I'm a(n interested and excited) noob and this will be my first build. After some rabbit-hole research and attempts I've endet up with this (maybe almost) final list.
Any comment pro and/or contra (preferably incl. reasons -> don't wanna stay a noob) are most welcome. Also is this list future/upgrade proof?
Budget -> max. 2000 € (including Monitor) Countrywise i'll switch around since sometimes other offers are cheaper even incl. delivery costs. de is a good place to start.
PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor	€347.99 @ Mindfactory
CPU Cooler	Cooler Master MasterLiquid 360L Core ARGB Liquid CPU Cooler	€89.36 @ Amazon Deutschland
Motherboard	Gigabyte B650 GAMING X AX ATX AM5 Motherboard	€184.90 @ Galaxus
Memory	G.Skill Flare X5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory	€116.90 @ Alza
Storage	Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€164.83 @ Amazon Deutschland
Video Card	Gigabyte WINDFORCE OC GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB Video Card	€575.99 @ Caseking
Case	NZXT H7 Flow ATX Mid Tower Case	€118.65 @ Amazon Deutschland
Power Supply	SeaSonic FOCUS GX-1000 ATX 3.0 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	€156.89 @ Alternate
Monitor	LG UltraGear 27GR75Q-B 27.0" 2560 x 1440 165 Hz Monitor	€229.99 @ Galaxus
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total	€1985.50
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-05-14 19:42 CEST+0200

After getting a bunch of help with deciding which CPU and GPU to go for for my use case this is the first "final version" of my build. Given that I have about 50 eur left in my budget after compiling all of this, what is something that could, or rather, should be upgraded or changed?
PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor	€183.99 @ Mindfactory
CPU Cooler	ARCTIC Freezer 36 CPU Cooler	€21.55 @ Amazon Deutschland
Motherboard	ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard	€161.19 @ Galaxus
Memory	G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory	€128.89 @ Galaxus
Storage	Western Digital Blue SN580 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€66.90 @ Alza
Video Card	Palit Dual GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER 12 GB Video Card	€648.89 @ Galaxus
Case	Deepcool MATREXX 50 ATX Mid Tower Case	€53.75 @ Amazon Deutschland
Power Supply	Corsair RM750e (2023) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	€94.90 @ Amazon Deutschland
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	€1360.06
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-05-06 21:14 CEST+0200

...I knew you when Our common goal was waiting for the world to end.
Yeah, couldn't resist the reference to "Black Sheep" by Metric. Or to Scott Pilgrim, maybe.
Anyway! This is another longish one, and a bit of a culmination of David's miniature paranoia arc. We'll be back to cozy food after this. I ran a little guessing game on my Discord thread over who was behind the break-in. Congratulations to longtime Sifal Superfan u/Killsode-slugcat for successfully guessing "One of the UN soldiers". Honorable mention to u/JulianSkies for guessing "Rosi the Yotul", which is also kind of correct, just not for this specific break-in.
I forgot to mention this last week, but I'm starting to make a point of not chaining myself to established NoP lore quite so much, particularly when that lore doesn't actually exist. So you're gonna catch me talking about aspects of the 2136 geopolitical landscape and the historical aftermath of the Satellite Wars, and most of that is just me making stuff up, e.g. referencing an otherwise unheard of event called the Buryatian Counter-Pogroms last week.
[First] - [Prev]
----------------------
Memory Transcription Subject: Chiri, Gojid Refugee
Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136
The sun was setting over the urban sprawl off to the west as David brought the boat full of supplies back to the rubble-specked island we were living on. I had my new holopad in my coat pocket, but aside from that, we’d left our purchases on the boat until we had a better idea of what was going on back at the restaurant. Strong-looking humans in blue uniforms, a darker shade of blue than the Peacekeepers, were filtering out of the building just as we strolled up.
“Hi, I’m the owner, I called it in,” said David, waving the law enforcement agents down. “What happened?”
One officer glanced back into the restaurant, and shook his head. “Nothing to report,” he said, an annoyed twist to his mouth. “There were no looters. You’re safe to head back in.” He wasn’t making eye contact with David when he spoke. I thought humans normally did that.
“The door wasn’t unlocked, was it?” asked David. He’d made a big show of locking it as we left. He’d said I was already the second alien to barge in while the place was closed.
“Have a nice evening, sir,” said the police officer, conspicuously neither answering the question nor setting us at ease.
David and I watched the officers filter out and drive off, not sure whether or not it was a wise idea to quietly dread whatever, if anything, we’d find inside. He took a deep breath, and led the way.
What we found was a human woman in a formal suit--wasn’t that normally menswear?--seated at a table, glaring at the door, her polished black shoes propped up on another chair for comfort. There was a glass of some brown liquor on the table in front of her, along with a couple lime wedges, some already used, and the rest of the fancy-looking bottle. Behind her, I noticed that the only gap in the bar’s lineup was on the top shelf. Beyond that, my deductive reasoning had nothing. I had no idea who this woman was.
Jilted former lover, here to steal him back from you, the critical voice offered immediately. She was always happy to put that kind of evil into words.
“Good evening, Charmaine,” David said coldly. “We’re not currently open. Shall I close out your tab for the añejo?” Aged tequila, then, if my memory served.
“Fuck you,” she said, pointing her glass at David aggressively. “You called the fucking cops on me?!”
“You broke into my restaurant,” David scoffed, incredulous.
“How did you even know I was here?” Charmaine asked pointedly.
“I’m sorry, you want hints on how to break into my building?” David said, eyebrows raised.
“If I wanted to go around intimidating civilians, I would have joined the CIA in the first place,” Charmaine said. “I didn’t. I joined the Peacekeepers. It’s a big, scary galaxy out there. Somebody with experience had to look after all those green fucking volunteers.” She glared bitterly at David. “You and your Plucky Space Girlfriend are the reason I’m stuck in this shit job on the home front instead now. So yes, the least you could do is help me get good at it.”
Plucky Space Girlfriend? I pointed to myself in baffled confusion.
“What? No, not you,” said Charmaine, incredulous. “Who the fuck even are you? Hell, how did you even get here? Aren’t all the Gojids supposed to be back at the--”
David cut her off, and redirected her back to her initial question. Away from asking questions about me. “Security system went off,” he said, patting the pocket containing his holopad.
“I disabled the security system,” Charmaine shot back.
“Backup security system,” said David, pointing at the ceiling. The two humans stared at each other in baffling silence for a few moments. Faintly, from several stories up, at the very edge of hearing, I could just barely make out the sound of a dog barking.
Charmaine’s jaw dropped. “Oh come on! You had a fucking nanny cam going for the dog?!”
“Yup! Poor little guy was freaking out, so I checked the main security system. Couldn’t see the feed for some reason.” David shrugged, smirking. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, you’re new at this.”
“Again, go fuck yourself,” said Charmaine. “You know goddamn well why I’m new at this.”
“Where’s your Plucky Earth Boyfriend, by the way?” asked David, taking the seat across from her. I followed David, but I wasn’t following this conversation.
“Do I look like I fuck dudes?” Charmaine scoffed, running her hand through a head of hair trimmed shorter than David’s.
“You look like a cop,” offered David helpfully.
“Fuck. You.” Charmaine clearly hadn’t found his observation helpful. “If you’re asking about William, College Boy’s at a plum desk job down in Arlington. Old jarheads like me get stuck with fieldwork.”
“Oh, you never mentioned your service history,” said David. “I’m surprised the Peacekeepers didn’t just transfer you back to the Marines.”
“The Powers That Be wanted me on a shorter leash than that,” said Charmaine, icily. “The leash feels great, actually! You should put one on, too.”
David rolled his eyes. “Is that why you’re here? You and I both know I’m entirely too stubborn and opinionated to follow orders at all, let alone to do proper intelligence work. This is just about loose ends, and making sure I don’t talk about what happened. They can’t properly call it Top Secret if it happened in plain sight of a civilian with no clearance, and they’re mad they can’t arrest me if I run my mouth about it.”
I blinked, as the puzzle suddenly started to click into place. “Oh! Okay, wait, is this about that Arxur you met?”
I didn’t think Charmaine’s jaw could drop any further, but there it went. Even David froze in shock, his eyes impossibly wide.
“You told a fucking HERBIVORE?!” Charmaine screeched. “How stupid are you?!”
I was on my feet in an instant, claws brandished with rage. “Call me an herbivore again and I'll rip your fucking skin off!” I roared.
Chairmaine’s eyes went wide and whipped over to David. Her head shook incredulously. “You son of a bitch,” she said hollowly. “You fucking did it again, didn’t you. Didn’t you!”
David smirked, and tried to regain momentum. “Did you know that the Kolshian meat allergy, at least in Gojids, isn’t triggered by cheese?” He leaned forward, conspiratorially. “Ask me how I know,” he whispered.
“How the fuck…” the human woman breathed. “You realize this isn’t making your case easier, right? Like, what, I’m supposed to head back home and tell my handlers that the goddamn Alien Whisperer doesn’t want to work with us?”
David shrugged. “It was a fluke.”
“Convincing an alien to betray its culture and defect to Earth once is a fluke! Twice, it’s becoming a fucking pattern!” Charmaine shouted.
“I barely did anything! It’s selection bias!” David insisted. “Only the open-minded ones are willing to come to Earth at all. Seriously, have we even had a single visiting foreign head of state yet? Even our staunchest allies are still too terrified to come see the Savage Predator Homeworld.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Charmaine muttered. “The CIA needs you.” She rolled her eyes. “Probably.”
David shook his head. “There's only one intelligence job I'll accept, and I'm already applying for it.”
Charmaine raised her eyebrows. “And that is?”
“Gang of Eight.”
David was a somewhat reserved person most of the time. So were most of the on-duty Peacekeepers I’d run into. It reasonably followed from that, then, that the sound that came out of Charmaine was, without hyperbole, the loudest I had ever heard a human laugh, ever.
“You’re running for Congress!?” she managed to eventually squeeze out between full-body comedy convulsions.
David shrugged. “City council first, maybe work my way up, but yeah. Gonna try my hand at politics.”
“Sorry, what’s the Gang of Eight?” I asked.
“America’s main legislative body has hundreds of delegates,” David said. “On paper, they’re supposed to oversee all intelligence work, but it’s just too impractical to brief all of them on matters of utmost secrecy, so in reality, only eight of them get briefed on the full picture. It used to be eight specific members back under the old pre-SatWar two-party system, but it’s a little more free-form nowadays.”
Charmaine rolled her eyes. “It’s still never a first-term congressman with no previous intelligence work.”
“It can be if the CIA says he’s got a talent for it,” David said, smirking. “In fact, I hear they’re so optimistic about my abilities, they dispatched an agent to ask me in person to work with them.”
Charmaine snorted dismissively, but there was a hint of a smile as she took another sip of her tequila. “Smartass.”
David smirked. “Now, now, there’s no need for obscenity! Why, I’m just a down-to-Earth small business owner with some strong opinions about how our mismanaged foreign policy’s starting to hurt our economy,” he said. “Who’s going to speak for the hardworking average American? Not those fat cats up on Capitol Hill, I’ll tell you what!”
“Stahp,” Charmaine groaned, as she slumped over her glass. “I’m not fuckin’ drunk enough to hear your shitty talking head impersonation.”
“And you won’t be,” said David. “Again, we’re closed, and I have some ingredients to unload, so unless you plan to help carry groceries, would you mind calling yourself a cab?”
The agent looked at the door, her brow furrowed, deciding her next course of action. The conversation sounded like it was concluding, at last, but it didn’t feel like the matter was resolved at all. If they wanted David’s silence, then it didn’t sound like Charmaine’s employers would consider a long-term career in public service to be a serious compromise. She looked like a woman who’d reached a dead-end, not a destination, and so she was already plotting a new course.
She’s a threat to the life we’re trying to build here, said the critical voice, far more emotional than usual. We’re leaving ourselves vulnerable. She’ll keep coming back until she gets what she wants.
She could interfere with our visa application, said the odd voice, far more methodical than usual. Force David to choose between silence and us.
Did I have the voices on backwards?
The two greatest threats to our safety are your weakness and your foolishness, the critical voice explained. I have to say unkind things to keep you alive. We are NOT getting hurt again!
You were raised an herbivore, but your blood remembers the hunt, the odd voice explained. You live astride two worlds. Your instincts know how to hurt people. Your imagination knows how others can hurt you.
What’s the Council’s recommendation, then?
Strike now, they said.
“So I’m sorry, but could I ask the obvious question?” I said, doing my best impersonation of a Fissan businesswoman in the midst of a particularly icy negotiation. “Why does it matter if David talks? The world’s been turned upside-down around once per month since the United Nations made first contact. What’s one more terrible revelation on the pile going to do?”
Charmaine shook her head in frustration. “I don’t fucking know. The ‘why’ is above my pay grade. I just have my orders.”
I tilted my head. “You don’t even know why talking about it is bad, but you somehow know that telling a former member of the Federation is worse?”
“I…” Charmaine began, baffled. She leaned back in her chair, away from me. “I mean, we don’t want state secrets leaking to the wider world.”
“I said ‘former’, though?” I said quizzically. “I'm on Team Earth now.”
“If I might interject?” David brushed his hair back, and seemed to mimic my stance at the table instinctively. He fell into formation as naturally as he breathed, covering me like a gunship off my wing. Was this the power of a social predator? “Look, if I had to speculate,” he said, “I’d say it’s a policy concern. I have more fingers on one hand than there have been conventional attacks on U.S. soil, and every single one ended in escalation. People are already calling for blood. Pull up social media from the last few weeks, and the only topic that was trending harder than ‘Glass Nishtal’ was ‘Humanity First’, and that particular movement has already drawn blood.”
Charmaine looked like she was searching for a good spot to hook into that argument. It had the cadence of supporting keeping the Arxur incident secret, but David had omitted that connection when making his case. He was technically just describing the regional zeitgeist without actually making a point. It was a good distraction, and I trusted that he had a deeper point he was thrusting towards.
The human woman is strong, said the odd voice, but we can outwit her. It’s two against one.
She’s probably beginning to regret drinking before this conversation, yes, said the critical voice.
“How does that tie back to the Arxur?” I asked, trying to set David up for the kill.
“Because my little incident makes the Arxur look sympathetic,” he said. “When the Federation had us dead to rights, it was the Arxur who bailed us out. That knowledge is already fucking with the narrative. Add in this idea that they were victims as much as victimizers, and suddenly policy shifts. The UN is gearing up for total war against the Federation. If this gets out, there’s going to be a massive popular push for us to detour into Arxur regime change.”
“Right!” said Charmaine, taking the bait. “So that’s why this can’t get out!”
David tilted his head forward. “You want us to go to war without letting the public make an informed decision on who we’re attacking?”
Charmaine flinched like she’d been struck. “That’s not what I--”
“No no, it’s fine, we’ve got a wonderful track record on undeclared wars with no civilian oversight,” said David. “We should just let the nice powerful men in suits do whatever they think is best for America and the economy. Aafa could use a few pineapple plantations.”
Charmaine leapt to her feet in a fury. I did likewise, and she froze up. The ex-Peacekeeper wasn’t wearing her shiny blue body armor anymore, just a set of clothing that humans called a “suit”. See, I’d been learning a lot today. I’d learned the names of a number of different kinds of human clothing, for example. I’d also learned that my quills alone could pretty trivially shred through most of them.
The human woman glared at me, and sat back down. “Keep Hawaii out of your fuckin’ mouth,” she muttered at David. “But yeah, I see your point.”
I sat down as well. “That covers the issues with telling humanity,” I said, “but what about people like me?”
This time, David’s attention swiveled, and it was me that he looked at with concern. His mouth opened, but he said nothing for a few moments, choosing his words carefully. “There’s too much hatred for the Arxur among the people of the Federation,” he said softly. “Opening doors with the Arxur might close them with the Feds. Even seeing us openly considering working with the Arxur might send what few allies we have running to the hills.”
Charmaine nodded. She hadn’t made the point, but it supported her position nevertheless. “Yeah, I mean, that’s a pretty big geopolitical concern. Good enough excuse to keep this under wraps, right?”
I didn’t need the chorus inside my head for this one. Deep down, I already knew what to say.
“I don’t feel like my life has been better for having the truth hidden from me,” I said softly. “If the Arxur were always willing to talk with meat-eaters, we Gojids might have been greeted as allies, like you were, if our culture hadn’t been stolen from us.”
Charmaine looked afflicted. Was that just empathy, or had her culture been stolen from her as well?
“So, wait, are you still Catholic, or did you finally stop living in fear of centuries-old missionaries?” asked David, showing an aggressive lack of tact.
Charmaine leapt to her feet again in a rage. “What did I fucking say?” Charmaine said threateningly.
“You said to keep Hawaii out of my mouth,” David said calmly. “I’m talking about the Philippines.”
“I’m from both archipelagos,” Charmaine growled.
“Then you can appreciate the damage that colonialism can do to a culture twice over,” said David, “and how important it is to reverse it. Do you even recognize the name of Kulalaying, the Moon’s Shadow, or do you simply accept the gods the Spaniards inflicted on you?”
Charmaine shook her head, hollowly. “So… what, that’s a pre-contact mythological name? Why the fuck do you even know that?”
David snorted. “Because I can cook a better pancit palabok than your grandmother.”
“Okay. Why don’t you reel it the fuck back in, buddy,” Charmaine said coldly.
David held his palms up in a gesture of peace. That was an out of line thing for him to say. I didn’t know what “pancit palabok” was, but it sounded like an old family recipe. Trash talking someone’s generational home cooking was considered “a dick move” in most cultures.
“Savory-sweet noodles flavored with sea creatures,” David explained. “Classic celebratory dish from Filipino culture.” He shook his head. “And… yeah, I was mentored by an outspoken expat for a while. He had some very strong opinions on the importance of reclaiming his precolonial heritage.”
“And ‘Catholic’?” I asked.
“Subtype of Christian,” said David. He turned back to Charmaine. “‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ Gospel of John, Chapter 8, Verse 32.”
She squinted at David incredulously. “Wait, I thought you were Jewish.”
David shrugged. “Think what you like, but it’s a poor Atheist who can’t quote scripture.”
“And the Bible quote is in reference to, what, your cooking?”
David shook his head. “No, that was back to the meat of the matter. Whether or not we should hide what I know from the Federation. We shouldn’t. It might be rough in the short term, but they’re better off in the long run for not living a lie. There’s a Krakotl Admiral in international prison right now who’s going to lose his shit if he ever fully grasps that humans are people. We shouldn’t hide from the Federation that the Arxur are people, too.”
I didn’t want to admit it, not about the Arxur, but I knew the score. “Don’t treat us like lessers,” I said. “We’re sapient. If the evidence is there, we’ll come around to it.”
Charmaine slumped back down into her chair, and just shook her head. “You two are exhausting, you know that?” She perked up for a moment, as a thought occurred to her. “I don’t think I caught your name, actually,” she said, looking towards me.
I stiffened, and repeated the words to the magic spell I’d learned. “I’d like to speak to an attorney before answering any further questions, sir.”
Charmaine snorted. “It’s ‘ma’am’. And see? Exhausting.” She sighed, and sat up. “Look, I hope you appreciate that I can’t actually make policy decisions. That happens way the fuck up the chain. Best I can realistically do is run interference. Drag this out long enough that somebody else’s cat gets out of a different bag, and keeping your secret becomes moot. So I suppose, to that end, I’ll be stopping by from time to time.” She smirked. “It sounds to me like I’ve almost convinced you to join up! I’ll let my boss know that it’ll just take another visit or two, and you’ll come around.”
“Might even take three, who knows?” David said, playing along. “I’m sure you’ll convince me eventually. Just keep trying!”
“Put the tequila on my tab, then,” said Charmaine, rising to her feet for a third time, but calmly at last. “And for the love of God, please stop casually deprogramming aliens.”
“No,” said David, smiling.
Charmaine groaned. “Fuck you, then. And I’m coming back for that better-than-my-Grandmother’s palabok, you hear me?”
“Only if you start respecting locked doors,” David shot back.
“No,” she said, smiling, and left.
For a moment, everything was quiet, and just the two of us were alone in an empty restaurant. David reached over and held my paw in his hand in a show of support and sympathy. “What an exhausting day,” he said, and I couldn’t disagree.

1. We would miss you.
2. It's not worth the regret. Either by yourself, if you failed or just simply left scars or the regret everyone else feels by not doing enough to help you.
3. It does get better. Believe it or not, it will eventually get better. Sometimes you have to go through the storm to get to the rainbow.
4. There's so much you would miss out on doing.
5. There is always a reason to live. It might not be clear right now, but it is always there.
6. So many people care, and it would hurt them if you hurt yourself.
7. You ARE worth it. Don't let anyone, especially yourself, tell you otherwise.
8. You are amazing.
9. A time will come, once you've battled the toughest times of your life and are in ease once again, where you will be so glad that you decided to keep on living. You will emerge stronger from this all, and won't regret your choice to carry on with life. Because things always get better.
10. What about all the things you've always wanted to do? What about the things you've planned, but never got around to doing? You can't do them when you're dead.
11. I love you. Even if only one person loves you, that's still a reason to stay alive.
12. You won't be able to listen to music if you die.
13. Killing yourself is never worth it. You'll hurt both yourself and all the people you care about.
14. There are so many people that would miss you, including me.
15. You're preventing a future generation, YOUR KIDS, from even being born.
16. How do you think your family would feel? Would it improve their lives if you died?
17. You're gorgeous, amazing, and to someone you are perfect.
18. Think about your favorite music artist, you'll never hear their voice again...
19. You'll never have the feeling of walking into a warm building on a cold day
20. Listening to incredibly loud music
21. Being alive is just really good.
22. Not being alive is really bad.
23. Finding your soulmate.
24. Red pandas
25. Going to diners at three in the morning.
26. Really soft pillows.
27. Eating pizza in New York City.
28. Proving people wrong with your success.
29. Watching the jerks that doubted you fail at life.
30. Seeing someone trip over a garbage can.
31. Being able to help other people.
32. Bonfires.
33. Sitting on rooftops.
34. Seeing every single country in the world.
35. Going on road trips.
36. You might win the lottery someday.
37. Listening to music on a record player.
38. Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
39. Taking really cool pictures.
40. Literally meeting thousands of new people.
41. Hearing crazy stories.
42. Telling crazy stories.
43. Eating ice cream on a hot day.
44. More Harry Potter books could come out, you never know.
45. Traveling to another planet someday.
46. Having an underwater house.
47. Randomly running into your hero on the street.
48. Having your own room at a fancy hotel.
49. Trampolines.
50. Think about your favorite movie, you'll never watch it again.
51. Think about the feeling of laughing out loud in a public place because your best friend has just sent you an inside joke,
52. Your survival will make the world better, even if it's for just one person or 20 or 100 or more.
53. People do care.
54. Treehouses
55. Hanging out with your soul mate in a treehouse
56. Snorting when you laugh and not caring who sees
57. I don't even know you and I love you.
58. I don't even know you and I care about you.
59. Nobody is going to be like you ever, so embrace your uniqueness!
60. You won't be here to experience the first cat world emperor.
61. WHAT ABOUT FOOD?! YOU'LL MISS CHOCOLATE
62. Starbucks.
63. Hugs.
64. Stargazing.
65. You have a purpose, and it's up to you to find out what it is.
66. You've changed somebody's life.
67. You could change the world.
68. You will meet the person that's perfect for you.
69. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
70. If you end your life, you're stopping yourself from achieving great things.
71. Making snow angels.
72. Making snowmen.
73. Snowball fights.
74. Life is what you make of it.
75. Everybody has talent.
76. Laughing until you cry.
77. Having the ability to be sad means you have the ability to be happy.
78. The world would not be the same if you didn't exist.
79. It's possible to turn frowns, upside down
80. Be yourself, don't take anyone's shit, and never let them take you alive.
81. Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary. Be your own hero.
82. Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.
83. One day your smile will be real.
84. Having a really hot, relaxing bath after a stressful day.
85. Lying on the grass and laughing at the clouds.
86. Getting completely smashed with your best friends.
87. Eating crazy food.
88. Staying up all night watching your favorite films with a loved one.
89. Sleeping in all day.
90. Creating something you're proud of.
91. You can look back on yourself 70 years later and be proud you didn't commit suicide.
92. Being able to meet your Internet friends.
93. Tea / Coffee / Hot Chocolate
94. The new season of Sherlock
95. Cuddling under the stars.
96. Being stupid in public because you just can.
97. If you are reading this then you are alive! Is there any more reason to smile?
98. Being able to hug that one person you haven't seen in years
99. People care enough about you and your future to come up with 101 reasons for you not to do this.
100. You can't die a Virgin.
101. But, the final and most important one is, just, being able to experience life. Because even if your life doesn't seem so great right now, anything could happen.

EDIT: On request

1. GTA 6
2. To outlive your enemies
3. To see ronaldo in madrid jersey once again
4. to see messi in barca jersey once again

Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism (Comics Culture) eBook : Young, Paul
This was the first honest-to-god analysis of a work of fiction I ever bought. Sure we all think about the stories we read but I had never sought out a professional look at it before. The interviews with Miller and others are really an invaluable look into his creative process, IMO.
I really recommend this book for insights not just into Daredevil, but Batman and Punisher, too.
For anyone curious, here are a lot of the parts which really stood out to me - although of course I have my own interests and you might have parts of the book you love which I just passed over. The first comic I ever remember reading and being deeply impressed by was JMS' Supreme Power. To me, the best superhero stories ask "what does it even mean to be a (super)hero?" I think Miller has some invaluable insights on this topic.

Miller's problem with Spider-Man was all the angst. "All my reservations about the character are in how he talks 'cause his visual is still very confident, and very strong - it's just that he never stops whining." Spidey's self-pity, his penchant for martyrdom, and his borderline masochistic self-neglect attracted fans' identification but also made his life more or less a continual nightmare. Even worse, it made his success as a superhero hard for Miller to swallow. Spider-Man's trademark heckling of villains during fights only made his effectiveness less believable:
"I don't believe that Spider-Man would last two weeks [as a crime fighter] the way he's conceived. In order to have power over the criminals, you would have to be that rotten; [criminals] would have to accept him as almost one of them... Daredevil has to reach the point where when he walks into a room. they're terrified of him. because he has to be accepted as a force they'll respect. That isn't done much in comic books; it's around in other kinds of fiction. I'm more comfortable with that; I don't see him as being happy go lucky when he's up against a bunch of guys with guns."
[...]
Miller would probably have incited comparisons to Batman in the fan press simply by transforming Daredevil into a grittier, more deterministic series, but Miller openly stressed the parallel in his Daredevil-era interviews. In 1981, Miller draws an explicit contrast between Daredevil and Batman: "Daredevil . . . operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice. . . . [Batman] is punishing those who killed his parents. Batman's focus is on the criminal, Daredevil's is on the victim."27 Critics picked up on Miller's concern with Daredevil's motives, as well as the productive task of measuring them against those of the Batman. Reviewing Miller's work thus far in the Comics Journal in 1982, Ed Via wrote that Miller had made Daredevil "first and foremost a moralist, a person with a strong sense of fairness and . . . compassion, someone whose actions were as directly in line with his convictions as humanly possible."28 Even Daredevil's scuffles with criminals differed from Batman's in that they were performances rather than acts of vengeance:
"I see Matt Murdock as being a grown man and Daredevil as almost being a boy. . . . He believes in everything he's doing and he works very hard at it, but part of him just gets off on jumping around buildings."29 "I'm also trying to develop him as a guy with a terrific sense of humor, who scares criminals and has a great time doing it. Like [Steve Ditko's DC character] the Creeper, he laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks [to himself], 'Jeez, they're buying it!'"30
Miller's favorite means of exposing his hero's antic side was to send Daredevil to Josie's Bar, a fictional dive where New York's entire population of petty thieves seems to turn up every night. Digging for clues to various cases, DD inevitably sparks fights that trash the place, hurling thugs through the front window while Josie protests (for the umpteenth time) that she just had it repaired. Sometimes he even orders a drink first, but as Miller points out, it's always a glass of milk. The milk (and the milk moustache it leaves behind) comically telegraphs Matt's wholesomeness compared to the hardened types guzzling whiskey and beer all around him, but it also underscores Miller's description of DD as Matt's boyish side, the inner child that "comes alive" while playing superhero.31
Ultimately, however, the contrast Miller once drew between the borderline psychotic Batman and the psychologically healthy Daredevil sounds like an overstatement of the argument, fronted by the Village Voice in 1965 (and echoed in Esquire the following year), that "Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World."32 By those lights, "real world" referentiality meant that Marvel heroes dealt openly with persecution, neuroses, and family squabbles and turned out to be their own worst enemies nearly as often as protagonists did in postwar literary fiction.
By contrast, DC didn't raise any schlemiels, with the possible exception of Clark Kent, whose inferiority complex is all an act to keep people from noticing that, but for the eyeglasses and the hunched shoulders, he looks exactly like Superman. DC stories followed the logic of such classical storytelling modes as the epic or the chronicle, where decision making is an exponent of action instead of a process inflected by character subtleties and every action thus taken is world-historical in importance. Its editors exiled strong emotion, anxiety, mortality, and other everyday complexities to the infamous imaginary stories of the fifties and early sixties.
This means of distinguishing Silver Age Marvel heroes from those of DC hits a snag, however, when we stack Batman's origin up against that of Spider-Man or Daredevil. The emotional crux of all three is the Spidey triumvirate of all-too-human gut reactions: guilt, shame, and a desire for revenge. Indeed, the most obvious precedent for Daredevil's origin is the first version of Batman's origin story in DC's Detective Comics #33 (December 1939), in which an anonymous street thug robs and shoots Bruce Wayne's parents before young Bruce's eyes. Batman's origin sets underexamined precedents for many origin stories from Marvel's Silver Age: dead parent, angry child, costume chosen to strike fear into what the Batman of 1939 touts as a "superstitious, cowardly lot" of evildoers, an initial state of helplessness igniting the desire to bulk up and do right. Not unlike the death of Jack Murdock in Daredevil's case, Bruce Wayne's extraordinary childhood loss forges Batman's determination to avenge that loss on all criminals everywhere forever after and to transform himself into a steroidal, bat-eared Sherlock Holmes.
Miller brought the Punisher, then Marvel's most homicidal lead character, into the comparison to develop a pet point about Daredevil's singularity: his duty to the legal system, for better or worse. In 1981, when Richard Howell asked Miller point blank, "Is Daredevil Marvel's Batman?" Miller answered that, no, "the Punisher is Marvel's Batman."33 Miller argued that, unlike the Batman, whose parents' murder catalyzed every major life decision he made from then on, the death of Battlin' Jack did not have as "big an effect on [Matt] as his father's life, and he is his father's son, being a natural born fighter."34 The Punisher, by contrast, shares not only Batman's desire to murdered loved ones but also his will to stop killers and drug dealers in their tracks. He exceeds Batman's mission only in that he executes the bad guys on the spot.
The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is "Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that's added on. It's not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil's basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice."35
This was not to say, however, that the Punisher's use of deadly force made him less heroic to Miller than Daredevil or Batman were. The Punisher is a hero, Miller says, but "I don't consider him a role model. The main difference between him and Daredevil is Daredevil's sense of responsibility to the law. The Punisher is an avenger; he's Batman without the lies built in."36
The "lies" Miller mentions refer in part to Batman's vow never to kill; he wields a gun only two or three times in his entire first forty-five years in print, due in each case to editorial inattention. While the no-kill rule probably helped keep Batman out of trouble with parents worried over comics' influence on young children, it exacerbated the tension between his desire for justice and his sense that the legal system is inadequate to the task of collaring mass murderers and rooting out corruption. If Batman's prime motive is to champion justice in the legal sense, to quash anarchy and restore social order, then why does he have such contempt for the police and the legal system except insofar as they can help him achieve his goals?
[...]
The ambivalence about due process expressed here stems in part from Miller's decision to make Daredevil a character whose convictions don't necessarily match his own: "I don't necessarily believe that Daredevil's right about everything he says. The character is built on very strong basic principles, and it would have been a terrible violation of those principles . . . to let Bullseye die. Daredevil has to believe that the law will work in every instance, but I'm allowed to believe differently."17 Miller had much tougher critiques of Daredevil-style liberalism waiting up his sleeve, including the bleeding-heart psychiatrists in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who claim that Two-Face and the Joker (the Joker, for crying out loud) can be rehabilitated and an unforgettable throwaway joke about liberal hypocrisy in the same book, in which a Central Casting suburbanite tells a reporter that he doesn't believe in Batman's brand of vigilante justice but then snorts that he himself would "never live in the city." But to paint Miller as a legal or social conservative would not be accurate, at least not at this point in his career. Satirically, in fact, Miller plays the entire political field, broiling John Ashcroft and George W. Bush in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001–2) for exploiting the Twin Towers' destruction to further their own political agenda (and while these men were doing exactly that in the aftermath of 9/11, no less).
The Daredevil run, though, is less a satire of Matt's position, or anyone else's, than it is a Brechtian experiment in which Miller draws sympathy to Murdock's point of view while examining it with a microscope at the same time, pushing harder and harder on the question of whether justice is served if lives are left at risk, while putting just as much pressure on the opposing question of whether preventive justice deserves to be called justice at all.
[...]
Matt's reaction to the death of Elektra is to bully Heather into the submissive role that Elektra couldn't play. Miller attributes to Matt not a single thought balloon to suggest that he is aware of the toll his bullying takes on her, while Miller continually draws the reader's attention to that toll via Matt's glib condescension and Heather's devastated reactions to it. The soundness of Daredevil's judgment is now more questionable than ever. Does his heroism stem from a neurotic urge to control everything around him, and is that neurosis reaching a tipping point? After all, we see him suffer a nearly dissociative breakdown when he convinces himself in #182 that Elektra somehow survived her own murder. The splash page of that issue still chills me with its full-face close-up of Matt in a cold sweat, staring into our eyes, as if pleading with us to believe something we know to be utterly false just because he believes it: "SHE'S ALIVE." By #189, only seven issues later, his demeaning paternalism has driven his new fiancée straight to the bottle.
In spite of the ugliness of Matt's abuse, and the emphasis Miller places on that ugliness, it's difficult for me to decide whether terrorizing Heather this way makes Daredevil less heroic or more heroic in Miller's definition. Miller has often spoken about the archetypical hero as something other than human, as dismissive of what others think they need as Matt is of Heather's feelings. When Miller discusses The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, which he and interviewer Gary Groth agree is nearly a parody of superhero comics, he emphasizes Batman's abstract quality, born of the kind of social isolation that Stick enforces on Matt: If Batman's "motto is striking terror" into the hearts of criminals, then "Batman can only be defined as a terrorist. . . . I don't want you to like this guy." "My feeling about Batman is that he's similar [to James Bond] in that you'd want him to be there when you're being mugged, but you wouldn't want to have dinner with him. The way he cheers Hawkman on as he crushes Luthor's skull . . . For me, [such scenes demonstrate] the idea [of Batman] coming into its own without the bullshit on top of it being a socially acceptable role model and all of that."23
Matt's disregard for Heather's emotional state during the Glenn Enterprises affair further clarifies Miller's sense of the heroic impulse: it is prosociety but deeply antisocial, convinced that Right and Wrong are real and unchanging standards but dangerously solipsistic in its interpretation of how to achieve Right at the expense of Wrong. The true hero, according to Miller, is, compared to "normal" human beings at least, a pathological narcissist. Daredevil, with unwavering faith in his own judgment, performs "necessary" services for a culture whether it asks for them or not, while those who are under his protection see him as unfathomable at best and terrifying at worst. But even if Miller thrills to his own extrication of the "lies" and "bullshit" from the Batman persona a few years later, in Daredevil he employs dramatic irony to relate the high cost, to both individuals and their community, of the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners heroism that Americans think they want. "Dirty Harry . . . is a profoundly, consistently moral force," Miller tells Kim Thompson, but that wouldn't keep him out of jail for "administering the 'Wrath of God' on murderers who society treats as victims.
An authoritative study of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield has suggested that Marvel Comics distinguished itself in the 1960s in part by placing new stress on the tension intrinsic to superhero comics between the hero's desire for justice and the extralegal means by which she or he pursues it.25 I would add that Marvel's Silver Age stories place the stress primarily on the plotting opportunities provided by this tension, as in the case of Spider-Man, whose good deeds only draw the ire of a public (understandably) suspicious of ununiformed law enforcement.
Miller further develops the "upstanding vigilante" paradox from a cliché of the genre into a philosophical dialectic that, though sometimes decried as fascistic, cannot be reduced to an unironic plea for authoritarian rule. The superheroic fantasies on display in 300, the Sin City graphic novels, The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, and even the controversial Holy Terror cast a clear eye on the paradox of the specifically American fascination with the superheroic ideal. All pose to the reader the implicit question, Is this really what you want? Considering the consistency of this theme dating back to Daredevil,
I think of the pre-9/11 Frank Miller as less conservative than libertarian, a posthippie refugee of the 1960s who disdains the everyone-is-special relativism of grade-school participation trophies and liberal humanism but shares with the conscientious objector and the bra burner a fervency for personal liberty: "I'm no middle-of-the-roader, but I find that people who tend to follow any party line, of the left or right, tend to all end up saying the same thing, which is 'Do what I tell you.' Quit those habits I don't like, don't use the words I don't like, don't draw the pictures I don't want my children to see. . . . So yeah, I have a very jaundiced view toward most authority."26 In any event, Miller's focus on Daredevil's unflagging moral code, and his attention to how a relentless diet of violence might change that code into an ideological prison, allows him to explore the upstanding vigilante figure from multiple angles—the broadly liberal defense of constitutional protection for criminals and victims alike; the broadly conservative ideal of defending one's own body, family, and property without impediment from the state—without readily disclosing his personal politics.
[...]
Slowly and steadily, Miller was maneuvering out of Code territory into the world of frankly adult themes and pressing harder and harder on the contradictions on which a traditional concept of heroism depends. Miller's The Dark Knight Returns steps even further into that world even as it sets up new "walls" to push against, namely, the postsixties culture of liberal humanism and so-called moral relativism. Miller's Batman has all of Daredevil's desire for justice but lacks any of DD's concern for the civil rights of the alleged perpetrators; indeed, if Daredevil's primary concern is with the victims, as Jim Shooter taught Miller, then Batman's primary concern is with crushing the perps. And he gets called on it throughout The Dark Knight Returns by loads of liberal-sounding talking heads who claim that Two-Face and the Joker were actually turned into supervillains by Batman's example, that even convicted homicidal maniacs deserve a second chance, and so forth.
What Miller has done is to take Daredevil's line of legal thinking regarding the rights of criminal defendants, the same line that made him save Bullseye from being mashed on the subway tracks, and put it in the mouths of comic-relief characters such as the brain surgeons and psychologists who try to make Two-Face a productive member of society again. Miller's Batman, by contrast, is an epic hero who refuses to mistake good for evil or vice versa, and he gets to define on his own what each term means. Miller's Matt Murdock refuses such a metaphysical view of good and evil as all-or-nothing opposites on idealist grounds of a different sort. Matt believes that obscured innocence and hidden guilt have to be brought to light intellectually by finding proof and testing it, while Batman, who was at one time represented as a detective at heart, relies entirely on instinct when Miller has the reins.
To be fair, Miller presents the crudeness of Batman's worldview as a serious problem and has even done so in the midst of a conflict that seemed to many Americans to draw the brightest possible line between the national Us and a foreign Them. DC had already published the first issue of Miller and the colorist Lynn Varley's Dark Knight sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, when al-Qaeda operatives commandeered the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event that, Miller told Groth, made it impossible to leave Batman's catchphrase about "striking terror into the hearts" of evildoers unannotated. As I've mentioned, Batman's dialogue in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!—even the dialogue written before 9/11—makes the ugliness of his philosophy unmistakable: "Striking terror. Best part of the job."
Groth even points out to Miller that one Batman speech, in which he refers to American capitalists and the federal government as "tyrants" and promises that he and his team will "strike like lightning and . . . melt into the night like ghosts," sounds uncannily like "the point of view of radical Islamists" toward the United States.13 Miller doesn't take such a crack at the obvious bad guys, however. Rather, he immediately pounces on the political reaction to the bad guys and how the George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, and John Ashcrofts of the world use crises like 9/11 for their own purposes. They stand in for the heroes we think we need in tumultuous times but slip the bounds of law at every turn—and Miller attempts to reduce our sympathy for them. This Miller, chastened by the 9/11 attacks but ever the shrewd critic of the media that deliver such disasters to us, digs into the fascistic politics of superhero comics, the news media's role in sensationalizing global politics and inciting fanatical nationalism, and the real-world politics of vigilante justice all at once. He claims comics as a space to explore what "heroism" means—and not necessarily to him but rather to contemporary US culture. If the one who "saves" us from tyranny, even the tyranny of our own leaders, claims he has to act like a terrorist to do it, do we even want to be saved?
At the same time, both Miller's comics and his interviews have long scrutinized the insolubility of the paradox—heroism is necessary to restore order, but it's also authoritarian in its purest form, even fascistic—as a necessary evil. Batman seems the purer Miller "hero" in that Batman's sense of justice is unencumbered by any complicating factors. He metes it out as he sees fit, on the basis of an Old Testament version of righteousness: you take my eye, I'll take yours, score settled. This hero is no model for quotidian life, but as in such classical Hollywood Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), the frontier will remain forever a chaotic wilderness without him. Only Ford's half-wild hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) can save his niece from hostile Comanche in post–Civil War Texas, but his intense race hatred makes him a relic, unfit to cross the threshold into the orderly world of law, family, and home that his very wildness has helped bring to the western frontier.
The civic-minded Daredevil would be welcome in any such home, but for the later Miller especially, that taste for civilization and its rules reads as an "impurity," a liberal-humanist streak within traditional superheroism that Miller once talked about strictly in terms of character type (it's the difference between Batman and his "purer" doppelgänger, the Punisher) but that lately he describes as a moral fault, without any of the irony he mustered up a decade ago. There are signs dating back to 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that this irony was ambivalent anyway, considering the extent to which Batman adopts the Western hero's ruthless stance when taming the "frontier" of racialized criminals, right down to trading in the Batmobile for a horse.
The progressive reverence with which Miller's comics after Daredevil treat that definition of heroism has everything to do with 9/11 and the scale of twenty-first-century global terrorism as Miller has processed it since The Dark Knight Strikes Again!. Back in 2003, he told Groth, "For at least the foreseeable future, [9/11 is] the whole point of my work. I'm going to play around with doing some propagandizing,"15 but this sentiment did not prevent him from making the US government's reaction to the disaster a target for satire in his second Dark Knight story or lambasting the Bush administration for branding disagreement with its policies as providing solace to terrorists. By contrast, the Fixer, the costumed hero of Miller's frankly propagandistic graphic novel Holy Terror (Legendary Comics, 2011), doesn't care whether he gets thrown out of the house or not; his lot is to make the world safe for civilization, American style, not to inhabit it, and he likes it that way. The Fixer, a behemoth who shares a name with a character that Miller created for his high school newspaper's comics page, kills terrorists like a sledgehammer breaks pavement. There's no second-guessing motives or anything else; as far as the Fixer is concerned, if you're Muslim, you've got a bomb strapped to your midsection, so there's no danger that he will smash the wrong face.
Unsurprisingly, the character originally at the center of Holy Terror was Batman. Finally, Miller had freed the character of its impurities. To do that, he also had to burn off the "impurities" of the fundamentalist foe by painting al-Qaeda as representatives of all Islam and all Muslims and playing on every Arab stereotype he could scratch onto his Bristol board, from big noses to using Evil English to express delight in the torture and murder of "infidels." He has matched such images with political commentaries on National Public Radio, his personal blog, and elsewhere that show none of the critical distance that once made his work as jarring and energizing intellectually as the best Dashiell Hammett novel you've ever read. Our terrorist enemy, Miller has said, is "pernicious, deceptive and merciless and wants nothing less than [our] total destruction." Never mind that the majority of victims of al-Qaida and now ISIS are, in fact, Muslims.16
The hardline right position that Miller takes in Holy Terror differs so dramatically from that expressed in interviews dating back to the early 1980s that one has to wonder if he's been replaced by a Life Model Decoy from Nick Fury's supply closet. But Holy Terror was a critical disaster, prompting fans and critics alike to swear off any future Miller work and even to claim that his comics have rallied around a "sexist, fascist" flagpole since as far back as The Dark Knight Returns and possibly even before. Spencer Ackerman echoes the most scathing reviews when he writes in Wired, "Frank Miller doesn't do things halfway. One of the true comic-book greats, he's created several of the most extraordinary stories ever to grace the art form. So perhaps it's fitting that now he's produced one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time.
[...]
I can't subscribe to such uses of Miller's Batman to evaluate Miller's own character. Critics have been mistaking the positions Miller examines in his comics for his own convictions for decades. Indeed, Miller would agree with every one of Kevin's criticisms of Batman and even offer an aesthetic justification for this portrayal that depends on a dramatic irony that is difficult to locate, precisely because superhero comics have always traded in absolutes; criticism of those absolutes would understandably be less obvious to a dedicated reader of superhero comics, not to mention a nonreader convinced of superheroes' intrinsic lack of sophistication, than to someone interested in exploring or exploding the limits of the Batman mythos. Now, however, it not only looks like Miller has given away his critical distance; he also wants everyone to know it and to decide for themselves whether what he's done is worthless as a result, as comics or as political activism.
Back in 1998, discussing 300 with Christopher Brayshaw in the Comics Journal, Miller acknowledges the historical irony of Greece, the epitome of civil organization and intellectualism in the ancient West, needing a nation-state of cold-blooded warriors to fight its battles. In another context, he tells Brayshaw, he might have invited readers to ponder that irony and consider its paradoxical relationship to the development of democratic ideals.19 He does not do so in this context, however. For Miller, 300 is all about the necessity of saving civilization—Western civilization—from barbarism. The three hundred Spartans did what was necessary; they lost the battle, badly, but without their sacrifice, discipline, and utterly unambiguous worldview, we would apparently still be living in mud huts today.
Even with 300, though, Miller argues that he's playing around just a tiny bit with our tendency to collapse heroes with role models. Miller makes Leonidas admirable but not likable and renders most of the other 299 Spartans as less admirable and even less likable. But maybe, Miller has said not only about the Spartans but about the Punisher, Batman, and Superman, cultures need guys like that, and I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can't or won't make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of "preserving civilization as we know it." Usually, as in The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again! and to a certain extent the noir riff on Dante's Inferno that is Sin City, Miller lets us sit with that ugly possibility, lets us squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust. He forces us to wonder if peace and forward movement are ever possible without the bright lines between good and evil and at the same time makes us ponder whether by drawing those lines, we put our humanity at risk. The generous way to interpret what Miller says here is that, like Hitchcock, he's casting doubt on the very notion of heroism that rules superhero comics, that is, the fantasy that superheroes could do what they do and yet remain "ordinary" people. Miller turned Batman into a living symbol of the fear that criminals should feel when threatened by "good," at least in a Platonist universe, but don't. However, when it's no longer comics, the First Amendment, or aesthetic complexity at stake but national security, take-no-prisoners tactics—in art as well as war—look to Miller like the only way to go.
[...]
In what I want to believe is a triumph of Miller the listener over the absolutist Miller who sneers at the same First Amendment he once sacrificed his industry goodwill to defend, Miller now refuses to comment further on his anti-Occupy rant. Perhaps he thinks it all speaks for itself, or perhaps he has accepted certain tenets of his critics just as he graciously (and legitimately, it seems) accepted the differing opinions of Groth and other interviewers as recently as a decade ago. Either way, he has stopped talking much about politics of any stripe. His blog is now abandoned due to "computer problems," Miller says, glowering during an interview for a Wired profile when Sean Howe suggests he find "a better technician" to fix it. "I will," Miller says, after a long silence.22
Look back on Daredevil's nemeses from the '79–'82 run with Miller's current anti-Islamicism in mind, though, and watch the ambiguities and nuances of his first major achievement get harder to pinpoint. Bullseye is a psychopath, complete with brain damage caused by cancer to guarantee it. Elektra is irredeemable despite her ostensibly clean bill of mental health: "The feeling I've been trying to get across is that she's betrayed something. She was meant to be something better than she is."23 But once you've fallen from grace, that's it. Some people are evil, through and through—think of the "reformed" Harvey Dent/Two-Face in The Dark Knight Returns, whose ruined mind no amount of reconstructive surgery can repair—and they must be punished, locked away for good, dismissed, disposed of. There's no other way to get the cancer out of society. Miller dates the rising scale of violent crime in Daredevil back to his getting mugged and robbed in New York: "The experience filled me with anger, and that translated right into my comics."24 As he got angrier, however, the struggle over right and wrong that plagued Daredevil seemed to get a lot less interesting to him than staking an unwavering claim to right.
Howe shrewdly characterizes Miller's use of secondary characters as a kind of misdirection: "Daredevil's dastardly supporting cast allowed Miller to have it both ways by making Daredevil's barrage of kicks and punches look reasonable in comparison."25 The bleak view on Miller's career would paint it as a slow but momentous roll past such apologies for superheroic vigilantism and into the stark light of the Fixer's gleeful, openly sadistic rampages, a development that Howe connects to Miller's personal victimization by crime prior to plotting Batman: The Dark Knight Returns:
"As Miller's career was taking off, the everyday violence in Manhattan at the time was taking its toll. "New York is no longer fit for human habitation," Miller told one friend. After enduring three robberies in the course of a month, he and [the colorist and his then-girlfriend Lynn] Varley decided to escape to LA. While she went out west to search for a home, he stayed behind to set up more work to get them out of debt. He had a check in his pocket when, once again, someone tried to rob him. "Frank just went berserk on the guy," Varley says. "He didn't hit him or anything, he just went so berserk the guy backed off and ran away. We were on edge."26
Such anger floats to the surface of his work with a bang in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, with not one but two smash-hit stories about characters that didn't belong to him: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Miller's most lauded Daredevil story, Daredevil: Born Again, his 1986 return to the Daredevil series, penciled by David Mazzucchelli.
[...]
It's a hell of a second coming for a character whose series stubbornly still bore a Comics Code seal. I won't fault Miller for the anger of that story today any more than I did when I read Born Again at seventeen; on the contrary, I still believe there's not much point in going through adolescence in the United States without some rebel-themed mass culture to embrace for the sole reason that your parents would hate it. Still, I marvel at how much Miller's perspective on his audience had changed between 1983's "Roulette" and the Born Again story line in 1985–86.
According to Howe's account of Marvel in the eighties, Miller's inspiration for Born Again was losing everything himself. Ramped up on the success of Ronin and eager to get away from the city that fostered at least one person's transformation into a real-life vigilante ("one Bernard Goetz is enough"), Miller moved to Los Angeles, found himself dead broke, and decided to pitch a new Daredevil story that started with Matt Murdock in similar straits.28 No doubt it was satisfying to create a world in which a bloated mob boss—somebody, anybody—could actually be held accountable for downturns of fortune, instead of such mundane external forces as random robberies or astronomically high rent. But Born Again also recommends interpretations of Miller's work as reflective of his worldview, making it more difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says he is investigating the justification of defensive violence rather than sponsoring it.

⚠️ WARNING: MAJOR spoilers for ACOTAR, TOG and CC (the Maasverse) ⚠️

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PART 1 - YOU ARE HERE
PART 2
PART 3
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Look. This isn't a new theory.
It's been said over and over again . . .

Ruhn looks just like Rhys. Lorin must be Rhysand's sister. Tamlin somehow saved her . . . she somehow portaled to Midgard.

I've seen the bits and pieces: Daphne and Apollo. The laurel leaves. The meaning of Donnall and Danaan.
But I've also seen the pieces not mentioned. The pieces not connected that could be. And I've yet to find a thread that's weaved them all together.

So come on, friends—jump with me on this crazy CRACKPOT theory train and let's see what we come up with.

And buckle up, buttercups. It's a long one.

​
Credit: AI art via booksnwriting on IG

First things first:

Were Rhys's sister and mother killed?

By all accounts, one would assume so.
After all, their wings were cut off, bodies beheaded, and those heads floated down the river to the closest Illyrian camp.
Now, at first read, one would assume their heads were sent to the camp Rhys was stationed at. However, it appears it was a separate camp, of which we know there are many:

"They put their heads in boxes and sent them down the river—to the nearest camp . . . When I heard, when my father heard . . . We winnowed to the edge of the Spring Court that night."
ACOMAF Ch 45

Many have theorized that Rhys and his father never saw these heads due to the above reference of hearing about the incident, not seeing**.** However, this theory is dispelled in ACOFAS:

I still saw their heads in those baskets, their faces still etched with fear and pain.
ACOFAS Ch 11

Let's walk through the timeline of events:

• Rhys's mother and sister were traveling through the Illyrian wilderness to see Rhys. Rhys was stationed at a war-camp, was supposed to meet them halfway, but was training a new unit and decided to stay (ACOMAF Ch 45).
• Tamlin let slip where this meeting spot was, not knowing Rhys made the decision to stay back. Tamlin, his father, and his brothers arrive and slaughter Rhysand's sister and mother anyway, then float their heads in baskets down to the nearest camp.
• Rhys and his father get wind of what happened; that night, they winnow to the Spring Court.
• Rhys slaughters Tamlin's brothers, Rhys's father slaughters Tamlin's mother and father, Tamlin kills Rhys's father.
• At some point after his father dies and the mantle of High Lord falls upon him, Rhys travels back to the Illyrian wilderness, finds their bodies, and buries them:

“And I know this because I have felt that way every day since my mother and sister were slaughtered and I had to bury them myself, and even retribution didn’t fix it.”
ACOMAF Ch 30

So. We have heads. We have bodies. How could one, or both, of these females have survived?

The fandom-favored theory is that Tamlin, with his shapeshifting powers, managed to switch out the bodies; that two other Fae were killed in their place. Some say only Rhys's sister was saved, others say it was his sister and mother whom Tamlin spared.

SJM likes to recycle material (like, a lot). So let's see if she's ever used the fake head psych-out before:

Celaena reached a gloved hand into the sack and tossed the severed head toward him.
The king leaned forward, examining the mauled face and the jagged cuts in the neck. “I can barely recognize him.”
“I’m afraid severed heads don’t travel well.” She fished in her sack again, pulling out a hand. “Here’s his seal ring.”
COM Ch 2
“I haven’t killed anyone,” she said softly . . . She remained where she was standing, needing the distance between them to get the words out right. “I faked all of their deaths and helped them flee.”
COM Ch 16

Not only has SJM used fake heads in another book, she's also included personal effects as extra proof of that death. In the case of Rhysand's mother and sister, their personal effects are their wings.

Do we ever see those wings? No. No, we do not.

Feyre searches for them:

Pinned in the study, Rhys had said.
But I hadn’t spotted any trace when I’d gone hunting for them upon returning here . . The cellars had yielded nothing, either. No trunks or crates or locked rooms containing those wings.
ACOWAR pg 35

But you guys. I think I know where they are.

Of course, this is hinging on the theory that Tamlin was lying when he said he burned them:

Lucien leaned back in his chair, smiling with feline delight. “Of course we can lie. We find lying to be an art."
ACOTAR Ch 16

Because there is one room, ONE VERY SPECIFIC ROOM, we never see in the Spring Court:

I lay back on the pillows, listening to the steady, efficient sounds of him preparing for bed. He kept his own quarters, deeming it vital for me to have my own space.
. . . I’d yet to visit his bed, though I wondered if our wedding night would change that.
ACOMAF Ch 2

The only other mention we have of Tamlin's bedroom is this:

“How bad was it?” I asked quietly.
“You saw your room. He trashed it, the study, his bedroom . . . "
ACOWAR Ch 6

Can I just say this is a DELICIOUS callback to the original inspiration for the first book? A Court of Thorns and Roses is, after all, a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast.
​
Source: SJM interview with Wilma Gonzalez via USA Today
Now, Disney did not invent the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast, despite what my partner once incorrectly believed (yes, he also thought classics like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin were Disney-created; yes, I honestly thought he was joking). But it is the first exposure many of us received in regard to this beloved tale, and the movie visuals themselves may just give us the clues we need in regard to Rhysand's sister.
​
Artist: rosiethorns88 on IG
I am OBSESSED with this Beauty and the Beast x ACOTAR artwork by Rosie Thorns. I mean, I've been obsessed with Rosie's work for a long while (IG here) and the many beautiful literature-themed fan art she has produced, but I mean, come on—the stained glass? The Cauldron as the rose? The connection to the animated film melded with the first few books? Genius.
But it's the ROSE itself I want to draw your attention to.
In Disney's 1991 animation, we see the Beast's struggle with his temper, not unlike our Tammy Tam. In the scene set up, after the delightful chorus ensemble of "Be Our Guest," we see Belle tiptoe up to the forbidden west wing where she discovers her captor's room. She sees herself in the shattered mirror, steps around the splintered chairs; watches the curtains move in their tatters . . . and touches the remnants of claws scoring his own self-portrait.
​
Source: Screenshot from Beauty and the Beast, 1991
Now, for those of you who would rather Tamlin not have a redemption arc, I apologize; this post may not be your favorite. But just as I believe the Beast shredded his portrait not out of vanity, not out of a sense of the beauty he once had, I believe Tamlin—after Feyre leaves the Spring Court in ruins—trashes his manor, his bedroom, his court . . . out of pure self-loathing. Out of the hatred he feels for himself, of how far he fell, of who and what he has become.
Our Beasts are flawed, broken, and alone.
And they have no one to blame but themselves.

But what does Belle see as she turns from this? As she turns from the ruined room, the slivered portrait, the evidence of man-turned-beast, both inside and out?

Artist: Jason Kim

The Rose.

The only unbroken, unblemished, living thing in view, kept under a glass cloche. Safe, and protected . . . displayed, even.
But do not mistake this for a reverential act. The rose represents everything the Beast despises about himself: his selfishness, his failure to see beyond himself . . . his inability to save himself.

Just like a certain set of Illyrian wings would remind Tamlin.

Remind him of his selfishness in letting slip vital information that led to two innocent females being slaughtered, two innocent females that were the mother and sister of his friend. Of his failure to save them, of his continued reminder that under his curse, under Amarantha's reign, he cannot save himself, he cannot spare himself or his court from the tragedy of what's happening . . . and that, just as it happened all those years ago, he cannot save the woman he loves.
Bit of a leap, right? Bear with me, I promise this is all going to connect.

Under this Rhys's sister + Tamlin theory, many believe the unnamed Night Court daughter was mated to our Spring Court High Lord.

Is that possible? Heck, is it even plausible?
Well . . .
The other day, I was ruminating on the names Rhys vs Ruhn and their inspired Welsh origins (see here for my post but warning: it has Maasverse spoilers. Oh, and am I a little bothered they have Welsh names when the Night Court itself is geographically located in Scotland based on Prythian's map? Kinda. But I can let it go). I was also perusing various theories on the Ruhn's mother is Rhys's sister debate, and came across a theory that the name Ruhn, in whatever language the Fae of Prythian speak, would translate to Rhys.

i.e. If Ruhn's mother is Rhys's sister, then she named her son after the shortened version of her long-missed brother's name.

Now, do I believe this? I don't know. But I really like the idea of it. I mean, it could work . . . because when Bryce mistook Rhys for Ruhn, Rhys blinked. As if calling him Ruhn was unexpected . . . surprising.

As if maybe . . . he recognized it:

Bryce gasped. “Ruhn?”
The male blinked. His eyes were the same shade of violet blue as Ruhn’s . . . He lifted his gaze to her, stars in his eyes.
HOSAB Ch 78
Rhys blinked, his only sign of surprise.
ACOWAR Ch 70

All this got me thinking . . . what would Rhys's sister's name be?
Because we know Ruhn's mother's name; it's Lorin. And the name Lorin itself is associated with laurel trees, which ties into the mythology of Daphne and Apollo, which is pretty huge within this particular fandom theory, but we're not quite there yet.
​
Artist: Lourdes Saraiva

Now, do I think Lorin is Rhys's sister's REAL name?

No, no I don't.
Because come, on . . . it's not like alternate names are uncommon in the SJM universe:

His eyes shifted to my face. “What’s your name, love?”
Keeping my mind blank and calm, I blurted the first name that came to mind, a village friend of my sisters’ whom I’d never spoken to and whose face I couldn’t recall. “Clare Beddor.”
ACOTAR Ch 26
"Elentiya,” she choked out. “My name is Elentiya.” Her gut tightened.
Thank the gods Rowan didn’t snort at the name. She might have eviscerated him . . . if he mocked the name Nehemia had given her.
HOF Ch 11

See, I did a little more digging. Not just into the name Lorin itself, which is derived from the Latin word Laurentum, meaning from Laurentum, referring to an ancient Roman city and gives one a sense of "sophistication and timelessness" (which, if Rhys's sister were to use a fake name, this fits in perfectly with the strongly Roman and Latin and Eternal City connecting references of CC).

But I looked into WELSH names. Specifically, Welsh names that would flow with the cadence and pattern of Rhys and Ruhn.

Now I'm not the first SJM reader to suss out feminine Welsh names; I've seen Seren associated with Rhys's sister, which, when translated from Welsh, means "star." Perfect for our Night Court daughter and the brother to night incarnate himself, no? A name fit for the daughter of the City of Starlight:

“This is my favorite view in the city,” Rhys said, stopping at the metal railing along the river walkway and gazing toward the artists’ quarter. “It was my sister’s favorite, too. My father used to have to drag her kicking and screaming out of Velaris, she loved it so much.”
ACOMA Ch 29

But I would like to propose a different name. Another Welsh name. A name that may be a perfect pairing, a perfect complement, to her brother's.

Rhosywn.

​
Artist: Unknown
​
Source: Google Translate
According to welshgirlsnames.co.uk, the Celtic girl's name Rhoswen means "rose," specifically "white rose," and also includes the meaning "blessed" and "fair." Other websites label its meaning as "blessed rose."
We're playing with something SJM commonly does with her own spelling, tweaking the placement of letters to make them fit just a little bit differently from their real-world counterparts. So if Rhosyn = rose in Welsh, and Rhoswen = a person's name, then we're settling on Rhosywn for SJM's spelling (I don't know that I love the "w" in it myself, but we're working with what we've got, folks).

What if . . . Rhys's sister was the Beast's rose—Tamlin's rose—all along? What if Feyre wasn't his Belle, his fair one . . . what if Rhosywn was?

Think about it. Simmer on it for a while. Rhysand and Rhosywn.
Rhys and Rhose.
It . . . fits . . . beautifully.
And can't you imagine a younger Rhys being followed around by a little Rhosy (Rosie)?
​
Artist: Unknown (killing me that I can't find the source for this one)

Moving forward, we're going to delve DEEP into a couple of sub-theories:

1. Rhys's sister survived. Rhys's mother did not.
2. This sister is in Midgard, and is Ruhn's mother, Lorin.
3. Tamlin may have faked this sister's death, but he failed to save her.
4. She and Tamlin are mates . . . and Tamlin became one cold-hearted bastard with severe PTSD because of it.

-----------------

Sub-theory 1: Rhys's sister survived

Remember when we referenced the fandom theory that Tamlin shapeshifted someone else's bodies and essentially faked Rhys's sister's death?
To be clear: I do not think Rhys's mother survived. If we tie in the various Rhun's of Welsh history/mythology, there is a slight hint that Rhys and Ruhn are half-brothers (see post where that is mentioned here) but the dots don't connect as well. If anyone is coming back, I think it's his sister vs his mother.
We have a couple of hints regarding this, the first being Lorin's eyes:

Lorin was indeed sitting in the breakfast room . . . She was beautiful, as all Fae were, but there was a gentleness to her face. A sadness to her deep blue eyes—Ruhn's eyes.
HOSAB Bonus Chapter

Coupled with Rhysand's eyes:

Bryce gasped. “Ruhn?”
The male blinked. His eyes were the same shade of violet blue as Ruhn’s. His short hair the same gleaming black . . .
HOSAB Ch 78

Putting two and two together, we can easily surmise that these eyes came from Rhys's father, NOT Rhys's mother. Rhys's mother is full Illyrian after all:

Like their High Lord, the males—warriors—were dark-haired, tan-skinned. But unlike Rhys, their eyes were hazel . . .
ACOMAF Ch 16
I only recognized one of the muscle-bound Illyrians in full armor waiting for us . . . Like Azriel and Cassian, they possessed dark hair and eyes of assorted hazel and brown.
ACOWAR Ch 51

So Lorin, if she is indeed directly related to Rhys, could only be Rhysand's sister, not his mother.

Also, with this characterization—

"And my mother—she was gentle and wild . . ."
". . . my father winnowed in . . . He saw my mother thrashing and fighting like a wildcat . . ."
"My mother was soft and fiery and beloved . . ."
ACOMAF Ch 16

I don't see Rhys's mother doing anything but fighting like hell, fighting to the death, to save her daughter . . . to give her time.
​
Artist: sncinderart on IG (only thing I'd change is trade out the Night Court blue eyes for Illyrian hazel)

Now, again, this next part isn't anything new in the realm of theory speculation, but we have to lay out the logic for Tamlin's shapeshifting abilities:

Note: We're going to move forward with the name Lorin for Rhys's sister because the whole Rhosywn thing is pure, made-up speculation at this point.
Tamlin can shapeshift not only himself, but others:

"Tam can shift us into other shapes if need be . . . When Andras went across the wall, Tam changed him into a wolf so he wouldn’t be spotted as a faerie."
ACOTAR Ch 9

We learn just how thorough Tamlin's shape-shifting ability is through what he passed on to Feyre:

“I thought she only made the wings—nothing else.”
“She shape-shifts. She transforms her entire self into the form she takes. When she grants herself wings, she essentially alters her body at its most intrinsic level. So she was fully Illyrian that night.”
ACOSF Ch 30

So the question we have to answer—CAN Tamlin shape-shift someone so thoroughly, so intrinsically, that even the High Lord of Night would not be able to tell the difference?

In short, yes.
Because his power—Feyre's power—has done it before:

I am Tarquin*. I am summer; I am warmth; I am sea and sky and planted field.*
. . . I felt my own skin shift, felt my bones stretch and change. Until I was him, and it was a set of male hands I now possessed, now pushed against the door. Until the essence of me became what I had tasted in that inner, mental shield of his . . .
ACOMAF Ch 36

The door containing the Book of Breathings, located in the Summer Court, was sealed with a blood-spell, with an imprint of the High Lord's power, the same way the Prison is keyed to Rhys's blood. But Feyre, after physically, on a biological level, shifting into Tarquin, was able to open that door.
But wait! you might say. The book called her on it; the book sniffed out her deceit and sealed Feyre and Amren inside the temple.
Yes, but remember—
It was only after Feyre shifted back into her own body that this happened. After she began using the kernel of Tarquin's gifted power vs Tamlin's full shape-shifting ability. She no longer was Tarquin; she only contained a piece of him, and a tiny piece wasn't enough to trick the book and the imprinted blood-spell and the wards.
We also know from Andras, the sentry-turned-wolf from the first book, that if one is killed while shape-shifted, they remain in their shifted form:

"I killed it . . . I sold its hide at the market today. If I had known it was a faerie, I wouldn’t have touched it.”
“You murdered my friend,” the beast snarled. “Murdered him, skinned his corpse, sold it at the market . . . "
ACOMAF Ch 4

So it stands to reason: Tamlin COULD have shape-shifted someone else into Lorin before his father and brothers begun their killing, essentially helping fake her death, and Rhys would have been none the wiser on seeing their bodies. Not if he FULLY shape-shifted someone else's body to match hers on a biological level. The same way he did with Andras. The same way Feyre did as Tarquin.

Now, if Lorin survived, are the wings Tamlin's father kept her actual wings, or are they shape-shifted wings?
Answer: I don't know, but if I had to pick, my bet is on option #2 below.
OPTION NO 1) They are shape-shifted wings from someone else's body:

And the reason Lorin doesn't have wings in CC is because, like her brother—like Rhysand—she can command and call hers at will.

OPTION NO 2) They are her actual wings:

But sometime between them being cut off and her being beheaded, likely while his fathebrothers were distracted with Rhys's mother, Tamlin switched out her barely-alive body for another's.

​
Artist: paintfaery on IG
-----------------
To keep this crackpot theory going, click HERE for Part 2

mechs and pigskins raided me at same time, also accepted refugees few seconds before raids wich did not end well for them
as bonus i want to say i have 4 artilleries shooting at their position

Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism (Comics Culture) eBook : Young, Paul
This was the first honest-to-god analysis of a work of fiction I ever bought. Sure we all think about the stories we read but I had never sought out a professional look at it before. The interviews with Miller and others are really an invaluable look into his creative process, IMO.
I really recommend this book for insights not just into Daredevil, but Batman and Punisher, too.
For anyone curious, here are a lot of the parts which really stood out to me - although of course I have my own interests and you might have parts of the book you love which I just passed over. The first comic I ever remember reading and being deeply impressed by was JMS' Supreme Power. To me, the best superhero stories ask "what does it even mean to be a (super)hero?" I think Miller has some invaluable insights on this topic.

Miller's problem with Spider-Man was all the angst. "All my reservations about the character are in how he talks 'cause his visual is still very confident, and very strong - it's just that he never stops whining." Spidey's self-pity, his penchant for martyrdom, and his borderline masochistic self-neglect attracted fans' identification but also made his life more or less a continual nightmare. Even worse, it made his success as a superhero hard for Miller to swallow. Spider-Man's trademark heckling of villains during fights only made his effectiveness less believable:
"I don't believe that Spider-Man would last two weeks [as a crime fighter] the way he's conceived. In order to have power over the criminals, you would have to be that rotten; [criminals] would have to accept him as almost one of them... Daredevil has to reach the point where when he walks into a room. they're terrified of him. because he has to be accepted as a force they'll respect. That isn't done much in comic books; it's around in other kinds of fiction. I'm more comfortable with that; I don't see him as being happy go lucky when he's up against a bunch of guys with guns."
[...]
Miller would probably have incited comparisons to Batman in the fan press simply by transforming Daredevil into a grittier, more deterministic series, but Miller openly stressed the parallel in his Daredevil-era interviews. In 1981, Miller draws an explicit contrast between Daredevil and Batman: "Daredevil . . . operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice. . . . [Batman] is punishing those who killed his parents. Batman's focus is on the criminal, Daredevil's is on the victim."27 Critics picked up on Miller's concern with Daredevil's motives, as well as the productive task of measuring them against those of the Batman. Reviewing Miller's work thus far in the Comics Journal in 1982, Ed Via wrote that Miller had made Daredevil "first and foremost a moralist, a person with a strong sense of fairness and . . . compassion, someone whose actions were as directly in line with his convictions as humanly possible."28 Even Daredevil's scuffles with criminals differed from Batman's in that they were performances rather than acts of vengeance:
"I see Matt Murdock as being a grown man and Daredevil as almost being a boy. . . . He believes in everything he's doing and he works very hard at it, but part of him just gets off on jumping around buildings."29 "I'm also trying to develop him as a guy with a terrific sense of humor, who scares criminals and has a great time doing it. Like [Steve Ditko's DC character] the Creeper, he laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks [to himself], 'Jeez, they're buying it!'"30
Miller's favorite means of exposing his hero's antic side was to send Daredevil to Josie's Bar, a fictional dive where New York's entire population of petty thieves seems to turn up every night. Digging for clues to various cases, DD inevitably sparks fights that trash the place, hurling thugs through the front window while Josie protests (for the umpteenth time) that she just had it repaired. Sometimes he even orders a drink first, but as Miller points out, it's always a glass of milk. The milk (and the milk moustache it leaves behind) comically telegraphs Matt's wholesomeness compared to the hardened types guzzling whiskey and beer all around him, but it also underscores Miller's description of DD as Matt's boyish side, the inner child that "comes alive" while playing superhero.31
Ultimately, however, the contrast Miller once drew between the borderline psychotic Batman and the psychologically healthy Daredevil sounds like an overstatement of the argument, fronted by the Village Voice in 1965 (and echoed in Esquire the following year), that "Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World."32 By those lights, "real world" referentiality meant that Marvel heroes dealt openly with persecution, neuroses, and family squabbles and turned out to be their own worst enemies nearly as often as protagonists did in postwar literary fiction.
By contrast, DC didn't raise any schlemiels, with the possible exception of Clark Kent, whose inferiority complex is all an act to keep people from noticing that, but for the eyeglasses and the hunched shoulders, he looks exactly like Superman. DC stories followed the logic of such classical storytelling modes as the epic or the chronicle, where decision making is an exponent of action instead of a process inflected by character subtleties and every action thus taken is world-historical in importance. Its editors exiled strong emotion, anxiety, mortality, and other everyday complexities to the infamous imaginary stories of the fifties and early sixties.
This means of distinguishing Silver Age Marvel heroes from those of DC hits a snag, however, when we stack Batman's origin up against that of Spider-Man or Daredevil. The emotional crux of all three is the Spidey triumvirate of all-too-human gut reactions: guilt, shame, and a desire for revenge. Indeed, the most obvious precedent for Daredevil's origin is the first version of Batman's origin story in DC's Detective Comics #33 (December 1939), in which an anonymous street thug robs and shoots Bruce Wayne's parents before young Bruce's eyes. Batman's origin sets underexamined precedents for many origin stories from Marvel's Silver Age: dead parent, angry child, costume chosen to strike fear into what the Batman of 1939 touts as a "superstitious, cowardly lot" of evildoers, an initial state of helplessness igniting the desire to bulk up and do right. Not unlike the death of Jack Murdock in Daredevil's case, Bruce Wayne's extraordinary childhood loss forges Batman's determination to avenge that loss on all criminals everywhere forever after and to transform himself into a steroidal, bat-eared Sherlock Holmes.
Miller brought the Punisher, then Marvel's most homicidal lead character, into the comparison to develop a pet point about Daredevil's singularity: his duty to the legal system, for better or worse. In 1981, when Richard Howell asked Miller point blank, "Is Daredevil Marvel's Batman?" Miller answered that, no, "the Punisher is Marvel's Batman."33 Miller argued that, unlike the Batman, whose parents' murder catalyzed every major life decision he made from then on, the death of Battlin' Jack did not have as "big an effect on [Matt] as his father's life, and he is his father's son, being a natural born fighter."34 The Punisher, by contrast, shares not only Batman's desire to murdered loved ones but also his will to stop killers and drug dealers in their tracks. He exceeds Batman's mission only in that he executes the bad guys on the spot.
The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is "Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that's added on. It's not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil's basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice."35
This was not to say, however, that the Punisher's use of deadly force made him less heroic to Miller than Daredevil or Batman were. The Punisher is a hero, Miller says, but "I don't consider him a role model. The main difference between him and Daredevil is Daredevil's sense of responsibility to the law. The Punisher is an avenger; he's Batman without the lies built in."36
The "lies" Miller mentions refer in part to Batman's vow never to kill; he wields a gun only two or three times in his entire first forty-five years in print, due in each case to editorial inattention. While the no-kill rule probably helped keep Batman out of trouble with parents worried over comics' influence on young children, it exacerbated the tension between his desire for justice and his sense that the legal system is inadequate to the task of collaring mass murderers and rooting out corruption. If Batman's prime motive is to champion justice in the legal sense, to quash anarchy and restore social order, then why does he have such contempt for the police and the legal system except insofar as they can help him achieve his goals?
[...]
The ambivalence about due process expressed here stems in part from Miller's decision to make Daredevil a character whose convictions don't necessarily match his own: "I don't necessarily believe that Daredevil's right about everything he says. The character is built on very strong basic principles, and it would have been a terrible violation of those principles . . . to let Bullseye die. Daredevil has to believe that the law will work in every instance, but I'm allowed to believe differently."17 Miller had much tougher critiques of Daredevil-style liberalism waiting up his sleeve, including the bleeding-heart psychiatrists in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who claim that Two-Face and the Joker (the Joker, for crying out loud) can be rehabilitated and an unforgettable throwaway joke about liberal hypocrisy in the same book, in which a Central Casting suburbanite tells a reporter that he doesn't believe in Batman's brand of vigilante justice but then snorts that he himself would "never live in the city." But to paint Miller as a legal or social conservative would not be accurate, at least not at this point in his career. Satirically, in fact, Miller plays the entire political field, broiling John Ashcroft and George W. Bush in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001–2) for exploiting the Twin Towers' destruction to further their own political agenda (and while these men were doing exactly that in the aftermath of 9/11, no less).
The Daredevil run, though, is less a satire of Matt's position, or anyone else's, than it is a Brechtian experiment in which Miller draws sympathy to Murdock's point of view while examining it with a microscope at the same time, pushing harder and harder on the question of whether justice is served if lives are left at risk, while putting just as much pressure on the opposing question of whether preventive justice deserves to be called justice at all.
[...]
Matt's reaction to the death of Elektra is to bully Heather into the submissive role that Elektra couldn't play. Miller attributes to Matt not a single thought balloon to suggest that he is aware of the toll his bullying takes on her, while Miller continually draws the reader's attention to that toll via Matt's glib condescension and Heather's devastated reactions to it. The soundness of Daredevil's judgment is now more questionable than ever. Does his heroism stem from a neurotic urge to control everything around him, and is that neurosis reaching a tipping point? After all, we see him suffer a nearly dissociative breakdown when he convinces himself in #182 that Elektra somehow survived her own murder. The splash page of that issue still chills me with its full-face close-up of Matt in a cold sweat, staring into our eyes, as if pleading with us to believe something we know to be utterly false just because he believes it: "SHE'S ALIVE." By #189, only seven issues later, his demeaning paternalism has driven his new fiancée straight to the bottle.
In spite of the ugliness of Matt's abuse, and the emphasis Miller places on that ugliness, it's difficult for me to decide whether terrorizing Heather this way makes Daredevil less heroic or more heroic in Miller's definition. Miller has often spoken about the archetypical hero as something other than human, as dismissive of what others think they need as Matt is of Heather's feelings. When Miller discusses The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, which he and interviewer Gary Groth agree is nearly a parody of superhero comics, he emphasizes Batman's abstract quality, born of the kind of social isolation that Stick enforces on Matt: If Batman's "motto is striking terror" into the hearts of criminals, then "Batman can only be defined as a terrorist. . . . I don't want you to like this guy." "My feeling about Batman is that he's similar [to James Bond] in that you'd want him to be there when you're being mugged, but you wouldn't want to have dinner with him. The way he cheers Hawkman on as he crushes Luthor's skull . . . For me, [such scenes demonstrate] the idea [of Batman] coming into its own without the bullshit on top of it being a socially acceptable role model and all of that."23
Matt's disregard for Heather's emotional state during the Glenn Enterprises affair further clarifies Miller's sense of the heroic impulse: it is prosociety but deeply antisocial, convinced that Right and Wrong are real and unchanging standards but dangerously solipsistic in its interpretation of how to achieve Right at the expense of Wrong. The true hero, according to Miller, is, compared to "normal" human beings at least, a pathological narcissist. Daredevil, with unwavering faith in his own judgment, performs "necessary" services for a culture whether it asks for them or not, while those who are under his protection see him as unfathomable at best and terrifying at worst. But even if Miller thrills to his own extrication of the "lies" and "bullshit" from the Batman persona a few years later, in Daredevil he employs dramatic irony to relate the high cost, to both individuals and their community, of the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners heroism that Americans think they want. "Dirty Harry . . . is a profoundly, consistently moral force," Miller tells Kim Thompson, but that wouldn't keep him out of jail for "administering the 'Wrath of God' on murderers who society treats as victims.
An authoritative study of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield has suggested that Marvel Comics distinguished itself in the 1960s in part by placing new stress on the tension intrinsic to superhero comics between the hero's desire for justice and the extralegal means by which she or he pursues it.25 I would add that Marvel's Silver Age stories place the stress primarily on the plotting opportunities provided by this tension, as in the case of Spider-Man, whose good deeds only draw the ire of a public (understandably) suspicious of ununiformed law enforcement.
Miller further develops the "upstanding vigilante" paradox from a cliché of the genre into a philosophical dialectic that, though sometimes decried as fascistic, cannot be reduced to an unironic plea for authoritarian rule. The superheroic fantasies on display in 300, the Sin City graphic novels, The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, and even the controversial Holy Terror cast a clear eye on the paradox of the specifically American fascination with the superheroic ideal. All pose to the reader the implicit question, Is this really what you want? Considering the consistency of this theme dating back to Daredevil,
I think of the pre-9/11 Frank Miller as less conservative than libertarian, a posthippie refugee of the 1960s who disdains the everyone-is-special relativism of grade-school participation trophies and liberal humanism but shares with the conscientious objector and the bra burner a fervency for personal liberty: "I'm no middle-of-the-roader, but I find that people who tend to follow any party line, of the left or right, tend to all end up saying the same thing, which is 'Do what I tell you.' Quit those habits I don't like, don't use the words I don't like, don't draw the pictures I don't want my children to see. . . . So yeah, I have a very jaundiced view toward most authority."26 In any event, Miller's focus on Daredevil's unflagging moral code, and his attention to how a relentless diet of violence might change that code into an ideological prison, allows him to explore the upstanding vigilante figure from multiple angles—the broadly liberal defense of constitutional protection for criminals and victims alike; the broadly conservative ideal of defending one's own body, family, and property without impediment from the state—without readily disclosing his personal politics.
[...]
Slowly and steadily, Miller was maneuvering out of Code territory into the world of frankly adult themes and pressing harder and harder on the contradictions on which a traditional concept of heroism depends. Miller's The Dark Knight Returns steps even further into that world even as it sets up new "walls" to push against, namely, the postsixties culture of liberal humanism and so-called moral relativism. Miller's Batman has all of Daredevil's desire for justice but lacks any of DD's concern for the civil rights of the alleged perpetrators; indeed, if Daredevil's primary concern is with the victims, as Jim Shooter taught Miller, then Batman's primary concern is with crushing the perps. And he gets called on it throughout The Dark Knight Returns by loads of liberal-sounding talking heads who claim that Two-Face and the Joker were actually turned into supervillains by Batman's example, that even convicted homicidal maniacs deserve a second chance, and so forth.
What Miller has done is to take Daredevil's line of legal thinking regarding the rights of criminal defendants, the same line that made him save Bullseye from being mashed on the subway tracks, and put it in the mouths of comic-relief characters such as the brain surgeons and psychologists who try to make Two-Face a productive member of society again. Miller's Batman, by contrast, is an epic hero who refuses to mistake good for evil or vice versa, and he gets to define on his own what each term means. Miller's Matt Murdock refuses such a metaphysical view of good and evil as all-or-nothing opposites on idealist grounds of a different sort. Matt believes that obscured innocence and hidden guilt have to be brought to light intellectually by finding proof and testing it, while Batman, who was at one time represented as a detective at heart, relies entirely on instinct when Miller has the reins.
To be fair, Miller presents the crudeness of Batman's worldview as a serious problem and has even done so in the midst of a conflict that seemed to many Americans to draw the brightest possible line between the national Us and a foreign Them. DC had already published the first issue of Miller and the colorist Lynn Varley's Dark Knight sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, when al-Qaeda operatives commandeered the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event that, Miller told Groth, made it impossible to leave Batman's catchphrase about "striking terror into the hearts" of evildoers unannotated. As I've mentioned, Batman's dialogue in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!—even the dialogue written before 9/11—makes the ugliness of his philosophy unmistakable: "Striking terror. Best part of the job."
Groth even points out to Miller that one Batman speech, in which he refers to American capitalists and the federal government as "tyrants" and promises that he and his team will "strike like lightning and . . . melt into the night like ghosts," sounds uncannily like "the point of view of radical Islamists" toward the United States.13 Miller doesn't take such a crack at the obvious bad guys, however. Rather, he immediately pounces on the political reaction to the bad guys and how the George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, and John Ashcrofts of the world use crises like 9/11 for their own purposes. They stand in for the heroes we think we need in tumultuous times but slip the bounds of law at every turn—and Miller attempts to reduce our sympathy for them. This Miller, chastened by the 9/11 attacks but ever the shrewd critic of the media that deliver such disasters to us, digs into the fascistic politics of superhero comics, the news media's role in sensationalizing global politics and inciting fanatical nationalism, and the real-world politics of vigilante justice all at once. He claims comics as a space to explore what "heroism" means—and not necessarily to him but rather to contemporary US culture. If the one who "saves" us from tyranny, even the tyranny of our own leaders, claims he has to act like a terrorist to do it, do we even want to be saved?
At the same time, both Miller's comics and his interviews have long scrutinized the insolubility of the paradox—heroism is necessary to restore order, but it's also authoritarian in its purest form, even fascistic—as a necessary evil. Batman seems the purer Miller "hero" in that Batman's sense of justice is unencumbered by any complicating factors. He metes it out as he sees fit, on the basis of an Old Testament version of righteousness: you take my eye, I'll take yours, score settled. This hero is no model for quotidian life, but as in such classical Hollywood Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), the frontier will remain forever a chaotic wilderness without him. Only Ford's half-wild hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) can save his niece from hostile Comanche in post–Civil War Texas, but his intense race hatred makes him a relic, unfit to cross the threshold into the orderly world of law, family, and home that his very wildness has helped bring to the western frontier.
The civic-minded Daredevil would be welcome in any such home, but for the later Miller especially, that taste for civilization and its rules reads as an "impurity," a liberal-humanist streak within traditional superheroism that Miller once talked about strictly in terms of character type (it's the difference between Batman and his "purer" doppelgänger, the Punisher) but that lately he describes as a moral fault, without any of the irony he mustered up a decade ago. There are signs dating back to 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that this irony was ambivalent anyway, considering the extent to which Batman adopts the Western hero's ruthless stance when taming the "frontier" of racialized criminals, right down to trading in the Batmobile for a horse.
The progressive reverence with which Miller's comics after Daredevil treat that definition of heroism has everything to do with 9/11 and the scale of twenty-first-century global terrorism as Miller has processed it since The Dark Knight Strikes Again!. Back in 2003, he told Groth, "For at least the foreseeable future, [9/11 is] the whole point of my work. I'm going to play around with doing some propagandizing,"15 but this sentiment did not prevent him from making the US government's reaction to the disaster a target for satire in his second Dark Knight story or lambasting the Bush administration for branding disagreement with its policies as providing solace to terrorists. By contrast, the Fixer, the costumed hero of Miller's frankly propagandistic graphic novel Holy Terror (Legendary Comics, 2011), doesn't care whether he gets thrown out of the house or not; his lot is to make the world safe for civilization, American style, not to inhabit it, and he likes it that way. The Fixer, a behemoth who shares a name with a character that Miller created for his high school newspaper's comics page, kills terrorists like a sledgehammer breaks pavement. There's no second-guessing motives or anything else; as far as the Fixer is concerned, if you're Muslim, you've got a bomb strapped to your midsection, so there's no danger that he will smash the wrong face.
Unsurprisingly, the character originally at the center of Holy Terror was Batman. Finally, Miller had freed the character of its impurities. To do that, he also had to burn off the "impurities" of the fundamentalist foe by painting al-Qaeda as representatives of all Islam and all Muslims and playing on every Arab stereotype he could scratch onto his Bristol board, from big noses to using Evil English to express delight in the torture and murder of "infidels." He has matched such images with political commentaries on National Public Radio, his personal blog, and elsewhere that show none of the critical distance that once made his work as jarring and energizing intellectually as the best Dashiell Hammett novel you've ever read. Our terrorist enemy, Miller has said, is "pernicious, deceptive and merciless and wants nothing less than [our] total destruction." Never mind that the majority of victims of al-Qaida and now ISIS are, in fact, Muslims.16
The hardline right position that Miller takes in Holy Terror differs so dramatically from that expressed in interviews dating back to the early 1980s that one has to wonder if he's been replaced by a Life Model Decoy from Nick Fury's supply closet. But Holy Terror was a critical disaster, prompting fans and critics alike to swear off any future Miller work and even to claim that his comics have rallied around a "sexist, fascist" flagpole since as far back as The Dark Knight Returns and possibly even before. Spencer Ackerman echoes the most scathing reviews when he writes in Wired, "Frank Miller doesn't do things halfway. One of the true comic-book greats, he's created several of the most extraordinary stories ever to grace the art form. So perhaps it's fitting that now he's produced one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time.
[...]
I can't subscribe to such uses of Miller's Batman to evaluate Miller's own character. Critics have been mistaking the positions Miller examines in his comics for his own convictions for decades. Indeed, Miller would agree with every one of Kevin's criticisms of Batman and even offer an aesthetic justification for this portrayal that depends on a dramatic irony that is difficult to locate, precisely because superhero comics have always traded in absolutes; criticism of those absolutes would understandably be less obvious to a dedicated reader of superhero comics, not to mention a nonreader convinced of superheroes' intrinsic lack of sophistication, than to someone interested in exploring or exploding the limits of the Batman mythos. Now, however, it not only looks like Miller has given away his critical distance; he also wants everyone to know it and to decide for themselves whether what he's done is worthless as a result, as comics or as political activism.
Back in 1998, discussing 300 with Christopher Brayshaw in the Comics Journal, Miller acknowledges the historical irony of Greece, the epitome of civil organization and intellectualism in the ancient West, needing a nation-state of cold-blooded warriors to fight its battles. In another context, he tells Brayshaw, he might have invited readers to ponder that irony and consider its paradoxical relationship to the development of democratic ideals.19 He does not do so in this context, however. For Miller, 300 is all about the necessity of saving civilization—Western civilization—from barbarism. The three hundred Spartans did what was necessary; they lost the battle, badly, but without their sacrifice, discipline, and utterly unambiguous worldview, we would apparently still be living in mud huts today.
Even with 300, though, Miller argues that he's playing around just a tiny bit with our tendency to collapse heroes with role models. Miller makes Leonidas admirable but not likable and renders most of the other 299 Spartans as less admirable and even less likable. But maybe, Miller has said not only about the Spartans but about the Punisher, Batman, and Superman, cultures need guys like that, and I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can't or won't make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of "preserving civilization as we know it." Usually, as in The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again! and to a certain extent the noir riff on Dante's Inferno that is Sin City, Miller lets us sit with that ugly possibility, lets us squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust. He forces us to wonder if peace and forward movement are ever possible without the bright lines between good and evil and at the same time makes us ponder whether by drawing those lines, we put our humanity at risk. The generous way to interpret what Miller says here is that, like Hitchcock, he's casting doubt on the very notion of heroism that rules superhero comics, that is, the fantasy that superheroes could do what they do and yet remain "ordinary" people. Miller turned Batman into a living symbol of the fear that criminals should feel when threatened by "good," at least in a Platonist universe, but don't. However, when it's no longer comics, the First Amendment, or aesthetic complexity at stake but national security, take-no-prisoners tactics—in art as well as war—look to Miller like the only way to go.
[...]
In what I want to believe is a triumph of Miller the listener over the absolutist Miller who sneers at the same First Amendment he once sacrificed his industry goodwill to defend, Miller now refuses to comment further on his anti-Occupy rant. Perhaps he thinks it all speaks for itself, or perhaps he has accepted certain tenets of his critics just as he graciously (and legitimately, it seems) accepted the differing opinions of Groth and other interviewers as recently as a decade ago. Either way, he has stopped talking much about politics of any stripe. His blog is now abandoned due to "computer problems," Miller says, glowering during an interview for a Wired profile when Sean Howe suggests he find "a better technician" to fix it. "I will," Miller says, after a long silence.22
Look back on Daredevil's nemeses from the '79–'82 run with Miller's current anti-Islamicism in mind, though, and watch the ambiguities and nuances of his first major achievement get harder to pinpoint. Bullseye is a psychopath, complete with brain damage caused by cancer to guarantee it. Elektra is irredeemable despite her ostensibly clean bill of mental health: "The feeling I've been trying to get across is that she's betrayed something. She was meant to be something better than she is."23 But once you've fallen from grace, that's it. Some people are evil, through and through—think of the "reformed" Harvey Dent/Two-Face in The Dark Knight Returns, whose ruined mind no amount of reconstructive surgery can repair—and they must be punished, locked away for good, dismissed, disposed of. There's no other way to get the cancer out of society. Miller dates the rising scale of violent crime in Daredevil back to his getting mugged and robbed in New York: "The experience filled me with anger, and that translated right into my comics."24 As he got angrier, however, the struggle over right and wrong that plagued Daredevil seemed to get a lot less interesting to him than staking an unwavering claim to right.
Howe shrewdly characterizes Miller's use of secondary characters as a kind of misdirection: "Daredevil's dastardly supporting cast allowed Miller to have it both ways by making Daredevil's barrage of kicks and punches look reasonable in comparison."25 The bleak view on Miller's career would paint it as a slow but momentous roll past such apologies for superheroic vigilantism and into the stark light of the Fixer's gleeful, openly sadistic rampages, a development that Howe connects to Miller's personal victimization by crime prior to plotting Batman: The Dark Knight Returns:
"As Miller's career was taking off, the everyday violence in Manhattan at the time was taking its toll. "New York is no longer fit for human habitation," Miller told one friend. After enduring three robberies in the course of a month, he and [the colorist and his then-girlfriend Lynn] Varley decided to escape to LA. While she went out west to search for a home, he stayed behind to set up more work to get them out of debt. He had a check in his pocket when, once again, someone tried to rob him. "Frank just went berserk on the guy," Varley says. "He didn't hit him or anything, he just went so berserk the guy backed off and ran away. We were on edge."26
Such anger floats to the surface of his work with a bang in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, with not one but two smash-hit stories about characters that didn't belong to him: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Miller's most lauded Daredevil story, Daredevil: Born Again, his 1986 return to the Daredevil series, penciled by David Mazzucchelli.
[...]
It's a hell of a second coming for a character whose series stubbornly still bore a Comics Code seal. I won't fault Miller for the anger of that story today any more than I did when I read Born Again at seventeen; on the contrary, I still believe there's not much point in going through adolescence in the United States without some rebel-themed mass culture to embrace for the sole reason that your parents would hate it. Still, I marvel at how much Miller's perspective on his audience had changed between 1983's "Roulette" and the Born Again story line in 1985–86.
According to Howe's account of Marvel in the eighties, Miller's inspiration for Born Again was losing everything himself. Ramped up on the success of Ronin and eager to get away from the city that fostered at least one person's transformation into a real-life vigilante ("one Bernard Goetz is enough"), Miller moved to Los Angeles, found himself dead broke, and decided to pitch a new Daredevil story that started with Matt Murdock in similar straits.28 No doubt it was satisfying to create a world in which a bloated mob boss—somebody, anybody—could actually be held accountable for downturns of fortune, instead of such mundane external forces as random robberies or astronomically high rent. But Born Again also recommends interpretations of Miller's work as reflective of his worldview, making it more difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says he is investigating the justification of defensive violence rather than sponsoring it.

[...]

Ranking novels I read
I ranked my top 10 favorites in a previous post and wanted to update and extend it. I will add some short description to others too here and continue to update this if it expands. P.S. ranking order is approximative.

1. A regressor's tale of cultivation
   
2. Reverend Insanity
   
3. Death Sutra
   
4. Lord of the mysteries
   
5. Shadow Slave
   
6. Dao of bizzare immortal
   
7. Journey of the fate destroying emperor
   
8. Tales of herding gods
   
9. Record of a mortal's journey to immortality
   
10. Top Tier Providence
    
11. Kill the sun
    
12. Pursuing immortality
    
13. Kingdom's bloodline - Game of thrones type novel but imo author bit more that he could chew. too much stuff.
    
14. Nine evolutions of the true spirit - RMJI type novel, sadly dropped by translator;
    
15. Sword god in a magic world
    
16. Why should I stop being the villain? -was entertaining although it is an edginess competition. It's dragged down by endless flashbacks from past live. author should have started with that at this point.
    
17. Can a scholar be called a villain? -sadly a system novel but characters and plot are solid. MC is evil fr but he still seems to be in danger which add suspense;
    
18. Young master in the shadows -Instant gratification novel but plot is good. Too many characters and has endless harem;
    
19. My senior brother is too steady -Careful MC in primordial Chinese mythology world. Lots of slice of life. Got tired of it around halfway through.
    
20. Author's POV -Cool novel as a concept, but things seemed forced to happen for the plot. Got tired halfway.
    
21. Mythic cultivation: My Tongtian can't be this cute- Also mythological Chinese world and MC is transmigrated into one of the 3 pure ones when they were born. Careful planning and nice to read.
    
22. Nightfall- Favorite Mao Ni novel really nice candid interaction between ML and FL.
    
23. Martial cultivator- Wuxia world written in Mao Ni style i.e. wanna sound profound and deep. It's not that deep but a cut above generic xianxia.
    
24. Pivot of the Sky- Can't remember much but it was decent.
    
25. The path toward heaven- A Mao Ni novel. they are overrated.
    
26. Warlock of the Magus World- Neural evil MC, larping as a scientist gets strong. Plot is decent although it gets boring towards the end.
    
27. Way of the devil- Actually this could be better than the previous although they are similar. I thought it was Chaotic and uthir couldn't decide on what the MC is like because of the contradiction, but someone said heis actually crazy so this makes it better.
    
28. Paragon of sin- One of the best first chapters but it I'd so disappointing because MC turns into the type of guy he mocks in the first chapter. Also too much content about side character nobody cares about.
    
29. Soul of negary- MC is not a human but a kind of ghost after he is betrayed by his system in the first chapter. He goes from world to world and becomes stronger generally by hurting the residents. Each one is unique. It is a bold novel and a bit weird but quite cool. Didn't finish.
    
30. Carefree path of dreams- Also neutral evil MC becomes a God by scheming and going from world to world. In Most xianxia MC plays the eternal junior by ascending to a higher place to get ancient inheritances. This MC is the type to play the elder in a lower world, exploit the weakling and only then ascend and repeat.
    
31. Ouroboros records- Read a bit but don't remember much.
    
32. I shall seal the heavens- Er Gen at his best. Generic xianxia with exaggerated descriptions, tropes and bad romance. A classic.
    
33. Lord Xue Que- IET novel which are all similar with kind protagonists and training montages. This one is my favorite.
    
34. King of gods- Generic xianxia but I really liked the plot.
    
35. A Will Eternal- Er Gen at his best with comedy. Got very bad towards the end with stale plot and ending.
    
36. Nine star hegemon body art- A good Generic xianxia but dreadfully repetitive. Face slapping on point.
    
37. Lightning is the only way- The other novels of this author are better. I read the beginning and ending.
    
38. The legendary mechanic- Enjoyable but overrated. MC is nerfed because the author made him too op and he still needs chapters.
    
39. Possesing nothing- MC is envious of others that have more talent then him. I was annoyed by the main girl that likes him for no reason. Dropped it.
    
40. Renegade immortal- Ok Er Gen novel.
    
41. Pursuit of the Truth- same
    
42. Cultivation chat group- Unique novel at its time. I dropped it because none of the 100 jokes per chapter landed with me.
    
43. Martial God Asura- This should be much higher. Very braindead Generic xianxia, very memeable, but after about 5000 chapter it got much better. Plot suspense is top.
    
44. City of sin- Edgy MC. overrated by many.
    
45. Sage Monarch- Generic xianxia ultra accelerated. Feels like snorting coke (I imagine). Good for what it is.
    
46. Emperor domination- Dropped early but it's a classic Generic xianxiawith huge worldbuilding.
    
47. Spiritual attainment of Minghe- Very bad Chinese mythology type novel. But intriguing at the beginning.
    
48. Birth of the demonic sword- Don't rember much proof that it is a very generic xianxia, but it wasn't terrible.
    
49. Demon's diary- By author of RMJI. It is not that bad.
    
50. Great Dao Commander- Don't remember much. Generic xianxia but not one of the worse.
    
51. Legend of the Great Saint- Same.
    
52. Nightranger- MC is in gamefied fantasy setting and gets stronger by killing stuff. Also instant gratification novel but had decent plot. I dropped it halfway.
    
53. I stayed at home for a century, when i emerged i was invincible- Mist broken system I encountered. Bulldozing to the top of the universe by just existing. Funny that he acts as if he is actually worth of it to his disciples when adding them to put their lives on the line. Enjoyed.
    
54. Archean Eon Art- (IET) generic xianxia I don't recall much of.
    
55. Realizing this is a wuxia world after cultivating for 300 years- Same.
    
56. Seeking the flying sword path- IET novels where the MC is especially righteous. Short relatively.
    
57. Divine throne of primordial blood- Another scientist larp in a generic xianxia. Not bad but nothing special. Could be higher.
    
58. Ultimate Scheming System Very funny in the beginning but ofc it can't last that long when you want to write so many chapters.
    
59. Swallowed star- IRT novel, can't remember many specifics.
    
60. Stellar transformation- Same. Tbh all are similar.
    
61. The prodigies war Generic xianxia that doesn't stand out especially thorigh anything. good pacing maybe.
    
62. True Martial World- classic generic xianxia. it's good but they are all the same.
    
63. Martial World- read this too fully but don't remember anything.
    
64. Grasping evil- I tried reading this generic xiaxia many times but it is overrated.
    
65. Tales of demons and gods- My first novel. Good for a generic xianxia but also dumb among it's peers.
    
66. Peerless martial god- generic xianxian (GX from now). can't rember much.
    
67. Sovereign of the 3 realms- Same.
    
68. Alchemy emperor of the divine dao- GX. Has some good comedy.
    
69. I cultivate passively- GX.
    
70. Complete martial arts attributes Fun in the beginning but cheat gets nerfed extremely and gets stale.
    
71. Immortal in the magic world Quite bad. Enjoyed the plot a little at the beginning. Cheat not even relevant for the plot.
    
72. The reincarnated assassin is a genius swordsman More immature than average.
    
73. Invincible- very bad GX.
    
74. Immortal mortal- Same
    
75. Dragon talisman- Same
    
76. Wu dong qian kun- Same x2
    
77. Systemless villain- GX. Put nascent souls before golden core, can't be taken seriously
    
78. Legend of the swordsman very bad GX.
    
79. Strongest senior brother- GX. can't rember much but it was decent.
    
80. Global lord: 100% drop rate- Funny gimmick concept. Gets boring eventually.
    
81. No way people find cultivation difficult, right? GX can't rember of good or bad.
    
82. I just won't play by the book- Same
    
83. I am the fated villain- Didn't actually read enough to be here but a system that tells you what to do is lame af.
    
84. Martial god- GX can't remember
    
85. Martial unity- Original worldbuilding but also very stupid. wants you too believe a world without Qi or a supranatural equivalent allows you to do stuff like levitating objects with wind by moving your fingers very fast or flying by walking with strong force (middle school physics lacking). Also MC just goes on questn plot is unengaging.
    
86. History's number one founder- MC has disciples? Anyway GX
    
87. Disciple cashback system: i got exposed by my disciple Same.
    
88. Portal to Wonderland- Bad GX vy RMJI author. Boring.
    
89. Everyone loves big chests- GX, can't remember.
    
90. My girlfriend from turquoise pond requests my help- GX with check in system. Not great.
    

EDIT with latter reads:
*Damned 13th Regression promising but on hiatus;
*My journey to Godhood as a caterpillar - evil MC quite enjoyable at the beginning but plot is all over the place especially later;
*Creating heavenly laws - actually really fun easy to read op MC bulldozing everything type story and the plot didn't get stale yet;
*Cultivation nerd - promisng concept but I dislike the MC and every character talks the same;
*Immortality: My cultivation has no bottlenecks - one of the most low key MC ever, really enjoyable at the beginning for me at least but got bad after he left the mortal world;
*Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon - nice little novel with very simple plot of good vs evil conflict.
*Naruto: Wind calamity - very good fanfiction. MC is careful, plans how to survive and avoids situations before he is strong enough to get into them. Definitely in the top 20.
*Dao of bizzare immortal - criminally underrated novel. Very original lore with horror elements and mystery. Makes you ask yourself a lot wtf is going on.
*Strongest villain system - wanna be villain, but actual righteous brainless Chinese MC makes stupid decisions that will make you gauge your eyeballs out.
*Yuan’s ascension - GX starts as a wuxia. People act more realistic than usual, plot is steady with no forced conflicts and MC keeps a low profile. But after he becomes a cultivator the quality seems to drop a lot

Hi everyone,
I'm about to purchase the parts for a PC that I intend to use for local LLaMA and other ML projects (Including my master thesis) and could use your insights on the budget allocation. I have budgeted €2200 but could stretch to €2700 (which would dig a bit more into my savings).
I am considering these options:

1. High-End GPU Focused: Prioritize a GPU like RTX 4090, sacrificing elsewhere (details below).
2. Balanced Components: Opt for medium-range parts all around for stability and longevity (details below).
3. Increase Budget: Stretch the budget to get the best of both.

High-End GPU Focused PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 7700 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor	€300.77 @ Amazon Deutschland
CPU Cooler	Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler	€38.90 @ Amazon Deutschland
Motherboard	ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard	€127.90 @ Galaxus
Memory	Patriot Viper Venom 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6400 CL32 Memory	€117.99 @ Mindfactory
Storage	Lexar NM790 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€129.90 @ Amazon Deutschland
Video Card	MSI VENTUS 3X E OC GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card	€1747.99 @ Mindfactory
Case	Zalman S2 ATX Mid Tower Case	€40.90 @ Alza
Power Supply	ADATA XPG CORE Reactor 850 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	€106.90 @ Alza
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	€2611.25
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-24 17:41 CEST+0200

Balanced Components PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 4.7 GHz 12-Core Processor	€398.30 @ Galaxus
CPU Cooler	ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 56.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler	€76.98 @ Amazon Deutschland
Motherboard	Gigabyte B650 AORUS PRO AX ATX AM5 Motherboard	€305.89 @ Amazon Deutschland
Memory	G.Skill Ripjaws S5 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory	€244.64 @ Galaxus
Storage	Samsung 990 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€110.90 @ Alza
Video Card	MSI VENTUS 2X OC GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16 GB Video Card	€859.00 @ Galaxus
Case	Lian Li LANCOOL 216 ATX Mid Tower Case	€100.19 @ Amazon Deutschland
Power Supply	be quiet! Straight Power 12 850 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	€159.90 @ Galaxus
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	€2255.80
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-24 17:42 CEST+0200

I would be happy to get specific component advice as well, if you see something you would do differently then those mentioned here. Thank you very much for your insights.

Originally posted on the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Vol 132, No 3 & 4, March-April 2017.
Retrieved from the Internet Archive
​
Continued From Here
​
It was like this: Tom, fortunately, had no difficulty acquiring a new battery. Parts were tricky to locate, even on the world market; batteries were not. It was much harder to find an outlet converter. VOOM! came from a time when the country used a different standard from the rest of the world. Once located, battery and convertor arrived within the week.
​
Not only was VOOM! now fully powered and capable of presenting the illusion of motion through Mappo™'s "street-level" projections on the windows, but the "real" electrical engine drove the "real" wheels of the vehicle to a maximum of five kilometers per hour, a fact that infuriated Agnes.
​
"There's a reason things get put into attics!" Agnes had faced down the VOOM! and its metallic-painted grill. "A crazed idiot, who for the moment will remain nameless, might get behind the wheel and start rolling this monstrosity around the floor without regard for the little ones standing by!"
​
If given the chance, Tom might have explained to her that Axel still had no way to control the vehicle. He was not equipped in size or shape to operate the car in the manner intended by its manufacturers. He had to stand on the front seat and lean very far forward, almost as if he were in a full run, just to get his forepaws on the steering wheel. This posture afforded him little in the way of maneuverability for turning.
​
The accelerator and brake were, from this vantage point, unattainable.
​
Not to mention that he couldn't see over the dashboard.
​
Axel was undeterred. He searched for sticks and levers and pulleys. Unfortunately, the sticks were too short or too long, or they slipped from their makeshift moorings; the levers had no way of being secured.
​
That might have been the end of it, until the day before Danner's visit, when Axel noticed Ross heading up to the attic and followed him.
​
Ross was never one to deviate from his activities: attending to the traffic reports; staring out the window; listening to the "music" played by the Five Wise Buddhasaurs; a rare game of Not So Hard with Alphonse. But he rarely went up past the second floor.
​
Ross scoured the museum, then the attic space where VOOM! had been discovered. He scrounged around through cartons of what looked like random stuff: things put away in haste to be sorted out later, but never were.
​
"Hey, Ross!" Axel could not restrain his curiosity. "Whatcha lookin' for?"
​
"Click Thing." He spoke without stopping his search.
​
"Click Thing?"
​
"Click Thing. Goes 'click.'" He moved on to another carton.
​
"That's neat," said Axel.
​
"Not neat. Click!" Ross opened a carton that was filled with coffee mugs and quickly closed it back up.
​
"What you need it for?"
​
"Not for me. For you!" He looked into a shoebox that contained, alas, nothing but shoes, and closed it up again.
​
"Me?"
​
"Click Thing. You click 'go,' it go. You click 'stop,' it stop. You click 'on,' it on."
​
"What's on?"
​
"VOOM! on!"
​
"VOOM!?"
​
"VOOM! Click 'off,' it off."
​
"So if we find the Click Thing, I can make VOOM! go?"
​
"What I said."
​
"Can I help?"
​
"Why not?"
​
Axel did more than open the next carton; he leapt into it. If the Click Thing could make VOOM! go, it had to be found.
​
He found a waffle maker and a toaster. But no Click Thing. From another carton, Axel pulled out an ear syringe and showed it to Ross.
​
"Too big." He batted it from Axel's grip. "Not like that!"
​
"What's it look like?"
​
"Click Thing small. Square. Like wrecked angle. Little guy. Fit in your paw."
​
Axel dug into another carton. And another. And one more. From each, he pulled a dozen things and presented them to Ross.
​
Ross shook his head each time. "Not Click Thing."
​
They continued to search. Axel delved into yet another carton. In the bottom was a wooden box originally made for something once (maybe still) called cigars. This cigar box contained sets of cards that used to be bound together by rubber bands now gone flaccid and brittle. One deck featured humans in sports uniforms. Another bundle of cards depicted starships and "space guys" in red uniforms. One pack was devoted to wizards and dragons. At the bottom of the box was a thick stack featuring pictures of dinosaurs. Ross cast the cards aside.
​
"Wait!" Axel retrieved one of the scattered cards. "This guy looks like Baraboo Bob!"
​
Ross refused the distraction. "You want Click Thing or no?"
​
Axel, with a stifled moan, let the card drop. "Yes! Click Thing! Yes yes yes!"
​
"Here!" Ross pointed to an enameled tile about the size and shape of a domino. It looked very much like a domino, with its eight dots on one side, grouped four and four. The dots, unlike those on dominoes, were not concave, but convex. When you pressed any of them, they made a distinctive "click" sound.
​
One more thing distinguished it: it was pink.
​
Ross handed it to Axel. "See?" With a digit of his left forepaw, he pointed to each tiny button. "On. Off. Stop. Go. Back. Left. Right." He gestured energetically to the buttons. "These make VOOM! move."
​
"What's that one?" Axel pointed to last concave spot on the face of the Click Thing, at the bottom right.
​
"That," said Ross, "is NO!"
​
"No?"
​
"NO! Don't press! Don't ever press!"
​
Axel stared at it, absorbed in its mystery. "Oh, I'll never use the last button! I promise! Never never never!"
​
"Unless," Ross pointed upward with one digit, "emergency!"
​
Axel nodded vigorously. "Emergency! Then NO! is YES!"
​
Ross nodded. "When Tom charge Click Thing, you own da road!"
​
"What?"
​
Almost from nowhere (for it had to come from somewhere) Ross took out a parsnip and with its narrow end he tapped Axel. " You own da road!" He tapped him again. " You."
​
"I don't know how to thank you."
​
"No thank! Own da road!" He put the tip of the parsnip in his mouth.
​
"How did you know about the Click Thing?"
​
Ross nibbled on his parsnip before answering. "Been around."
​
"Around what?"
​
"All around." He spoke as he chewed. "Gow-boys. Gobos. Ganadians."
​
"Why'd you find it for me?"
​
"You OH-kay. Make Agnes mad. You OH-kay."
​
"Okay?"
​
"Oh-KAY!" Still nibbling his parsnip, Ross started back down the stairs.
​
"Okay!" Axel, with the Click Thing, followed after.
​
He still needed one more element: height. Even with the Click Thing charged and operative, he still couldn't see over the dashboard. It would be no fun to roam the world if all you could see were a plastic panel, buttons, dials, and a steering wheel.
​
Fortunately, Hubert contributed a book from the library. It was a volume of more than two thousand pages, very old, from a period some scholars refer to as "Paste Modern." The book was titled Zemblia. No one remembered the name of the author, but the body of the text appeared to be a random dusting of words taken from other novels, cut to shreds, and randomly re-pasted. The best purpose for which such a book could be employed was to provide Axel with sufficient elevation to see past the dashboard. It took some effort for Hubert to carry it over, but he was glad to see it finally put to use.
​
Axel was almost ready.
​
Agnes, however, would not relent.
​
"No good ever came from anything pink!"
​
"You may not have noticed," said Charlie, looking across the room to Bronte's eggling, "but little Guinevere is pink, too."
​
Agnes, undeterred, was about to speak again when Elliot, the red stegosaur, timidly concurred. "He's right."
​
"Yeah," Baraboo Bob, the styracosaurus, added his vote. "Guinevere is pink."
​
Several other saurs muttered in agreement.
​
A small, curious crowd gathered around Agnes, who was standing in front of VOOM! with Sluggo and Leslie. Also in the crowd was Lana, a sauropod of unquestionably pink color. She didn't look angry, only interested in seeing a plated quadruped backpedal.
​
Kara regarded Agnes the same way.
​
As did Bronte.
​
And, of course, Guinevere.
​
Agnes stared at them as if she were surrounded by assassins.
​
"Are you all idiots? It's not the same thing! Guinevere is not pink! She is salmon!"
​
A number of saurs laughed. More of them wanted to laugh, but were afraid to.
​
A little one whispered to another saur standing nearby, "Agnes said Guinevere is a fish."
​
"That's not what I said at all!"
​
"Salmon is a fish," said another little one.
​
"Salmon is a color, too!" Agnes shot back.
​
"Color of a fish," said Tex, a blue-gray hadrosaur.
​
"Guinevere is not a fish!"
​
"You said she was a salmon," Tex insisted.
​
"Salmon- colored — not a salmon! Are you listening?"
​
"I don't know about you," said Charlie, "but salmon sure looks pink to me!" He smiled at Guinevere, who smiled back.
​
Some little ones repeated, "Fish!" Others chanted, "Salmon!"
​
"You've all gone crazy!" Agnes shouted at them. "Or stupid! Can't you see it doesn't matter what color Guinevere is?"
​
And another chant started—an easy one for saurian voices; they had no trouble with the dominant vowel, and the consonants were simple to articulate:
​
"VOOM! VOOM! VOOM!"
​
Agnes's sides drew in and out. The plates along her back rippled like waves in a troubled stream.
​
"Fools! Idiots! Cretins!"
​
She would have kept haranguing everyone had she not noticed, standing next to Sluggo, her eggling—her Leslie. He looked up at her, wide-eyed (or as wide-eyed as an eggling can manage) and trembled.
​
Agnes, more often than not, had an impenetrable surface when it came to what she knew and what she believed to be right. She never doubted: the world was wrong, plain and simple, and it was her duty to make that point clear to everyone until such time as the world became right—until the world shaped up.
​
But then there was Leslie. The way he looked at her.
​
Her anger didn't lessen, but it eased with her breathing. She swung her tail around and, with its momentum, turned away from VOOM! From everyone.
​
"Sluggo! Leslie! Come along!"
​
Sluggo and Leslie came along, the little one looking first to Sluggo for assurance.
​
The advantage to having a physique that places your head near the floor is that parent and offspring can see eye-to-eye from an earlier age.
​
Later, when she had calmed down, Agnes climbed the plastic stairs up to the table near the window in the former dining room and walked directly up to the ReggiesystemTM computer portal.
​
"Hey, Reggie! I'm sending a message!" She spoke to the Reggie icon in the center of the portal display screen.
​
"To whom do you wish to send the message?" The icon, who previously wore a serene expression, appeared more guarded now.
​
"To the idiot President."
​
"Another message?"
​
"There a problem?"
​
A pause before the reply. "Audio or voice-to-text?"
​
"I don't care, as long as she gets it. Make sure you copy it to all other humans."
​
"All humans?" Reggie accented each syllable tersely.
​
"Scratch that. Let her worry about it."
​
Another pause. "You may begin dictating."
​
"Good." She began without hesitation. "Dear President Idiot: It has recently come to my attention that dangerous killing machines have been left available and unguarded in places where possibly unstable—delete that 'possibly'—where unstable lunatics can acquire these weapons and use them against innocent and unsuspecting members of the saurian constituency! How can you possibly live with yourself in good conscience—"
​
​
"You know," said Dr. Margaret Pagliotti, the woman who kept track of the saurs' health, "Agnes has a point."
​
Dr. Margaret rarely qualified her statements. No "maybe." Never "perhaps."
​
"I know," said Tom.
​
They were in Tom's office the day before Danner's visit, drinking coffee. "Dr. Margaret," as most of the saurs called her, had already completed her rounds and was surprised at how contagious Axel's enthusiasm for the VOOM! had become. "You said yourself you don't know where this car came from. No record of its delivery. It's not inventoried with the rest of the things in the attic."
​
"I found an empty crate up there," said Tom. "It's the right size. It could be no one ever looked in it before."
​
Dr. Margaret frowned. "Maybe, for safety's sake, you should intervene this time."
​
They were sitting together on a little green couch next to Tom's desk. Each had an arm around the other. At her words, Tom withdrew and sat forward to the edge of his seat.
​
"My job isn't to do what I think is right. It's to trust them to do the right thing—to figure it out. Make sense?"
​
"Yes. I don't like it, but it makes sense."
​
"You're a doctor, always making decisions for others."
​
"That's not true!" She shoved him with the palm of her hand. "Not...not always. Besides, we treat people like toys sometimes, don't we?" She stood up and poured herself another cup of coffee from the carafe at the edge of Tom's desk.
​
"We used to make toys for people. Maybe now it's the other way round." Tom held out his empty mug.
​
"I don't even know what a toy is anymore." She poured him some more coffee and returned to the seat next to him.
​
"I'm glad I don't have to know." Tom took Dr. Margaret's hand—the one not holding her coffee—and squeezed it gently. "All I have to do is live with them."
​
You live with them too much, Dr. Margaret thought, making decisions again.
​
​
"Who cares about a bunch of rejects?" Christine Haig had asked when Nicholas Danner, rather spur-of-the-moment, offered her the chance to visit the saurs with him.
​
"You should care," said Danner, staring at his screen.
​
"Why?"
​
"You're in the toy business now. It's what you do."
​
She replied offhandedly, "Bioengineered toys that triggered one of the worst marketing disasters in retail history."
​
"It was a disaster we created. Right here."
​
"So?"
​
"You can learn a lot from a disaster." He spoke as he worked.
​
"Like what?"
​
"Like, the simplest thing about a disaster is creating one."
​
Christine nodded. "Right. The hardest part is the cleanup. Oil spills. Cadmium in foodstuffs. Meltdowns. Pesticides. Collapsed infrastructure. All that fun stuff."
​
"That's not the hardest part."
​
"What is, then? Since you're so smart."
​
"Preventing it."
​
Christine cleared her throat. "Easy to say."
​
"I know. That's why I said it. Still true."
​
The thing about all Danner's "stuff"—the pictures pushpinned to the walls, the books (all the novels of Ellis Lawrence Cartwright), the models, the old tools from bygone days—was not how they distracted Danner but how they distracted others.
​
In contrast, Christine's space was devoid of the slightest ornament. Were it not for her name plaque pinned to the cubicle partition, it would have been anonymous. She caught herself staring at Danner's photograph of a railroad engine that had crashed through the outer wall of the grand old Montparnasse train terminal in 1895. The engine, having been on a track a level above the street, now hung at a precarious angle and was surrounded by debris. When she realized she was staring at the picture, she turned back to her screen.
​
"You're crazy," she said. "You sound like my dad."
​
She lied. He sounded nothing like her dad. And she didn't really believe he was crazy. He was fun to work with, but something must have been wrong with him. A smart guy in such a low-grade job—why waste time with him?
​
"Want to see something?" He was still staring at his screen.
​
"What?"
​
"Something."
​
"What?"
​
"Take a look."
​
It wasn't a busy day. Already she was filling up her time archiving. She came around to his cubicle and stood behind him, peering at his screen from over his shoulder.
​
He played her part of a Canadian documentary about a small, green corythosaur with a canvas tote bag slung across his back, bandolier-style. He collected coins he found in the plaza just outside the television studios, took them to a convenience store a block or two away, and bought food.
​
"I've seen this," said Christine. "He buys carrots, right?"
​
"Parsnips."
​
"But so what? An abandoned bio-toy adapts. He can count, knows what money is, and buys food. So what?"
​
"Keep watching."
​
The documentary went on to show that the corythosaur carried back to the plaza bags of popcorn and sunflower seeds for the sparrows and squirrels that also foraged in the area.
​
"A 'bio-toy,' as you call him, who learns to buy food and to feed himself is one thing. For that 'toy' to return to feed his fellow creatures...can you still call him a 'toy'?"
​
"From a performance perspective—"
​
"Fuck performance!" His voice echoed through the entire Sequencing Department. "You ask someone to play 'Pop Goes the Weasel' and you get a Chopin sonata instead and you fail him on a 'performance perspective'! It's 'Not to plan.' Are you nuts?"
​
"But that's what it—"
​
"Forget that. Look at this."
​
He cued another video, a hearing in a Senate chamber crowded with suited legislators and their aides, and media people of the type who used to be called "journalists."
​
At screen center, a beige tyrannosaur sat behind one of the big tables reserved for witnesses, their counsel, and guests.
​
These were the famous "Koine-Belter Hearings" on whether or not to grant special status to certain bioengineered life-forms—namely, the saurs.
​
The beige tyrannosaur was small enough that he could have stood on the table and seen things from a human eye level, but instead he sat on a raised chair. Perhaps it felt undignified to stand on the table. His deep baritone cut through the riot of voices that burst from the committee when Senator Conman protested the Atherton Foundation's request that one of the saurs be allowed to testify. Conman insisted it "insulted the dignity" of the committee to allow a "genetically manipulated beast" a voice in the chamber, like "allowing a dog to bark for its freedom." The senator went on to say the "dinosaur" was "obviously manipulated and cannot possibly think for itself."
​
The tyrannosaur replied: "I well understand the senator's concern to establish my authentic autonomy. Let me assure you, I am not a ventriloquist's dummy. Nor am I a piece of technology, nor the medium for anyone's speech but my own. But—"
​
Senator Belter tried to cut in, but the saur raised his voice.
​
"— may I remind the committee, with all due respect, as difficult as it is for them to establish my autonomy, so I find it difficult to confirm yours. Are you not all ventriloquists' dummies for other vested interests?"
​
The committee room went wild with shouting, gavel-pounding, and cameras rolling.
​
"Someday," Danner halted the video, "you should hear the complete testimony."
​
"I have."
​
"And you call that the 'worst marketing disaster in the history of retail'?" Danner scratched his head.
​
"I don't care." Christine was back at her desk. "That's in the past. No one will ever duplicate it. Get over it. Move on."
​
Danner sighed, exited the videos, and returned to his work.
​
A few moments later, Christine's phone beeped. She spoke softly, briefly, then walked over to Zoey's office, as if she had been summoned.
​
The door closed behind her.
​
Danner didn't like closed doors. After thirty-three years with a troubled company, the click of a shutting door sounded remarkably like a hammer being drawn back on a revolver.
​
And the revolver was always aimed at your head.
​
The door stayed closed for an hour before Christine returned to her desk.
​
For another hour she said nothing. Then: "Maybe I will go with you to the house."
​
Something is up, Danner thought. Christine was a smart kid. He wanted her to see what she was potentially dealing with—that they weren't making bio-widgets rolling off an assembly line. She wouldn't be working in Sequencing for long; she'd jump up to more important posts, and quickly. She didn't need to engage in subterfuge. Maybe she didn't know that. Just out of college. Maybe he could still save her soul if he approached it the right way.
​
He knew that last part—about saving her soul—was a joke. How dare he think he could help anyone? And yet he did.
​
Or he had to try.
​
"Sure," he said. "I'll pick you up. Mind taking my car?"
​
​
THE DAY DANNER went to see the saurs was the same day Tibor was ready for VOOM!
​
The Click Thing and the battery had been charged the night before.
​
Once Tibor reminded him, Axel, of course, was supercharged. He sprinted over to the vehicle, hopped up (it took a hop for him to reach up to the door with his forelimbs), and climbed in. Tibor followed a few paces behind, maintaining a regal distance.
​
Axel had placed the Click Thing on the front seat the night before. If he had left it anywhere else he would have forgotten where he put it.
​
He'd also arranged for the voice of Reggie to be audible through the car "stereo" speaker, so that Reggie could function as a sort of navigator.
​
Tibor planned to sit on top of the front seat-back. It afforded him the best view as well as the best place from which to be viewed. He knew he would be greeted by adoring throngs as he entered the city. Thousands would line the street; some might be holding signs or banners. "Welcome Tibor!" "We love Tibor!" Were they not able to see Tibor—their brave leader—they would surely be disappointed. It was a hardship to summon two theropods, Slim and Slam, to bring the plastic stairs for him to climb atop the front seat, but Tibor was willing to forgo his natural modesty, for Tibor loved his people.
​
Tibor assured Slim and Slam that when he addressed the Great Tiborean Council (not to be confused with the Grand Tiborean Council, which was purely ceremonial) in the megalopolitan Temple of Tibor, he would mention them both by name in humble gratitude.
​
Slim and Slam secured the plastic stairs and beat it.
​
The top of the front seat was narrow, but Tibor was small, and he had no worry of lurching from his perch when the vehicle accelerated or came to an abrupt halt.
​
As a further concession to Agnes's protests, Charlie had suggested that the wooden wedges be placed under each of the tires. Unless the engine was given a real jolt, pedal to the floor, the wedges would prevent the car from any forward or reverse movement.
​
This didn't completely mitigate Agnes's concerns, but it was better than Axel's suggestion to station Rotomotoman in front of the car with raised hand and the word "HALT!" flashing boldly on his torso display screen.
​
Axel asked Tibor, "So, where you wanna go?"
​
"Tiboria!"
​
"Where's that?"
​
"The great city to the north."
​
Reggie, through the car speaker, informed the two: "Mappo™ does not indicate any destination by that name."
​
"It is a secret name," said Tibor, "known only to a select few."
​
"It appears," said Reggie, "that Mappo™ is not a member of the select few."
​
"Is it anywhere near a train station?" Axel stared at the speaker. "I dreamed about a train station last night."
​
"The Grand Tiborean Terminus," Tibor said, not missing a beat. "It is well known and much admired throughout the galaxy."
​
"Let's go there!" Axel hopped onto the copy of Zemblia on the front seat.
​
Tibor gave the destination a moment of thought. "It is exactly where Tibor intends to go."
​
"Mappo™ does not indicate any destination by that name," Reggie replied.
​
"The big one!" Axel insisted
​
Reggie paused to search. "A visual scan indicates you have identified the Oscar Gordon Memorial Mass Transit Center, often referred to as 'the O. G.'"
​
"Oh! Gee!" Axel raised his forelimbs as far as he could raise them. "Let's go!"
​
He reached for the Click Thing and...
​
...It wasn't there!
​
"The click thing is gone! The click thing is gone!"
​
He stared at the spot where he had left it the night before, as if it might materialize in response to his need. It didn't. He searched the front seat, the back seat (as much of a back seat as there was), the floor, the trunk, the engine—all around (and underneath) the car. He followed an often practiced though consistently ineffectual rule: if shouting for something brings no results, shout louder: " The click thing is gone! The click thing is gone!"
​
The degree of alarm, panic, injury, and even despair in his voice attracted a number of saurs, including Bronte and Kara, who raced from the library where they had been reading to Hetman, the blind and broken tyrannosaur relegated to a wheeled, child-sized hospital bed.
​
"Did you forget it somewhere?" Kara asked.
​
"No!" Axel returned to the spot on the front seat where he had left the Click Thing the night before.
​
"Did it fall on the floor?" asked Bronte.
​
"No!"
​
"It must be someplace." Kara looked around the living room. "No one would be so cruel as to steal, especially something that means so much to you."
​
"I know who steal!" said Ross, standing on the couch and looking down at the gathered saurs. "Someone not like Click Thing! Someone not like VOOM! Someone not like PINK!"
​
They all stared in the direction of Agnes's lair.
​
"Of course I didn't steal it!" Agnes told them. "All I did was confiscate a piece of dangerous equipment."
​
"You take Click Thing I give Axel!" Ross pointed his parsnip at her. "You steal!"
​
Agnes reared back. " You are an accessory to lunacy!"
​
"You shouldn't have done that," Bronte said to Agnes.
​
In a louder voice, Kara added, "You have no authority!"
​
"I have all the authority I need!" Agnes twisted her tail around until her spikes faced downward. "Am I the only one present who cares about the safety and well-being of everyone here, especially the little ones?"
​
"No!" said Kara. "You're not! Even if you were, you don't just take things by cover of night! It's devious!"
​
"I don't care!" Agnes said.
​
"You act like human!" said Ross.
​
"Take that back!" Agnes raised her tail.
​
"Not take back!" Ross folded his forelimbs stubbornly.
​
"It's cruel," said Bronte. "Cruel to Axel."
​
"Are you blind?" Agnes stomped the floor with a foreleg. "This isn't just Axel—it's that dimwit Tibor, too! And wherever Tibor sticks his goofy green hat, you know that Geraldine can't be far behind."
​
It was a sensitive note to strike with Bronte, given her concern for Guinevere's ongoing fascination with the strange saur's "lab." With less certainty, Bronte replied, "We don't know if Geraldine has anything to do with this."
​
Agnes snorted.
​
"Agnes—" Axel looked at the stegosaur with the expression of someone who has missed his train...forever.
​
"No!"
​
"Please! Give it back! I promise—"
​
"I don't have to give back anything!" Agnes looked him straight in the eye. "It isn't mine, but it isn't yours, either!"
​
Doc arrived, as quickly as his tricky left leg allowed. He swayed a little as he found his balance and caught his breath.
​
"My dear Agnes—"
​
"Oh, shut up!" Agnes shook her head. "Don't even start!"
​
"Is anyone else here protesting?" He looked around the room. "Who here wishes to see this VOOM! returned to the attic?"
​
No shouts of "Aye!" No raised forelimbs.
​
Agnes dismissed them all. "What do you know? You're all brainwashed!"
​
"Agnes, please!" Axel wailed. "Please please please please please!"
​
Tom came in from the kitchen, where he had been clearing up from breakfast. He sat down on the floor among them so the saurs wouldn't have to look up so far to see his face.
​
"Is there any way you can come to a compromise?" He spoke to everyone but looked straight at Agnes.
​
"I thought you'd ask that. I'm not going to hand over that damn Clicker, or whatever you call it." She stared defiantly at Axel, then at Ross, and finally at Tom. "I've hidden it. If you can find it, you can have it, but I won't simply give it back."
​
"Where is it?" Kara asked.
​
"That's for you to find out!"
​
"Agnes—" Kara's tone grew sharper.
​
"That's my compromise, take it or leave it!" She slapped her tail against the floor like a judge pounding a gavel, turned away, and headed for her lair.
​
Sluggo, who had been standing next to Agnes all this time and whom no one noticed until now, said to the others, "I think she's wrong." And to Axel: "I'm sorry. If I knew where it was, I would tell you."
​
"When is Tibor's estimated time of arrival in Tiboria?" asked Tibor, who somehow managed to miss...everything.
​
From Agnes's lair: "Hah!"
​
"Axel not worry." Ross patted Axel on the back. "We find Click Thing."
​
"Where?" Axel's voice sounded weaker than anyone had heard it in a long time.
​
"Where Agnes hide. Where else?" He pointed to the window of the former dining room. "Let's ride!"
​
"Ride?"
​
"What Gow-boys say."
​
"Up there?"
​
From somewhere (again), Ross found a parsnip, held it by the thick end, and pointed the other end toward his head. "We think like Agnes." He then pointed to Agnes's lair. "Then we know where Click Thing is."
​
Axel looked frightened by the prospect. "She's too smart."
​
Ross poked him with the parsnip. "You say you smarter now, right?"
​
"I did!" Axel raised his forepaw to his jaw, as if remembering a forgotten promise. "I did say I was smarter!"
​
"Smart enough to think like Agnes," said Ross, in softer voice, as if Agnes might overhear them.
​
"Oh, I'll never be that smart!"
​
"You lucky!" He pointed to the window. "Let's think!"
​
If Agnes heard, she gave no sign to them. One never knew. Agnes was a lurker.
​
Ross dragged over a set of plastic stairs, which they used to ascend to the seat of the couch. From there they climbed on the armrest, and from there to the top of the seat-back, which was a step or two from the window ledge. They placed their hind legs on the ledge while their tails rested against the seat-backs.
​
Ross nibbled his parsnip and stared out at the trees surrounding the grounds. Axel, following his lead, also stared out at them.
​
"Ross?"
​
Ross nibbled his parsnip and said nothing.
​
"What are we looking at?"
​
"Not looking! Thinking!"
​
"About what?"
​
"Agnes!"
​
"Ohhhh! Right."
​
"Where Agnes hide Click Thing."
​
"Right."
​
"Not right! Where!"
​
"I don't know."
​
"That's why you think!"
​
"Oh!"
​
He tried to think about Agnes, but all he could think about were the trees.
​
Ross must have been thinking about trees, too, in spite of what he said about Agnes and the Click Thing. He stared into the distance and said, " Them still out there."
​
Axel didn't have to ask who "them" referred to. They were the "guys from Toyco." They listened, with high-tech, high-power equipment. They waited for a chance—slim, but still a chance—that through some oversight on the part of Tom or Dr. Margaret, they might acquire a few DNA samples good enough to allow them to...to what? They didn't quite know. They knew that the saurs—the ones who dwelled here, and in other similar homes—did not live up to the specifications Toyco thought they had hard-coded into them: limited intelligence; a three-year life-span; sterility. Toyco had surrendered their ownership of the genomes in exchange for release from a tsunami of liability cases.
​
It didn't take long for Toyco to regret the decision. It was as if they had given away penicillin, thinking it nothing more than moldy bread. If a saur lived ten times past her life-span, "bad" toys could be good medicine.
​
Or something. No one knew. It was important enough to attract the attention of the multinational SANI Corporation, a major defense contractor. They were determined to get Toyco: all that it owned and all it ever had owned.
​
Including the unmarked van parked in the woods outside the house, with humans inside staring out at Axel and Ross...who were staring back at them.
​
"Still out there." Ross nibbled his parsnip.
​
"Bad guys," Axel said—not like he was afraid of them; he just didn't know what else to call them.
​
"Geraldine get 'em once." Ross bit down on the tip of his parsnip and made a loud snap. "Get 'em good!"
​
Ross hadn't seen it, but had been told many times about the flash that came from Geraldine's "lab," and the sizzling noise followed by the van (the "old" van, the one that had the bogus "Forestry Service" logo) tearing out of its spot in the woods, blue smoke trailing from the back and the smell of burning plastic in the air. It was why Tom now kept the fire extinguishers up in the workroom.
​
Axel had to ask, "Are we still thinking about Agnes?"
​
"Sure."
​
"Why are we looking at the trees?"
​
"Looking at forest!"
​
"Oh!" Axel stared more carefully. "That's out there, too?"
​
Ross cocked his head and stared at the driveway. "Listen!"
​
"To what?" Axel heard plenty of sounds inside—voices; checkers sliding across the floor; music from the video playing in the living room; the "music" of the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, tweedling, honking, bellowing—but nothing from out side.
​
"Car coming!" Ross raised one digit of his forepaw as if he could balance the sound on the end of it.
​
Continued Here

Many persons accustomed to travel the old York and London road, in the days of stage-coaches, will remember passing, in the afternoon, say, of an autumn day, in their journey to the capital, about three miles south of the town of Applebury, and a mile and a half before you reach the old Angel Inn, a large black-and-white house, as those old-fashioned cage-work habitations are termed, dilapidated and weather-stained, with broad lattice windows glimmering all over in the evening sun with little diamond panes, and thrown into relief by a dense background of ancient elms. A wide avenue, now overgrown like a churchyard with grass and weeds, and flanked by double rows of the same dark trees, old and gigantic, with here and there a gap in their solemn files, and sometimes a fallen tree lying across on the avenue, leads up to the hall-door. Looking up its sombre and lifeless avenue from the top of the London coach, as I have often done, you are struck[21] with so many signs of desertion and decay,—the tufted grass sprouting in the chinks of the steps and window-stones, the smokeless chimneys over which the jackdaws are wheeling, the absence of human life and all its evidence, that you conclude at once that the place is uninhabited and abandoned to decay. The name of this ancient house is Gylingden Hall. Tall hedges and old timber quickly shroud the old place from view, and about a quarter of a mile further on you pass, embowered in melancholy trees, a small and ruinous Saxon chapel, which, time out of mind, has been the burying-place of the family of Marston, and partakes of the neglect and desolation which brood over their ancient dwelling-place. The grand melancholy of the secluded valley of Gylingden, lonely as an enchanted forest, in which the crows returning to their roosts among the trees, and the straggling deer who peep from beneath their branches, seem to hold a wild and undisturbed dominion, heightens the forlorn aspect of Gylingden Hall. Of late years repairs have been neglected, and here and there the roof is stripped, and "the stitch in time" has been wanting. At the side of the house exposed to the gales that sweep through the valley like a torrent through its channel, there is not a perfect window left, and the shutters but imperfectly exclude the rain. The ceilings and walls are mildewed and green with damp stains. Here and there, where the drip falls from the ceiling, the floors are rotting. On stormy nights, as the guard described, you can hear the doors clapping in the old house, as far away as old Gryston bridge, and the howl and sobbing of the wind through its empty galleries. About seventy years ago died the old Squire, Toby Marston, famous in that part of the world for his hounds, his hospitality, and his vices. He had done kind things,[22] and he had fought duels: he had given away money and he had horse-whipped people. He carried with him some blessings and a good many curses, and left behind him an amount of debts and charges upon the estates which appalled his two sons, who had no taste for business or accounts, and had never suspected, till that wicked, open-handed, and swearing old gentleman died, how very nearly he had run the estates into insolvency. They met at Gylingden Hall. They had the will before them, and lawyers to interpret, and information without stint, as to the encumbrances with which the deceased had saddled them. The will was so framed as to set the two brothers instantly at deadly feud. These brothers differed in some points; but in one material characteristic they resembled one another, and also their departed father. They never went into a quarrel by halves, and once in, they did not stick at trifles. The elder, Scroope Marston, the more dangerous man of the two, had never been a favourite of the old Squire. He had no taste for the sports of the field and the pleasures of a rustic life. He was no athlete, and he certainly was not handsome. All this the Squire resented. The young man, who had no respect for him, and outgrew his fear of his violence as he came to manhood, retorted. This aversion, therefore, in the ill-conditioned old man grew into positive hatred. He used to wish that d——d pippin-squeezing, hump-backed rascal Scroope, out of the way of better men—meaning his younger son Charles; and in his cups would talk in a way which even the old and young fellows who followed his hounds, and drank his port, and could stand a reasonable amount of brutality, did not like. Scroope Marston was slightly deformed, and he had the lean sallow face, piercing black eyes, and black lank hair, which sometimes accompany deformity.[23] "I'm no feyther o' that hog-backed creature. I'm no sire of hisn, d——n him! I'd as soon call that tongs son o' mine," the old man used to bawl, in allusion to his son's long, lank limbs: "Charlie's a man, but that's a jack-an-ape. He has no good-nature; there's nothing handy, nor manly, nor no one turn of a Marston in him." And when he was pretty drunk, the old Squire used to swear he should never "sit at the head o' that board; nor frighten away folk from Gylingden Hall wi' his d——d hatchet-face—the black loon!" "Handsome Charlie was the man for his money. He knew what a horse was, and could sit to his bottle; and the lasses were all clean mad about him. He was a Marston every inch of his six foot two." Handsome Charlie and he, however, had also had a row or two. The old Squire was free with his horsewhip as with his tongue, and on occasion when neither weapon was quite practicable, had been known to give a fellow "a tap o' his knuckles." Handsome Charlie, however, thought there was a period at which personal chastisement should cease; and one night, when the port was flowing, there was some allusion to Marion Hayward, the miller's daughter, which for some reason the old gentleman did not like. Being "in liquor," and having clearer ideas about pugilism than self-government, he struck out, to the surprise of all present, at Handsome Charlie. The youth threw back his head scientifically, and nothing followed but the crash of a decanter on the floor. But the old Squire's blood was up, and he bounced from his chair. Up jumped Handsome Charlie, resolved to stand no nonsense. Drunken Squire Lilbourne, intending to mediate, fell flat on the floor, and cut his ear among the glasses. Handsome Charlie caught the thump which the old Squire discharged at him upon his open hand, and[24] catching him by the cravat, swung him with his back to the wall. They said the old man never looked so purple, nor his eyes so goggle before; and then Handsome Charlie pinioned him tight to the wall by both arms. "Well, I say—come, don't you talk no more nonsense o' that sort, and I won't lick you," croaked the old Squire. "You stopped that un clever, you did. Didn't he? Come, Charlie, man, gie us your hand, I say, and sit down again, lad." And so the battle ended; and I believe it was the last time the Squire raised his hand to Handsome Charlie. But those days were over. Old Toby Marston lay cold and quiet enough now, under the drip of the mighty ash-tree within the Saxon ruin where so many of the old Marston race returned to dust, and were forgotten. The weather-stained top-boots and leather-breeches, the three-cornered cocked hat to which old gentlemen of that day still clung, and the well-known red waistcoat that reached below his hips, and the fierce pug face of the old Squire, were now but a picture of memory. And the brothers between whom he had planted an irreconcilable quarrel, were now in their new mourning suits, with the gloss still on, debating furiously across the table in the great oak parlour, which had so often resounded to the banter and coarse songs, the oaths and laughter of the congenial neighbours whom the old Squire of Gylingden Hall loved to assemble there. These young gentlemen, who had grown up in Gylingden Hall, were not accustomed to bridle their tongues, nor, if need be, to hesitate about a blow. Neither had been at the old man's funeral. His death had been sudden. Having been helped to his bed in that hilarious and quarrelsome state which was induced by port and punch, he was found dead in the morning,—his head hanging[25] over the side of the bed, and his face very black and swollen. Now the Squire's will despoiled his eldest son of Gylingden, which had descended to the heir time out of mind. Scroope Marston was furious. His deep stern voice was heard inveighing against his dead father and living brother, and the heavy thumps on the table with which he enforced his stormy recriminations resounded through the large chamber. Then broke in Charles's rougher voice, and then came a quick alternation of short sentences, and then both voices together in growing loudness and anger, and at last, swelling the tumult, the expostulations of pacific and frightened lawyers, and at last a sudden break up of the conference. Scroope broke out of the room, his pale furious face showing whiter against his long black hair, his dark fierce eyes blazing, his hands clenched, and looking more ungainly and deformed than ever in the convulsions of his fury. Very violent words must have passed between them; for Charlie, though he was the winning man, was almost as angry as Scroope. The elder brother was for holding possession of the house, and putting his rival to legal process to oust him. But his legal advisers were clearly against it. So, with a heart boiling over with gall, up he went to London, and found the firm who had managed his father's business fair and communicative enough. They looked into the settlements, and found that Gylingden was excepted. It was very odd, but so it was, specially excepted; so that the right of the old Squire to deal with it by his will could not be questioned. Notwithstanding all this, Scroope, breathing vengeance and aggression, and quite willing to wreck himself provided he could run his brother down, assailed Handsome Charlie, and battered old Squire Toby's will in the Prerogative[26] Court and also at common law, and the feud between the brothers was knit, and every month their exasperation was heightened. Scroope was beaten, and defeat did not soften him. Charles might have forgiven hard words; but he had been himself worsted during the long campaign in some of those skirmishes, special motions, and so forth, that constitute the episodes of a legal epic like that in which the Marston brothers figured as opposing combatants; and the blight of law costs had touched him, too, with the usual effect upon the temper of a man of embarrassed means. Years flew, and brought no healing on their wings. On the contrary, the deep corrosion of this hatred bit deeper by time. Neither brother married. But an accident of a different kind befell the younger, Charles Marston, which abridged his enjoyments very materially. This was a bad fall from his hunter. There were severe fractures, and there was concussion of the brain. For some time it was thought that he could not recover. He disappointed these evil auguries, however. He did recover, but changed in two essential particulars. He had received an injury in his hip, which doomed him never more to sit in the saddle. And the rollicking animal spirits which hitherto had never failed him, had now taken flight for ever. He had been for five days in a state of coma—absolute insensibility—and when he recovered consciousness he was haunted by an indescribable anxiety. Tom Cooper, who had been butler in the palmy days of Gylingden Hall, under old Squire Toby, still maintained his post with old-fashioned fidelity, in these days of faded splendour and frugal housekeeping. Twenty years had passed since the death of his old master. He had grown lean, and stooped, and his face, dark with the peculiar[27] brown of age, furrowed and gnarled, and his temper, except with his master, had waxed surly. His master had visited Bath and Buxton, and came back, as he went, lame, and halting gloomily about with the aid of a stick. When the hunter was sold, the last tradition of the old life at Gylingden disappeared. The young Squire, as he was still called, excluded by his mischance from the hunting-field, dropped into a solitary way of life, and halted slowly and solitarily about the old place, seldom raising his eyes, and with an appearance of indescribable gloom. Old Cooper could talk freely on occasion with his master; and one day he said, as he handed him his hat and stick in the hall: "You should rouse yourself up a bit, Master Charles!" "It's past rousing with me, old Cooper." "It's just this, I'm thinking: there's something on your mind, and you won't tell no one. There's no good keeping it on your stomach. You'll be a deal lighter if you tell it. Come, now, what is it, Master Charlie?" The Squire looked with his round grey eyes straight into Cooper's eyes. He felt that there was a sort of spell broken. It was like the old rule of the ghost who can't speak till it is spoken to. He looked earnestly into old Cooper's face for some seconds, and sighed deeply. "It ain't the first good guess you've made in your day, old Cooper, and I'm glad you've spoke. It's bin on my mind, sure enough, ever since I had that fall. Come in here after me, and shut the door." The Squire pushed open the door of the oak parlour, and looked round on the pictures abstractedly. He had not been there for some time, and, seating himself on the table, he looked again for a while in Cooper's face before he spoke.[28] "It's not a great deal, Cooper, but it troubles me, and I would not tell it to the parson nor the doctor; for, God knows what they'd say, though there's nothing to signify in it. But you were always true to the family, and I don't mind if I tell you." "'Tis as safe with Cooper, Master Charles, as if 'twas locked in a chest, and sunk in a well." "It's only this," said Charles Marston, looking down on the end of his stick, with which he was tracing lines and circles, "all the time I was lying like dead, as you thought, after that fall, I was with the old master." He raised his eyes to Cooper's again as he spoke, and with an awful oath he repeated—"I was with him, Cooper!" "He was a good man, sir, in his way," repeated old Cooper, returning his gaze with awe." He was a good master to me, and a good father to you, and I hope he's happy. May God rest him!" "Well," said Squire Charles, "it's only this: the whole of that time I was with him, or he was with me—I don't know which. The upshot is, we were together, and I thought I'd never get out of his hands again, and all the time he was bullying me about some one thing; and if it was to save my life, Tom Cooper, by —— from the time I waked I never could call to mind what it was; and I think I'd give that hand to know; and if you can think of anything it might be—for God's sake! don't be afraid, Tom Cooper, but speak it out, for he threatened me hard, and it was surely him." Here ensued a silence. "And what did you think it might be yourself, Master Charles?" said Cooper. "I han't thought of aught that's likely. I'll never hit on't—never. I thought it might happen he knew something about that d—— hump-backed villain, Scroope, that[29] swore before Lawyer Gingham I made away with a paper of settlements—me and father; and, as I hope to be saved, Tom Cooper, there never was a bigger lie! I'd a had the law of him for them identical words, and cast him for more than he's worth; only Lawyer Gingham never goes into nothing for me since money grew scarce in Gylingden; and I can't change my lawyer, I owe him such a hatful of money. But he did, he swore he'd hang me yet for it. He said it in them identical words—he'd never rest till he hanged me for it, and I think it was, like enough, something about that, the old master was troubled; but it's enough to drive a man mad. I can't bring it to mind—I can't remember a word he said, only he threatened awful, and looked—Lord a mercy on us!—frightful bad." "There's no need he should. May the Lord a-mercy on him!" said the old butler. "No, of course; and you're not to tell a soul, Cooper—not a living soul, mind, that I said he looked bad, nor nothing about it." "God forbid!" said old Cooper, shaking his head. "But I was thinking, sir, it might ha' been about the slight that's bin so long put on him by having no stone over him, and never a scratch o' a chisel to say who he is." "Ay! Well, I didn't think o' that. Put on your hat, old Cooper, and come down wi' me; for I'll look after that, at any rate." There is a bye-path leading by a turnstile to the park, and thence to the picturesque old burying-place, which lies in a nook by the roadside, embowered in ancient trees. It was a fine autumnal sunset, and melancholy lights and long shadows spread their peculiar effects over the landscape as "Handsome Charlie" and the old butler made their way slowly toward the place where Handsome Charlie was himself to lie at last.[30] "Which of the dogs made that howling all last night?" asked the Squire, when they had got on a little way. "'Twas a strange dog, Master Charlie, in front of the house; ours was all in the yard—a white dog wi' a black head, he looked to be, and he was smelling round them mounting-steps the old master, God be wi' him! set up, the time his knee was bad. When the tyke got up a' top of them, howlin' up at the windows, I'd a liked to shy something at him." "Hullo! Is that like him?" said the Squire, stopping short, and pointing with his stick at a dirty-white dog, with a large black head, which was scampering round them in a wide circle, half crouching with that air of uncertainty and deprecation which dogs so well know how to assume. He whistled the dog up. He was a large, half-starved bull-dog. "That fellow has made a long journey—thin as a whipping-post, and stained all over, and his claws worn to the stumps," said the Squire, musingly. "He isn't a bad dog, Cooper. My poor father liked a good bull-dog, and knew a cur from a good 'un." The dog was looking up into the Squire's face with the peculiar grim visage of his kind, and the Squire was thinking irreverently how strong a likeness it presented to the character of his father's fierce pug features when he was clutching his horsewhip and swearing at a keeper. "If I did right I'd shoot him. He'll worry the cattle, and kill our dogs," said the Squire. "Hey, Cooper? I'll tell the keeper to look after him. That fellow could pull down a sheep, and he shan't live on my mutton." But the dog was not to be shaken off. He looked wistfully after the Squire, and after they had got a little way on, he followed timidly. It was vain trying to drive him off. The dog ran round[31] them in wide circles, like the infernal dog in "Faust"; only he left no track of thin flame behind him. These manœuvres were executed with a sort of beseeching air, which flattered and touched the object of this odd preference. So he called him up again, patted him, and then and there in a manner adopted him. The dog now followed their steps dutifully, as if he had belonged to Handsome Charlie all his days. Cooper unlocked the little iron door, and the dog walked in close behind their heels, and followed them as they visited the roofless chapel. The Marstons were lying under the floor of this little building in rows. There is not a vault. Each has his distinct grave enclosed in a lining of masonry. Each is surmounted by a stone kist, on the upper flag of which is enclosed his epitaph, except that of poor old Squire Toby. Over him was nothing but the grass and the line of masonry which indicate the site of the kist, whenever his family should afford him one like the rest. "Well, it does look shabby. It's the elder brother's business; but if he won't, I'll see to it myself, and I'll take care, old boy, to cut sharp and deep in it, that the elder son having refused to lend a hand the stone was put there by the younger." They strolled round this little burial-ground. The sun was now below the horizon, and the red metallic glow from the clouds, still illuminated by the departed sun, mingled luridly with the twilight. When Charlie peeped again into the little chapel, he saw the ugly dog stretched upon Squire Toby's grave, looking at least twice his natural length, and performing such antics as made the young Squire stare. If you have ever seen a cat stretched on the floor, with a bunch of Valerian, straining, writhing, rubbing its jaws in long-drawn caresses, and in the absorption of a sensual[32] ecstasy, you have seen a phenomenon resembling that which Handsome Charlie witnessed on looking in. The head of the brute looked so large, its body so long and thin, and its joints so ungainly and dislocated, that the Squire, with old Cooper beside him, looked on with a feeling of disgust and astonishment, which, in a moment or two more, brought the Squire's stick down upon him with a couple of heavy thumps. The beast awakened from his ecstasy, sprang to the head of the grave, and there on a sudden, thick and bandy as before, confronted the Squire, who stood at its foot, with a terrible grin, and eyes that glared with the peculiar green of canine fury. The next moment the dog was crouching abjectly at the Squire's feet. "Well, he's a rum 'un!" said old Cooper, looking hard at him. "I like him," said the Squire. "I don't," said Cooper. "But he shan't come in here again," said the Squire. "I shouldn't wonder if he was a witch," said old Cooper, who remembered more tales of witchcraft than are now current in that part of the world. "He's a good dog," said the Squire, dreamily. "I remember the time I'd a given a handful for him—but I'll never be good for nothing again. Come along." And he stooped down and patted him. So up jumped the dog and looked up in his face, as if watching for some sign, ever so slight, which he might obey. Cooper did not like a bone in that dog's skin. He could not imagine what his master saw to admire in him. He kept him all night in the gun-room, and the dog accompanied him in his halting rambles about the place. The fonder his master grew of him, the less did Cooper and the other servants like him.[33] "He hasn't a point of a good dog about him," Cooper would growl. "I think Master Charlie be blind. And old Captain (an old red parrot, who sat chained to a perch in the oak parlour, and conversed with himself, and nibbled at his claws and bit his perch all day),—old Captain, the only living thing, except one or two of us, and the Squire himself, that remembers the old master, the minute he saw the dog, screeched as if he was struck, shakin' his feathers out quite wild, and drops down, poor old soul, a-hangin' by his foot, in a fit." But there is no accounting for fancies, and the Squire was one of those dogged persons who persist more obstinately in their whims the more they are opposed. But Charles Marston's health suffered by his lameness. The transition from habitual and violent exercise to such a life as his privation now consigned him to, was never made without a risk to health; and a host of dyspeptic annoyances, the existence of which he had never dreamed of before, now beset him in sad earnest. Among these was the now not unfrequent troubling of his sleep with dreams and nightmares. In these his canine favourite invariably had a part and was generally a central, and sometimes a solitary figure. In these visions the dog seemed to stretch himself up the side of the Squire's bed, and in dilated proportions to sit at his feet, with a horrible likeness to the pug features of old Squire Toby, with his tricks of wagging his head and throwing up his chin; and then he would talk to him about Scroope, and tell him "all wasn't straight," and that he "must make it up wi' Scroope," that he, the old Squire, had "served him an ill turn," that "time was nigh up," and that "fair was fair," and he was "troubled where he was, about Scroope."Then in his dream this semi-human brute would approach his face to his, crawling and crouching up his[34] body, heavy as lead, till the face of the beast was laid on his, with the same odious caresses and stretchings and writhings which he had seen over the old Squire's grave. Then Charlie would wake up with a gasp and a howl, and start upright in the bed, bathed in a cold moisture, and fancy he saw something white sliding off the foot of the bed. Sometimes he thought it might be the curtain with white lining that slipped down, or the coverlet disturbed by his uneasy turnings; but he always fancied, at such moments, that he saw something white sliding hastily off the bed; and always when he had been visited by such dreams the dog next morning was more than usually caressing and servile, as if to obliterate, by a more than ordinary welcome, the sentiment of disgust which the horror of the night had left behind it. The doctor half-satisfied the Squire that there was nothing in these dreams, which, in one shape or another, invariably attended forms of indigestion such as he was suffering from. For a while, as if to corroborate this theory, the dog ceased altogether to figure in them. But at last there came a vision in which, more unpleasantly than before, he did resume his old place. In his nightmare the room seemed all but dark; he heard what he knew to be the dog walking from the door round his bed slowly, to the side from which he always had come upon it. A portion of the room was uncarpeted, and he said he distinctly heard the peculiar tread of a dog, in which the faint clatter of the claws is audible. It was a light stealthy step, but at every tread the whole room shook heavily; he felt something place itself at the foot of his bed, and saw a pair of green eyes staring at him in the dark, from which he could not remove his own. Then he heard, as he thought, the old Squire Toby say—"The[35] eleventh hour be passed, Charlie, and ye've done nothing—you and I 'a done Scroope a wrong!" and then came a good deal more, and then—"The time's nigh up, it's going to strike." And with a long low growl, the thing began to creep up upon his feet; the growl continued, and he saw the reflection of the up-turned green eyes upon the bed-clothes, as it began slowly to stretch itself up his body towards his face. With a loud scream, he waked. The light, which of late the Squire was accustomed to have in his bedroom, had accidentally gone out. He was afraid to get up, or even to look about the room for some time; so sure did he feel of seeing the green eyes in the dark fixed on him from some corner. He had hardly recovered from the first agony which nightmare leaves behind it, and was beginning to collect his thoughts, when he heard the clock strike twelve. And he bethought him of the words "the eleventh hour be passed—time's nigh up—it's going to strike!" and he almost feared that he would hear the voice reopening the subject. Next morning the Squire came down looking ill. "Do you know a room, old Cooper," said he, "they used to call King Herod's Chamber?" "Ay, sir; the story of King Herod was on the walls o't when I was a boy." "There's a closet off it—is there?" "I can't be sure o' that; but 'tisn't worth your looking at, now; the hangings was rotten, and took off the walls, before you was born; and there's nou't there but some old broken things and lumber. I seed them put there myself by poor Twinks; he was blind of an eye, and footman afterwards. You'll remember Twinks? He died here, about the time o' the great snow. There was a deal o' work to bury him, poor fellow!"[36] "Get the key, old Cooper; I'll look at the room," said the Squire. "And what the devil can you want to look at it for?" said Cooper, with the old-world privilege of a rustic butler. "And what the devil's that to you? But I don't mind if I tell you. I don't want that dog in the gun-room, and I'll put him somewhere else; and I don't care if I put him there." "A bull-dog in a bedroom! Oons, sir! the folks 'ill say you're clean mad!" "Well, let them; get you the key, and let us look at the room." "You'd shoot him if you did right, Master Charlie. You never heard what a noise he kept up all last night in the gun-room, walking to and fro growling like a tiger in a show; and, say what you like, the dog's not worth his feed; he hasn't a point of a dog; he's a bad dog." "I know a dog better than you—and he's a good dog!" said the Squire, testily. "If you was a judge of a dog you'd hang that 'un," said Cooper. "I'm not a-going to hang him, so there's an end. Go you, and get the key; and don't be talking, mind, when you go down. I may change my mind." Now this freak of visiting King Herod's room had, in truth, a totally different object from that pretended by the Squire. The voice in his nightmare had uttered a particular direction, which haunted him, and would give him no peace until he had tested it. So far from liking that dog to-day, he was beginning to regard it with a horrible suspicion; and if old Cooper had not stirred his obstinate temper by seeming to dictate, I dare say he would have got rid of that inmate effectually before evening.[37] Up to the third storey, long disused, he and old Cooper mounted. At the end of a dusty gallery, the room lay. The old tapestry, from which the spacious chamber had taken its name, had long given place to modern paper, and this was mildewed, and in some places hanging from the walls. A thick mantle of dust lay over the floor. Some broken chairs and boards, thick with dust, lay, along with other lumber, piled together at one end of the room. They entered the closet, which was quite empty. The Squire looked round, and you could hardly have said whether he was relieved or disappointed. "No furniture here," said the Squire, and looked through the dusty window. "Did you say anything to me lately—I don't mean this morning—about this room, or the closet—or anything—I forget—" "Lor' bless you! Not I. I han't been thinkin' o' this room this forty year." "Is there any sort of old furniture called a buffet—do you remember?" asked the Squire. "A buffet? why, yes—to be sure—there was a buffet, sure enough, in this closet, now you bring it to my mind," said Cooper. "But it's papered over." "And what is it?" "A little cupboard in the wall," answered the old man. "Ho—I see—and there's such a thing here, is there, under the paper? Show me whereabouts it was." "Well—I think it was somewhere about here," answered he, rapping his knuckles along the wall opposite the window. "Ay, there it is," he added, as the hollow sound of a wooden door was returned to his knock. The Squire pulled the loose paper from the wall, and disclosed the doors of a small press, about two feet square, fixed in the wall.[38] "The very thing for my buckles and pistols, and the rest of my gimcracks," said the Squire. "Come away, we'll leave the dog where he is. Have you the key of that little press?" No, he had not. The old master had emptied and locked it up, and desired that it should be papered over, and that was the history of it. Down came the Squire, and took a strong turn-screw from his gun-case; and quietly he reascended to King Herod's room, and, with little trouble, forced the door of the small press in the closet wall. There were in it some letters and cancelled leases, and also a parchment deed which he took to the window and read with much agitation. It was a supplemental deed executed about a fortnight after the others, and previously to his father's marriage, placing Gylingden under strict settlement to the elder son, in what is called "tail male." Handsome Charlie, in his fraternal litigation, had acquired a smattering of technical knowledge, and he perfectly well knew that the effect of this would be not only to transfer the house and lands to his brother Scroope, but to leave him at the mercy of that exasperated brother, who might recover from him personally every guinea he had ever received by way of rent, from the date of his father's death. It was a dismal, clouded day, with something threatening in its aspect, and the darkness, where he stood, was made deeper by the top of one of the huge old trees overhanging the window. In a state of awful confusion he attempted to think over his position. He placed the deed in his pocket, and nearly made up his mind to destroy it. A short time ago he would not have hesitated for a moment under such circumstances; but now his health and his nerves were shattered, and he was under a supernatural alarm which[39] the strange discovery of this deed had powerfully confirmed. In this state of profound agitation he heard a sniffing at the closet-door, and then an impatient scratch and a long low growl. He screwed his courage up, and, not knowing what to expect, threw the door open and saw the dog, not in his dream-shape, but wriggling with joy, and crouching and fawning with eager submission; and then wandering about the closet, the brute growled awfully into the corners of it, and seemed in an unappeasable agitation. Then the dog returned and fawned and crouched again at his feet. After the first moment was over, the sensations of abhorrence and fear began to subside, and he almost reproached himself for requiting the affection of this poor friendless brute with the antipathy which he had really done nothing to earn. The dog pattered after him down the stairs. Oddly enough, the sight of this animal, after the first revulsion, reassured him; it was, in his eyes, so attached, so good-natured, and palpably so mere a dog. By the hour of evening the Squire had resolved on a middle course; he would not inform his brother of his discovery, nor yet would he destroy the deed. He would never marry. He was past that time. He would leave a letter, explaining the discovery of the deed, addressed to the only surviving trustee—who had probably forgotten everything about it—and having seen out his own tenure, he would provide that all should be set right after his death. Was not that fair? at all events it quite satisfied what he called his conscience, and he thought it a devilish good compromise for his brother; and he went out, towards sunset, to take his usual walk. Returning in the darkening twilight, the dog, as usual[40] attending him, began to grow frisky and wild, at first scampering round him in great circles, as before, nearly at the top of his speed, his great head between his paws as he raced. Gradually more excited grew the pace and narrower his circuit, louder and fiercer his continuous growl, and the Squire stopped and grasped his stick hard, for the lurid eyes and grin of the brute threatened an attack. Turning round and round as the excited brute encircled him, and striking vainly at him with his stick, he grew at last so tired that he almost despaired of keeping him longer at bay; when on a sudden the dog stopped short and crawled up to his feet wriggling and crouching submissively. Nothing could be more apologetic and abject; and when the Squire dealt him two heavy thumps with his stick, the dog whimpered only, and writhed and licked his feet. The Squire sat down on a prostrate tree; and his dumb companion, recovering his wonted spirits immediately, began to sniff and nuzzle among the roots. The Squire felt in his breast-pocket for the deed—it was safe; and again he pondered, in this loneliest of spots, on the question whether he should preserve it for restoration after his death to his brother, or destroy it forthwith. He began rather to lean toward the latter solution, when the long low growl of the dog not far off startled him. He was sitting in a melancholy grove of old trees, that slants gently westward. Exactly the same odd effect of light I have before described—a faint red glow reflected downward from the upper sky, after the sun had set, now gave to the growing darkness a lurid uncertainty. This grove, which lies in a gentle hollow, owing to its circumscribed horizon on all but one side, has a peculiar character of loneliness. He got up and peeped over a sort of barrier, accidentally[41] formed of the trunks of felled trees laid one over the other, and saw the dog straining up the other side of it, and hideously stretched out, his ugly head looking in consequence twice the natural size. His dream was coming over him again. And now between the trunks the brute's ungainly head was thrust, and the long neck came straining through, and the body, twining after it like a huge white lizard; and as it came striving and twisting through, it growled and glared as if it would devour him. As swiftly as his lameness would allow, the Squire hurried from this solitary spot towards the house. What thoughts exactly passed through his mind as he did so, I am sure he could not have told. But when the dog came up with him it seemed appeased, and even in high good-humour, and no longer resembled the brute that haunted his dreams. That night, near ten o'clock, the Squire, a good deal agitated, sent for the keeper, and told him that he believed the dog was mad, and that he must shoot him. He might shoot the dog in the gun-room, where he was—a grain of shot or two in the wainscot did not matter, and the dog must not have a chance of getting out. The Squire gave the gamekeeper his double-barrelled gun, loaded with heavy shot. He did not go with him beyond the hall. He placed his hand on the keeper's arm; the keeper said his hand trembled, and that he looked "as white as curds."Listen a bit!" said the Squire under his breath. They heard the dog in a state of high excitement in the room—growling ominously, jumping on the window-stool and down again, and running round the room. "You'll need to be sharp, mind—don't give him a chance—slip in edgeways, d'ye see? and give him both barrels!"[42] "Not the first mad dog I've knocked over, sir," said the man, looking very serious as he cocked the gun. As the keeper opened the door, the dog had sprung into the empty grate. He said he "never see sich a stark, staring devil." The beast made a twist round, as if, he thought, to jump up the chimney—"but that wasn't to be done at no price,"—and he made a yell—not like a dog—like a man caught in a mill-crank, and before he could spring at the keeper, he fired one barrel into him. The dog leaped towards him, and rolled over, receiving the second barrel in his head, as he lay snorting at the keeper's feet! "I never seed the like; I never heard a screech like that!" said the keeper, recoiling. "It makes a fellow feel queer." "Quite dead?" asked the Squire. "Not a stir in him, sir," said the man, pulling him along the floor by the neck. "Throw him outside the hall-door now," said the Squire;" and mind you pitch him outside the gate to-night—old Cooper says he's a witch," and the pale Squire smiled, "so he shan't lie in Gylingden." Never was man more relieved than the Squire, and he slept better for a week after this than he had done for many weeks before. It behoves us all to act promptly on our good resolutions. There is a determined gravitation towards evil, which, if left to itself, will bear down first intentions. If at one moment of superstitious fear, the Squire had made up his mind to a great sacrifice, and resolved in the matter of that deed so strangely recovered, to act honestly by his brother, that resolution very soon gave place to the compromise with fraud, which so conveniently postponed the restitution to the period when further enjoyment on his[43] part was impossible. Then came more tidings of Scroope's violent and minatory language, with always the same burthen—that he would leave no stone unturned to show that there had existed a deed which Charles had either secreted or destroyed, and that he would never rest till he had hanged him.

its all new parts
PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor	€81.90 @ Alza
Motherboard	Asus Prime B450M-A II Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	€56.60 @ Amazon Deutschland
Memory	*ADATA XPG GAMMIX D10 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory	€36.90 @ Alza
Storage	Kingston NV2 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€63.90 @ Alza
Video Card	ASRock Challenger D OC Radeon RX 5700 8 GB Video Card	€175.00
Case	Deepcool CH370 MicroATX Mid Tower Case	€68.89 @ notebooksbilliger.de
Power Supply	MSI MAG A550BN 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply	€58.90 @ Amazon Deutschland
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total	€542.09
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-23 07:36 CEST+0200

Hi peeps,
I’m planning a new build, as mine is starting to get a “little” old (4690k, GTX960 😬).
It’s for both productivity (photos, maybe a little machine learning) and gaming. Hence the Ryzen 7700, which I can get for just a bit more over a 7600.
SSD I will reuse my Adata 2TB 8200 pro (or so).
Is there a point in getting a RX 7700 XT over the RX6800 (non XT)? The price difference isn’t massive. I will probably use my trusty old Dell U2711 - 1440p, 60Hz.
Is the a point of going B650 over A620 if I don’t plan to overclock?
Also, has anyone been able to buy the AM4 mounting kit for the Scythe Mugen Max? If I can, I’d like to reuse the cooler.
Thanks ☺️
PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 7700 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor	€236.00
CPU Cooler	Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler	€38.90 @ Amazon Deutschland
Motherboard	ASRock A620M Pro RS WiFi Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard	€135.62 @ Galaxus
Memory	Corsair Vengeance 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory	€127.88 @ Amazon Deutschland
Video Card	XFX Speedster SWFT 319 Radeon RX 6800 16 GB Video Card	€389.90 @ Alza
Power Supply	be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	€85.82 @ Galaxus
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	€1014.12
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-22 10:24 CEST+0200

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Wiki
​
Chapter 35
Subject: Fleet Leader Barrilin Onaya
Species: Oyan
Description: Avian humanoid, feathered tail. 6'1" (1.8 m) avg height. 96 lbs (43 kg) avg weight. 161 year life expectancy.
Ship: RSV Nolbarinil {Majestic In Flight}
Location: Unknown
​
"Good hits," intel-head Salin reported. "Target destroyed, fleet leader."
"Looks like the other teams have accomplished their objectives as well, sir," Hindal said.
Salin is sending my orders and receiving updates while my second in command is coordinating with the other strike teams. Salin's has a heavier burden than Hindal does, but he is well within his element.
"Excellent," I replied. "Now all that's left is clean-up. The swarm should be here to take over for us soon. In the meantime, have the non-US forces pull back and start sniping stragglers. Remind them to check their fire, we don't need a diplomatic incident."
"Yes, Fleet Leader," Salin said, turning back to the task at hand.
I smiled softly as I watched my crew tend to their tasks. The crew of the RSV Nolbarinil is one of the few crews that is a blend of each space-faring species in our great republic. People with wildly different cultures, customs, perspectives, and even dietary requirements working together toward a common goal. As someone who believes that our differences make us stronger together, I've always found this beautiful.
It isn't hard to draw a parallel between my crew and the strike teams. I've argued with other Fleet Leaders and even politicians over my beliefs, and to see my point wholly and completely proven on such a massive scale is a wonderful experience. However, I can't say that I don't empathize a little with their perspectives.
I stole a glance at the dark metallic box that had been installed on my bridge. It contains an Artificial Intelligence, one powerful enough to put the OU to shame. Once I had been approved for this command I had been escorted into a dark room along with several other officers. After we had taken our seats and stewed for a bit, a different group of people entered the room. This group of people was comprised of the highest ranking officers of each of our militaries, including High Commander Uliriona.
They proceeded to explain that Omega's presence aboard our ships was a requirement for this mission, and this mission is not voluntary. Regardless of our views on the sanctity of biological life, we would be working alongside this AI, and refusal to do so would result in court-martial. We were informed that what we were about to be told is classified and failure to keep this information secret would result in life-long imprisonment or even execution. Then they explained what this Artificial Intelligence is capable of, and the collective gasps nearly turned the room into a vacuum.
During their war with the Artificial Intelligences that they created, the United Systems somehow thought it was a good idea to create an even more powerful AI to fight for them. They designed this AI with cyberwarfare capabilities that made the other AI look like elderly people struggling to figure out the newest version of their terminal's operating system. Somehow this plan succeeded and the US survived the war, which is the most compelling case for divine intervention I've ever seen.
However, Omega surprised them with its capability. Unbeknownst to its creators, it has the ability to replicate itself and literally be in multiple places at once. This, in combination with its cyberwarfare capabilities, makes it very useful against the Omni-Union. But also very, very dangerous. Our leaders believe that its usefulness outweighs the potential danger, but I'm not sure I agree.
"The swarm has entered the system and is now engaging the Omni-Union," Salin said.
"Regroup and make ready to enter warp," I ordered. "Hindal, give the mark once it comes in."
"Yes, fleet-leader," they said in unison.
One of the key components of this operation is coordination. We are coordinating our warps with other strike teams so that we enter the system simultaneously, which will prevent the Mobile Prime Platforms from supporting each other and potentially destroying the dreadnoughts. Even during the battles, the strike teams are coordinating with each other to keep the Omni-Unions ships at bay.
We are using overwhelming firepower against the MPPS and small fleet tactics against the ships that would help them. We even have reserves waiting in case the enemy is reinforced or one of the dreadnoughts is destroyed. This operation was extensively calculated and planned, which makes one wonder what part Omega could possibly play in all this.
"Mark," Hindal said.
The RSV Nolbarinil entered warp less than half a second later. Within a few more seconds, we were in a new system and back in the thick of it.
"Dreadnoughts, fire at will," I ordered.
Everyone already knew what to do and were going about doing it. I began watching the battle on the tac-map that the United Systems had installed months ago. Part of me was already used to this technology, but every now and then I couldn't help but marvel at how much better than its predecessor it is. Being able to know the near real-time location of every ship in a battle kind of feels like cheating.
The OU ships had once again known we were coming, and had once again focused their fire on the United System's ships. And just like the last time, this strategy was ineffective. As the dreadnoughts and the Mobile Prime Platform engaged each other, I checked our casualties.
We lost five Republic vessels and one of the Dtiln collective ships, but the US ships hadn't even lost their shields. What would have happened to our civilization if we had encountered the United Systems in a more hostile fashion? I chuckled softly and shook my head. They would have destroyed or assimilated us with little to no contest.
As I was trying to calculate how quickly we would have surrendered, a red marker began barreling toward one of the dreadnoughts. I furrowed my brow as several dozen more began following its lead. Surely they're smart enough to realize that their weapons can't do anything against the dreadnought's shield? They're stupid, but they're not...
"Salin, tell the dreadnoughts to engage their PDLs and brace for impact!" I shouted.
"Yes, sir!"
I squeezed the arm of my seat as I watched the red markers close in on the dreadnought. The dreadnought began to fire at them, and the markers started disappearing one by one. Too slowly, though.
Green markers suddenly appeared as US ships warped into the path of the suicide ships and started engaging them, but some of the red markers still slipped past. After a few more excruciating seconds, two of the red markers impacted the dreadnought. I swore under my breath.
"The USSS Tempest has lost shields, sir," Salin reported. "The MPP has begun focusing fire on them."
"Have the other two form a shield formation with the Tempest," I said. "What's the extent of the damage?"
"Waiting on the full damage report, sir."
I watched the Tempest and one other dreadnought begin to move. The idea behind the shield formation is to put the dreadnought with shields in between the Tempest and the hostile MPP, allowing it to avoid taking any further damage while its shield recharged. The dreadnoughts are slow, though, and the MPP's MACs are too damn quick.
"They've got a hull breach and have taken damage to their primary cannon," Salin shook his head solemnly. "They're out of the fight, sir."
"Blood encrusted stool," I whispered. "Hindal, report this to high command and request guidance."
I already knew what they were going to say. The Tempest can't warp out of the system until we can arrange an escort or eliminate the Omni-Union. We can't do either of those things until we destroy the MPP. In the meantime, the MPP is going to destroy the Tempest.
"They've lost power," Salin said.
I quietly prepared myself to witness the destruction of the USSS Tempest.
"Give the order to abandon," I said.
"Belay that," a raspy voice came over the intercom. "The USSS Tempest has some of the best armor ever made. More than enough to protect the crew from the Omni-Union ships. The escape pods are much less armored, and the OU will simply pick them off."
"Omega?" I asked, then silently chided myself for asking such an obvious question. "The MPP is going to destroy the Tempest. If the crew is aboard when that happens, they will all die."
"Negative. Check the tac-map."
I looked at the map, desperately trying to find a clue as to what the mad machine was talking about. I stared at the icon denoting the MPP for a few seconds before I finally came to the realization that the MPP wasn't firing anymore.
"What's happening?" I asked, dumbfounded.
"I have disabled its weaponry and FTLD. Its current countermeasures will disable my control over these systems after approximately forty-five seconds, but that's more than enough time to destroy it. The Tempest is safe from the Mobile Prime Platform."
"Fine. Salin, tighten our forces around the dreadnoughts."
"Yes, sir."
I leaned back in my chair again. Omega seems to be as useful as it was billed, but to think that it could disable an MPP's weapons and FTLD. A Prime is a planet-sized Artificial Intelligence, but on the other wing, Omega was built specifically to kill AI. If it can do that to them, though...
I caught myself and shut down that train of thought. Guess I have a negative bias to work on, after all. I thought I could avoid ambivalence toward the United System's AI despite my experiences in this lengthy war, but those experiences have obviously soured my opinion. Shame on me for not realizing it sooner.
While it is true that Omega could be apocalyptically deadly if it chose to be, it has been living among the species of the United Systems for centuries now. Even though a good portion of its capabilities are classified, those that are in the know still trust it. If I approached that fact rationally, then it would be safe to assume that it hasn't shown many signs of maliciousness. Well, towards them, at least.
"USSS Tip of the Tip is firing," Salin said.
"That's got to be a translation error," I rubbed my forehead softly.
"No, it isn't. Once we got the list I asked some of the gonts at the dock," Hindal chuckled. "Apparently, in the United Systems the engineering team that builds the ship gets to come up with its name."
"Good hit," Salin reported.
"Alright, hold here and keep those dreadnoughts safe until the swarm rejoins us," I said, then turned back to my second. "So what, the engineers that built the Tip of the Tip ran out of ideas for a name?"
"Well, the gont could only postulate, of course, but they seemed to think that the engineering crew were human and trying to slip a joke past the censors," Hindal grinned. "A rather specific joke regarding a particularly male piece of human anatomy."
"The way you phrase that makes it sound like they are making a cloaca joke, but..." I trailed off, trying to figure out the punchline on my own.
"Negative, sir. Humans have a different type of genitals, and for the males it's more like a..." Hindal paused for a moment, trying to keep her composure. "Like a meat spear, sir."
"Oh by the grace of the sun," I rubbed my forehead harder. "Tip of the tip, yeah. I get it now. Disgusting."
"Oh, yeah, definitely disgusting," she said, masking a chuckle. "Interestingly, the gont I spoke to pointed out that a great many number of objects take on the same shape as the human male..."
"The USSS Alikonuoro reports that its primary cannon is malfunctioning," Salin interrupted. "So now we've got two replacements inbound."
"Understood. Alikonuoro, now that's a proper name for a ship. What does it mean?" I asked.
"I'll check, sir," Hindal replied.
"I already looked, can't find a meaning," Salin said.
"It is Alumari in origin," Omega interjected. "It is a reference to an ancient origin myth in which a fertility goddess bred with anything that came along, including her own children, which resulted in the many different species of animal on the Alumari cradle world of Alunis."
A thick sheet of shocked silence fell over the bridge, until it was interrupted by a snort from Hindal.
"The censors were overwhelmed by the rapidity in which this fleet was constructed," the AI said with a sigh. "There are currently twenty eight dreadnoughts with names that are puns regarding genitals or sexual conduct."
"The swarm has arrived, and the USSS Alikonuoro's replacement is inbound..." Salin trailed off, staring at the terminal in front of him.
"What is it?" I asked.
He let out a heavy sigh, "Its name is the USSS Gaping Maw."
Hindal began laughing so hard that she fell out of her seat.
​
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Before I buy the parts for my new gaming and video editing PC, I wanted to get your (expert) opinions. My budget is around €850 and I live in Germany. I've been working with a few Redditors over the past few days since I'm still pretty new to this topic. Do you have any suggestions for improvement or tips for me? Thanks in advance! List:

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor	€119.00 @ Amazon Deutschland
CPU Cooler	ARCTIC Freezer 36 A-RGB CPU Cooler	€30.98 @ Galaxus
Thermal Compound	Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 1 g Thermal Paste	€7.89 @ Alza
Motherboard	Asus TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS WIFI II Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	€128.60 @ Amazon Deutschland
Memory	G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory	€75.29 @ Amazon Deutschland
Storage	Lexar NM620 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€62.90 @ Galaxus
Video Card	MSI VENTUS 2X BLACK OC GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB Video Card	€315.00 @ Amazon Deutschland
Case	Deepcool MATREXX 40 3FS MicroATX Mini Tower Case	€56.89 @ Alternate
Power Supply	MSI MAG A550BN 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply	€58.90 @ Amazon Deutschland
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total	€855.45
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-16 19:00 CEST+0200

Bevor ich die Teile für meinen neuen Gaming- und Videoschnitt-PC kaufe, wollte ich gerne eure Expertenmeinungen einholen. Mein Budget liegt bei etwa 850€. Ich habe in den letzten paar Tagen mit ein paar Redditoren zusammengearbeitet, da ich selbst noch ziemlich neu in diesem Thema bin. Habt ihr vielleicht Verbesserungsvorschläge oder Tipps für mich? Danke schon im Voraus! Liste:

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor	€119.00 @ Amazon Deutschland
CPU Cooler	ARCTIC Freezer 36 A-RGB CPU Cooler	€30.98 @ Galaxus
Thermal Compound	Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 1 g Thermal Paste	€7.89 @ Alza
Motherboard	Asus TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS WIFI II Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	€128.60 @ Amazon Deutschland
Memory	G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory	€75.29 @ Amazon Deutschland
Storage	Lexar NM620 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	€62.90 @ Galaxus
Video Card	MSI VENTUS 2X BLACK OC GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB Video Card	€315.00 @ Amazon Deutschland
Case	Deepcool MATREXX 40 3FS MicroATX Mini Tower Case	€56.89 @ Alternate
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Hey everyone! Thank you for your feed back and support in this Beardy Tale. This is but the tip of the iceberg for Tucker AKA: Badge Beard, and his beardy antics. As I discussed this with several people through the community it's shed some light on things he has done that can be classified as beard behavior that I didn't quite realize at the time. I will of course be including these incidences into this story at some point, which can be as long as time itself due to the fact that somehow Badge Beard still works with me despite poor attendance, poor hygiene, several HR complaints about sexual harassment and one DV situation involving the Police. Despite all of this and our best efforts to get rid of Badge Beard he still has stained gainfully employed, he is like a cockroach you step on him thinking he's dead, but the second you lift your foot he comes scuttling out angrier and beardier than ever. Seriously though! thank you for all your support and I hope that this tale will keep you guys intrigued and entertained for a long time. So as always please forgive any grammatical and punctuation mistakes as I do struggle with writing, but this helps me. in case you missed part one, here is the cast list below.
Cast List: (Note not everyone listed is a regular, but does have an important role no matter how minor. Also names are changed to protect identities) Theo: OP 32 M, Red hair, average height but quite muscular as I have the bad habit of going to the gym almost every chance I get. Former big city cop who decided to venture into Executive Protection for wealthy clients. I have been a cop for a long time roughly around 10 years before deciding to leave that career and embark on a less stressful and much better paying adventure. Rabbit: 31 M My Coworker and friend who saves my sanity daily, Has a good heart, but the darkest humor you will ever hear also former big city cop. He's very wealthy, but you wouldn't know it unless he told you exactly how much he has. Dresses like a homeschooled cowboy and is missing half his teeth from various extreme sports and unfortunate injuries. Rabbit has the bad habit of falling off of high places and catching his fall with his face. Rabbit and I are near identical in how we think and act and I firmly believe that we are the same person with how scarily we think alike. Jack: 36 M Tall, bald, 350 pounds of Australian Muscle and poor temper, has been part of Executive Protection and high risk security for the better part of 15 years, good heart and even darker sense of humor than Rabbit. Jack has seen and done it all when it comes to doing contract security and has the skill set similar to Jason Bourne. I honestly would never, ever cross this man as I know that if he wanted to he would be to end me without as much as breaking a sweat. Will: 68 M Loveable tall older gentleman from down south who spent many years first in Vietnam kicking ass and taking names before coming home and working all of the country as an expert in CQB (Close Quarters Combat) training with various Law Enforcement agencies around the country teaching Cops how to clear buildings safely. Will has the patient of a saint and is genuinely a man of the people, he can talk down anyone in any situation, and have everyone leaving with a smile on their face. His patience though was well and truly tested with the beard of our story, and it almost broke him. Tucker (AKA Badge Beard): 28 M, Not chubby, but does have a scraggly beard and does not believe in washing their uniform or even wearing clean clothes in general. Our humble beardy antagonist, who became incredibly Badge heavy after being hired on, believing that his time as an MP in the Army made him the Alpha Male of the group. He did have a slightly patchy beard, and his clothes were always wrinkled and stained, he had a noticeable odor about him that was a mix of Jalapeno Cheetos and old urine. Tuckers truest beard came through when he expressed his love for anime "Females". His obsession for power and lust would seal his fate as our beard in this tale as he thought that toting a tremendously tiny token trinket of testosterone to tantalize the tender tarts, would make everyone fall in love with him. It would all be for naught in the end as this story does not have a happy end for our noble knight.
Badge Beard Part Two: Training Day As mentioned in Part one Badge Beard did technically already have a first day and some training, but that shift was cut short by him trying to take pictures of our clients scantily clad teenage daughters while they were swimming in the family pool. Badge Beard was then sent home to due to his behavior and then had a very unpleasant meeting with our supervisor the next day who went over the basic human behavior guidelines that we all live by while at work. While I was not there at the meeting, I was informed later by my Supervisor and Client Manager that Tucker was under that impression that the "Females wouldn't mind since he was just trying to compliment them by taking their picture, and that any woman would be flattered to have a man see them as so beautiful to take his time to photograph them" This understandably did not go well for him as my supervisor is a father of five girls and is 100% The protective Ron Swanson manly man, especially when it comes to his children".
My supervisor then placed me in charge of watching over him for the remainder of his training and to make sure that this didn't happen again. I told my supervisor that while I can try to keep him in line, Tucker is an adult and I can't be watching him the whole time we are working as some assignments do not allow two of us to be working right next to each other. The Supervisor assured me it would be fine and that we would take that into account while making work schedules and assignments for the next few weeks.
I show up the next day early for my shift to make some preparations for my new work responsibilities in trying to guide Tucker into an average employee who did not creep out everyone who he laid his pervy eyes on. As I sat in our make shift office with Rabbit who had shown up around the time I did, I looked out the window as I heard vehicles approaching and saw that Tucker was first to arrive to my surprise, but as he stepped out of his vehicle I could see that his uniform was just as unkempt and wrinkly as the day before, His shirt was untucked and as he walked towards the door to the office he half heartedly tucked it into his pants not caring that his gig line was embarrassingly crooked. ( I turned and looked at Rabbit with a pissed of look)
OP: I don't believe this kid was ever in the Army, I mean look at this dude.
Rabbit: (coming over to look at Badge Beard) What a fucking joke, this dude kept telling Supervisor that he was some hot shot in his unit and that he practically ran his Platoon. This dude looks like the fuck up who can't even put his socks on the right feet.
OP: Well he's our fuck up now, more specifically my fuck up until he figures out how to be normal.
Tucker: (The door open and Tucker Walks in) Oh hey OP how's it going? I was told you're going to be my trainer.
OP: Yeah, There's some things we need to go over and make sure you're squared away in. We had an issue last night and we need to make sure you understand what you can can't do.
Tucker: No worries man! I was an MP in the Army, so I know how to be professional.
Rabbit: Do you know how to fix your gig line? or maybe iron your clothes
Tucker: Of course I do! (He turns and faces Rabbit getting red in the face) I was in a hurry, were you in the military?
Rabbit: No, but I've been a cop for a long time and I know how to dress myself without looking like I just rolled out of bed.
Tucker: (Snorting and doing a weird laughing yell) Of course you had to be a cop! you couldn't make it in the Army like me, I bet you didn't even have the balls to go talk to a recruiter.
Note: Rabbit did in fact enlist when he was younger, but had suffered a serious training accident when he was in BCT and was medically discharged. Due to the fact that Rabbit never finished training he was adamant that he was never part of the military and felt that he did not truly become a Soldier. Whenever asked if he ever enlisted he would always say no, and that he tried, but it didn't work out.
Rabbit: You got me there, Soldiers are scary.
Tucker: (smiling with a smug look of satisfaction) I thought so.
OP: (already tired of Badge Beards shit. I walk over and grab his belt and pull the buckle over to be correctly lined up with his center mass)
Tucker: Oh what the hell! What are you doing?
OP: Fixing you. now that we have you looking less like a slob, I need you to take a lint roller and get rid of all that dandruff and chip dust. Also tomorrow you will show up with an ironed shirt to look professional.
Tucker: But I don't have an iron or an ironing board, I'll just hang it up in the bathroom and turn on the shower really hot to get the wrinkles out.
OP: (Maintaining eye contact and getting in his face) Buy a fucking iron, I don't need you wearing a mildew shirt and smelling like you just jumped in a swamp. As were talking the rest of the crew trickles in and gets their gear on and goes over their duty assignments. Tucker relented his protests and went about getting the rest of his gear on. The rest of the shift went by agonizingly slow, Tucker could not remember his log in for the the computers and when he was doing online training that was required, he kept asking me for help and if I could just answer some of the questions for him since I had done it already. When I told him no he would get pissy and go silent muttering under his breath something about how the Army never treated him like this.
At one point while we were doing our rounds, Tucker asked if he could go to the bathroom and I told him he didn't need to ask, just say he needed to go and he should go. Fast forward 30 minutes later still no Tucker and I was getting pissed. I head back to the office of the property and I see that bathroom light on and someone moving around in there and I can clearly hear two voices. I knock on the bathroom door and ask if anyone is in there.
Tucker: Just a minute! I'm just pooping
OP: Dude! you've been in there for 30 minutes what are you doing?
Tucker: I said I'm pooping.
OP: (Noted the door to the bathroom does have a lock, but with the right about of leverage you can easily get it open.) Bullshit. (I hit the door with my shoulder and I see Tucker in the bathroom video chatting with someone) What the fuck dude!
Tucker: What are you doing pervert? I'm not done get out!
OP: (I walk over, flush the toilet and look at him) Now you're done get out.
Tucker: (walks past me holding his phone muttering) Bunch of assholes, Sorry babe I got to go, I'll call you later.
OP: Dude! why are you video chatting on duty... In uniform! and why are you doing it in the bathroom?
Tucker: That's my girl! She thinks I'm a cop and I had to show her my uniform to make her believe that I am working in a cool special unit. She says that cops turn her on and we started dating when I was an MP in the Army and she loves a man in uniform.
OP: Dude... no... I don't care. Just please don't do that at work, and don't fucking do that in uniform anymore, I'm pretty sure it's a violation of policy and it's just weird.
Tucker: You're not going to tell on me are you?
OP: I will make you this one deal! if you do not ever, and I mean ever do this again and we can go through the rest of the shift with you not screwing up. I will let this slide, and Supervisor won't know. (Note: I screwed up and should of told our supervisor about this, I was tired and did not have a good rationale for letting it go.)
Tucker: Thanks OP! I promise I will do better! I won't let you regret this.
OP: I'll hold you to it.
The rest of the night went by without an further issues surprisingly, Badge Beard did do better and his attitude increased quite a bit. Even the next two weeks went by without any serious issues, and it seemed like Badge Beard was trying to assimilate into the workplace and be a decent human being and coworker. As we all know these Beards just can't help themselves and that eventually they will always return to their beardy ways and unless a new serving of cringe and disappointment on those around them.
Tune in next time for Part Three: M'lady and the dog Thank you so much and I hope you will continue to show interest in this and I will do my best to keep updating you all with more stories from Badge Beard. Till next time!