of war-related books and films. The problem with doing this in a video game is that it would require having multiple one-sided fights past the most climatic fight, which would be unfun, and we return to that fucking Reggie quote again. While video games can effectively explore this anti-war narrative space - This War of Mine is a fantastic example - it just doesn’t gel with the fun games that IntSys wants to make. I bring this up in the context of FE because Fire Emblem has such an aesthetic focus on warfare compared to other video games, so it sticks out even further. Even in FE6/FE9 where the war is effectively over in the final few maps, the enemies still remain extremely challenging, because if they didn’t things would be boring.
A few minor things that didn’t fit in above before we wrap up this section. First of all, in making an action packed story, Fire Emblem neglects an important aspect of army life in warfare - the “hurrying up and waiting”. In the majority of cases, the breaks between fights is under 10 minutes, it’s just glossed over. Fire Emblem Three Houses is the exception to this, but there it’s more framed as school life. Some people may say “what’s the point in having large amounts of timewasting where nothing happens in my game about war” and to that I would say fuck you, I want to play Jarhead Emblem. Next, Fire Emblem involves fighting people AND monsters, but these targets are typically given equal narrative weight, outside of maybe a funny line of dialogue about someone being afraid of monsters. In 99% of cases, enemy soldiers you fight have no more humanity than literal monsters. The death of any of your beloved soldiers is a tragedy with big sad death quotes, the death of those poor fuckers is quite literally a statistic which is proudly used to rank how well your guys have done at the end of the game. Finally, the limited scope of the violence the series can show limits the potential impact of scenes. In some cases, this is good as the implication is enough, e.g. the ‘Monica’ scene in Sacred Stones is wonderfully grim and would be weakened by anything explicit. However, a number of other scenes are neutered by the limitations on violence. This fundamentally relates to the aesthetics of the series:

insert prozd tweet/skit here (or Aesthetics, Tone, and Characters)

I’ve been talking a lot about ‘the violence committed’, and this might have seemed a bit weird to you. It’s a true statement, but because the violence is mostly cartoony and abstracted - bad guys disappear into nothingness, there’s no blood, etc - it’s hard to think of it in that way. It’s basically impossible to place Fire Emblem in the same artistic sphere as, say, All Quiet on the Western Front. This aesthetic sense was partially tech-limited in the early NES and SNES games, which was grandfathered into the more graphically complex titles, but it’s also related to how the aesthetics unavoidably warp the tone of the work. IntSys needs their games to be relatively lighthearted and unconcerned with the consequences of its violence, as one of the core appeals of these games is the charming cast of characters. As you would expect, it would be a lot harder to appreciate your goofy blorbos and their lighthearted chats about nothing if you could see the brutal consequences of their triple digit body counts. If violence was more realistic, there would be a lot less “ooh I like training and/or this one hyperspecific food” or “I like peace, but I guess violence may be possibly needed sometimes” and there would have to be a lot more trauma and dourness. There are also age rating concerns, as you can’t exactly sell Come And See Emblem to pre-teens. And once more, to clarify: Fire Emblem as it exists now is fine! I like the lighthearted tone of this series, and I like the characters that reside within it. However, a few problems do arise from IntSys’s approach to violence, as occasionally they brush up against darker ideas but (due to similar reasons to the above) they can never commit to them, which neuters their potential impact. This is especially troublesome with regards to characterisation, as the little dudes are a core appeal, so if something is off that could cause problems. In a sense, at points we have severe aesthetic tension.
A fairly useful case study to see how this affects characterisation is with Mozu in Fire Emblem Fates. Mozu is a charming character, a genial country bumpkin with a bit of an edge at times, who has fond memories of her hometown. This lines up with the lighthearted tone of her recruitment paralogue, where (checks notes) her entire village gets massacred by inhuman monsters, with her mother literally being murdered right in front of her, and she joins up with Corrin’s party because there is literally nothing left of her old life. I understand that people who experience extreme trauma do still manage to live meaningful lives, and that IntSys wouldn’t want to have a character who is a barely functional traumatised mess for 90% of the campaign. However, this doesn’t explain the sheer dissonance between the relatively normal and well-adjusted Mozu who quietly remembers her lost loved ones, and the fact that her village got My Lai’d a handful of weeks ago in the game’s timeline. IMO this would work a lot better if there were a few survivors (instead of literally everyone else dying), with Mozu actively choosing to leave her old life to help others instead of being forced to leave by circumstance. This reduction in scope would mitigate the dissonance between the character and what actually happens to her. This is by far the most extreme example in the series, however I’m sure you can think of others. My issue here is not with having ‘normal’ characters, or with them suffering tragedies, my issue is the dissonance between the two when viewing the scope of said tragedies. This is just one way the series wants to get into darker territory, then swiftly backing off instead of delving into the consequences.
This aesthetic restriction also affects the potential impact of dramatic scenes in the main story, limiting what the focus of these scenes can actually be. This little bit will involve heavy spoilers for Genealogy of the Holy War and Spec Ops: The Line (I KNOW THESE GAMES ARE VERY DIFFERENT WITH VERY DIFFERENT INTENDED DEMOGRAPHICS IN VERY DIFFERENT CULTURAL CONTEXTS, SHUT UP). Both have a very important narrative moment around their midpoints, involving fire magic/white phosphorus respectively. In each game, the deaths that occur are utterly horrific when you think about them. In FE4 the focus is on the drama of the plot twist and effects on the characters, with the actual effects of the violence being left to implication. We don’t know if this was the original intent of Kaga and the team, or if this was enforced by various tech- and publisher-related restrictions, but in either case we do not see anything explicit. In any case, in Spec Ops: The Line, the horror and graphic nature of the violence is completely inescapable, and therefore forms the core of the turning point of the story. The specifics of the violence itself are crucial - the game does not work if you don’t see the consequences of the white phosphorus - and it leads beautifully to the complete descent of its endgame. You may be saying “of course you couldn’t show that violence in FE, it’s a kids game” which is true, and in any case the scene in Genealogy is very good, even without showing the violence. I imagine if we get a remake in the year 202X we wouldn’t see anything explicit anyway, partially due to the publisher but also because the scene doesn’t necessarily need it. The point I am trying to make is that the aesthetics form a limitation on what Fire Emblem can explore, narrative space that the series fundamentally cannot reach.
One more thing, and this isn’t really about the games themselves but the impressions leading into them, and how the aesthetics can affect that. Do you guys remember when the intro cutscene of Three Houses was released a few weeks before release? I do, and I also remember the collective shock of the community when seeing the early previews. It was so drastically different to everything that had come before, and consequently was really intriguing - you can see a lot of speculation in the above comments. To clarify, I don’t want to pretend that 3H is some kind of super mature ultra gritty war story, or that blood = good game, but that beginning cutscene gave one hell of a first impression. Even though the game isn’t that much darker than any other FE game, the sheer unexpectedness put people off-kilter in a kinda awesome way. Does the game actually deliver? YMMV, but I think this (and some of the later cutscenes, such as the mid-game Dimitri one) work quite well. Sometimes, a little injection of harsher violence can go a long way.

Conclusion

Frankly I don’t really have a conclusion, sorry. As you can see, there are so many disparate strands, I can’t possibly make one grand thesis statement. Maybe the inherent contradictions of having warfare in a family friendly video game weakens the potential end result? I guess, but I don’t want to imply that what we have now is bad, as it is pretty good tbh. So, uhh…
…
OK, if I had to say something, it’s more about the process of making this. Having to try and think about how violence intersects with a video game you like takes you in a number of different directions. Ultimately, this process was really fulfilling for me, and I would recommend that you do the same (for FE or anything else)! Trying to analyse something you enjoy from a perspective not usually applied is pretty neat. If you guys have any thoughts (on the points above or your own), I’d be very interested to hear them!
Also, if people are interested, I’ll try to make a few case studies. I would focus on Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses, as (when thinking on this topic) I found that these games were consistently the most intriguing, with the most interesting relationships to violence. This would probably take a while though, as I am gonna be very busy in June, and I probably won’t have time this month either.