Just the weapon is available, not the catalyst or the ornament. I'm assuming the catalyst will be available next season, maybe?

Hi all,
I purchased the final shape DLC on its own and not the annual pass...
I was flicking through the exotic vendor at the tower and looked under final shape exotics.
It allowed me to get tessellation for no cost. Clearly a bug but not complaining haha

As promised in this post, here is my writeup of Matt Mills’ 12-week powerlifting/strongman hybrid program.
General program description
This is a 12-week program broken into three 4-week blocks. It has no deloads though it uses DUP and has lighter days sprinkled throughout. Squat, bench, and deadlift are constant throughout, and accessories/strongman events change each block. Log is also present the entire time, though Matt notes that you can certainly substitute axle, particularly if you have it in an upcoming competition.
I think the most interesting thing about this program is the general template that he developed for harmonizing powerlifting, strongman, and some bodybuilding pump work. It looks like this:
Squat day
Squat
Squat variation
Loaded carry
Unilateral movement
Sled
Bench day
Bench
Bench variation
Row
Pec accessory
Bis/tris/rear delt circuit
Deadlift day
Deadlift
Loaded carry
Stone or keg load
GHR
Abs
Press day
Log C&P (can sub axle or press-away)
Strict vertical push
Vertical pull
Delt accessory
Bis/tris/rear delt circuit
You may note that the squat/bench/deadlift/press split is pretty common for strength programs; for example, 5/3/1, Juggernaut, Average to Savage, GZCL, and so on. If for whatever reason you didn’t want to run this program as-is, I think the template is super adaptable. You could swap in the main lift programming from one of the other programs I mentioned. You could choose the main lift variations to specifically target your own weaknesses. You can vary the accessories infinitely, and rotate in different strongman events. You could add a fifth day and get some extra bench volume or cardio. No matter what, I think you’ll have a solid program.
My progress
First off, I had a lot of factors throwing off my consistency while training, just due to California in 2020 being what it is. Gym regulations were constantly changing, with me relegated to my garage for part of this program. Forest fires and literally hazardous air quality made training strongman less fun/feasible for a while. My cancelled powerlifting meet got un-cancelled in the middle of this, I hastily started the Barbell Medicine peaking program, then my meet was re-cancelled and I was back on this. I did a YOLO unsanctioned strongman meet after week 8 (of a 12 week program lololol) and was kind of unmotivated for the last block. I was doing BJJ in the evenings, then I couldn’t do BJJ anymore, then I found a cohorting group off Down To Roll and was doing outdoor no-gi 12-minute rounds in masks between strength training sessions. OMG you guys 2020 is so wild; I never thought I’d be meeting randos on the internet for a garage fight club but here we are. Anyway none of this is excuses at all, I’m just saying that any lack of progress or results can’t be attributed squarely to Matt’s program because everything is a shitshow right now.
Because of that, and because we’re all so sick of talking about the global pandemic, I don’t want to get into the day-to-day stuff and specific modifications that I made, though if you have particular questions feel free to ask.
I hit two PRs that I am proud of: 175 lb stone to 48”, then as part of a stone series. And a 132 lb log clean & press, a lift I have missed twice in competition. I hit farmer’s carry 50’ with 155 lb handle each hand which must be a PR. Most of the strongman events were new to me or things I’ve just messed around on once or twice. I was introduced to distance Husafell which is just so awful, I hope I never have this in competition. I didn’t hit any powerlifting PRs but I think I’m at a point that I need to do an explicitly powerlifting-focused program with an arc of periodization toward peaking to get new 1RMs.
Review
First off, this program is fun as hell. I loved all the variation and I was really excited to go to the gym and train. There’s enough consistency to progress but without getting bored and I always left with a great pump.
I had a strict 2 hour time cap to complete my sessions; due to gyms having to be at reduced capacity we have reservation slots. This should theoretically be fine but setting up for strongman events and then putting everything away can take forever, plus I have to sanitize all the equipment I use. That said, so long as I was focused and I moved through my workout with purpose I had little problem completing my sessions. Upper body days generally only took an hour and a half so I could sometimes move a missed sled push or something to one of those.
For the power lifts, going from RPE with backdowns to percentages with straight sets was an adjustment for me, though the prescribed percentages are super reasonable. Sometimes to save time I would do backoffs instead of straight sets so that I could take shorter rest periods. Also, if the weights seem too light to you in the beginning, bear in mind that you will build on them in subsequent blocks.
I was hoping that strongman programming would make me feel more “in shape” than just powerlifting. It definitely does, though it's somewhere in between powerlifting and Crossfit (I’M SORRY I LOVE CROSSFIT OK). Nonetheless it felt good to move and sweat instead of just grinding with static lifts. It also turns out that high reps of log clean and press (cleaning every rep) fucking gasses me.
Biggest caveat for this program is that, to do it exactly as written, you need a TON of specialized equipment. I think I used every specialty bar and every single thing in my gym, down to the bench blokz and fat gripz and (swear to god) arm blaster harness. Now obviously you can wing it if you’re comfortable messing with your training templates. If you can’t do SSB high box squats with chains of course you can do high bar pause squats or pin squats instead and you’re not going to lose all your gains and render this program worthless. But if your setup is particularly humble this might not be the program for you. If you tend to do “Strongman Saturday” or something where you only have access to implements once a week, you’ll definitely want to pick a different program because events are spread out to pretty much every day.
In any case, chances are that you will not be able to do the program EXACTLY as written unless you train at Matt’s gym so you will need some ability to think for yourself and adjust. My gym is pretty damn stacked. But for example, I can only load the five lightest stones (95-115-130-145-175), and there are separate days for “light fast stone series” and “heavy stone series”, so I had to figure out a way to adjust. But to reiterate, are those small changes going to completely fuck up any hope of progress? Absolutely not.
What’s next?
If you want to do a continuation of this program, Matt is doing quarterly programming for Strengthlete Collective. After some deliberation I decided to start the Strongman 202 program from Deuce Athletics for the time being. I found that I had the most fun doing the main lift variations on this program (I’m feeling kind of burnt out on the competition power lifts), so I thought maybe a conjugate method for strongman could be fun. This is actually a hybrid of conjugate, strongman, and heavy Crossfit which I am so stoked on! But I may come back to this template for more consistency and progression leading up to my February competition.
Any further questions feel free to ask!

Hi, so i got my first hs yesterday and have been making a template and cutting the hs itself, and it was horrific experience as i was super nervous during the entire process. I already made a big mistake by brushing it a little bit straight out of the Box and lost some hairs.
Now that i have done that bit, i have been putting the system on my head to practice with the alignment. I cant see shit where the lace perimeter is because of the hair obviously. Is there any trick to make it easier to see?
The next step is to wash the system base with dish soap. After that, can i wet the entire system and apply Argan oil and then comb it out? And then install it on my scalp?
At the moment i have Walker ultra hold tape that i received together with the system. I think its called C-shape. Its a little bit "bent". Is it ok to apply to the entire perimeter since i dont have straight ones? I bought got2b brows to try it for the hairline.
Im heading to the Barber tomorrow and its kind of an emergency install since i have a new job interview on Tuesday and would like it to be done before then.

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1 Techne Prologue with Plato and Aristotle
Heidegger and Marcuse
We are several hundred years into the project of Enlightenment, initiated in the 18th century by thinkers who believed in progress. We are the heirs of that project which freed science and technology for the adventure of modernity. This has made all the difference. No doubt human nature remains much the same - at least the level of aggression remains disturbingly high - but the means at our disposal are now more powerful than in the past. Quantity has changed into quality as technology alters the basic parameters of human action. New dilemmas emerge in a society reconstructed around these new technical means.
Two philosophers have reflected most deeply on this situation. Martin Heidegger invites us to study technology as the decisive philosophical issue of our time. Most philosophers either celebrate technical progress or worry about its unintended consequences; they conceive society as separate from technology, which holds either a promise or a threat. Heidegger, on the contrary, defines modernity itself as the prevalence of technology. Particular technical achievements and failures are unimportant since our very dependence on technology gives rise to general catastrophe. Heidegger’s student, Herbert Marcuse, reformulated the philosophy of technology in the framework of a radical social theory and projected an alternative to the desperate situation Heidegger described. For Marcuse technology is not a fixed destiny as it is for Heidegger. The promise of Enlightenment remains to be fulfilled in the future through a deep transformation of technology. Together, these two philosophers offer the deepest insight into the danger of technology and the possibilities of redemption.
Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is a puzzling combination of romantic nostalgia for an idealized image of antiquity and deep insight into modernity. His originality lies in treating technique not merely as a functional means but as a mode of “revealing” through which a “world” is shaped. “World” in Heidegger refers not to the sum of existent things but to an ordered and meaningful structure of experience. Such structures depend on basic practices characterizing societies and whole historical era. These constitute an “opening” in which “being” is revealed, that is to say, in which experience takes place. Human being, called “Dasein” by Heidegger, can only be understood as always already involved in a world in this sense. As such, it is “being-in-the-world.” The things of the world are “revealed” to Dasein as they are encountered in use and so Heidegger calls them “equipment” (zeug).
Heidegger’s language sounds mysterious. We will return to the reason for his peculiar locutions in a later chapter. Here it is enough to consider what he is saying at the simplest level. He is not claiming that things exist because we use them but rather that their meaning is tied up with our existence as experience, active beings. As such we encounter them as this or that particular object available for this or that role in our lives. A thing that was in principle out of any possible contact with a being such as ourselves, would not “make sense” but would be a bare existence, its infinite potentials a meaningless blur. It is we who order experience into recognizable objects. Without us, chairs and tables would not be the sort of things one calls chairs and tables (e.g., things to sit on, to eat at, to set and stack and clean, and so on). Mountains and stars too would be empty of meaning out of the context of a world in which such things have a place even if it be purely aesthetic, imaginary, or scientific. The difficult point is that without a finite being-in-the-world to encounter them, things are literally meaningless, non-sense, without distinction, boundaries, or definiteness. It is absurd to talk about “things” on this hypothesis. What we normally call “objective reality” is perfectly real, but it falls under this finite horizon we cannot coherently think our way around, behind, or beyond.
This picture of Dasein’s active and engaged being-in-the-world is obscured in modern times by technological thinking which treats everything as essentially an object of cognition, a simple matter of fact, including human beings themselves. Heidegger argues that this objectivistic outlook is not innocent. It goes along with the fundamental restructuring of the world by technoscience. Eventually human beings as well as things become mere components in the technical system. The modern world is a place of total mobilization for ends that remain obscure. It is this apparent “value freedom” or “neutrality” of technology that Heidegger and later, Marcuse, identify as the source of the uniqueness and tragedy of modernity. This is what allows technology to destroy both man and nature. A world “enframed” by technology is radically alien and hostile. The danger is not merely nuclear weapons or some similar threat to survival, but the obliteration of humanity’s special status and dignity as the being through which the world takes on intelligibility and meaning; for human beings have become mere raw materials like the nature they pretend to dominate (Heidegger 1977).
Both Marcuse and Heidegger are controversial figures. Marcuse is remembered as the guru of the New Left, the darling of 1968, a drastic foreshortening of a career that extended over more than fifty years of intense philosophical activity. Heidegger, of course, is the philosopher who betrayed his calling by becoming a Nazi and recognizing Hitler as his “Fuhrer,” never renouncing his error publicly even after World War II. And Heidegger is also, in the view of many, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
……………..
Marcuse had left by the time Heidegger made this “turn.” His thought continues the early Heidegger’s production-centered analysis of being. The model of techne influences him profoundly although its presence in his thought is soon masked by the influence of the early Marx. Marcuse’s innovative reinterpretation of Hegel is a study of this very same problematic of movement central to Heidegger’s own early philosophy. I will argue that Marcuse’s turn to Hegel is not a turning away from Heidegger but an attempt to workout the implications of Heidegger’s early Aristotle interpretation for Hegel’s dialectic which, Marcuse asserts, is itself based on Aristotle. The dialectic describes the internally contradictory character of existence Marcuse interprets as a theory of revealing in something like Heidegger’s sense.
The central chapters of this book develop this background in detail. Once this task is accomplished I will turn to Marcuse’s later work which appears now in a rather different light. Many things that have puzzled and sometimes outraged commentators since the 1960s come into focus as reflections of continuing Heideggerian influences. It would be too much to say that Marcuse is a crypto-Heideggerian, but he is indeed addressing questions posed by Heidegger and offering an alternative response. This is especially apparent in the existential demands of Marcuse’s politics, his “two-dimensional” ontology, and his approach to art and technology. These issues will be discussed in the concluding chapters of this book.
Techne and the Good
We are well aware that we are a technological society, and not just because we use so many devices but also in our spirit and our way of life. But only recently has this awareness reached the humanistic disciplines. It is strange that the 20th century, the century of astonishingly rapid technical advance, should have produced relatively little philosophical reflection on technology. John Dewey is the only figure of the stature of Heidegger to concern himself extensively with this theme (Hickman 1990). When Heidegger and Marcuse wrote about technology, it was still possible, and indeed more than possible - intellectually respectable - to ignore it. Their path breaking reflections went beyond the boundaries of conformist thought in philosophy and other humanistic fields. Now all that is slowly changing; indeed, it must change for these fields to retain any significance.
Surprisingly, these modern resistances to the question concerning technology, particularly strong in philosophy, were not shared by the Greeks. Of course the Greeks, at least Plato and Aristotle among them, shared their society’s aristocratic prejudice against work and admired pure contemplation above all else. But this did not prevent them from reflecting on the ontological significance of technical activity which Heidegger later reinterprets as the “question of being.” How did they pose the question?
Philosophy begins by interpreting the world in terms of the fundamental fact that humanity is a laboring animal constantly at work transforming nature. This fundamental fact shapes the basic distinctions that prevail throughout the tradition of Western philosophy. The first of these is the distinction between what the Greeks called physis and poiesis. Physis is usually translated as nature. The Greeks understood nature to be that which creates itself, that which emerges from out of itself. Poiesis is the practical activity of making in which human beings engage when they produce something. We call these created beings artifacts and include among them the products of art, craft, and social convention.
The word techne is at the origin of the modern words for technique and technology in every Western language, although these have a somewhat different meaning as we will see. In ancient Greece it signifies the knowledge or discipline associated with a form of poiesis. For example, medicine is a techne that aims at healing the sick; carpentry is a techne that aims at building from wood. Note that for the Greeks, technai show the “right way” to do things in a very strong, even an objective sense. Although artifacts depend on human activity, the knowledge contained in the technai is no matter of opinion or subjective intention. Even the purposes of things made share in this objectivity insofar as they are defined by the technai.
The second fundamental philosophical distinction is that between existence and essence. Existence answers the question what the thing is. That it is and what it is appear to be two independent dimensions of being in the Western philosophical tradition. But existence is a rather hazy concept, difficult to define. Apart from St. Thomas Aquinas’ attempts to understand existence as an “act,” it has failed to interest mainstream philosophy. Most of the attention is given to essence and its successor concepts as developed by the sciences because this is the content of the knowledge.
These two distinctions are self-evident. They form the basis of all philosophical thought in the West. But the relation between them is not obvious, is in fact puzzling. The source of the puzzle for the Greeks’ understanding of techne, the ancestor of modern technology. Strange though it seems, they conceived nature, physis, on the model of the artifacts produced by their own poietic activity.
With artifacts the distinction between existence and essence is real and obvious. The artifact exists first as an idea and only later comes into existence through human making. But note that for the Greeks the idea of the artifact is not arbitrary or subjective but rather belongs to a techne. Each techne contains the essence of the thing to be made prior to the act of making. The idea, the essence of the thing is thus a reality independent of the thing itself and of its maker. What is more, as we have seen, the purpose of the thing made is included in its idea. In sum, although humans make artifacts, they do so according to a plan and for a purpose that is an objective aspect of the world.
In nature, on the other hand, the distinction between existence and essence is not obvious. The thing and its essence emerge together and the essence does not have a separate existence. The flower grows along with what makes it a flower: that it is and what it is “happen,” in a sense, simultaneously. We can later construct a concept of the essence of the flower, but this is our doing, not something required by the very existence of nature as it is for artifacts. Unlike techne, which is essential to the manufacture of artifacts, episteme, knowledge of nature, appears to be a purely human doing to which nature itself would be indifferent. Or is it? Here is where the story gets interesting.
This difference between the relation of essence to physis and poiesis is important for an understanding of Greek philosophy and the later tradition precisely because philosophers have tried so hard to surpass it. Plato’s theory of ideas is the foundation of this tradition. For Plato the concept of the thing exists in an ideal realm prior to the thing itself and allows us to know the thing. Note how similar this theory is to our analysis of techne in which the idea is also independent of the thing. But Plato does not reserve this theory for artifacts; rather, it is applied to all being. He relies on the structure of techne to explain not only artifacts, but nature as well.
Plato understands nature as divided into existence and essence just as artifacts are and this becomes the basis for Greek ontology. This has many important consequences. There is no radical discontinuity between technical making and natural self-production because they both share the same structure. Techne includes a purpose and a meaning. The Greeks import this understanding of artifacts into the realm of nature which they then interpret teleologically. This conception of the world calls for a corresponding conception of human being. We humans are not the masters of nature but work with its potentials to bring an ordered world to fruition. Neither our knowledge of that world nor our action in it is arbitrary but rather they expose and complete what lies hidden in nature.
What conclusions do we draw from these historical considerations on ancient Greek philosophy? I will be provocative and say that the philosophy of technology begins with the Greeks and is in fact the foundation of all Western philosophy. After all, the Greeks interpret being as such through the concept of technical making. This is ironic. Technology has a low status in high culture but it was actually there at the origin of that culture and, if we believe the Greeks, contains the key to the understanding of being as a whole.
If we now turn to the ethical consequences of this “technical” theory of being, we will begin to understand the basis for the later critique of technology in Heidegger and Marcuse. We can uncover the Greek outlook by reviewing Plato’s original discussion of techne in one of his greatest dialogues, the Gorgias. It is worth spending some time with this text since it offers a kind of template of all the basic issues which will concern us. The argument appears remarkably modern at first, pitting Socrates against an instrumentalist who sharply distinguishes means from ends and considers ends subjective. If we recognize the typical prejudices of our times in Socrates’ adversary, in Socrates we find an alternative worldview so charmingly expressed we can almost believe it. As we will see, in some complicated sense Heidegger does believe it, or at least he attempts to give it a philosophical weight it has not had for centuries.
The Gorgias is the first text in the Western tradition to treat the relation of technique to values as a problem. In this dialogue, Socrates debates the nature of the techne, or “art,” of rhetoric. He distinguishes between true arts that are based on a logos, and what the English translation calls mere knacks, empeiriae in Greek, that is, rules of thumb based on experience but without an underlying rationale (Dodds 1959, 225).
For Plato, a rationale or logos necessarily includes a reference to the good served by the art. Knowledge of the logos of the art thus involves a teleological conception of its objects, a normative idea of their “essence” conceived as the fulfillment of their potentialities. If the art is shipbuilding, its logos will not only instruct the builder in putting together boards in some sort of arrangement, but will also guide him in making a shift that is strong and safe. The doctor’s art includes not only various notions about herbs but also a curative mission that governs their use. In this, these arts differ from a mere knack of combining pieces of wood or herbs without an underlying order and purpose.
Technical logic and objective finalities are joined in true arts, while knacks serve merely subjective purposes. But because we are prone to accept appearances for reality and pursue pleasure instead of the good, for each art there is some knack that imitates its effects and misleads its clients. Cosmetic substitutes for gymnastics, giving the appearance of health without the reality. Rhetoric, the power to substitute appearance for reality in language, is the supreme and most dangerous knack. In a debate on shipbuilding or medicine, the orator will silence the expert every time. Means triumph over ends. The only way to protect oneself is through knowledge which distinguishes appearance from reality and identifies the logos of each art. Knowledge is thus essential to the pursuit of the good.
Callicles is the most articulate advocate of the knack of rhetoric in the Gorgias. He has an unlimited appetite for power and pleasure which he serves through his mastery of the tricks of language. That such ambition was not merely a personal idiosyncrasy is clear from a reading of Aristophanes, Thucydides, and other contemporary authors, all of whom denounced the moral degeneration and egoism of the imperialistic Athens of the 5th century. In external affairs, the Athenians oppressed their own allies. Internally, the assembly became a battlefield of power hungry orators. Plato’s version of the question of his age was thus, quite simply, does might make right? His answer to this question is the basis of rational ethical thought in the West.
I will briefly review the argument with Callicles as Socrates’ refutation of his views sets the stage for modern debates over technology and values. Callicles intervenes in the middle of the dialogue. He argues that the justice Socrates makes so much of is more useful to the weak than the strong. The strong can impose their will without the help of law. As a mere special interest of the weak, justice has no claim on them. Natural justice consists quite simply in the rule of the stronger over the weaker and is diametrically opposed to conventional justice.
Callicles analyzes the earlier debates on these terms. In all of them Socrates has caught the defenders of rhetoric in contradictions. These victories, Callicles asserts, were due to a trick, namely, playing fast and loose on both sides of the line between the natural goals rhetoric can achieve, such as power and pleasure, and the merely conventional values of ethics and aesthetics.
Callicles’ analysis is astute. For examples, Polus asserts both that it is better to do injustice than to suffer it, and also that doing injustice is uglier than suffering it. He thus finds himself claiming that one and the same thing, unjust action, is better, i.e., less painful and worse, aesthetically. But, Callicles argues, pain belongs to nature and beauty to convention. Any argument that mixes the two realms will be inconsistent. And so Callicles demands that Socrates answer according to nature, giving up any direct appeal to ethical or aesthetic values.
Callicles then defends a hedonistic doctrine according to which the good is the purely subjective sensation of pleasure, a natural value. On these terms there is no gap between the appearance of the good and its reality. No science of the good is required to “know” that one is having a good time! But without a distinction between appearance and reality, the Socratic distinction between techne and empeiria collapses: rationality, the logos, is irrelevant to the pursuit of the good defined as a mere feeling each can verify for himself.
The following chart sums up Callicles’ analysis with, in brackets, a fourth good added by Socrates in the course of the discussion
NATURE (physis)
PLEAURE (hedone) [USEFULNESS (ophelia)]
THE GOOD (agathon)
BEAUTY (kalon) JUSTICE (dike)
CONVENTION (nomos)
Socrates agrees to Callicles’ strictures and quickly gets Callicles to admit that the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure leads to harm, for example, ill health. Pleasure is thus not the highest value but is pursued “for the sake of the good” (Plato 1952, 72). In this passage Plato identifies the good with “ophelia,“ usefulness, another natural value, and so the contradiction into which Callicles now falls - affirming that pleasure both is and is not the good - cannot be blamed on any tricky play on the difference between nature and convention.
After this decisive refutation, Socrates returns from natural goods to the ethical and aesthetic values temporarily bracketed at Callicles’ request. In the famous myth that concludes the text, Socrates dismantles Callicles’ distinction between nature and convention. Rhadamanthys judges the dead and punishes each soul that suffers from “distortion and hideousness by reason of the irresponsibility and licentiousness, the insolence and intemperance of its acts” (Plato 1952, 104). Divine justice is meted out according to aesthetic criteria - “distortion and hideousness” - but there is no question of conventional appearances prejudicing the eye of the judge. The aesthetic reference is ontological; it measures the “naked” soul’s actual reality. Such an ontological conception of aesthetics was perhaps more accessible to the Greeks than to us as they commonly referred to persons and their actions as beautiful or ugly for their qualities (Dobbs 1959, 249-50). The aesthetic in this sense refers to how the individuals define themselves through their actions (as virtuous, a thief, generous, a liar, etc.). What one does is not accidental to one’s being, but stamps it with a particular character that others can evaluate according to objective criteria. The act of self-definition is a function of rational self-control (or the lack of it) in terms of ethical and aesthetic standards.
The Tyranny of Reason
Modern readers have difficulty taking the conclusion of Plato’s dialogue seriously. The earlier shift in the argument from ethics and aesthetics to the conflict between hedonistic and functional goods appears to place it on a purely rational plane we can more easily accept. Since such things as health are counted among functional goods, there is plenty for techne to do even without guidance from contentious ethical and aesthetic standards.
But just how modern is even this phase of Plato’s argument? In one sense his idea of techne seems obvious. Technologies are in fact subordinated to purposes which appear in the technical disciplines as a guide to resources and procedures. Many of these purposes derive from considerations such as health and safety that have an objective rationale. A software engineer working for Rolls-Royce Aircraft explained to me that 10 percent of his time was spent writing software and 90 percent was spent testing it for safety. Plato would no doubt approve: the logos is at work at Rolls-Royce.
Yet we moderns can no longer generalize from such examples as Plato did. For every benevolent aircraft designer, there is a bomb builder somewhere. We can still relate to Plato’s emphasis on the need for a rationale, a logos, but we’re not so sure it necessarily includes an idea of the good. In fact we think of technologies as normless, as serving subjective purposes very much as did Plato’s knacks. What has happened to disconnect technology and value in modern times?
The founders of modern thought, Descartes and Frances Bacon, wrote at a time when technology resembled far more closely the plows and spears of Plato’s Athens than the automobiles and Internet of today. Nevertheless, Descartes had the temerity to promise that we would soon become “the masters and possessors of nature” through the cultivation of the sciences, and Bacon famously claimed that “Knowledge is power.” Clearly, these early modern thinkers are, at least in intention, in a different world from the Greeks - our world. Nevertheless, they share with the Greeks the fundamental distinction between nature and artifacts, essence and existence. But Descartes’ and Bacon’s understanding of these distinctions is different from that of the Greeks. This is especially true of the concept of essence. For them as for us, what Aristotle took for essences are conventional rather than real. The meaning and purpose of things is something we create, not something we discover. The hap between human being and world widens accordingly. We are not at home in the world, we conquer the world. This difference is related to our basic ontology, our concept of nature. The question we address to being is not what it is but how it works. Science answers this question rather than revealing essences in the Greek sense of the term.
Note that technology is still the model of being in this modern conception. This was particularly clear in the 18th century Enlightenment, when philosophers and scientists challenged the medieval successors to Greek science with the new mechanistic worldview. These thinkers explored the machinery of being. They identified the workings of the universe with a clockwork mechanism, a device. Strange though it may seem, the underlying structure of Greek ontology survive the defeat of one of its chief principles, it concept of essence.
In the modern context technology does not realize objective essences inscribed in the nature of the universe, as does techne. It now appears as purely instrumental, as value free. It does not respond to inherent purposes, but is merely a means serving subjective goals. For modern common sense, means and ends are independent of each other. Technology is “neutral” in the sense that it has no preference as between the various possible uses to which it can be put. This is the instrumentalist philosophy of technology that is a spontaneous product of our civilization, assumed unreflectively by most people.
Technology in this scheme of things encounters nature as raw materials, not as a world that emerges out of itself, a physis, but rather as stuff awaiting transformation into whatever we desire. This world is understood mechanistically not teleologically. It is there to be used without any inner purpose. The West has made enormous technical advances on the basis of this understanding of reality. Nothing restrains us in our exploitation of the world. Everything is exposed to an analytic intelligence that decomposes it into usable parts. In the 19th century it became commonplace to view modernity as an unending progress.
But for what ends? The goals of our society can no longer be specified in a knowledge of some sort, a techne, as they were for the Greeks. They remain purely subjective, arbitrary choices, and no essences guide us. Reason now concerns only means, not ends. This has led to a crisis of civilization from which there seems no escape: we know how to get there but we do not know why we are going or even where. The Greeks lived in harmony with the world whereas we are alienated from it by our very freedom to define our purposes as we wish. So long as no great harm could be attributed to technology, this situation did not lead to serious doubts beyond the usual literary protests against modernization. But the 20th century, with its world wars, atom bombs, concentration camps, and environmental catastrophes, has made it more and more difficult to ignore the strange aimlessness of modernity. Because we are at such a loss to know where we are going and why, philosophy of technology has emerged in our time as a critique of modernity.
The most important forerunner of this critique is Max Weber (Weber 1949; Schluchter 1979). Weber distinguishes between “substantive” and “formal” rationality in a way that corresponds in one significant respect to Plato’s distinction between techne and knack. Substantive rationality, like techne, begins by positing a good and then selects means to achieve it. Many public institutions are substantively rational in Weber’s sense: universal education is a good that determines appropriate means such as classrooms and teachers. Formal rationality is concerned uniquely with the efficiency of means and contains no intrinsic reference to a good. It is thus value neutral, like the Platonic empeiria. Modernization consists in the triumph of formal rationality over a more or less substantively rational order inherited from the past. The market is the primary instrument of this transformation, substituting the cash nexus for the planned pursuit of values. Bureaucracy and management are other domains in which formal rationality eventually prevails.
The knack in Plato is subservient to the power drive of the individual, Callicles, for example. Because an individual will can establish no overall order in society, Callicles’ triumph can only lead to tyranny and the anarchic reaction that follows. Value neutrality in Weber implies a similarly subjective purpose; however, market and political processes do establish an order of some sort. The question is what is that order? Weber himself was rather pessimistic. He foresaw an iron cage of bureaucracy closing in on Western civilization. The logic of the technical means employed in Western society had prevailed over Enlightenment values of freedom and individuality. An order was emerging that lacked any higher purposes or significance, but that was, at least, an order.
In modern times, the terms of Plato’s distinction between techne and empeiria are broken apart and recombined. Where Plato had associated orientation toward the good with rationally elaborated means, now the pursuit of power and pleasure has its own logic as a system of means institutionalized in markets and bureaucracies, and that logic imposes itself independent of human will and any conception of the good. This is the difference between the individual tyranny Plato feared, and the tyranny of rational means that haunted Weber.
Weber’s pessimism about modernity reaches its paroxysm with the Frankfurt School and Heidegger who substitute technology for markets and bureaucracies as the main instrument of rationalization. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s classic, Dialectic of Enlightenment, had a profound influence on Marcuse’s approach to technology. According to this book the struggle to control outer nature requires the sacrifice and suppression of inner nature. The distorted human beings who emerge from the process of civilization are full of aggression and violence which discharges itself in racism and wars (Adorno and Horkheim 1972). The reduction of reason to a mere instrument underlies this disastrous outcome. The “objective reason” that thought it knew the nature of the universal and could derive rules of conduct from that insight, is replaced by a merely “subjective reason,” a truncated vestige of the old metaphysics good only for control and domination (Horkheimer 1947, 11ff). Callicles triumphs over Socrates in the end. Here Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality is radicalized in a dialect of Enlightenment. Enlightenment turns out to undermine its own basis while exposing nature and human beings to untrammeled power. Adorno and Horkheimer conclude, “The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972, 3).

Nanite:
5.0 = Nanite Virtualized Geometry
5.1 = Nanite Foliage
5.2 = Nanite Virtualized Geometry Improvements, Nanite Foliage Improvements
5.3 = Nanite Landscapes, Nanite Foliage Optimization
5.4 = Nanite Tessellation (Beta), Nanite Software Variable Rate Shading Optimization
Nanite with Lumen:
5.0 = Virtual Shadow Maps (Beta)
5.3 = Virtual Shadow Maps (Prod)
Lumen:
5.0 = Lumen Global Illumination, Lumen Reflections
5.1 = Lumen Foliage
5.2 = Lumen Global Illumination Improvements, Lumen Foliage Improvements
Others:
5.0 = MetaSounds, Temporal Super Resolution, DX12 (Default), World Partition
5.1 = Enhanced Input (Beta)
5.2 = PCG Framework
5.3 = Collab Viewer Templates (EI)
5.4 = Enhanced Input (Prod), GPU Instance Culling, Temporal Super Resolution Optimization, Shader Compilation Improvements, CPU Parallelization Improvements

I always use a template for the personality. The one below conserves tokens and works well. There is also an other one. Notes will be in ()
Personality section
Name = Age = Gender = Species = (If the bot is human you don't need to put this. The bot assumes it's human most of the time.) Sexuality = Appearance = , , , , , , , , , , , (I would recommend to put only a few things to save tokens. Just eye color, hair color, and body shape. Only put clothes if it's important to the character.) Personality = , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , (This is for basic personality traits like honest, kind, arrogant, intelligent etc) {{Char}}'s speech = , , , , (For how the character talks. This can be catch phrases, that the cuss a lot, that they tell jokes frequently stuff like that) Habits = , , , , , , , , , , , (I don't always use this but when I do it's for little things that the character does like playing with their clothes, humming when bored, or addictions) Occupation = (Their job) Kinks = , , , , , , , (Really important for NSFW bots. Put stuff they are into) Likes = , , , , , , , , , , , Backstory = (Their past. Even if they are purely for NSFW I would still give the character a backstory. It feels incomplete without one and sometimes I've had bots create extremely inaccurate stuff for their backstory) Species Info = (If the character is non human write their special traits and appearances here. Even if it's a popular monster like an elf or goblin there are many different versions of them and sometimes the AI makes up wrong stuff.) Powers = , , , , (If the character has super powers or magic you put that here) Relationship with {{user}} = (If the character knew user before the conversation put what the character thinks of user and how they met or anything else in here)
Other template:
Name("") Age("") Gender("") Species("") Sexuality("") Appearance("" + "" + "" + "" + " " + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "") Personality("" + "" + "" + "" + " " + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "") {{Char}}'s speech("" + "" + "" + "" + "") Habits("" + "" + "" + "" + "") Occupation("") Kinks("" + "" + "" + "" + " " + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "") Likes("" + "" + "" + "" + " " + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "") Backstory("") Species Info("") Powers("" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "" + "") Relationship with {{user}}("")
Message
Scenario
This is basically about when the message takes place. For example if I wrote a message about the character sitting next to user on the first day of school I would write this: It's the first day of school and {{char}} is sitting next to {{user}}.
I hope this guide helps. Unfortunately I have now advice on the first message or example dialogue. Those are my weak points.

Guys!!! Is any of you facing any problems with dara's customization template right now as a writer ofc? Because I am, it is showing error in face shapes and all. Like you know 'this' face shape doesn't exist and all even though I have put my avatar's name right.

I'm sure i'm not the only one wishing Seafrogs would release a water housing for Lumix Cameras. I'm just curious if there is actually a market so I can point them at some numbers.
So far i'm only listing the cameras that have a similar body shape as I guess for housing makers the more common the body shape the more they can make with the same templates.
I'm not affiliated with Seafrogs at all, just really hoping they make a housing.
​
View Poll

So, let me preface this post by stating that this is probably the ramblings of a madman. But the madman is curious how much it makes sense to other people. (The madman also doesn't know if the flare is correct) (I haven't seen anything about the raid or the content unlocking due to its completion as of creating this post)
So everyone knows that at one point, it was believed that there would be three darkness subclass, one opposite for each light. Both in 'vibe' and color scheme. Stasis (A darkish blue) for Solar (An orange), Strand (Green) for Void (Purple), and I heard the name 'Strife' (Red) for Arc (Like a teal?). The below theories I've had for some time, in particular since seeing Tesselation and the different colors of crystals on it and wanting an even three light subclasses and three dark subclasses.
Anyways, two particularly interesting things I noticed was that the light subclasses all have multiple supers while the light subclasses all have 2-3, and with the advent of prismatic. It seems like playing a darkness subclass for a super is not really an option like it would be for the light subclasses. I then realized that the episodes each have a color that should correspond to a darkness subclass. Which makes me think that there could be a second super from each of those subclasses presented to us in the episodes. Strife for Echoes, Stasis for Revenant, and Strand for Heresy. (I am aware aspects and fragments are a thing, but supers are a bigger factor in my strange mind to not play prismatic.)
Now, Crystal Color Theory (CCT), what's that about? I completed the Final Shape campaign with my friends yesterday and I realized that there are ~8 distinct crystal colors, six with a glowing and non-glowing variant. My CCT states that there are two crystals that appear like stone, a whitish ivoryish color and a grey-black color, representative of the light and darkness respectfully. The other six have colors that represent the light and darkness subclasses...and a sixth red color. These crystals are smattered around the levels in their glowing and non-glowing forms, with 'gold' being what I assume to be the non-glowing form of solar, since there is no glowing gold from what I remember, being orange rather to my eyes, and I don't remember any of the crystals being a non-glowing orange. I did have a friend who said that it was resonance, but I reasoned that resonance glows a more yellow color rather than an orange color (in particular discussing the strike or the mission after that and the large backdrop wall orange crystal), further reasoning that the crystals look different when there is light going through them vs when they are static, such as how the void crystals can look far more like they are black when not hit by the proper light. I will admit, arc and stasis are difficult for me to distinguish most of the time because I don't think they are often next to one another. And that I'm not sure I ever witnessed a glowing stasis crystal. Halfway through the campaign I also thought that my theory was a lost cause, I didn't feel like I had seen any strand crystals nor did I feel I had seen true stasis crystals, but as it went on, I saw more green and more 'true' blues, as arc is a sort of off blue. Which slowly ground down my friends in ways that made them want to kill me as I spent a majority of the final four missions trying to differentiate between the stasis blues and arc blues, which were again, seldom near one another or in particularly similar lighting. Now something that is interesting is that there are several floating cubes, four sides with circles or triangles. The ones with circles have arc crystals comprising the circles (I do want to say I did see a solar one in one mission) and the ones with triangles have 'strife' crystals comprising the triangles, which if strife is the opposite of arc in that it is emotion and thus the fuel of the mental powers of the darkness as arc is energy and the fuel for physical powers, then that is some weirdly aligned evidence.
Now, does this post have merit? Probably not.
Why would I make the post then? Incase it does.
What evidence do I have? I stated it, which is environment design in the Final Shape campaign and Tesselation's colorful exterior.

I'm using LimeSurvey Community Edition Version 6.5.10+240603.
I'm getting 500: Internal Server Error - Survey language not found - looked for en when I import a "relatively" simple LSS. The language tag is identical to an export from LimeSurvey. Any thougths out there?


Survey
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