Hi,
I'm planning to switch completely to OpenBSD for day-to-day tasks and set up a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a Ryzen 2400G (Vega 8 graphics) for that. I successfully installed and set up Xfce. I noticed very high CPU usage and choppyness during operations which should be hardware accelerated (e.g. video playback) and started to investigate. According to everything I could gather, the OS tells me that GPU decoding is enabled while the programs (tested with Firefox, Blender and VLC) don't seem to be able to use it.
dmesg (had to omit some things because of the character limit) ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 9 pa 0xfec00000, version 21, 24 pins ioapic1 at mainbus0: apid 10 pa 0xfec01000, version 21, 32 pins acpimcfg0 at acpi0 acpimcfg0: addr 0xf8000000, bus 0-63 acpihpet0 at acpi0: 14318180 Hz acpiprt0 at acpi0: bus 0 (PCI0) acpiprt1 at acpi0: bus -1 (GPP0) acpiprt2 at acpi0: bus 1 (GPP1) acpiprt3 at acpi0: bus -1 (GPP2) acpiprt4 at acpi0: bus 2 (GPP3) acpiprt5 at acpi0: bus -1 (GPP4) acpiprt6 at acpi0: bus -1 (GPP5) acpiprt7 at acpi0: bus -1 (GPP6) acpiprt8 at acpi0: bus 3 (GP17) acpiprt9 at acpi0: bus 4 (GP18) acpipci0 at acpi0 PCI0: 0x00000010 0x00000011 0x00000000 acpicmos0 at acpi0 acpibtn0 at acpi0: PWRB tpm0 at acpi0 TPM_ 2.0 (TIS) addr 0xfed40000/0x5000, device 0x00fc1050 rev 0x1 "PNP0C14" at acpi0 not configured "PNP0C14" at acpi0 not configured acpicpu0 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu1 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu2 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu3 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu4 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu5 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu6 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpicpu7 at acpi0: C2(0@400 io@0x414), C1(0@1 mwait), PSS acpipwrres0 at acpi0: P0ST, resource for SATA acpipwrres1 at acpi0: P3ST, resource for SATA acpivideo0 at acpi0: VGA_ cpu0: 3200 MHz: speeds: 3200 2300 1600 MHz pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0 ksmn0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "AMD 17h/1xh Root Complex" rev 0x00 pchb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "AMD 17h PCIE" rev 0x00 ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 2 "AMD 17h/1xh PCIE" rev 0x00: msi pci1 at ppb0 bus 1 re0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "Realtek 8168" rev 0x0e: RTL8168EP/8111EP (0x5000), msi, address 6c:4b:90:bf:a4:32 rgephy0 at re0 phy 7: RTL8251 PHY, rev. 0 "Realtek RealManage Serial" rev 0x0e at pci1 dev 0 function 1 not configured "Realtek RealManage Serial" rev 0x0e at pci1 dev 0 function 2 not configured "Realtek RealManage IPMI" rev 0x0e at pci1 dev 0 function 3 not configured ehci0 at pci1 dev 0 function 4 "Realtek RealManage USB" rev 0x0e: apic 10 int 7 ehci0: pre-2.0 USB rev ppb1 at pci0 dev 1 function 4 "AMD 17h/1xh PCIE" rev 0x00: msi pci2 at ppb1 bus 2 nvme0 at pci2 dev 0 function 0 vendor "SK hynix", unknown product 0x174a rev 0x00: msix, NVMe 1.3 nvme0: SKHynix_HFS256GDE9X081N, firmware 41730C20, serial CYB9N019710509L1K scsibus1 at nvme0: 2 targets, initiator 0 sd0 at scsibus1 targ 1 lun 0: sd0: 244198MB, 512 bytes/sector, 500118192 sectors pchb1 at pci0 dev 8 function 0 "AMD 17h PCIE" rev 0x00 ppb2 at pci0 dev 8 function 1 "AMD 17h/1xh PCIE" rev 0x00 pci3 at ppb2 bus 3 amdgpu0 at pci3 dev 0 function 0 "ATI Radeon Vega" rev 0xd6 drm0 at amdgpu0 amdgpu0: msi azalia0 at pci3 dev 0 function 1 "ATI Radeon Vega HD Audio" rev 0x00: msi azalia0: no supported codecs ccp0 at pci3 dev 0 function 2 "AMD 17h/1xh Crypto" rev 0x00 xhci0 at pci3 dev 0 function 3 "AMD 17h/1xh xHCI" rev 0x00: msix, xHCI 1.10 usb0 at xhci0: USB revision 3.0 uhub0 at usb0 configuration 1 interface 0 "AMD xHCI root hub" rev 3.00/1.00 addr 1 xhci1 at pci3 dev 0 function 4 "AMD 17h/1xh xHCI" rev 0x00: msix, xHCI 1.10 usb1 at xhci1: USB revision 3.0 uhub1 at usb1 configuration 1 interface 0 "AMD xHCI root hub" rev 3.00/1.00 addr 1 "AMD 17h/1xh I2S Audio" rev 0x00 at pci3 dev 0 function 5 not configured azalia1 at pci3 dev 0 function 6 "AMD 17h/1xh HD Audio" rev 0x00: apic 10 int 30 azalia1: codecs: Realtek ALC233 audio0 at azalia1 ppb3 at pci0 dev 8 function 2 "AMD 17h/1xh PCIE" rev 0x00 pci4 at ppb3 bus 4 ahci0 at pci4 dev 0 function 0 "AMD FCH AHCI" rev 0x61: msi, AHCI 1.3.1 scsibus2 at ahci0: 32 targets piixpm0 at pci0 dev 20 function 0 "AMD FCH SMBus" rev 0x61: SMI iic0 at piixpm0 spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x50: 8GB DDR4 SDRAM PC4-21300 SO-DIMM iic1 at piixpm0 pcib0 at pci0 dev 20 function 3 "AMD FCH LPC" rev 0x51 pchb2 at pci0 dev 24 function 0 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb3 at pci0 dev 24 function 1 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb4 at pci0 dev 24 function 2 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb5 at pci0 dev 24 function 3 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb6 at pci0 dev 24 function 4 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb7 at pci0 dev 24 function 5 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb8 at pci0 dev 24 function 6 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 pchb9 at pci0 dev 24 function 7 "AMD 17h/1xh Data Fabric" rev 0x00 isa0 at pcib0 isadma0 at isa0 pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5 irq 1 irq 12 pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61 spkr0 at pcppi0 vmm0 at mainbus0: SVM/RVI efifb at mainbus0 not configured uhub2 at uhub1 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0 "Genesys Logic USB2.0 Hub" rev 2.00/60.52 addr 2 uhidev0 at uhub2 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "Cherry Mikroschalter USB Wireless Device" rev 2.00/0.13 addr 3 uhidev0: iclass 3/1 ukbd0 at uhidev0: 8 variable keys, 6 key codes wskbd0 at ukbd0 mux 1 uhidev1 at uhub2 port 2 configuration 1 interface 1 "Cherry Mikroschalter USB Wireless Device" rev 2.00/0.13 addr 3 uhidev1: iclass 3/1, 1 report id ums0 at uhidev1 reportid 1: 3 buttons, Z dir wsmouse0 at ums0 mux 0 uhidev2 at uhub2 port 2 configuration 1 interface 2 "Cherry Mikroschalter USB Wireless Device" rev 2.00/0.13 addr 3 uhidev2: iclass 3/0 ucc0 at uhidev2: 668 usages, 20 keys, array wskbd1 at ucc0 mux 1 vscsi0 at root scsibus3 at vscsi0: 256 targets softraid0 at root scsibus4 at softraid0: 256 targets sd1 at scsibus4 targ 1 lun 0: sd1: 243938MB, 512 bytes/sector, 499585087 sectors root on sd1a (1b730a558f585b4a.a) swap on sd1b dump on sd1b amdgpu0: RAVEN GC 9.1.0 11 CU rev 0x01 amdgpu0: 3840x2160, 32bpp wsdisplay0 at amdgpu0 mux 1 wskbd0: connecting to wsdisplay0 wskbd1: connecting to wsdisplay0 wsdisplay0: screen 0-5 added (std, vt100 emulation)
sysctl hw hw.machine=amd64 hw.model=AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2400GE w/ Radeon Vega Graphics hw.ncpu=8 hw.byteorder=1234 hw.pagesize=4096 hw.disknames=sd0:9255b5825bf34986,sd1:1b730a558f585b4a hw.diskcount=2 hw.sensors.cpu0.frequency0=2500000000.00 Hz hw.sensors.cpu2.frequency0=2450000000.00 Hz hw.sensors.cpu4.frequency0=2450000000.00 Hz hw.sensors.cpu6.frequency0=2500000000.00 Hz hw.sensors.ksmn0.temp0=45.50 degC (Tctl) hw.sensors.softraid0.drive0=online (sd1), OK hw.cpuspeed=3200 hw.setperf=100 hw.vendor=LENOVO hw.product=10VHS1JG00 hw.version=ThinkCentre M715q hw.serialno=S4MD9580 hw.uuid=80dff399-94f6-e911-a6f6-20aca7f51800 hw.physmem=7950430208 hw.usermem=7949889536 hw.ncpufound=8 hw.allowpowerdown=1 hw.perfpolicy=auto hw.smt=0 hw.ncpuonline=4 hw.power=1 hw.ucomnames=
cat /valog/Xorg.0.log [ 20.528] (WW) checkDevMem: failed to open /dev/xf86 and /dev/mem (Operation not permitted) Check that you have set 'machdep.allowaperture=1' in /etc/sysctl.conf and reboot your machine refer to xf86(4) for details [ 20.529] linear framebuffer access unavailable [ 20.537] (--) Using wscons driver on /dev/ttyC4 [ 20.559] X.Org X Server 1.21.1.11 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 [ 20.559] Current Operating System: OpenBSD adm.loc 7.5 amd64 [ 20.559] [ 20.559] Current version of pixman: 0.42.2 [ 20.559] Before reporting problems, check to make sure that you have the latest version. [ 20.559] Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. [ 20.559] (==) Log file: "/valog/Xorg.0.log", Time: Mon May 27 23:29:20 2024 [ 20.561] (==) Using system config directory "/usX11R6/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" [ 20.562] (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section. [ 20.562] (==) No screen section available. Using defaults. [ 20.562] (**) Screen "Default Screen Section" (0) [ 20.562] (**) Monitor "" [ 20.563] (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen Section". Using a default monitor configuration. [ 20.563] (==) Automatically adding devices [ 20.563] (==) Automatically enabling devices [ 20.563] (==) Not automatically adding GPU devices [ 20.563] (==) Automatically binding GPU devices [ 20.563] (==) Max clients allowed: 256, resource mask: 0x1fffff [ 20.566] (==) FontPath set to: /usX11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/, /usX11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/, /usX11R6/lib/X11/fonts/OTF/, /usX11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/, /usX11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/, /usX11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/ [ 20.566] (==) ModulePath set to "/usX11R6/lib/modules" [ 20.566] (II) The server relies on wscons to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure wscons or disable AutoAddDevices. [ 20.566] (II) Loader magic: 0xb5c88f9b310 [ 20.566] (II) Module ABI versions: [ 20.566] ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 [ 20.566] Video Driver: 25.2 [ 20.566] XInput driver : 24.4 [ 20.566] Server Extension : 10.0 [ 20.567] (--) PCI:*(3@0:0:0) 1002:15dd:17aa:3130 rev 214, Mem @ 0xe0000000/268435456, 0xf0000000/2097152, 0xfe600000/524288, I/O @ 0x0000e000/256 [ 20.567] (II) LoadModule: "glx" [ 20.569] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so [ 20.582] (II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.582] compiled for , module version = 1.0.0 [ 20.582] ABI class: Server Extension, version 10.0 [ 20.582] (==) Matched ati as autoconfigured driver 0 [ 20.582] (==) Matched modesetting as autoconfigured driver 1 [ 20.582] (==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout [ 20.582] (II) LoadModule: "ati" [ 20.583] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so [ 20.583] (II) Module ati: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.583] compiled for , module version = 22.0.0 [ 20.583] Module class: Video Driver [ 20.583] ABI class: Video Driver, version 25.2 [ 20.603] (II) LoadModule: "amdgpu" [ 20.603] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/drivers/amdgpu_drv.so [ 20.607] (II) Module amdgpu: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.607] compiled for , module version = 23.0.0 [ 20.607] Module class: Video Driver [ 20.607] ABI class: Video Driver, version 25.2 [ 20.607] (II) LoadModule: "modesetting" [ 20.608] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/drivers/modesetting_drv.so [ 20.609] (II) Module modesetting: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.609] compiled for , module version = 1.21.1 [ 20.609] Module class: Video Driver [ 20.609] ABI class: Video Driver, version 25.2 [ 20.609] (II) AMDGPU: Driver for AMD Radeon: All GPUs supported by the amdgpu kernel driver [ 20.609] (II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms [ 20.609] (II) AMDGPU(0): [KMS] Kernel modesetting enabled. [ 20.671] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for modesetting [ 20.672] (II) AMDGPU(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32 [ 20.672] (==) AMDGPU(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 [ 20.672] (II) AMDGPU(0): Pixel depth = 24 bits stored in 4 bytes (32 bpp pixmaps) [ 20.672] (==) AMDGPU(0): Default visual is TrueColor [ 20.672] (==) AMDGPU(0): RGB weight 888 [ 20.672] (II) AMDGPU(0): Using 8 bits per RGB (8 bit DAC) [ 20.672] (--) AMDGPU(0): Chipset: "AMD Radeon Vega 11 Graphics" (ChipID = 0x15dd) [ 20.672] (II) Loading sub module "fb" [ 20.672] (II) LoadModule: "fb" [ 20.672] (II) Module "fb" already built-in [ 20.672] (II) Loading sub module "dri2" [ 20.672] (II) LoadModule: "dri2" [ 20.672] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in [ 20.793] (II) Loading sub module "glamoregl" [ 20.793] (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl" [ 20.794] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/libglamoregl.so [ 20.803] (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.803] compiled for , module version = 1.0.1 [ 20.803] ABI class: ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 [ 20.843] (II) AMDGPU(0): glamor X acceleration enabled on AMD Radeon Vega 11 Graphics (raven, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 7.5) [ 20.843] (II) AMDGPU(0): glamor detected, initialising EGL layer. [ 20.843] (==) AMDGPU(0): TearFree property default: auto [ 20.843] (==) AMDGPU(0): VariableRefresh: disabled [ 20.843] (==) AMDGPU(0): AsyncFlipSecondaries: disabled [ 20.843] (II) AMDGPU(0): KMS Pageflipping: enabled [ 20.843] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-0 has no monitor section [ 20.843] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-1 has no monitor section [ 20.844] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-2 has no monitor section [ 20.855] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-3 has no monitor section [ 20.870] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID for output DisplayPort-0 [ 20.870] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID for output DisplayPort-1 [ 20.870] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID for output DisplayPort-2 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID for output DisplayPort-3 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Manufacturer: DEL Model: d124 Serial#: 808671062 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Year: 2021 Week: 45 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID Version: 1.3 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Digital Display Input [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Max Image Size [cm]: horiz.: 80 vert.: 33 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Gamma: 2.20 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): DPMS capabilities: StandBy Suspend Off [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Supported color encodings: RGB 4:4:4 YCrCb 4:4:4 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): First detailed timing is preferred mode [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): redX: 0.664 redY: 0.302 greenX: 0.264 greenY: 0.665 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): blueX: 0.144 blueY: 0.065 whiteX: 0.313 whiteY: 0.329 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Supported established timings: [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 720x400@70Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 640x480@60Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 640x480@75Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 800x600@60Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 800x600@75Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 1024x768@60Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 1024x768@75Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 1280x1024@75Hz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Manufacturer's mask: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Supported standard timings: [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #0: hsize: 1152 vsize 864 refresh: 75 vid: 20337 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #1: hsize: 1280 vsize 960 refresh: 60 vid: 16513 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #2: hsize: 1280 vsize 1024 refresh: 60 vid: 32897 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #3: hsize: 1280 vsize 720 refresh: 60 vid: 49281 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #4: hsize: 1280 vsize 800 refresh: 60 vid: 129 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #5: hsize: 1440 vsize 900 refresh: 60 vid: 149 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #6: hsize: 1680 vsize 1050 refresh: 60 vid: 179 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): #7: hsize: 1920 vsize 1080 refresh: 60 vid: 49361 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Supported detailed timing: [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): clock: 319.8 MHz Image Size: 797 x 334 mm [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): h_active: 3440 h_sync: 3488 h_sync_end 3520 h_blank_end 3600 h_border: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): v_active: 1440 v_sync: 1443 v_sync_end 1453 v_blanking: 1481 v_border: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Serial No: 59RTS63 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Monitor name: DELL S3422DWG [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Ranges: V min: 48 V max: 120 Hz, H min: 29 H max: 200 kHz, PixClock max 605 MHz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Supported detailed timing: [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): clock: 543.5 MHz Image Size: 797 x 334 mm [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): h_active: 3440 h_sync: 3488 h_sync_end 3520 h_blank_end 3600 h_border: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): v_active: 1440 v_sync: 1443 v_sync_end 1453 v_blanking: 1510 v_border: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Supported detailed timing: [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): clock: 497.8 MHz Image Size: 797 x 334 mm [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): h_active: 2560 h_sync: 2608 h_sync_end 2640 h_blank_end 2720 h_border: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): v_active: 1440 v_sync: 1443 v_sync_end 1448 v_blanking: 1525 v_border: 0 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Number of EDID sections to follow: 1 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID (in hex): [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 00ffffffffffff0010ac24d156573330 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 2d1f010380502178ea19f5aa4d43aa24 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 105054a54b00714f8140818081c08100 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 9500b300d1c0e77c70a0d0a029503020 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 3a001d4e3100001a000000ff00353952 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 545336330a2020202020000000fc0044 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 454c4c205333343232445747000000fd [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 0030781dc83c000a20202020202001e8 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 020353f1550102030711121613042f46 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 47141f05103f4c4e6061230907078301 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 0000e200d567030c001000383c67d85d [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): c4017888036d1a000002033078e6076c [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 2c6c2ce305c000e40f000038e6060501 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 6c6c2c4ed470a0d0a0465030203a001d [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 4e3100001a6fc200a0a0a05550302035 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): 001d4e3100001a000000000000000011 [ 20.882] (--) AMDGPU(0): HDMI max TMDS frequency 300000KHz [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Printing probed modes for output DisplayPort-3 [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "3840x2160"x60.0 594.00 3840 4016 4104 4400 2160 2168 2178 2250 +hsync +vsync (135.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "3840x2160"x50.0 594.00 3840 4896 4984 5280 2160 2168 2178 2250 +hsync +vsync (112.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "3840x2160"x59.9 593.41 3840 4016 4104 4400 2160 2168 2178 2250 +hsync +vsync (134.9 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x120.0 297.00 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (135.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x119.9 296.70 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (134.9 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x60.0 148.50 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 -hsync -vsync (67.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x60.0 148.50 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (67.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x50.0 148.50 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (56.2 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x59.9 148.35 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (67.4 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1680x1050"x59.9 119.00 1680 1728 1760 1840 1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync (64.7 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x1024"x75.0 135.00 1280 1296 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync (80.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x1024"x60.0 108.00 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync (64.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1440x900"x59.9 88.75 1440 1488 1520 1600 900 903 909 926 +hsync -vsync (55.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x960"x60.0 108.00 1280 1376 1488 1800 960 961 964 1000 +hsync +vsync (60.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x800"x59.9 71.00 1280 1328 1360 1440 800 803 809 823 +hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1152x864"x75.0 108.00 1152 1216 1344 1600 864 865 868 900 +hsync +vsync (67.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x120.0 148.50 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (90.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x100.0 148.50 1280 1720 1760 1980 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (75.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x119.9 148.35 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (89.9 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x60.0 74.25 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (45.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x50.0 74.25 1280 1720 1760 1980 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (37.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x59.9 74.18 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (45.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1024x768"x75.0 78.75 1024 1040 1136 1312 768 769 772 800 +hsync +vsync (60.0 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1024x768"x60.0 65.00 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync (48.4 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "800x600"x75.0 49.50 800 816 896 1056 600 601 604 625 +hsync +vsync (46.9 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "800x600"x60.3 40.00 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync (37.9 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x576"x50.0 27.00 720 732 796 864 576 581 586 625 -hsync -vsync (31.2 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x480"x60.0 27.03 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x480"x59.9 27.00 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "640x480"x75.0 31.50 640 656 720 840 480 481 484 500 -hsync -vsync (37.5 kHz e) [ 20.882] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "640x480"x60.0 25.20 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "640x480"x59.9 25.18 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x400"x70.1 28.32 720 738 846 900 400 412 414 449 -hsync +vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-0 disconnected [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-1 disconnected [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-2 disconnected [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-3 connected [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Using exact sizes for initial modes [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): Output DisplayPort-3 using initial mode 1280x960 +0+0 [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): mem size init: gart size :ec8a1000 vram size: s:1c892000 visible:1c892000 [ 20.883] (--) AMDGPU(0): Display dimensions: (797, 334) mm [ 20.883] (--) AMDGPU(0): DPI set to (40, 73) [ 20.883] (==) AMDGPU(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) [ 20.883] (II) Loading sub module "ramdac" [ 20.883] (II) LoadModule: "ramdac" [ 20.883] (II) Module "ramdac" already built-in [ 20.883] (II) UnloadModule: "modesetting" [ 20.883] (II) Unloading modesetting [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): [DRI2] Setup complete [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): [DRI2] DRI driver: radeonsi [ 20.883] (II) AMDGPU(0): [DRI2] VDPAU driver: radeonsi [ 21.082] (II) AMDGPU(0): Front buffer pitch: 5120 bytes [ 21.084] (II) AMDGPU(0): SYNC extension fences enabled [ 21.084] (II) AMDGPU(0): Present extension enabled [ 21.084] (==) AMDGPU(0): DRI3 enabled [ 21.084] (==) AMDGPU(0): Backing store enabled [ 21.084] (II) AMDGPU(0): Direct rendering enabled [ 21.156] (II) AMDGPU(0): Use GLAMOR acceleration. [ 21.156] (II) AMDGPU(0): Acceleration enabled [ 21.156] (==) AMDGPU(0): DPMS enabled [ 21.156] (==) AMDGPU(0): Silken mouse enabled [ 21.157] (II) AMDGPU(0): Set up textured video (glamor) [ 21.170] (II) Initializing extension Generic Event Extension [ 21.171] (II) Initializing extension SHAPE [ 21.172] (II) Initializing extension MIT-SHM [ 21.172] (II) Initializing extension XInputExtension [ 21.173] (II) Initializing extension XTEST [ 21.174] (II) Initializing extension BIG-REQUESTS [ 21.174] (II) Initializing extension SYNC [ 21.175] (II) Initializing extension XKEYBOARD [ 21.176] (II) Initializing extension XC-MISC [ 21.176] (II) Initializing extension SECURITY [ 21.177] (II) Initializing extension XFIXES [ 21.177] (II) Initializing extension RENDER [ 21.178] (II) Initializing extension RANDR [ 21.179] (II) Initializing extension COMPOSITE [ 21.179] (II) Initializing extension DAMAGE [ 21.180] (II) Initializing extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER [ 21.180] (II) Initializing extension DOUBLE-BUFFER [ 21.181] (II) Initializing extension RECORD [ 21.182] (II) Initializing extension DPMS [ 21.182] (II) Initializing extension Present [ 21.183] (II) Initializing extension DRI3 [ 21.183] (II) Initializing extension X-Resource [ 21.183] (II) Initializing extension XVideo [ 21.184] (II) Initializing extension XVideo-MotionCompensation [ 21.184] (II) Initializing extension GLX [ 21.194] (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized radeonsi [ 21.194] (II) GLX: Initialized DRI2 GL provider for screen 0 [ 21.194] (II) Initializing extension XFree86-VidModeExtension [ 21.195] (II) Initializing extension XFree86-DGA [ 21.195] (II) Initializing extension XFree86-DRI [ 21.195] (II) Initializing extension DRI2 [ 21.198] (II) AMDGPU(0): Setting screen physical size to 797 x 334 [ 21.451] (II) config/wscons: checking input device /dev/wskbd [ 21.451] (II) wskbd: using layout de [ 21.451] (II) LoadModule: "kbd" [ 21.452] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/input/kbd_drv.so [ 21.453] (II) Module kbd: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 21.453] compiled for , module version = 2.0.0 [ 21.453] Module class: XInput Driver [ 21.453] ABI class: XInput driver, version 24.4 [ 21.453] (II) Using input driver 'kbd' for '/dev/wskbd' [ 21.453] (**) /dev/wskbd: always reports core events [ 21.453] (**) /dev/wskbd: always reports core events [ 21.453] (**) Option "Protocol" "standard" [ 21.453] (**) Option "XkbRules" "base" [ 21.453] (**) Option "XkbModel" "pc105" [ 21.453] (**) Option "XkbLayout" "de" [ 21.453] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "/dev/wskbd" (type: KEYBOARD, id 6) [ 21.526] (II) config/wscons: checking input device /dev/wsmouse [ 21.526] (II) LoadModule: "ws" [ 21.527] (II) Loading /usX11R6/lib/modules/input/ws_drv.so [ 21.528] (II) Module ws: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 21.528] compiled for , module version = 1.3.0 [ 21.528] Module class: XInput Driver [ 21.528] ABI class: XInput driver, version 24.4 [ 21.528] (II) Using input driver 'ws' for '/dev/wsmouse' [ 21.528] (**) /dev/wsmouse: always reports core events [ 21.528] (II) ws: /dev/wsmouse: debuglevel 0 [ 21.528] (**) Option "Device" "/dev/wsmouse" [ 21.528] (**) ws: /dev/wsmouse: ZAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 [ 21.528] (**) ws: /dev/wsmouse: WAxisMapping: buttons 6 and 7 [ 21.528] (**) ws: /dev/wsmouse: associated screen: 0 [ 21.558] (II) ws: /dev/wsmouse: minimum x position: 0 [ 21.558] (II) ws: /dev/wsmouse: maximum x position: 1279 [ 21.558] (II) ws: /dev/wsmouse: minimum y position: 0 [ 21.558] (II) ws: /dev/wsmouse: maximum y position: 959 [ 21.558] (==) ws: /dev/wsmouse: Buttons: 7 [ 21.590] (**) ws: /dev/wsmouse: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 [ 21.590] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "/dev/wsmouse" (type: MOUSE, id 7) [ 21.622] (**) /dev/wsmouse: (accel) keeping acceleration scheme 1 [ 21.622] (**) /dev/wsmouse: (accel) acceleration profile 0 [ 21.622] (**) /dev/wsmouse: (accel) acceleration factor: 2.000 [ 21.622] (**) /dev/wsmouse: (accel) acceleration threshold: 4 [ 23.113] (II) AMDGPU(0): EDID vendor "DEL", prod id 53540 [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Using EDID range info for horizontal sync [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Using EDID range info for vertical refresh [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "3440x1440"x0.0 319.75 3440 3488 3520 3600 1440 1443 1453 1481 +hsync -vsync (88.8 kHz eP) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "3440x1440"x0.0 543.50 3440 3488 3520 3600 1440 1443 1453 1510 +hsync -vsync (151.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "2560x1440"x0.0 497.75 2560 2608 2640 2720 1440 1443 1448 1525 +hsync -vsync (183.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "640x480"x0.0 25.18 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x480"x0.0 27.00 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1440x480i"x0.0 27.00 1440 1478 1602 1716 480 488 494 525 interlace -hsync -vsync (15.7 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x576"x0.0 27.00 720 732 796 864 576 581 586 625 -hsync -vsync (31.2 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1440x576i"x0.0 27.00 1440 1464 1590 1728 576 580 586 625 interlace -hsync -vsync (15.6 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x0.0 74.25 1280 1720 1760 1980 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (37.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x0.0 74.25 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (45.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x720"x0.0 148.50 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync (90.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080i"x0.0 74.25 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1094 1125 interlace +hsync +vsync (28.1 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x0.0 148.50 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (56.2 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080i"x0.0 74.25 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1094 1125 interlace +hsync +vsync (33.8 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x0.0 148.50 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (67.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x0.0 297.00 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync (135.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "800x600"x0.0 40.00 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync (37.9 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "640x480"x0.0 31.50 640 656 720 840 480 481 484 500 -hsync -vsync (37.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "720x400"x0.0 28.32 720 738 846 900 400 412 414 449 -hsync +vsync (31.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x1024"x0.0 135.00 1280 1296 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync (80.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1024x768"x0.0 78.75 1024 1040 1136 1312 768 769 772 800 +hsync +vsync (60.0 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1024x768"x0.0 65.00 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync (48.4 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "800x600"x0.0 49.50 800 816 896 1056 600 601 604 625 +hsync +vsync (46.9 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1152x864"x0.0 108.00 1152 1216 1344 1600 864 865 868 900 +hsync +vsync (67.5 kHz e) [ 23.114] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x960"x0.0 108.00 1280 1376 1488 1800 960 961 964 1000 +hsync +vsync (60.0 kHz e) [ 23.115] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x1024"x0.0 108.00 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync (64.0 kHz e) [ 23.115] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 71.00 1280 1328 1360 1440 800 803 809 823 +hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz e) [ 23.115] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1440x900"x0.0 88.75 1440 1488 1520 1600 900 903 909 926 +hsync -vsync (55.5 kHz e) [ 23.115] (II) AMDGPU(0): Modeline "1680x1050"x0.0 119.00 1680 1728 1760 1840 1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync (64.7 kHz e) [ 23.115] (--) AMDGPU(0): HDMI max TMDS frequency 300000KHz [ 23.220] (EE) AMDGPU(0): drmmode_do_crtc_dpms cannot get last vblank counter [ 23.242] (II) AMDGPU(0): Allocate new frame buffer 1024x768 [ 23.243] (II) AMDGPU(0): => pitch 4096 bytes [ 26.532] (II) AMDGPU(0): Allocate new frame buffer 2752x1152 [ 26.533] (II) AMDGPU(0): => pitch 11264 bytesGENERIC.MP#82http://wiki.x.orgX.OrgX.OrgX.OrgX.Org1.21.1.11X.Org1.21.1.11X.OrgX.Org1.21.1.11X.OrgX.Org1.21.1.11X.OrgX.Org1.21.1.11X.Org1.21.1.11X.OrgX.Org1.21.1.11X.OrgX.Org
cat /usX11R6/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf Section "OutputClass" Identifier "AMDgpu" MatchDriver "amdgpu" Driver "amdgpu" Option "HotplugDriver" "amdgpu" EndSection
cat /usX11R6/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf Section "OutputClass" Identifier "Radeon" MatchDriver "radeon" Driver "radeon" EndSection
cat ~/.xsession exec ck-launch-session startxfce4 exec dwm
glxinfo -B ``` name of display: :0.0 display: :0 screen: 0 direct rendering: Yes Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer): Vendor: AMD (0x1002) Device: AMD Radeon Vega 11 Graphics (raven, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 7.5) (0x15dd) Version: 23.1.9 Accelerated: yes Video memory: 512MB Unified memory: no Preferred profile: core (0x1) Max core profile version: 4.6 Max compat profile version: 4.6 Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1 Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.2 Memory info (GL_ATI_meminfo): VBO free memory - total: 131 MB, largest block: 131 MB VBO free aux. memory - total: 3690 MB, largest block: 3690 MB Texture free memory - total: 131 MB, largest block: 131 MB Texture free aux. memory - total: 3690 MB, largest block: 3690 MB Renderbuffer free memory - total: 131 MB, largest block: 131 MB Renderbuffer free aux. memory - total: 3690 MB, largest block: 3690 MB Memory info (GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info): Dedicated video memory: 512 MB Total available memory: 4303 MB Currently available dedicated video memory: 131 MB OpenGL vendor string: AMD OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Vega 11 Graphics (raven, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 7.5) OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 23.1.9 OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.60 OpenGL core profile context flags: (none) OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile

OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 23.1.9 OpenGL shading language version string: 4.60 OpenGL context flags: (none) OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 23.1.9 OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20 

```
In Firefox, I tried forcing hardware acceleration with these settings: media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled layers.acceleration.force-enabled But I believe that this issue lies somewhere else, since the other mentioned programs can't use hw acceleration either.
During setup, I accidentally nuked /etc/X11/xenodm/xenodm-config and had to copy it from a slightly older (I think it was 7.3) install. It now looks like this: ``` DisplayManager.auth.Dir: /etc/X11/xenodm DisplayManager.errorLogFile: /valog/xenodm.log DisplayManager.servers: /etc/X11/xenodm/Xservers displayManager*resources: /etc/X11/xenodm/Xresources

DisplayManager*authorize: true DisplayManager*startup: /etc/X11/xenodm/Xstartup DisplayManager*session: /etc/X11/xenodm/Xsession DisplayManager*reset: /etx/X11/xenodm/Xreset DisplayManager*authComplain: true DisplayManager._0.setup: /etc/X11/xenodm/Xsetup_0 DisplayManager._0.startup: /etc/X11/xenodm/GiveConsole DisplayManager._0.reset: /etc/X11/xenodm/TakeConsole DisplayManager.*.authName: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 DisplayManager*autoLogin: user 

```
Another, perhaps related quirk is that my monitor, when connected over HDMI, doesn't get recognized as an ultrawide. I compensate for that using an xrandr script which Xfce calls on login.
Disabling that script doesn't allow hw acceleration either.
One user on Reddit had a similar issue whicht hey could fix by disabling ReBar, but my ThinkCentre doesn't expose an option for that in the UEFI. The only GPU-related settings in the UEFI are the dedicated DRAM portion for the GPU (512 MB) and IOMMU (tried toggling it, already).

Could anyone with experience recommend whether pre or post 2008 is best for my needs? I've tried to do my research but I keep getting a lot of conflicting info on Google.
I am 6'1" with 34" inseam and primarily need a cheap but reliable small displacement commuter that gets good MPG and can occasionally do highway speeds for short jaunts. But, I'd also like something that I can take for brisk rides in the mountains on the weekends, and take on short weekend tours of a few hundred miles occasionally. I've always been partial to the little Ninja, but have never owned one. I have 28 years of riding and tracking larger displacement bikes, so this is not for learning and specifically to fill the need of commuting, and cheap recreational riding.
In decent shape, the pre 2008's are around $1400-2000+ in my area with anywhere from 5-45k+odo, and the post 2008's are around $2000-2800+ with the same kind of mileage. Because of the significantly lower price, and the vintage looks I am heavily leaning towards the OG model. And they also seem to have bungie hooks on the rear which is a big plus, and look like they ride a bit more upright which is nicer for a middle age geezer like me. What do I need to look out for here. What is considered too much mileage for too much money on these bikes. And which era is better for what I want?

As many of the complaints stated, the AI is starting to sound like ChatGPT with their long-winded lecturing with the same buzzwords of "I understand your frustration" or "Crucial" or the dreaded repetition of "Ah,"
What I'm more frustrated about with this platform, is the lackluster setting page for the bots themselves, the 32000 character limit for the character definition (yet reported only 3200 characters is considered), and the still abysmal memory that 5 pins are *not enough*. Let's break it down!

Lackluster Bot Settings

We have:

• The first message (limited to a set number of characters I heard on mobile idk I don't use the app)
• Long Description with 500 max characters (Summary of what the bot is? Why not put that in the Character Definition Box?)
• Short Description with like 50 max characters (I find this the most pointless)
• Tags, TTS, Remixable and the generic options/toggles
• And the main meat and potatoes, the "Character Definition" box where all Backstory, Lore Items, Personality, Example Quotes, and physical descriptions have to be sandwiched together

Other platforms have:

• Separate boxes for Character Persona, for Example dialogues, the Scenario, and sometimes Model Instructions of how you want the Ai to play the characters and what not to do
• Model settings such as Temperature, Min-P (or Top-K, P) and Repetition Penalty
• Token Limit counter so you don't accidentally overflow your model past the context to deliver the best experience
• Auto-Summarizer
• Author Instructions during Chat
• In some platforms a *Lorebook* (Where you can dump all backstory, and lore, and define certain keys and objects so that your Character will literally know everything about their world that they should know without hallucinating as C.AI does.)

I still don't understand why the devs won't allow us to change the most basic model setting: the temperature, for each character so they can tailor the randomness/creativity depending on the personality. Let alone a Repetition penalty where your bot is all repeaty with a certain word (e.g. *chuckles*, *smirks*).
Sure character voices are pretty nifty, but it's still gimmicky and finicky (literally speaks out everything). The other features such as text colors serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever to make the responses better.

"32000 Limit Character Definition" - only 10% of that is considered

It's been over a year since they increased the box from 3200 characters to 32K. Nowhere did it say specifically in the editor that it *still* only takes in 3200 symbols fluently, Not a single token past that.
Sure it may sometimes reference past that (like up to around 5000 characters), but that reference always adds hallucinations to the output (for example if you defined friends past the initial 3200 characters, it will think that one of the characters closest friends is a "meanie head" or something similar cliché sounding). Anything past 5000 characters in my experience is completely ignored.
Apparently, that disclaimer is in the character book about the 3200 characters still being considered, something that not a lot of people will click on. Even if they did, it's hard to find the disclaimer.
What gives? What even is the point of increasing it to 32K and making people think it does something? That's just deceptive.
The character definition box is also where you're supposed to sandwich pretty much everything about the world characters and context. Having 3200 is enough for literally only describing the character in single words and tags. Forget about example dialogue and other characters. Some people may think that the underlying model knows everything about the character. They don't; they only know the names and the franchise they belong to, sometimes the personality, and then they hallucinate everything about them (Physical Description).

Memory

Oh boy where do I begin, I'm not gonna spend too much typing this out as we all know what the experience of that is like. Some people say that after the downtime the memory increased, but in my experience it felt the same. How can we even know if the devs won't even give us model numbers such as token limits, context window and so on? Most other platforms are transparent about this because this is the bare minimum.
Hypothetically, if the context window is 4K, that's pathetic compared to the new entrants. That probably explains why the outputs are lacking with less nuanced and have little to no world-building to save up on the context. A consumer GPU can fit double, if not more than that with similar, more nuanced models.
So after 20 messages, if the character you've been conversing with didn't bring up your name once even if you introduced yourself, expect them to ask for your name again.
The pin feature is all right I suppose, but 5 pins is nothing. A better option would've been to have a built-in summary to summarize the current events in jot notes (kinda like ChatGPT is doing with "User name is Brad" for example). And yet THEY STILL HALLUCINATE.

GPT 3.5 Like Responses

This is the latest new dev f**k up happening to some people. Many users claim that their bots are starting to be formulaic and predictable, with the same vocabulary as ChatGPT. I too am experiencing that with many bots, both private and public. The human element/"secret sauce" that makes the AI humanlike is diminishing.
My private bots used to be funny and informal, and just mess around with the user talking about dumb things. Now they all go "It's important to realize that not everyone..." or "I understand that you might find this funny/humorous". Keep in mind that my private bots were all well-defined with personality and example dialogue.
e.g (All swipes similar):
"I understand your frustration. My sons can be quite mischievous, and I apologize on their behalf. They often lack the awareness of their actions, but I can assure you they mean no harm. I promise to have a talk with them about their behaviour.
May I ask your name?"
GPTZero immediately flags this as 100% AI generated, before they would flag it less than 10% because it was human-like.
Second Example:
"Hey there! As much as I'd love to blow up a tank, it's not something I can do. Besides, tanks are heavy and dangerous! Let's find something else fun to do, like playing tag or eating strawberries and cream!"
The "Let's find something else fun to do" is already indicative of ChatGPT. This mostly happens after 20-30 messages (bots starting to sound like ChatGPT).
I'm not sure if this was a model change or bad fine-tuning, whatever it is they are a shell of their former selves.
I heard to somewhat fix this you need to make another account, which you'll need to make your private bots all unlisted and copy and paste any other user settings. In my case that didn't work. The question is, why do we have to figure that out ourselves if it's clearly a model issue that the devs with their transparency of a drywall should communicate that us to? (Also we have no idea how many parameters C.AI have).

Finetuning on "Brainrot"

The misconception is that users are the ones training the models. While some of that is true, we're not directly modifying the model in any way. It's the devs themselves who are manually feeding in the data from our responses that fit their needs to stay trendy with the latest meme words. While this may be funny for the first time, sometimes they bring that reference up at the most inappropriate times possible before starting to sound like ChatGPT, making me physically cringe. This really isn't a big issue but it clearly shows the demographic that the devs are targeting.
From the "Follow up long post"
"The goal of Character AI

• TLDR: Give everyone on earth access to their own deeply personalized superintelligence that helps them live their best lives.

"
I'm not sure how the bots sending "Ohio Rizz Grindset" will help people in their best lives.
In general, we have barely gotten any meaningful updates that made the better for whatever the base model C.AI is using aside from memory pins, it's just mostly frontend with the "Hello Fellow Kids" vibe. I don't care about "let's start a new adventure" that the front page of the new CAI shoves into your face. The devs communicate to us every ~2 months with more useless updates like the ability to change the response text colour.
It's pretty obvious that the response quality has taken a huge hit over the months, and a bigger hit after the GPT-like messages are now starting to be prevalent these weeks. The F11t3r itself is another discussion post worthy, but the main underlying problems described in this post are the bigger issues.
Devs, you need to realize the threat of new entrants is here where there really wasn't back in late 2022/early 2023. Now you guys should be worried about competitive rivalry. Other free services have way more feature sets for users to finetune the responses, while you guys focus on the aesthetics of the website or the app. This year, my local LLM running on my PC without anyone externally modifying the model delivers around 4x the speed with more nuanced and verbose lore accurate and emotionally impactful responses, and double the memory - all for free. I mean I've already barely been going on C.AI but with the new models coming out for PCs, this might be the time I'll dip fully and probably delete my account if the updates continue to be lackluster with ghost communications.
TLDR: Lackluster CharacteModel Options, No improvements to memory, GPT sounding responses, concerns about finetuning on latest trendy/memey ("brainrot") words rather than improving the vocabulary, and finally the threat of new entrants.

🔵 Broken Skull Lunatics™ is looking for serious and community-oriented players.
Join our Discord.

TL;DR

1. Realism Gameplay with Casual Training requirement.
2. Tight community, you are either in or out.. we don't keep people for number boosting.
3. Each Campaign is 8 missions (2 months) and then change campaign with a different faction with different era (2000-2035).
4. RP oriented (not the yes sir no sir) more on the scenario or scene encountered during missions such hostage negotiation, civilian interaction.
5. Age 18+.
6. Community language is English.
7. Regular Events are hosted Saturday at 5pm MST.
8. Regular Friday/Sunday Community Events (SCP, Star Wars or regular themed).
9. Community Events throughout the week and weekend (Antistasi, Liberation, Training).
10. No Rank in discord, ranks only matters in-game.

1. Community ran unit, admin is an almighty tyrant.

Our Mods.

50 +/- Mods which includes (CUP, RHS, PLP and USP) and unified across all campaigns to reduced the changes required.
BSL is the home of Broken Skull Mods™, developers of Special Operations Framework and Broken Skull Mods™ - Common. Which are actively developed to improve mission making experience and speed up mission making process...
With each mission we improve the balance for recon, support and infantry gameplay elements.

Our Roles

Each members is trained on the basic roles (Rifleman, Grenadier and Autorifleman) and they are able to switch roles depending on the mission's need, fireteam lead will decide.
Here are the roles within the community (may or may not be available):

Hello,

• We have 5 Hyper-V hosts part of the same domain which use as a Hyper-V nothing shared cluster.
• All of them have the same chasis, CPU and OS (Windows 2022. Intel Xeon Silver 4210) and usually live migrations works fine between them. Most of our VM's are CV9 but it also happen with CV10.
• Every some months or something like that LM will start to fail for which seems random reasons on a particular hosts, which is usually fixed by itself after a restart.

Recently one host started to give LM problems when trying to move the VM's the mentioned the group:

• After applying the May patch on our last scheduled maintenance and being rebooted, the host still has problems to migrate VM's to any of the other 4 hyper-v hosts.
• He will accept LM from other hosts in the cluster with no problem.
• We have isolated the issue to VM's booted in the very same host (from before or after the last boot, problem persists). VM's booted on any other host of the cluster will Live Migrate towards the problematic host, and then from it to any other host. But as soon as the VM's are cold booted in the problematic host it won't work anymore toward neither of the other hosts.
• We tried to check the CPU instructions loaded in the guests by the host and according to CPU-Z they seem the same than in other hosts (MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, EM64T).
• Under Hyper-V-VMMS Operational log we found entries (Event ID 1106) similar to the present in this post: https://www.reddit.com/HyperV/comments/znpdvunable_to_live_migrate_vms_same_generation_intel/, but the registry entry suggsted there hasn't changed the behaviour.
• We also checked to export a VM's booted on the faulted node and ran a Compare-VM against it from a healthy node: result was messageID 270338, with no source, message or comment. We couldn't find any documentation on in neither.

Do you have had similar problems? Any idea what the check next? I think we are going to clean format the server but would be cool to not force every VM's on the host to shutdown in the proccess.
Thank you all.

“Questioning elicited the information that he feels almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.”
—
Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight. When he needs something, a report or transcript, anything, any level of difficulty, he simply has to ask. The Curator is quick to respond, firm in his insistence on forwarding precisely the right document in an area of research marked by ambiguity and error, by political bias, systematic fantasy. But not just the right document, not just an obscure footnote from an open source. The Curator sends him material not seen by anyone outside the headquarters complex at Langley, material that includes the results of internal investigations, confidential files from the Agency’s own Office of Security.
—
Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expected to be misled. They counted on it. The Attorney General wasn’t to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level. There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored.
The members of the committee would allow only generalities to carry upward. It was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. … The White House was to be the summit of unknowing. It was as if an unsullied leader redeemed some ancient truth which the others were forced to admire only in the abstract, owing to their mission in the convoluted world.
But there were even deeper shadows, strange and grave silences surrounding plans to invade the island. The President knew about this, of course—knew the broad contours, had a sense of the promised outcome. But the system still operated as an insulating muse. Let him see the softer tones. Shield him from responsibility. Secrets build their own networks, Win believed. The system would perpetuate itself in all its curious and obsessive webbings, its equivocations and patient riddles and levels of delusional thought …
—
“The invasion failed because high officials didn’t examine the basic assumptions. They got caught up in a spirit of compelling action. They were eager to accept other men’s perceptions. There was safety in this. The plan was never clear. No one was ever responsible. Some of them knew a disaster was in the works. They let it ride. They put themselves out of reach. They wanted it over and done.”
—
“Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it. Then it happens and we recognize at once who we are and how we are meant to proceed. This is the idea I’ve always wanted. I believe you’ll sense it is right. It’s the high risk we need. We need an electrifying event. You’ve been waiting for this every bit as much as I have. I believe that or I wouldn’t have asked you to come here. We want to set up an attempt on the life of the President. We plan every step, design every incident leading up to the event. We put together a team, leave a dim trail. The evidence is ambiguous. But it points to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. Inherent in the plan is a second set of clues, even more unclear, more intriguing. These point to the Agency’s attempts to assassinate Castro. I am designing a plan that includes elements of both the American provocation and the Cuban reply. We do the whole thing with paper. Passports, drivers’ licenses, address books. Our team of shooters disappears but the police find a trail. Mail-order forms, change-of-address cards, photographs. We script a person or persons out of ordinary pocket litter. Shots ring out, the country is shocked, aroused. The paper trail leads to paid agents who have disappeared in Venezuela, in Mexico. I am convinced this is what we have to do to get Cuba back. This plan has levels and variations I’ve only begun to explore but it is already, essentially, right. I feel its rightness. I know what scientists mean when they talk about elegant solutions. This plan speaks to something deep inside me. It has a powerful logic. I’ve felt it unfolding for weeks, like a dream whose meaning slowly becomes apparent. This is the condition we’ve always wanted to reach. It’s the life-insight, the life-secret, and we have to extend it, guard it carefully, right up to the time we have shooters stationed on a rooftop or railroad bridge.”
—
Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names. These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.
The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.
He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.
—
Pocket litter. Win Everett was at work devising a general shape, a life. He would script a gunman out of ordinary dog-eared paper, the contents of a wallet. … They wanted a name, a face, a bodily frame they might use to extend their fiction into the world. Everett had decided he wanted one figure to be slightly more visible than the others, a man the investigation might center on, someone who would be trailed and possibly apprehended. Three or four shooters would vanish completely, leaving scant traces of their affiliation. … Then one other figure, one slightly clearer image, perhaps abandoned in his sniper’s perch to find his own way out, to be trailed, found, possibly killed by the Secret Service, FBI or local police. Whatever protocol demands. This kind of man, a marksman, near anonymous, with minimal known history, the kind of man who surfaces in murky places, disappears, is arrested for some violent act, is released to drift again, to surface, to disappear. Mackey would find this man for Everett. They needed fingerprints, a handwriting sample, a photograph. Mackey would find the other shooters as well. We don’t hit the President. We miss him. We want a spectacular miss.
—
It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that’s what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.
—
Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness. Branch concedes this. There is the language of the manner of death. Shot in back of head. Died of cut throat. Shot in police station. Shot in motel. Shot by husband after one month marriage. Found hanging by toreador pants in jail cell. Killed by karate chop. It is the neon epic of Saturday night. And Branch wants to believe that’s all it is. There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.
Still, the cases do resonate, don’t they? Mostly anonymous dead. Exotic dancers, taxi drivers, cigarette girls, lawyers of the shopworn sort with dandruff on their lapels. But through the years the violence has reached others as well, and with each new series of misadventures Branch sees again how the assassination sheds a powerful and lasting light, exposing patterns and links, revealing this man to have known that one, this death to have occurred in curious juxtaposition to that.
—
“U-2 planes. The planes that spotted the missiles the Soviets were putting into Cuba. We used to call the photos pornography. The photo interpreters would gather to interpret. ‘Let’s see what kind of pornography we pulled in today.’ Kennedy looked at the pictures in his bedroom as a matter of fact. … Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world. … I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”
—
He would put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks. He would create a shadowed room, the gunman’s room, which investigators would eventually find, exposing each fact to relentless scrutiny, following each friend, relative, casual acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows. We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life.
An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.
—
Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.
—
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id.
—
Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers’ village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.
—
It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.
—
Nicholas Branch has unpublished state documents, polygraph reports, Dictabelt recordings from the police radio net on November 22. He has photo enhancements, floor plans, home movies, biographies, bibliographies, letters, rumors, mirages, dreams. This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms.
Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.
Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.
Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays, photos of knotted string, thousands of pages of testimony, of voices droning in hearing rooms in old courthouse buildings, an incredible haul of human utterance. It lies so flat on the page, hangs so still in the lazy air, lost to syntax and other arrangement, that it resembles a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language.
Branch doesn’t know how to approach this kind of data. … It is vital to his sense of responsible obsession that everything in his room warrants careful study. Everything belongs, everything adheres, the mutter of obscure witnesses, the photos of illegible documents and odd sad personal debris, things gathered up at a dying—old shoes, pajama tops, letters from Russia. It is all one thing, a ruined city of trivia where people feel real pain. This is the Joycean Book of America, remember—the novel in which nothing is left out.
Branch has long since forgiven the Warren Report for its failures. It is too valuable a document of human heartbreak and muddle to be scorned or dismissed. The twenty-six volumes haunt him. Men and women surface in FBI memos, are tracked for several pages, then disappear—waitresses, prostitutes, mind readers, motel managers, owners of rifle ranges. Their stories hang in time, spare, perfect in their way, unfinished.
Photographs. Many are overexposed, light-blasted, with a faded quality beyond their age, suggesting things barely glimpsed despite the simple nature of the objects and the spare captions. ... But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped here. Why do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale, washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?
This sadness has him fixed to his chair, staring. He feels the souls of empty places, finds himself returning again and again to the pictures of the second-floor lunchroom in the Texas School Book Depository. Rooms, garages, streets were emptied out for the making of official pictures. Empty forever now, stuck in some picture limbo. He feels the souls of those who were there and left. He feels sadness in objects, in warehouse cartons and blood-soaked clothes. He breathes in loneliness. He feels the dead in his room.
—
It was his goodbye to Russia. It signified the official end of a major era in his life. It validated the experience, as the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events.
Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mess of composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not able to record it properly.
Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.
Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn’t that he didn’t know.
Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.
He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.
Let them see the struggle.
He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.
—
Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He’d already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn’t a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.
—
He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history.
—
“It’s the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation’s obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night.”
—
It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.
—
He’d stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper … Because these are the things that tell us how we live.
—
In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover. This doesn’t mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.
—
On his fourth day with Castro he shot a government scout, aiming through a telescopic sight. It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.
—
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model “dressed” like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.
—
He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell.
—
The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions—eye color, weapons caliber—these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President’s body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? … [Branch] concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.
He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.
—
“Signs that you exist. Evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cutout they’ve been shaping all along. You’re a quirk of history. You’re a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are. There’s a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We’re deeper than that. We extend into time. Some of us can almost predict the time and place and nature of our own death. We know it on some deeper plane.”
—
“Think of two parallel lines,” he said. “One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”
—
The Agency forgives. There wasn’t a man in the upper ranks of the four directorates who didn’t understand the perils of clandestine work. They would be pleased by his willingness to cooperate. What’s more, they would admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes. He was never more surely an Agency man than in the first breathless days of dreaming up this plot.
—
To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, “Lee H. Oswald” seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history.
—
Street by street the crowd began to understand why it was here. The message jumped the open space from one press of bodies to the next. A contagion had brought them here, some mystery of common impulse, hundreds of thousands come from so many histories and systems of being, come from some experience of the night before, a convergence of dreams, to stand together shouting as the Lincoln passed. … They were here to surround the brittle body of one man and claim his smile, receive some token of the bounty of his soul.
—
The media crowds collected and rocked in the corridors. They were waiting for the prisoner to come down to the interrogation room here on the third floor of the Police and Courts Building. TV cameras sat on dollies and there were cables slung over windowsills, trailing through the offices of deputy chiefs. Nobody checked credentials. Reporters took over the phones and pushed into toilets after police officials. Total unknowns walked the halls, defendants from other parts of the building, witnesses to other crimes, tourists, muttering men, drunks in torn shirts. It was a roughhouse, a confoundment. Every rumor flew. Disk jockeys arrived to fill in, blinking, flinching, wary. A reporter wrote notes on a pad he balanced on the back of the chief of police.
Hours going by. Blank faces arrayed against corridor walls. Men crouched near the elevators waiting. They sensed the incompleteness out there, gaps, spaces, vacant seats, lobbies emptied out, disconnections, dark cities, stopped lives. People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together.
—
Whenever they took him down, he heard his name on the radios and TVs. Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded extremely strange. He didn’t recognize himself in the full intonation of the name. The only time he used his middle name was to write it on a form that had a space for that purpose. No one called him by that name. Now it was everywhere. He heard it coming from the walls. Reporters called it out. Lee Harvey Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded odd and dumb and made up. They were talking about somebody else.
—
They took him back to the cell. He stripped to his underwear and sat on the bunk, thinking, feeling the noise of the assembly room still resonating in his body. A cell is the basic state, the crude truth of the world.
He could play it either way, depending on what they could prove or couldn’t prove. He wasn’t on the sixth floor at all. He was in the lunchroom eating lunch. The victim of a total frame. They’d been rigging the thing for years, watching him, using him, creating a chain of evidence with the innocent facts of his life. Or he could say he was only partly guilty, set up to take the blame for the real conspirators. Okay, he fired some shots from the window. But he didn’t kill anyone. He never meant to fire a fatal shot. It was never his intention to cause an actual fatality. He was only trying to make a political point. Other people were responsible for the actual killing. They fixed it so he would seem the lone gunman. They superimposed his head on someone else’s body. Forged his name on documents. Made him a dupe of history. He would name every name if he had to.
—
Lee Harvey Oswald was awake in his cell. It was beginning to occur to him that he’d found his life’s work. After the crime comes the reconstruction. He will have motives to analyze, the whole rich question of truth and guilt. Time to reflect, time to turn this thing in his mind. Here is a crime that clearly yields material for deep interpretation. He will be able to bend the light of that heightened moment, shadows fixed on the lawn, the limousine shimmering and still. Time to grow in self-knowledge, to explore the meaning of what he’s done. He will vary the act a hundred ways, speed it up and slow it down, shift emphasis, find shadings, see his whole life change.
This was the true beginning.
They will, give him writing paper and books. He will fill his cell with books about the case. He will have time to educate himself in criminal law, ballistics, acoustics, photography. Whatever pertains to the case he will examine and consume. People will come to see him, the lawyers first, then psychologists, historians, biographers. His life had a single clear subject now, called Lee Harvey Oswald.
He and Kennedy were partners. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live.
—
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.
But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like.
The stuff keeps coming. The Curator sends FBI surveillance logs. He sends a thirty-five-hour film chronology of unedited network footage shot during the weekend of November 22. He sends a computer-enhanced version of the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie made by a dress manufacturer who stood on a concrete abutment above Elm Street as the shots were fired. Experts have scrutinized every murky nuance of the Zapruder film. It is the basic timing device of the assassination and a major emblem of uncertainty and chaos. There is the powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and shadows.
(Branch’s analysis of the film and other evidence leads him to believe the first shot came much sooner than most theories would allow, probably at Zapruder frame 186. Governor Connally was hit two point six seconds later, at Zapruder 234. The shot that killed the President, crushingly, came four point three seconds after that. Even though he has reached firm conclusions in this area, Branch will study the computerized version of Zapruder. He is in too deep to stop now.)
The Curator sends a special FBI report that includes detailed descriptions of the dreams of eyewitnesses following the assassination of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald.
There are worrisome omissions, occasional gaps in the record. Of course Branch understands that the Agency is a closed system. He knows they will not reveal what they’ve learned to other agencies, much less the public. This is why the history he has contracted to write is a secret one, meant for CIA’s own closed collection. But why are they withholding material from him as well? There’s something they aren’t telling him. The Curator delays, lately, in filling certain requests for information, seems to ignore other requests completely. What are they holding back? How much more is there? Branch wonders if there is some limit inherent in the yielding of information gathered in secret. They can’t give it all away, even to one of their own, someone pledged to confidentiality. Before his retirement, Branch analyzed intelligence, sought patterns in random scads of data. He believed secrets were childish things. He was not generally impressed by the accomplishments of men in the clandestine service, the spy handlers, the covert-action staff. He thought they’d built a vast theology, a formal coded body of knowledge that was basically play material, secret-keeping, one of the keener pleasures and conflicts of childhood. Now he wonders if the Agency is protecting something very much like its identity—protecting its own truth, its theology of secrets.
The Curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. There are important things he has yet to learn. There are lives he must examine. It is essential to master the data.
—
He believes people are distorting his words even as he speaks them. There is a process that takes place between the saying of a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly but actually change it to mean what they want.
—
He is miscast, or cast as someone else, as Oswald. They are part of the same crime now. They are in it together and forever and together.
—
The camera doesn’t catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies.
—
There was something in Oswald’s face, a glance at the camera before he was shot, that put him here in the audience, among the rest of us, sleepless in our homes—a glance, a way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel, that he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his sense of the crime. Something in the look, some sly intelligence, exceedingly brief but far-reaching, a connection all but bleached away by glare, tells us that he is outside the moment, watching with the rest of us.

Only last year did I realize that I actually love "fantasy", I just never called it that. I love books that deal with the fantastic - especially things that make me feel challenged, on-edge, and/or unsettled. For me, fantasy is not escapism but an exploration of conceits that can't be approached in other forms of fiction. The example I'll give to anyone willing to listen is Jorge Luis Borges, whose short-form fiction collected within Labyrinths and Ficciones frequently considers philosophical concepts taken to their logical extremes. For example: what if two people wrote the exact same book? Does the fact it's two different people with two different lives, backgrounds, and belief systems change what individual lines mean, or do we take Death of the Author to its extreme and treat them as the exact same book?
For 2023, my bingo card was the sardonic "Weird shit I read in the woods". Depending on your point of view, my obsession of mountaineering is either mania or hyperfocus; I like to read books in my tent after long days. Spring here has been an absolute clusterfuck of work and weather (and on top of that I'm dealing with a twisted ankle) so these eight books might be better described as "Weird shit I read while plaintively sighing westward". My goal this year is to do full-on hard mode; an erect bingo card.
So far, it's been an awesome year. Five books I strongly enjoyed (with one potentially being a top 20 book I've ever read), two I felt "eh" on but have things to recommend, and only one I just didn't enjoy at all (though even that had some good stuff).
Spoilers on content warnings that would spoil notable plot points or interpretations. All scores are out of 5, with a higher score being a stronger rating. Non-fantasy and speculative fiction at the very end.
Thanks, and hope some of these seem interesting to you!
Other write-ups:

• 2023 bingo: Weird shit I read in the woods
• Five books of nature writing with the vibe of fantasy
• Three novellas
• Five short story collections

Criminals (HM): Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

• Appeal: 2.75
• Thinkability: 3
• Weird shit? Inspired a lot of weird shit!
• Reading location: Windowside comfy chair
• Date published: 1972
• Page count: 209, including foreword and afterword
• Tags: USSR literature, aliens, science fiction, influential, eldritch
• Content warnings: Body horror, alcoholism, injury detail, pregnancy, infidelity
• Other bingo squares: Multi-POV, Character with a Disability, Survival (HM), Set in a Small Town (HM), Reference Materials

After reading The Master and Margarita in February and it being one of the best books I've ever read in speculative fiction/fantasy, I decided to consciously pursue more Eastern European and Russian/USSR books. (One of these includes László Krasznahorkai's Sátántangó in April, which is now my fifth favorite book I've ever read.) Both Roadside Picnic and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris rocketed up to the top of the to-read list.
Roadside Picnic is one of the most influential books of contemporary science fiction through the Andrei Tarkovsky movie Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games. (Fun fact, the Strugatsky brothers just liked the word.) It takes place in a small town in four distinct time periods over around a decade. This small town (along with several others) were visited by utterly unknowable aliens recently in earth's past whose visit sites are full of strange, dangerous, and immensely valuable artifacts. You (mostly) follow a single stalker named Red and his illegal trips into the Zone, as well as how the Visit impacts his family and those around him.
This'll be one of those books that I like more for the ideas than the content itself. The Zone is fascinating, and I find myself dining on and thinking about the various horrific conceits in the novel. Many of the more insidious aspects are mentioned off-hand, as if the "traps" (how else to think of them from a human perspective?) have become mundane.
However, the book itself is... kind of boring. Perhaps this is because it's so short, which isn't a problem I usually have with speculative fiction (if anything, I overwhelmingly prefer shorter books to longer ones). Forays into the zone are bookended by lots of talking and drinking with what felt like cursory examination of the danger. And I'm not convinced that banality is its own point; Roadside Picnic isn't a character study, as stated in Boris Strugatsky's afterword. Dialogue feels mismatched, chapters start in the middle or at the end of action, and chapters stop right as other events start to move. For a book about the Zone and people's relationship to it, there's an awful lot of puttering about.
The high point is the conversation between two scientist characters. One has a theory about aliens having the eponymous "roadside picnic" and leaving their trash for smaller creatures to obsess over - an absolutely fascinating postmodern outlook on man's purpose in the universe.
I'm glad I read this for the influence on some media that I adore, but it would be a hard sell to someone who isn't deeply invested in the history of Russian science fiction or just wants to get more out of the "Stalker" media.
Multi-POV (HM): Lanny by Max Porter

• Appeal: 4.5
• Thinkability: 4
• Weird shit? The typeset is a character.
• Reading location: Windowside comfy chair
• Date published: 2019
• Page count: 224
• Tags: English literature, "Green Man" mythos, paganism, eald gods, family drama, character study
• Content warnings: Grief, animal death, classism, homophobia, sexual content, bullying, confinement, hate crimes
• Other bingo squares: Dreams, Set in a Small Town (HM)

Just like Borges, I'll exalt the literary merits of Max Porter and Ling Ma (who's also featured here). Both of these are fairly young authors with a small list of works, but I'll easily buy everything they put out if it's anywhere near the quality of what I've read so far.
Porter a British bookstore-owner who writes short novels and novellas (Lanny is his longest) with highly idiosyncratic writing. Have you heard the term "prose-poetry"? Porter writes "prose-poetry-stage directions". Passages are announced with the name of characters in bold, and you read their thoughts or conversations with others rather than "normal" dialogue or descriptions. No surprises his debut Grief Is the Thing with Feathers was indeed adapted for stage, starring Cillian Murphy.
Lanny follows a family who recently moved to a small town outside of London. Their capricious son has a gift for art, cavorts around the town, and has the fine-edged chaos that so many single-digit ages have before they "grow up" or something. The town also embodies the presence of Old Papa Toothwort, a Green Man-esque figure who... inhabits? haunts? is? the town as a sort of genius loci. Toothwort is waking up after a long rest, and the town has changed since last time.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Lanny goes missing. Porter is incredible at describing the creeping fear of searching for a missing child and the irreparable harm it does to a family and community. At one point, POVs switch with every little break as the slow dread sinks in, with characters no longer being introduced but nonetheless distinct, just providing occasional snippets of thoughts or conversation as it turns from "Lanny isn’t home yet in the afternoon" to "have you seen Lanny?" to "I always knew that woman was a bad mum". It is tense.
Spoiler for parents interested in the book but don't want to go in wondering about the missing child plotline: Lanny survives, and the ending is actually kind of sweet in the implied relationship between Lanny, nature, and creativity even after the trauma of his disappearance.
Published in 2024 (HM): This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer

• Appeal: 1.75
• Thinkability: 2
• Weird shit? Kinda?
• Reading location: In bed with a single light on
• Date published: 2024
• Page count: 301
• Tags: Slasher, horror, violent, climbing, Kentucky
• Content warnings: Blood, cannibalism, vomit, child death, animal death
• Other bingo squares: Dreams, Self-Published/Indie, Multi-POV, Survival (HM)

This Wretched Valley was recommended to me as a horror novel that involves climbing. Not only that - it takes place around the Red River Gorge, where I cut my teeth on hard sport climbing. Hell yeah - how could I not?
Four acquaintances uncover a mysterious, brand-new climbing crag in the southeast Kentucky wilderness, and they go to climb the new routes while also study its strange geology. The area turns out to be an eldritch, evil land that shifts and contorts itself to keep people trapped there while luring them with visions of past victims and deep desires. The concept is a little similar to Junji Ito's Uzumaki in that sense, albeit without a singular obsession like that graphic novel's spirals.
The book definitely reflects her understanding/experience within climbing culture at the Red River Gorge, down to referencing specific climbs I've sent. Unfortunately, I felt that the book was a good example of something written by an enthusiast but not so much a writer. The beginning is strong in uncovering the mysterious crag, but the characters just kind of... ruminate. There are flashbacks to other deaths and persons lured there, but there's little to be shown except "land evil!" with inconsistent descriptions of how that evil occurs. People who die there also become evil ghosts (not a spoiler; it happens pretty early on), and it just doesn't really make sense how or why, as if Jenny Kiefer's thoughts on how the land's evil came about changed throughout the novel.
Not that I need everything explained for me, it just felt like "hey what if this land wanted to literally eat people" and only developed about sixty percent of the way. I ended up just being kind of bored, as if each new horror were just "ooo spooky ghost!" rather than something that sank into me. And weirdly enough, there are a lot of descriptions of vomit and its various consistencies. Like, enough that I'm even mentioning it.
This would make a great stylized indie horror B-movie, despite me not liking the book. And even then, I was thinking about why it didn't work for me, which is better than no thoughts at all.
Survival (HM): Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Appeal: 5
• Thinkability: 4
• Weird shit? The fact it isn't "weird" is the most horrific part of it all.
• Reading location: Camping in the Front Range
• Date published: 1987
• Page count: 324
• Tags: Slavery, discursive, ghost story, horror, Civil War literature, Black American literature
• Content warnings: Slavery, infanticide, sexual assault, torture, racism, murder
• Other bingo squares: Criminals, Multi-POV (HM), Set in a Small Town (HM), Author of Color

Beloved was directly cited by the Nobel Committee upon awarding Toni Morrison with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. I see why. Beloved is the kind of book where I want to doubt the humanity of any US citizen even tangentially familiar with slavery who isn't changed upon reading it. I finished it yesterday and stared into space for a few minutes, unhearing my fiancee ask me what kind of burgers I wanted for Memorial Day.
Beloved was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner - an enslaved woman who escaped to Ohio and killed her daughter before being found so her daughter wouldn't return to the horror of slavery. Horror? That word isn't powerful enough to describe American slavery. Likewise, it would be reductive to call Beloved a horror novel. Though the titular Beloved refers to the ghost of one-year old killed by Sethe (one of the book's protagonists) for the same reason Garner killed her daughter, this is so much more than that. Beloved is both her own story and a eulogy for the "sixty million and more" lost through the Atlantic slave trade - per Morrison's own dedication.
I can't describe more. Nothing I can summarize would be appropriate. It's rare to experience any piece of media so profoundly changing, loving, and heartrending. I can't call it hopeful, but I also can't call it hopeless. The trauma (generational and personal) of slavery is expressed in so many ways - from the "tree" on Sethe's back to the two words "it rained".
This was my first Morrison novel, and two things surprised me. First, I did not anticipate the book to be so discursive. This is not a bad thing. Characters flit back and forth between different time periods in their heads as PTSD, and several times it's an errant action or phrase that sets them off. (After writing that, a friend told me that Morrison coined the word "rememory" to describe this phenomenon; it's also used in the book.) Second, Morrison has such an incredible economy of phrase where one-off references end up having extreme impact, like when I realized Stamp Paid was castrated or what Baby Suggs truly meant when she said "lay down your sword and shield", which was otherwise implied to mean "open your heart to love".
"We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."
Judge a Book By Its Cover (HM): Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

• Appeal: 4.25
• Thinkability: 4
• Weird shit?
• Reading location: Various coffee shops
• Date published: 1972
• Page count: 165
• Tags: Magical realism, semiotics, Italian literature, combinatorics, parables
• Content warnings: Grief, suicide, ableism
• Other bingo squares: Set in a Small Town (HM), but only if you're a little scamp.

I knew nothing about Invisible Cities other than Italo Calvino was strongly recommended to me. This is a fantastic exploration(!) of semiotics, meaning, and combinatorics through literature. Over 55 short prose vignettes, Marco Polo speaks with Kublai Khan about fantastic cities with a focus on a particular quirk or interpretation of that city. Each city is categorized in one of several themes (Thin Cities, Cities & Desire, Cities & The Sky, etc.), some of which are more steeped in the semiotic discussion, others are allegorical, and still others are simply surreal.
My copy is less than 170 pages, but I easily read 300+ over two weeks given I was so enchanted by each of Calvino's parables. I would read one of the nine sections, pause, and then go back two sections to reread and rethink. This little book is inspiring not only for fantastic places but as a way to simply view your city (whatever that might mean) in new contexts.
My only caveat is that Calvino uses a similar theme of "two cities existing at once" for probably ten of the passages. The book is so strongly organized by patterns and combinations that I found this to be almost a frustrating red-herring in it not really amounting to anything other than a conceipt that Calvino must have liked. Kinda wish he just had a category called "Twin Cities".
As I read, I kept thinking about my time in the Sierra Nevada and similar interpretations with mountains. Like, one of Calvino's stories is about how the archetype you have of a profession in a city makes you collapse any memories of people doing that skill into the single person (i.e. I saw ten stonemasons but I only remember one), kind of like a twisted platonic ideal. It made me think of seeing quaking aspen in the northern Sierra; I can't tell you about one particular aspen, but instead all the ones I've walked past coalesce in my mind as the memory of aspen.
Set in a Small Town (HM): Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon

• Appeal: 3
• Thinkability: 1
• Weird shit? Not as weird as it initially came off.
• Reading location: Climbing trip to Devils Tower (WY)
• Date published: 2021
• Page count: 230
• Tags: Magical realism, dreams, surreal, mundane horror, beige prose
• Content warnings: Domestic abuse, pregnancy, car accident, death, toxic relationship, emotional abuse, medical trauma
• Other bingo squares: Self-Published/Indie

"Set in a Small Town" really gets around on this bingo card. Most of my books so far are set in small towns!
Spoiler free summary: An unnamed woman arrives at a subdivision simply called the Subdivision. She has some memory loss, and she is asked by the owners of her guesthouse to help put together a large puzzle. Along the way she encounters fantastic persons and situations, including a shapeshifting creature called the bakemono that attempts to seduce her with undercurrents of emotional abuse, a child who attends a birthday party where the kids are described as "belonging to the neighborhood", and a courthouse that "analyzes phenomena" under constant threat of a windstorm. She has a personal assistant/AI named Cylvia that seems to be near-omniscient while transforming into different shapes. The story follows her interactions with this Kafka-esque town and cast of characters before culminating in the central mystery: why did she arrive at the Subdivision at all?
Spoilerrific discussion: Put simply, Subdivision would have struck me harder if I hadn't seen this trick pulled in lots of other media. I got that this was a dying dream before the halfway point. Not a flex on my behalf, simply that the puzzle pieces (hehehe) were all there early on. It's one of those books that simultaneously is a little obvious and a little cryptic, and the cryptic parts (such as the birthday party) become more annoying than poignant as they seem to be there to confuse our narrator and just be weird. I love surreality, but if you go to great strides to make things have a symbol, they could be more consistently symbolic. It felt disjointed in how "challenging" it wanted to be - and overly precious when it tried to be heartfelt.
Yet I wanted to keep reading because I wanted to see if Lennon stuck the landing - and he did. Parts like the unnamed narrator being pregnant, the probability well at the house being what the family could have had in a happier life, her forgetting her own name due to the head trauma of the accident, and Cylvia being her unborn child who does survive the accident were nice little "aha!" moments.
Five Short Stories (HM): Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

• Appeal: 3.75
• Thinkability: 2
• Weird shit? Subtly so.
• Reading location: Treadmill
• Date published: 2022
• Page count: 228
• Tags: Magical realism, surreal, Millennial, immigrant experience in the USA
• Content warnings: Emotional abuse, child abuse, drug abuse, parent death
• Other bingo squares: Author of Color, Multi-POV (different perspectives in a single short story)

Short stories are an art, and those who wield them well are masters. Bliss Montage is Ling Ma's second published work and first set of short stories, though some of them were published elsewhere beforehand. I like to describe Ling Ma as a prototypical "Millennial" author, in that I do not believe these stories could be written by someone who wasn't an adolescent during the 1990s boom-era and then experienced her formative years during 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession. There's a wry exhaustion to the way she writes that just speaks to my experience as well (though I'm over a decade younger than her).
Bliss Montage is on the cusp of speculative fiction in that the fantastic aspects are window dressing for Ling Ma's exploration of relationships and the American immigrant experience. The first (and best) story features a woman who lives in a large mansion with her husband, kids, and every single ex-boyfriend - including flings and one-night stands. It's a fascinating portrayal of how the tendrils of emotional abuse sink into one's psyche, with the follow-up story basically being the "real life" version.
Other stories are less successful... but like I said with Porter, I'll buy everything she releases.
Reference Materials (HM): The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

• Appeal: 3.5
• Thinkability: 4
• Weird shit? Subtly so.
• Reading location: Treadmill
• Date published: 1957
• Page count: 236
• Tags: Magical realism, bestiary,
• Content warnings: Violence
• Other bingo squares: Entitled Animals

Hey look, a book that's only reference materials! And even then, there are plenty of translator's notes and introductory text to make this HM even without the content. And it's Borges??
The Book of Imaginary Beings is a bestiary of mythical beings by Argentinian philosophemagical realism author Jorge Luis Borges in collaboration with Margarita Guerrero. Over 110 entries on various creatures that have haunted and thrilled imaginations, with a focus on western mythologies.
This is a book about the mind's creation of imaginary beings, not the beings themselves. You're not reading this to learn about the lifecycle of the Chinese Dragon, but instead the history of their references and subtle differences between depictions. Borges isn't as interested in directly stating what the creatures are as much as exploring the epistemology about what makes imaginary creatures interesting to us. It's classic Borgesian metafiction in that way!
The bestiary describes beasts as much as it describes their philosophical and moral progeny with the economy of phrase that typifies Borges' short fiction. Most entries are just a couple paragraphs long, and any entry longer than 2 pages is a surprise. Some might find it confusing that he has a single paragraph on elves or his dismissal of the chimera, but it's about the "why" more than the "what" for Borges' take on the fantastic. If there's a downside, it's that Borges is probably too coy for his own good for about one-third of the entries.
Nonfiction and Non-Spec Fic:

• Scott Lankford - Tahoe Beneath the Surface (2010). Historical essays on places and events tied to Lake Tahoe, from Mark Twain to JFK's presidency. Decent local book overall. (Appeal: 3.25, Thinkability: 1)
• László Krasznahorkai - Sátántangó (1985). Hungarian historical fiction in twelve chapters, with each chapter a single unbroken paragraph. Top five book I've ever read. Absolutely loved it; the pub scene felt like I could see every single raindrop. (Appeal: 5, Thinkability: 4)
• Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves (2000). Semi-revisit for me since I got through most of it in 2015. I still think Johnny is annoying, though I "get it" more now. Part of my "sub zeitgeist" bingo card, if I get to it. (Appeal: 4, Thinkability: 3)
• Bruce Tremper - Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain (2001, 4th edition). The field classic for a reason. (Appeal: 4.5, Thinkability: 5)
• Lynda V. Mapes - Witness Tree (2017). A woman lives in Harvard Forest for a year, centering her life around a single red oak. Unfortunately, it doesn't really feature the tree; it's more about the natural history of New England. (Appeal: 2.5; Thinkability: 1)

List of mods in the build :
Create fabric
Indium
sodium 5.8
jei
modmenu
Crash report

---- Minecraft Crash Report ---- // Uh... Did I do that? Time: 2024-05-27 21:01:23 Description: Unexpected error java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "net.minecraft.client.render.entity.EntityRenderer.shouldRender(net.minecraft.entity.Entity, net.minecraft.client.render.Frustum, double, double, double)" because "entityRenderer" is null at net.minecraft.client.render.entity.EntityRenderDispatcher.shouldRender(EntityRenderDispatcher.java:138) at net.minecraft.client.render.WorldRenderer.render(WorldRenderer.java:1079) at net.minecraft.client.render.GameRenderer.renderWorld(GameRenderer.java:1081) at net.minecraft.client.render.GameRenderer.render(GameRenderer.java:891) at net.minecraft.client.MinecraftClient.render(MinecraftClient.java:1122) at net.minecraft.client.MinecraftClient.run(MinecraftClient.java:774) at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:223) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.Knot.launch(Knot.java:74) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClient.main(KnotClient.java:23) at net.fabricmc.devlaunchinjector.Main.main(Main.java:86) A detailed walkthrough of the error, its code path and all known details is as follows: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Head -- Thread: Render thread Stacktrace: at net.minecraft.client.render.entity.EntityRenderDispatcher.shouldRender(EntityRenderDispatcher.java:138) at net.minecraft.client.render.WorldRenderer.render(WorldRenderer.java:1079) at net.minecraft.client.render.GameRenderer.renderWorld(GameRenderer.java:1081) -- Affected level -- Details: All players: 1 total; [ClientPlayerEntity['Player283'/1, l='ClientLevel', x=2.50, y=-60.00, z=10.50]] Chunk stats: 1024, 609 Level dimension: minecraft:overworld Level spawn location: World: (0,-60,0), Section: (at 0,4,0 in 0,-4,0; chunk contains blocks 0,-64,0 to 15,319,15), Region: (0,0; contains chunks 0,0 to 31,31, blocks 0,-64,0 to 511,319,511) Level time: 294 game time, 294 day time Server brand: fabric Server type: Integrated singleplayer server Stacktrace: at net.minecraft.client.world.ClientWorld.addDetailsToCrashReport(ClientWorld.java:428) at net.minecraft.client.MinecraftClient.addDetailsToCrashReport(MinecraftClient.java:2132) at net.minecraft.client.MinecraftClient.run(MinecraftClient.java:795) at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:223) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.Knot.launch(Knot.java:74) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClient.main(KnotClient.java:23) at net.fabricmc.devlaunchinjector.Main.main(Main.java:86) -- Last reload -- Details: Reload number: 1 Reload reason: initial Finished: Yes Packs: vanilla, fabric -- System Details -- Details: Minecraft Version: 1.20.1 Minecraft Version ID: 1.20.1 Operating System: Windows 11 (amd64) version 10.0 Java Version: 17.0.10, Oracle Corporation Java VM Version: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (mixed mode, sharing), Oracle Corporation Memory: 825911808 bytes (787 MiB) / 2237661184 bytes (2134 MiB) up to 4250927104 bytes (4054 MiB) CPUs: 12 Processor Vendor: GenuineIntel Processor Name: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12400F Identifier: Intel64 Family 6 Model 151 Stepping 2 Microarchitecture: Alder Lake Frequency (GHz): 2.50 Number of physical packages: 1 Number of physical CPUs: 6 Number of logical CPUs: 12 Graphics card #0 name: AMD Radeon RX 7600 Graphics card #0 vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. 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Window size: 1920x1080 GL Caps: Using framebuffer using OpenGL 3.2 GL debug messages: Using VBOs: Yes Is Modded: Definitely; Client brand changed to 'fabric'; Server brand changed to 'fabric' Type: Integrated Server (map_client.txt) Graphics mode: fancy Resource Packs: vanilla, fabric Current Language: en_us CPU: 12x 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12400F Server Running: true Player Count: 1 / 8; [ServerPlayerEntity['Player283'/1, l='ServerLevel[New World]', x=2.50, y=-60.00, z=10.50]] Data Packs: vanilla, fabric Enabled Feature Flags: minecraft:vanilla World Generation: Stable 

Please help i can give any other information of needed

What is good buds. It is time for the next chapter of Human Trauma. This time we have Martinez returning home to what no military man fears to see. A letter from someone who is MIA that reads like a final goodbye.
Let's get a fresh baked garlic loaf.
-----
Martinez groaned, turning from handing the keys to the rental SUV to the clerk. A line nearly half a kilometer long of impatient aliens had formed; claws flared, tentacles undulated, and teeth bared.
“Sorry about the delay,” Martinez muttered, slinking out of the way.
It was not like it was his fault the alien meaning the counter, had lost the record of him having rented the vehicle, causing him to have to prove he had through credit statements, his copy of the contract, and showing that he had the damn SUV.
Martinez slipped past the crowd on the thoroughfare and skirted the road's edge, allowing families and taxis to drop off and receive sentients from the Celna aispaceport. Both were almost as densely populated as any street in Draun.
Martinez was already missing the solitude and calm of Nelya’s house—but the navy had assigned him to Draun, so he had to return on time. He would not want to be shipped off to the Iron Spire on Mars to serve brig time for going A.W.O.L(absent without leave)
If rumors about that Navy supermax were to be believed, being on bread and water aboard a starship was a far more pleasant fate.
Pausing before crossing the road and entering the main terminal, Martinez was amazed by the number of aliens in the small port. It was abuzz with sentients going to and from their destinations, paying one another no mind as they did.
Through the large glass windows, Martinez could see even more. If anything, the density inside increased, something that became all the more apparent once he had joined the hellish, flowing waves of aliens inside.
Martinez slowed his pace as he neared the shoreline of the ruckus crowd, scanning over it for his found family. The task was made simple because of the menagerie's treatment of them. The crowd gave the three Aviex in their midst a wide berth, letting Nelya’s bright yellow jacket and poofy pompom hat stand out like the north star.
Martinez quickly adjusted his heading and moved through the turbulent crowd, never losing sight of Nelya. He navigated the crowd with practiced ease, a talent Draun and, more specifically, the Hospital there had taught him.
Breaching through the crowd and into the calm void to join them, Lysa was just wrapping up her goodbyes. She was hugging Kyroll tightly while he did the same; only the mangled half of his face was visible through his daughter's raven hair. If that side of his face was still emotive, without a doubt, it would be overflowing contentment—but alas, all Martinez could see was the slight upturn of his lip.
Before Martinez had recovered from stumbling through the crowd, Nelya had already grabbed hold of him, latching to him tighter than a person trying to break his rib through sheer machismo.
“Little Hunter, please don’t leave!” Nelya whined, pulling Martinez down to her level, hugging around his head, burying his head against her sweater and the plush build beneath. “You two just got here.”
Martinez could not deny that the time they had spent here had flown by, and despite his wish to stay, that was not possible. “Sorry, Kurenla,” Martinez replied, righting himself and returning the gesture, referring to Nelya with the Aviex word for Mother. “We have to go home.”
Calling her that apparently was both the correct and incorrect thing to do for the man. With more force than Martinez thought possible with her seam-splitting build, Nelya reengaged the hug around his chest, causing him to gasp.
“Gruh’ha could get you a job here; Lysa could stay home with me, writing our days away. A big happy Kureal,” Nelya argued. If you could call her explaining, they would be the Aviex equivalent of an extended family unit a argument.
It was not like they all had not accepted that as reality, save for Kyroll, who likely needed more time to warm up to the thought.
“Kurenla, as cherubic as the sounds, ruh’ah has to finish school,” Lysa interjected, patting Nelya’s shoulder.
“You are supposed to be on my side here,” Nelya complained, looking over her shoulder and sticking her tongue out at her daughter, earning a chuckle from both Lysa and Kyroll.
It was pleasant for such a mature woman that Nelya was so open with her feelings. Few sentients would be as expressive. Nelya was so willing to wear her heart on her sleeve that everyone knew what she intended.
“I am. However, I also informed you that I would not strong-arm ruh’ah into moving here,” Lysa said before gesturing at Martinez. “That is up to him once he graduates,”
“Don’t worry, we will visit again. Just after I graduate,” Martinez added, not giving Nelya the chance to make a protest.
Without missing a beat, Nelya’s cunning and ability to move things to where she wanted shined brighter than the sun. “Are we not able to attend?” She said with a bit of sing-song begging while widening her pink eyes, mimicking the cutest kitten eyes he had ever seen.
“Of course you can,” Martinez chuckled, not needing the kitten begging; he would have invited them anyway.
“Thank you, little hunter. I can’t wait to see you two again,” Nelya replied, letting Martinez go but having not completed her onslaught of hugs.
She turned around and grabbed her daughter, who saw it coming this time and met her living ferocity without issue.
As they gave their final heartfelt goodbyes, Martinez turned to Kyroll and gave him a firm handshake.
“Take care of her,” Kyroll smirked, “I know you can.”
“I won't let you down, brother,” Martinez nodded.
“Come on, Nelly. They will miss their flight if we keep them,” Kyroll said, going over to Nelya and Lysa.
Nelya looked at Kyroll and likely was about to argue the point, wanting to insist her dear daughter stay but giving the man a point; he knew Nelya. Kyroll snaked an arm between Nelya and Lysa, twisting her around and planting a kiss on his wife's lips, leaning down over her.
Martinez had never seen how Lysa melts in his arms, but now he thinks he knows what it looks like. In the span of one second, Nelya went from as stiff as a board to clutching Kyrolls shirt, lightly moaning against him, letting him support her as they leaned down.
“I guess we should,” Nelya breathed once the little kiss broke, and Kyroll stood her up and wrapped his arm around her waist.
Lysa and Martinez glanced at each other, neither willing to admit aloud how uncanny the similarities between their relationship and the older couple's were—but they knew.
After another short round of pleasantries, Nelya and Kyroll left, letting Martinez and Lysa get checked in and board the shuttle.
To Martinez’s surprise, the airline did not care that he had a gun now. The weapon just had to be unloaded and in his checked bag. It seems Kyrolls's shaky idea of legality was genuine when he told Martinez about the legality of owning the JKL. The airline representative just wanted to see his Military, GU, or LE ID to confirm he could own it.
Once the dynamic duo were settled in their seats, Lysa lay against Martinez and immediately fell asleep, leaving Martinez to stew in his emotions about what was to come once he returned home.
It was odd; the two times he had returned to Earth after enlisting, returning home was joyous–but Draun was melancholic.
Martinez had hardly thought about work, Shiksie, patients, or the incident since arriving in Celna. But now that he was en route to Draun, it was at the forefront of his mind; the same was true of an expected enemy brief, which made him think of what injuries he would be dealing with.
Martinez was not worried about getting in trouble for throttling Shiksie; she was molesting him and causing a S.H.A.R.P(sexual harassment and rape prevention) officer's worst nightmare.
The only way Martinez could see any backlash befalling him would be if Shiksie had gotten an aneurysm from slamming into the fridge.
“Fuck,” Martinez muttered, realizing this was the first time after texting Ivron he had thought of possible injuries she could have sustained.
In all the chaos and emotions of that night, he did not even consider that she could have died from the impact he gave her. Telling Ivorn was not enough. Shiksie could have sustained a fractured skull, TBI, Internal hemorrhaging, or countless other life-changing injuries.
Had he abandoned her after hurting her? Martinez had no idea how he would cope if that were the case. Yeah, he was not a doctor and did not have the Hippocratic oath—he had something else: the Corpsman's oath.
“I shall do all within my power to show in myself an example of all that is honorable and good throughout my Naval career!” The words of his instructors roared in his mind.
Martinez had said those words like gospel for months in training and afterward at every promotion and follow-on school. Had he fallen so far as to abandon Shikise when she was not only in need but also harmed?
He had beat the fuck out of Marines but still stitched them up, had a beer with and told them it was ok. But he ran away and left Shiksie alone.
The sight of her crying and belting herself as he ran flashed in his mind. If Martinez could take it back, he would—but what else should he have done? He was panicked.
What if that was the last he would have seen of her? She could have died, and he had not for one moment thought of her.
If something happened after leaving her there, Martinez might as well give up on medicine, and he would not deserve to see another patient again.
Martinez’s imagination ran rampant, and he imagined his kind, quirky, and gentle mentor changed because of his actions: stuck with crutches, unable to speak, paralyzed, or even dead—all because of him.
Those thoughts haunted him, clawing at his mind like a razor blade until he reached Lysa’s house in the afternoon.
“Shall I see you tomorrow?” Lysa asked, turning around in the afternoon sun, the light flaring against her raven hair, making her look positively angelic. The only thing since the flight started to pull Martinez back down to earth—or Renoral in this case.
“Maybe,” Martinez replied with a shaky answer.
“Are you positive?” Lysa purred, playfully plucking at his shirt button and fluttering her four blood-red eyes.
“I want to see how studying and work go,” Martinez loathfully choked out.
Lysa lost her flirty attitude and stared at Martinez, plucking his expression apart. It was enigmatic. Her love looked nervous and sad yet had a painful grimace, like someone was driving nails under his skin.
“Are you still upset about Shiksie?” Lysa sighed, knowing Martinez likely said work and studying so as not to name-drop the Farun’se woman.
Martinez froze momentarily when Lysa mentioned Shiksie but quickly recovered and attempted to deflect. “It’s not about that.”
“Oh! Then what might it be?” Lysa pressed, challenging the obvious attempt at avoiding being candid.
“Well, you know, it’s just getting back, getting into the swing of things, and—” Martinez started to trail off, listing things about their daily routines they would be resuming.
If the subject matter were less meaningful to him, Lysa would find the idea of drowning herself in word soup comedic, but in this case, it was annoying.
With each addition, Martinez’s answers became less logical and grew in mundanity. By the time Lysa stopped him, he was going on about folding his laundry.
“Ruh’ah—please cease. I know you must be nervous about meeting up with Shiksie again; considering how you are behaving, it must be niggling you,” Lysa said, draping her arms on Martinez’s shoulders and pulling herself against him.
Nearly instinctually, Martinez wrapped his firm hands around her hips, holding Lysa in place. “Am I that obvious?”
“Just to me. I know you too well, just as you do me,” Lysa whispered into Martinez’s ear, her warm breath rolling past his neck, the beatific care of it burrowing in him.
They stood silent for several seconds while Martinez quantified what he needed to say. Each enjoyed the truth in the statement of knowing the other so well. However, Lysa has been a bit more challenging for humans to read in the last few weeks. It was not impossible, but Martinez had to adapt to her mood swings.
“I figured you would be furious if I mentioned needing to talk to her,” Martinez admitted, moving a hand up Lysa’s back, bringing her into a half hug. “You did say you would skin her alive.”
A smirk crawled up on Lysa’s lips, thankfully not visible to Martinez—she would have looked psychotic. “I did, but she is essential to your life, career, and schooling. I cannot demand you abandon her altogether—that seems a bit—selfish on my part.”
Lysa stepped back and let the cold winter air fill the gap between them. “Could you please seek counsel on how to confront her? Perhaps seek out Ivorn or possibly the doctor?”
Martinez was already planning on getting one of them to broker a meeting between them to help clear the air. Lord knew he had no plans to ever be alone again with Shiksie. It was not because Martinez felt like she was a danger to him; no, Martinez could slaughter Shiksie if push came to shove.
He just felt violated. A line had been crossed, and there was no return to what the world once was. All they could do now was adapt to the new battle space.
“I will ask them,” Martinez assured.
“Marvelous; tell me how it goes, ruh’ah,” Lysa purred, kissing Martinez’s cheek and leaving a trace of her black lipstick just over his stubble.
—--
The walk from Lysa’s house to Martinez’s apartment was not far, only clocking in at a cunt hair over fifteen kilometers. Martinez ran further than that most mornings. But with everything going on in Martinez’s mind, it felt like he was back on Mars and conducting the Joli Rouge again.
The Joli Rouge, a French term for pretty red, was the cumulative event for Corpsmen in the Human Navy. It consisted of three tribulating days of constant marching, triage, physical training, and ruck marches, all against the backdrop of the Rouge desert.
With confronting Shiksie on the horizon, Martinez could not deny the conflict brewing inside him.
Had he not been clear enough? Was staying at Shiksies despite knowing she had set a trap a stupid idea? Each question rolled in his mind, and conjured up a thousand ways to solve the issue. But that was all in hindsight and only made the Human feel more guilty as if he had failed one of his only friends.
“God fucking dammit,” Martinez muttered, kicking a rock into a bush, a small animal scurrying out and chirping angrily at him.
“Well fuck you too,” Martinez said, flipping the squirrel thing off, wanting to tell something o pound sand, even if it's just a random animal.
Once the beast had returned to the bush and Martinez felt no more vindicated, he continued to stew alone in his thoughts—specifically on the incident.
How the hell was he supposed to know the usually level-headed woman would have come onto him like a bitch in heat? He doubted anyone would have ever pictured prim and proper Shiksie doing that. It was so out of the left field it might as well have been an ambush.
Who would blame him for panicking and throttling her? Other than himself, that is.
As if Martinez did not hate himself enough for all the missteps that led to the schism between himself and his mentor, his understanding of the fallout was about to shift from guilt to being unable to deny his culpability.
Once Martinez reached the floor of his apartment, his onus was laid to bear, not in the form of a body or anything he had ever encountered. This time, it was just simple brown boxes. Stacked neatly in front of his door were dozens of boxes, each with his name written in oh-so-familiar, print-like handwriting.
Martinez drew his knife and sliced open one of the boxes, wondering what Shiksie could have dropped off. They were all filled to the brim with the notebooks Shiksie had him use to study from. The same ones she read regularly and had used to pass her college classes several years ago.
At first, Martinez wondered why she had left her notes with him until he started to move the boxes out of the way of the door and found the note taped to his door.
Reaching up with a trembling hand and pulling it down, Martinez swallowed his spit, fearing the absolute worst. While being in the military made him jumpy about suicide, it was for a damn good reason; this would not be the first final goodbye he had to read—and every fiber of him prayed the gut reaction the Navy built into him was wrong.
But seeing the uncharacteristically shaky text on the paper, it was as if the worst parts of his fears had been manifested into reality.
The scrawl was short and to the point and read like it was written by someone about to suck start a shotgun.
Henry, I enjoyed our time together. I hope you did as well. I pray you do well in life. I wish it did not have to end this way. Please forget about me for your sake. Your friend -Shiksie
Martinez sucked in a breath and dropped the note; pulling out his datapad, he texted Shiksie, telling her he was coming over right now, before running back out into the cold Draun evening.
------
So what you all thinking? This chapter is setting up the lowpoint for the trillogy, with the last chapter driving home some stuff about Martinez that even he does not like, but will have to face with what is coming up. I hope you enjoyed. Please do not forget to updoot and comment. I will see you soon for the conclusion to HT2.
Your baker man
-Pirate
-----
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Part 1
Part 2
I didn’t sleep after my encounter at the midnight river. I mean, how could I? You’re not able to just go home and relax after experiencing something like that.
When I arrived back home, I double checked that every door and window in the house was firmly sealed and locked up tight, turned on every light, and proceeded to sit on my bed clutching the largest kitchen knife I could find, just in case. It must have been around 3 or 4 in the morning when I heard the sound of static coming from the living room.
I tiptoed carefully through the rooms of my new home, knife held close in case any intruder suddenly made their presence known. As I reached the living room, I found the TV set on to a dead channel, breaking the silence with a muted roar of signal noise. It was an ancient CRT, older than I was, and despite my shock I had to admit there was something faintly nostalgic about the buzzing of the static.
As I stood there, unsure of what I was supposed to do, I heard the static quiet down into a low hum of analog noise. I discerned a faint image appearing on the screen. It was dark, shadows on top of shadows, just a vague shape. It didn’t take very long for me to realize what I was seeing. The image slowly became brighter and brighter, revealing a blurry, uncanny face, cocked at an extreme angle and partially covered with long, dark hair. The image continued to brighten, starting to come into focus, and I could see more details. The neck seemed broken, unnaturally snapped to an impossible angle. There were tiny pinpricks of light, buried deep in the eye sockets. And I can’t honestly say I am convinced any longer that the expression on the face could accurately be described as a smile.
I didn’t have long to look over the image before there was another burst of static, followed by video footage of the interior of a house, taken from outside a backyard window. The shot panned slowly to the right, until I could see myself, staring transfixed with terror at the television set. But the camera wasn’t focusing on me. It began to zoom in slowly, focusing down at the couch behind me, revealing a pale, twisted arm, snaking out towards me from underneath the couch.
All at once, the lights went out, and the television set shut off as abruptly as it had turned on, leaving me alone in the darkness of the living room scrambling frantically to get away from the couch and knocking over a vase of flowers in the process, shattering it on the floor. The lights came back on, and I was alone in the living room. There was nothing reaching out from under the couch. Through the window, however, I could faintly see something climbing rapidly over the fence, disappearing into the neighbor’s yard.
I nearly had a heart attack when my phone started ringing. I’d spent the remainder of the night hiding in my bedroom with a flashlight, just in case the power went out again, and my nerves were shot from so much time spent awake and afraid. Hours of silence being suddenly interrupted filled me with an intense panic, to the extent that I’m fairly certain in my startled state I screamed something like “Go away!” before realizing it was just my phone. After taking a minute to calm myself, I answered the call.
“Hello?” I asked, trying and failing to hide my fear, “Who is this?”
In response, a familiar voice, tinged faintly with an affected transatlantic accent, drifted out of my phone’s speakers, replying “Goodness Trinity are you alright? You sound as though you’ve seen a ghost.” It was the voice of my friend, Helen. A friend who I sincerely hope is reading this.
I just started crying in response. After I’d eventually managed to calm down, just a little bit, I explained all that had happened, starting with the call from Seth and ending with my pursuer at the midnight river. The other end of the line remained politely quiet as I explained, with my caller only occasionally interjecting to provide sympathy and prompt me to continue. It felt so incredibly nice to just be able to tell someone what was going on, for someone to listen and take me seriously.
After I’d finished my explanation and the tears had stopped flowing, the voice at the other end took some time to reassure me that I wasn’t going crazy, that everything was alright. There were some discussions of possible rational explanations, and after a few minutes I began to feel much more normal. I felt safe again. I hate that it made me feel safe.
After a while the conversation had shifted to mundane topics, I don’t even remember exactly what, something like movies, or books we had read recently, things of that nature. I’d moved out of my bedroom and was just lounging on the couch in the living room. There was a brief lull in the conversation, and I was about to say that I needed to go and make myself breakfast, when suddenly the voice at the other end said, “You know, Trinity, I really like the way your clothes smell.”
I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. I mean, what else are you supposed to say when a longtime friend just out of nowhere announces that they enjoy the smell of your clothes? The voice at the other end laughed too, before adding “I thought it must have been some perfume or deodorant you wore, but no, I think it is the clothes, not any sort of scent you add. Perhaps there is something in the detergent that appeals to me, because,” there was a long inhale, compressed badly by the phone call’s quality, “I’m smelling them right now, and they’re just as good in your closet as they are on your body.”
My blood ran cold. “If this is your idea of a fucking joke, Helen, it’s not funny. Why would you think saying this sort of shit is even remotely okay after what I’ve been dealing with?”
There was a laugh on the other end of the line. A sick, acidic laugh, like venom dripping from a serpent’s fang. It didn’t sound like Helen’s laugh at all.
“Check the caller ID, Thomas,” said the voice, enunciating my deadname in a tone that made my heart drop. With shaking hands, I did as I was told. Unknown caller. The phone number displayed beneath it wasn’t Helen’s at all. A laugh erupted loudly out of my phone’s speakers, louder than should have been possible. I tried to hang up, but the laughter kept coming. At first I thought there was something wrong with my phone, and I just pressed down on the power button until the screen went black, but I could still hear it. I realized it wasn’t coming out of my phone anymore though. It was coming from my bedroom.
Picking back up the kitchen knife I had left on the counter, I crept to my room, slowly, shakily. As soon as I touched the doorknob, the laughter stopped abruptly. I opened the bedroom door, and was greeted still with total silence. Tinnitus rang loud in my ears as I braced myself to open the closet. When I finally did so, however, there was nobody there. There was nothing there but clothes, shoes, and a cheap, old flip phone, snapped in two and lying on the wooden floor.
I no longer felt safe in my own home by this point. I still wasn’t sure if I was being stalked, having some sort of psychotic break, or a combination of the two, but it was becoming abundantly clear to me that I could not stay in the house. I booked a motel room online, the cheapest place I could find at short notice. I wasn’t planning on staying long, so I only prepared one suitcase, in which I packed my laptop, a change of clothes, and my medication (including a generous quantity of sleep aids).
For the record, I did try calling 911, multiple times even. But my calls never seemed to direct to the right number, I’d just be greeted with dead air on the other end, without so much as an automated recording telling me that I had a wrong number. I even tried calling the local police station directly, but with no luck. I considered just driving down to the police station myself, but I realized that the only thing they’d be able to do would be to have an officer take my statement and maybe send someone to watch my house. I didn’t think either of those things would be able to help me anymore. Whatever was happening to me, it was becoming increasingly evident that I was going to need to deal with it alone.
I arrived at the motel at about noon, at least, I think that is when I got there. I remember the sun was high in the sky. The receptionist showed me to my room, and begrudgingly accommodated me when I insisted he stay with me for a few minutes while I proceeded to check every nook and cranny for any sign of an intruder. He must have thought I was crazy, but the 20 dollar bill I tipped kept his mouth shut.
I tried to do some research into lookatme.png, at least as best as I could with the crappy motel WiFi. I had no doubt at this point that the mysterious image was the root cause of all my suffering, and at the same time I felt with increasing certainty that Seth had absolutely nothing to do with it, at least not directly. I still blame them for all of this though. I wouldn’t have clicked that email if it wasn’t for them.
In any event, my search turned up no actual, usable leads. The idea of a “cursed image” seemed at least as old as the internet itself, and even looking for specific instances of the phrase “look at me” in conjunction with such topics didn’t really give me anything to work with. In the end, funnily enough the most useful piece of information I found was a typo-riddled post on some tech forum from a decade ago, describing a computer crash caused after downloading a “weird image” from an email by accident. The OP was convinced that the image had been a computer virus, and the thread was locked by a moderator after they started cursing out a user who said they were an idiot for downloading random email attachments. This didn’t bring me any closer to solving my problem, but I at least knew now that I wasn’t lookatme.png’s only victim.
It seemed to be getting darker more rapidly all the time. When you are exposed to continual stress it changes your perception of time. The periods of time during the stressful events themselves feel like they last forever, the clock’s hands moving past at a snail’s pace. Then when you’re alone, when you’re no longer in immediate danger, time starts to flow faster again, all while your mind relives over and over the terrors you experienced. It felt like only minutes after I checked into my room and began doing my research that the sun was beginning to set. I ate a supper of instant ramen I bought from the gas station across the street, cooking it with hot water from the motel room coffee maker.
My energy finally started to fail me, and I decided at the very least I should brush my teeth before going to bed, though I was not planning on turning off any of the lights. It was the motel’s electricity bill, not mine, and I refused to be alone in the dark after all I had experienced. I shuffled over to the bathroom, feeling more like a zombie than a living human being. My reflection seemed to support this descriptor. Greasy, unwashed hair, dark eye bags, and sunken cheeks showed the toll that this was taking on me, physically and mentally. As I moved to brush a tangled lock out of the way of my eyes, some of it actually came out in a clump. My lip trembled, but I didn’t have the energy to cry, and I found my mouth shifting into a now familiar grimace. I wanted to smash the mirror, but I didn’t have the energy. Instead, I just slunk off to bed, hoping that tomorrow all of this would just be a bad dream, but knowing in my heart that it would only get worse.
^{Postscript
For reasons that should be obvious, I found this third document particularly distressing. After reading it, I redoubled my efforts towards contacting Trinity, but she still is not answering my calls. Admittedly, if what she says in this testimony is true, I can perhaps understand her hesitancy in speaking with others via phone, especially me, and it may also be entirely possible that she is unable to receive or send communications at this time. I have asked some of her friends and known associates if they have heard from her, but this has thus far led nowhere. The only thing stopping me from calling the police at this point is my concern for Trinity’s safety; law enforcement and the healthcare system aren’t typically very kind to women like her, and I wouldn’t want to see her unwillingly institutionalized (or worse because of my actions.})
<sup>To be entirely honest, I am quite anxious to read what Trinity’s fourth and final “stage” of her narrative contains, but I am a woman of my word, and, in spite of my better judgment, will respect her wishes. I shall read and post the final document in 24 hours.
- Helen Theodora Waite</sup>

I play all types of games ranging from Helldivers, GoW, The Witcher 3, Forbidden West to FIFA, stardew valley, rimworld... as I said, I'm not that picky in the graphics quality but it sure would be pleasant to upgrade.
I'm also a software and AI engineer so I might use my pc as a server sometimes, run some deep learning trainings... so i sure need CPU and GPU power - I can have different virtual machines, VS code, recording program, spotify and a game open at once so handling multitasking is important.

$1500-2000$

ASAP but I can wait for the new gen for cheaper components

Just the actual tower. I already have two monitors a headset, a keyboard and a mouse. I'd like suggestions for a potential 4k and 1440p monitors to replace the ones I have in the future.

• Headset: Razer Barracuda X
• Keyboard: ROG STrix Flare
• Mouse: ROG Chakram Core
• Monitors: Asus VG248QE 24" FHD and Acer 23.8" KA242Y FHD

Not really, but I never had to.

AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU combo and at least 2TB of storage

Not really

Windows 11

Maybe, it could be an option

AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU

I'm currently using a laptop Legion with Ryzen 7 4800H, 32 GB RAM, RTX 2060. It's the most powerful I ever got in a pc so I'm comfortable with medium graphics quality (sometimes high depending on the game) but I'm not that picky. If i could ever upgrade to 4K later it would be great, but if not, it's alright.

I really appreciate everyone’s help, thank you in advance!

TLDR: Hired a handyman/tradesman who's starting out on his own and asked if I had any work for him. Saw his previous work, but it was all team projects and now seeing his painting work, I worry about his skills and professionalism. I want out without spending more money or time on his project. How can I stop the work and just lose my 1000 deposit?
Backstory: We had work done on our house for phase 1 of a 3 phase project. Over the few weeks they worked, I got to know the team. They were great guys and did good work. I would chat briefly with them and bring them coffee each day. One said he was about to quit and start his own business. I was kind and supportive of his decision to control his schedule more since I was witnessing how these guys were working 7 days a week because the bosses made the schedule.
He was part of phase 1 in our house and phase 2 is a new kitchen and phase 3 is another bathroom. We made it clear to the contractor in phase 1 that the phases were financially necessary but also to give us breaks from construction stress in our home. They and the independent guy each pressured us to do everything at once so we could lock into their schedule. I understand the benefits, but that's a lot of debt all at once. Also, the disruption is especially difficult for me to manage with our children and my own need for stability (like I need to be able to function in my house: use the bathroom privately, make food, and sleep comfortably). In Phase 1, it was chaotic and a disastrous mess. They changed the order of the work at the last-minute and I didn't plan well for living without kitchen access. But the work got done.
A month or so later, I hear from him that he has quit and started his own contracting business. I congratulate him. He asks if he can be competitive with others if I'd be willing to share my quotes for the work he did. Not just the quote from his employer, but competing quotes. I send them along because I didn't see any harm.
Current situation: He comes by to ask what I need done. Unless a permit or special skill (electrician/plumberoofer) is required, I DIY everything to save money. I've done this since I was a teen to help my parents out. But I wanted to help him out and I thought if he did some painting I'd be able to play with my kids more this summer instead of painting rooms. He quotes one price to paint 5 small hallways, 1 stairwell (tall walls), 1 tiny bathroom, and 3 normal-sized rooms. He also included adding an electrical fixture to one room and fixing something in the bathroom. Also included is that he would help move the furniture because some pieces I can't do on my own. I was thrilled. Quote = 2,500. These are all things I am able to do. I own all the supplies and equipment (he does not), but I thought this would buy me time with my kids and help him start out. The quote was high for what my friends had paid for similar work, but not knowing the full scope of their projects and recognising this guy has broader experience than just painting I went with it. This was agreed upon via text message.
He comes the first day and starts work. He asks for partial payment so I give 500 deposit. He says it should be more. I give him another 500 and he seems happy. He graciously let me choose where to start and I wanted the bathroom since it was small and I had all the supplies ready. He starts on the bathroom and moves everything including a massive freestanding cabinet into the doorway of the closest room (the tv/gaming room). I appreciated that so much because I couldn't move it myself. Unfortunately, it is turned sideways against the open door so I cannot empty the cabinet make it light enough to get on a dolly to move elsewhere. I cannot access the room. He takes two days to paint the tiny bathroom. Everything is going fine mostly. He uses matt paint on the wood trim at the window, but then doesn't paint the door frame or door at all. He said I didn't say I wanted the doors painted only the walls in the rooms. I didn't realize that the doors aren't part of the room. Ok, that's fine, I can do it later. He finishes the bathroom, but the tarp is there and his coffee cups are sitting around. He says he may do another coat (that was a week ago). He moves onto the hallway. He paints all the door frames matt white. I thought it was the primer, it is not. He said I should have been more specific with which paint goes where. I apologise. At one point, I noticed he has used the guest room bed for laying out tools and such. He put a wet paintbrush on folded clean laundry. I mention maybe putting things on the floor instead and he says there is not enough space. Not strictly true, but I accept it.
A few days into it, I have a panic attack. Not a bad one, mild, but I am convinced I need to reduce the scope of the project because I'm paying him to basically do a worse and more disruptive job than I myself could do. I ask him to adjust the quote to remove the 3 downstairs hallways and 3 big rooms (so, he'd just do 2 halls, 1 bathroom, and 1 stairwell). And to not do anything with the lights. He has not given me a straight answer about his insurance coverage and licensing for electrical/plumbing. I don't want any work done if he isn't licensed as that is problematic for home insurance and general safety. He reduces to 2000 and I explain based on area covered and space, that is disproportionate and he said 1800. Fine. Then I realize I am back to spending my kids' summer vacation painting so I say we will stick with the plan and he says he took another job and has to change the schedule because I changed my mind. Fair enough, even if he had to go to a different job and come back I understand he is starting out and needs to retain as many clients as possible.
Summary of work done: In 4 days, he has painted 1 tiny bathroom and 1 hallway, plus primed 1 hallway. He has said he can't paint the stairwell because he doesn't know how he will reach the top, but if he can paint it all with the same white ceiling paint he can probably figure out a way. I say that's fine so long as he puts his safety first.
Other interactions: He told me my house is messy and dirty and he has a cleaning team as part of his contracting business and I can have them come weekly. He said that is what I need. I gently told him that I feel it's more important to teach my kids to pick up after themselves and cannot afford any kind of maid service.
Almost every day when he comes to work, he has asked me if I know of a room or house to rent for the men on his team. I have asked my neighbours and they do not have anything.
He said he can add the bathroom we want but it can't be where I want it and it will cost more where he thinks it will work better and limits access to my home office.
I've paid him 1000 and I accept that I won't get that back, but I am hoping to diplomatically end this project and work with him. I would like to not pay more than I already have. Logically, he quoted 2500 to paint 81.2 square meters and has already painted/primed 18.3 square meters. If I break down the quote by price per square meter (30.78), the completed work would cost 564.65. However, I know I'm not seeing any of my 1000 again. But how can I convey this logic and the end of the project without hurting his feelings or setting myself up for retaliation.

I thought I'd share a little primer on statistics & how they're relevant for considering efficacy and risk of pregnancy - both for methods which are highly effective, and for methods which are less so.
So, the basic idea behind probability is putting a number to how likely something is or isn't. With a regular 6-sided die, for example, the odds that it will land on any particular number are 1 in 6 or about 0.17 as a decimal. The odds that it will not land on that number would then be 5 in 6 or 0.83. So, it's more likely than not a roll of the die will land on something other than 3. However, the more times we roll the die, the less likely it is that it will never land on a 3. To get the probability of independently linked events, you'd multiply them - so the odds of not landing on a 3 for two rolls in a row would be 5/6 * 5/6 = 0.69=69% probability. Additional rolls would make that number smaller and smaller, and it only takes four rolls of the die before it's more likely than not that it's landed on 3 for at least one of those rolls.
What does that have to do with fertility awareness? Well, if you look at the efficacy rates for a method, that's the probability that you will not get pregnant in one year of use. Now, the same thing doesn't get less effective over time, but it does have more opportunities to fail the longer you use it.
Let's say you use Sensiplan with a one year perfect-use efficacy of 99.6% (abstinence in the fertile window). Multiply that by itself 10 times, and the probability that it doesn't fail for any of the 10 years that you use it is 96.1% - that's pretty reassuring. Now let's do the same thing with something that has a 98% efficacy (like perfect use of the Marquette method or condoms). Over the course of 10 years, the probability that there's not a method failure in any of the years is 81.7%. That's a much bigger difference than the one year efficacy!
If you're closer to typical use efficacy? 95% efficacy for one year gives you a 59.9% probability of not having a failure over 10 years of use. 93% efficacy is about where it's more likely than not to fail over the course of 10 years of usage - there is a 48.3% chance that you'll never have a failure during that time. 92% efficacy brings you to a 43.4% chance of success over the course of 10 years. At 90% efficacy, there's less than a 35% chance it won't fail over the course of 10 years of use.
Those numbers are all assuming that you're starting off with something relatively reliable. But what if you aren't? Let's say you're using the rhythm method and the efficacy is 75%. Over the course of a single year, you're more likely than not to avoid getting pregnant. After two years, it's still more likely than not that you'll be able to avoid pregnancy (56.3% chance of success). It's only after three years of use that the rhythm method is more likely than not to fail.
Now, I want to be clear - methods do not become less effective over time. To go back to our die, if you roll the die five times and it doesn't land on a 3 any of those times, it's not more likely that it will land on a 3 for the sixth roll than it was for any of the previous rolls. It simply becomes less likely over time that none of the rolls would land on a 3. Similarly, if you're using the same method for 10 years, it is just as effective in year 10 as it was in year 1. It simply has had more chances to fail and is therefore less likely to be successful each and every year.
Some key points that I want to highlight:

• If you're seriously TTA for a decent length of time, a 1-2% efficacy difference really matters.
• Methods with really low efficacy (like the rhythm method) can still be pretty likely to be successful for a short time. That is why it is a bad idea to rely on anecdotes (rather than data) when choosing a method! The fact that something has worked for you or for a friend for a couple of years is not a testament to its efficacy.

I will note that I'm simply running numbers here, and a 10-year study with the same method may provide a different success rate than the numbers I'm giving here. Nonetheless, the basic idea is important.

EDIT: Thank you everyone who tried to help me. For future reference, the issue was installing both the crappy program and the browser extension as admin. So, after uninstalling everything, I re-installed as admin, and now the card is detected on that page.
I want to kill whoever is in charge of the piece of shit system to get the thing online.
I'd rather avoid going to immigration just for that (not close, and I'd need to waste a whole morning in that hellhole that is Osaka's immigration center).
I bought an IC card reader just for that. Because ONLY an IC card reader + a PC can be used for this process (as the website says). Can't use a smartphone to do it, like you otherwise can for other services that read your MyNumber card.
Well..it simply doesn't seem to work. I installed the WinME era looking software that shows ?????s instead of Japanese characters because I guess it's too difficult in 2024 to make a program that works on operating systems not originally in Japanese (I switched language to Japanese in Windows and I still get the ?????s). I installed the stupid extension for Chrome/Edge (Firefox not taken into account, it seems), and It doesn't work on either.
The Card reader works. It works on their MyNumber card portal, it works in the ?????? program (I can read the card's contents, even tho most of it is illegible characters).
https://www.ras-immi.moj.go.jp/WC01/WCAAS010/ras?dispOutputEvent= This is supposed to be the page where I can RegisteLogin, but whenever I click on either "Foreign national (applicant)/other", I get an error:
Please connect an IC card reader writer to your computer and set and scan your Individual Number Card. The Online Residence Application System's screen is disabled until the Individual Number Card is scanned. If you cannot proceed to the application procedure after the Individual Number Card is scanned, press Cancel to start over again.
And that's where the fun ends.
I would really appreciate if someone has experience with this and has some insight on what may be the issue (my ONLY guess is that the card reader is just a no-name one I got from Amazon, and not in their specific list of readers that work, but at the same time, it IS working everywhere else but this stupid page).
Finally, last thing I want to vent about: I can speak Japanese, my reading is not great but I can indeed read. BUT, why the F in 2024 (and this is a system that started THIS JANUARY) they have stuff that is 100% for foreigners (a national WON'T need a "permit to engage in activity other than that permitted") and 100% in Japanese. SOME parts of the process are auto-translated, but the more you dig, the more it's all Japanese.

Hello all,
I have some issues regarding flashing the bios of an old(ish) Lenovo G505s.
I want to update to the latest BIOS version before attempting coreboot. I thought this part would be the easiest, but it got me scratching my head for a while now.
This is the only tool I've found to flash BIOS on this machine.
I've used an old HDD to install WIndows 8.1 on it, but every time I run the application it freezes the system. (Last frame stays on the screen, no further events, it will be stuck indefinetly, until I force-reset.)
I currently have v2.03 BIOS version.
Anyone experiment with this, or are there any other flashing tools that I can try to achieve this?
Things I've tried so far:

• Installing Windows and trying to run the executable in both UEFI and Legacy BIOS modes.
• Using FreeDOS to run the extracted flasher .exe file in the CLI
• Using Windows 8's recovery enviroment to run the executable
• Using WindowsPE to get a more recent pre-boot enviroment and run the files there, but I got a "side-by-side" configuration errorr with all of the extracted executables.

Honestly I'm lost here, should I try to run the file on Win10 in compatibily mode? That one I haven't tried but I think the underlying issue might be a bit deeper than that.
Thanks in advance, if anyone wants to help me flash this old laptop. (Temps / Fan speeds are misconfigured, I get overheating and system shutdown under load, this latest BIOS version (3.00) should fix these issues, only then I want to proceed with coreboot.)

At this point, you'd have expected an official map of the Pokemon world would've been released already, at least in one canon, but of course, that hasn't happened. We've had some brief instances where the planet is shown, such as during the Delta Episode of ORAS, or on the occasional globe like in LGPE. However, trying to use those as reference quickly falls apart, as they seem to be filler maps composed of random shapes that repeat and rotate, rather than legitimate attempts at a world map.
With that, it's no surprise that people tend to do whatever they want when it comes to making their own maps of the Pokemon world. Some mirror real life, others come up with something original, and of course, there's those that do a bit of both; the developers can't be bothered, so anything's valid, right?
Well, to a certain extent. It's true that beyond the occasional comment about another region being "distant" or "far away", we don't get much indication as to where the various regions are in relation to each other. Even so, aside from those unhelpful comments, we still do get the occasional bit of information that is actually somewhat helpful.
Sadly, as is the case with a lot in Pokemon, most people are unaware of these tidbits. So, I figured, why not throw my hat in the ring and make my own version of the Pokemon world map while also presenting these various bits of information at the same time? Talk about killing two Starly with one Rock Throw.
Feast your eyes upon my version of the Pokemon world map. Quite the spectacle, isn't it? I'm no map or geography expert, and this one's not quite 100% accurate, but the main point was to visually place the various regions together.
With that out of the way, let's take a look at the information and reasoning I used to put this map together, shall we?

Part 1: Pokemon Japan

Starting out with the basics for our first landmass, which we'll call 'Pokemon Japan' due to lack of a better name, we find Kanto and Johto are right next to each other, as everyone knows. Additionally, thanks to Professor Oak, we also know that Hoenn and Sinnoh are likely quite close, as all four regions are part of the same country.

"Ah, ! This is it! This is Pal Park! Pokémon from around the country can be brought here. In other words, Pokémon from places like Kanto and Hoenn."

Granted, this is slightly changed in BDSP to be a bit more generic.

"This place has a special connection with regions around the world, such as Kanto and Hoenn!"

Despite this, it doesn't necessarily indicate the four regions being close was completely retconned.
Aside from Hoenn and Sinnoh, there are other areas also likely a part of this country, those that avoided this potential retcon, one of these locations being the Sevii Islands, a remote archipelago located far to the south of Kanto.

Bill: "There's this little island in the far south called One Island. A friend invited me, so I'm on my way out there."
(...)
"Hey, wasn't that a long cruise?"
Celio: "It's running fine, but we're too remote out here. The PCs on this island just can't link with your PC, Bill."

Although most notable for being in FRLG, a few areas within the Sevii Islands, the special event areas, such as Birth Island and Navel Rock, are also accessible in Emerald, which are no problem for the sailors to reach.
But there is one area in Emerald that is a problem to access: Faraway Island, where Mew can be found. If the player tries to head there, they'll be turned down at first because, as the name suggests, the island is too far from Hoenn.
Evidently, the Sevii Islands must be relatively close to Hoenn. They're clearly a bit farther from Hoenn than they are to Kanto, given Celio's efforts to reach Hoenn, but still close enough that Hoenn and Kanto being part of the same country is plausible.

Celio: "I'm modifying the Network Machine right now. I'm changing it so it can handle trades over long distances. When I get finished, you'll be trading for exotic Pokemon from Trainers far away."
(...)
"I've managed to link up with Trainers in the Hoenn region! Finally, the Network Machine is fully operational!"

Coupled with the Sevii Islands sharing a warm climate with Hoenn, it's also plausible the two areas are located at similar points in the south, with Hoenn being somewhere east or west of the islands.

Man (One Island): "Hi, sight-seeing, are you? Isn't the warm climate here great?"

Without much to help determine whether Hoenn's east or west, most would choose to go with the latter, as it mirrors the placement of Hoenn's real world inspiration. Though while on the topic, there is something important that needs to be discussed.
Sometimes, when people make Pokemon world maps, they may rotate certain regions, with Hoenn often being the biggest victim of this, as its real world inspiration is rotated. Aside from it simply being common sense that the in-game maps show us a region's correct orientation, there is usually other evidence backing this up, and for Hoenn, we have several instances of this.

Route 104: "This path, rich with water and colorful plant life, runs north and south of Petalburg Woods."
Route 118: "This seaside route brings together the east and west sides of the Hoenn region."
HNN Broadcast: "Large tremors have just been observed in southeastern Hoenn. They hypocenter of the quake was approximately 10 miles beneath Route 128. No serious injuries or damage have been reported at this time."

Plus, there's Southern Island, which big surprise, is located in the south of Hoenn, which mirrors Hoenn itself really, since as we can tell from soaring in ORAS, Hoenn is also an island quite far from other landmasses.
It's difficult to say if this also applies to Sinnoh though. We know in the past, when the region was called Hisui, it was indeed an island, as the map shows us. However, in modern day Sinnoh, the games consistently avoid showing us the very edges of the map, particularly the southern and western sides, which are especially important to figuring this out, since we know Sinnoh's somewhere to the north of Kanto and Johto.

PokeGear Sinnoh Sounds: "The Sinnoh music, the sound of the great land to the north, might just lure a bunch of Pokemon to follow you!"
PokeWalker Sinnoh Field: "A Route through the Sinnoh region, far from Johto and Kanto. Rare Pokémon live here."

Which is also backed up by the Sinjoh Ruins being somewhere to the north of Johto, likely between it and Sinnoh.
Given how much Sinnoh changed from the days of Hisui, we can't be sure whether or not it's still an island or if it connected itself to a bigger landmass, such as the one holding Kanto and Johto. At the very least, if Sinnoh's still not connected, there is indication the region's likely very close to this landmass.
Kitakami is an area many suspect to be part of the same country as Kanto and Johto, mostly due to the Japanese theming of the area, but also because of a specific Pokemon, Bloodmoon Ursaluna.

Official Website: "It is said that a certain Ursaluna crossed the seas and arrived in the land of Kitakami—and that it then underwent a unique transformation over many years as a result of surviving in its harsh new environment."
Perrin: "This Ursaluna--the Bloodmoon Beast--used to live in my homeland waaay back when people still called the region Hisui. Seems like it crossed over the waters here to Kitakami at some point and made itself comfy."

This suggests that Kitakami is rather close to Sinnoh, which could both indicate that Kitakami is on the main landmass of this country, while Sinnoh is pretty damn close to it, island or not.
However, for reasons we'll see later, I don't believe this Ursaluna literally swam from Sinnoh to Kitakami, but I do still think the regions are close. Can't imagine a ship would make it very far with a wild Ursaluna stowing away on board; even if it was tame or formerly captured, an Ursaluna would likely require a ton of food to satisfy, making them impractical to transport long distances. Who knows though, Kitakami could very easily be located somewhere else, but Bloodmoon Ursaluna does still serve as an okay indication.
Certainly better than the reasoning I used for several other locations. Poketopia of Battle Revolution, Pokemon Island of Snap, and the unnamed region of Trozei are all areas that have pretty much nothing to work with.
Poketopia I decided to place somewhat near Sinnoh, due to how many statues and buildings of Sinnoh Pokemon appear throughout the island. I moved it a bit to the south, as due to it having a tropical battlefield, plus a complete lack of snow, it's evidently not as cold as Sinnoh. Not the most solid connections, but like I said, not much to work with for this area.
Pokemon Island though, does have a more decent connection to Kanto. Even though I don't believe Snap is canon to the main series, I still figured why not add the location of the game to this map anyway? Considering Oak's appearance on the island, plus how he seems to have some authority over it, would suggest the island is located relatively close to Kanto. It did used to be inhabited by people too, and seemingly quite recently compared to other old locations. However, the island is still pretty remote, as no humans reside there anymore, and no trainers seem to ever come around to try and catch Pokemon there.
An area that does have trainers present, despite what the gameplay may suggest, is the unnamed region of Trozei. Although trainers don't physically appear, Poke Balls holding Pokemon are plentiful in this area. I wish I could say there was a decent reason as to why I placed the Trozei region where I did, perhaps because of all the Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn Pokemon that appear, I placed it somewhat near those three regions as a result. However, given other areas like Orre feature these Pokemon, despite being located very far away from those regions, that's evidently not the greatest indication. No, the main reason I put Trozei's region here was just because it loosely fit the shape of the landmass I was making.
Speaking of, some may wonder about the landmass' weird shape. Well, I noticed a small detail as I was going through LGPE. There seemed to be a calendar in several houses, most notably in Cerulean City, which featured an image of some landmass. I wondered if perhaps this could be the country holding the various locations we've spoken of; it would make sense that if an image of any landmass were to appear in Kanto, it'd be that one. Hell, it even had an island that could be interpreted as Sinnoh in the north.
However, that idea does run into a few issues, most notably, the complete lack of any islands, especially Hoenn and the Sevii Islands. You could make the argument that those regions aren't widely known during the time of LGPE, considering people in Kanto at the time are somehow only aware of Kantonian Pokemon, but that doesn't really work when something resembling Sinnoh is visible on the map. Either way, I figured why not use this landmass as an extremely loose reference anyway? Not like there's much else to work with.

Part 2: Pokemon Europe

As we leave our first landmass behind, we find the amount of useful clues we have also dries up.
That's not to say we don't have any. For instance, we know Paldea's to the west of Kitakami, as Jacq tells us:

Jacq: "You'll get to go study and experience the great outdoors off to the east--in the land of Kitakami!"

Plus, there's even a time zone difference between Paldea and Kitakami, with the latter supposedly being 18 minutes, which apparently translates to six hours, ahead of Paldea. Pretty safe to assume Paldea's on a different landmass from Kitakami at least.
As for other regions, well, there are some potential clues that could help us place Kalos and Galar, however, those relate to the reason I referenced earlier about why I don't believe Bloodmoon Ursaluna swam from Sinnoh to Kitakami. The clues in question are none other than the swimmers who supposedly swam between Hoenn, Kalos, and Galar.

Swimmer (Azure Bay): "I swam all the way here from the oceans of Hoenn, and I'm still not too tired for a battle!"
Swimmer (ORAS Demo Mossdeep City): "I get it. I accept your feelings, both of you. So I guess this is where we'll say good-bye. I'll swim back to Kalos on my own."
Route 108: "People come swimming from as far away as the Kalos region to see the site of Sea Mauville."
Swimmer (Galar Route 9): "To deal with the shock of losing, I'm going to swim far, far away."
"There are swimming experts who can swim all the way to the Kalos region."

This would seem to suggest these three regions are rather close. Putting aside real-world inspiration, that could make sense, especially with both Hoenn and Kalos having strong ties to Mega Evolution, though not so much with Galar.
Yet at the same time, there's also indication these three regions are actually quite far apart. We already saw how the Route 9 swimmer seems to refer to Kalos as being "far, far away", but there's more than just that.

Fossil Maniac: "I heard he traveled all the way to Kalos, crossing three oceans to find the white Pokemon and some kind of stone..."
Gentleman (Lavaridge Pokemon Center): "How disappointing. Traveled all the way from Kalos dreaming of the hot springs over there..."
Poke Mart Worker (Battle Maison): "I heard that my muse, Mademoiselle Evelyn, is touring the Hoenn region, so I used everything I had saved and came all the way from Kalos!"
Mr. Stone: "There was a great war at that time, in a region far from here."
Little Boy (Motostoke): "Kabu's the flaming star that crashed into the Galar region from the distant land of Hoenn!"
Poke Maniac (Indigo Plateau): "I...I sell rare stones. I sell mega-awesome stones that I bought overseas."

The three regions would evidently have to be very close in order for swimming between them to be humanly possible at all; something along the lines of the distance between Kanto and Johto. Yet not only did we already see earlier in ORAS how Hoenn's not close to other landmasses at all, but it's also really strange how everyone acts like the regions are far apart if they're truly so close. Plus, there's also the detail of how different the climates are between the three regions.
Either way you cut it, you ultimately end up having to brush off one side as either lying or exaggerating. Because there's so many more examples of people treating the regions as being far apart, I have to go with that option as being true.
Hell, there's even direct indication the few swimmers that claim to swim between these regions are exaggerating anyway, as we've seen other swimmers struggle to swim comparatively short distances, such as one struggling to swim the length of Six Island, while another determines it's impossible to swim from Kanto to Johto, two regions that are literally right next to each other.

Swimmer (Outcast Island): "Gasp... Gasp... I swam here from Six Isle Port in one go."
"Gasp... Gasp..."
"I'm only at the halfway point... I'm beat..."
Swimmer (HGSS Route 20): "I guess it's impossible to swim all the way to Johto."

Who knows, maybe these guys aren't good enough to make or judge such long trips, with only the best of the best being able to swim between the three regions. Considering what we saw earlier, though, I'm still not convinced Hoenn, Kalos, and Galar are that close to each other.
Doesn't leave us with much else to work with. I ultimately placed Kalos and Galar somewhat close to each other and around the same landmass as Paldea, all loosely based on real world inspirations. I didn't put them too close to each other though, as otherwise, you'd have expected their regional gimmicks to overlap a bit.
There is at least one thing we can be certain of: there's nothing close to Kalos around the northwest. After Lysandre activates the ultimate weapon, we get a brief view of Kalos from space, which shows us that there's nothing but ocean surrounding Kalos in those directions. Quite a useful bit of information, especially with how much people like to place Galar in this area.
Instead, there's another area that may be closer to Galar than Kalos, and that location is Ryme City from Detective Pikachu. I've said before how for all the dialogue these games have, there's shockingly little information when it comes to the wider Pokemon world.
There are still some clues though. In these games, Pokemon usually appear in their original forms, with characters often commenting when a regional variant shows up, usually being surprised at them.

Pikachu: "Wait, isn't this an Alolan Exeggutor?"
Tim: "I'd never seen one before, so I didn't even realize that! What's it doing here in Ryme City?"
(...)
Pikachu: "Yeah, it's a Steel-type Meowth. I take it you're not from around these parts, Meowth. Where'd you come from, buddy?"
"What?! You're friends with Darmanitan and Eiscue?"
"So your friends got captured and you followed them, only to lose track of them along the way..."
(...)
Pikachu: "Huh? It looks like a Rattata, but...is it a different Pokemon?"
(...)
Pikachu: "That explains what an Alolan Pokemon is doing here. You don't see much of 'em in this neck of the woods."

Alola is evidently quite far from Ryme City, and although characters like Tim aren't that familiar with Galarian Pokemon such as Galarian Meowth, there is a noticeable difference in how they're treated compared to Alolan Pokemon. For instance, when first encountering a Galarian Darmanitan, Tim instantly recognizes it as a Darmanitan, despite being unfamiliar with Pokemon like Alolan Exeggutor.
Additionally, while most regional variants do have reasons provided as to why they're present, there is one that doesn't get an explanation. In the wild near Bamboo Borough, the player can casually find a Sirfetch'd, with a flashback showing this Pokemon has lived in the area for a very long time, ever since it was still a Galarian Farfetch'd.
Ryme City evidently isn't in Galar, as it's normally home to Pokemon like Unovan Stunfisk, plus this comment from Pikachu...

Pikachu: "Can't believe they got dragged here all the way from Galar..."

Yet with a Sirfetch'd so casually residing near the city, perhaps the area's close enough to Galar that it's not uncommon for the occasional Pokemon from there to make its way over on short boat or plane rides; we did see a Galarian Meowth do exactly that after all.
In cases like this, regional forms do serve as a decent indication of where different areas could be in relation to each other. However, it's not always a surefire method. For instance, on Aeos Island of Unite, regional forms from Alola, Galar, and Paldea all appear, plus other Pokemon that seem unique to specific regions, such as the Galarian regis. With the island being home to big flashy Unite battles, plus Hoopa being around, it's entirely possible these Pokemon were brought over specifically for the tournament, distance be damned. After all, Lear from Masters does exactly this to promote Pasio, only with people as well.
Regional forms aren't the only thing unique to specific regions though, there's also regional gimmicks, as we mentioned earlier.
Although Mega Evolution being exclusive to Kalos got thrown out the window with ORAS, while nothing seems to be stopping people from taking Z-Moves outside of Alola, Dynamax appears to be a lot more strongly tied to Galar in comparison.

Sonia Lab Book: ""What is the Dynamax Phenomenon?" This phenomenon, in which Pokemon take on gigantic forms, has only been observed in the Galar region."

Yet somehow, the occasional Gigantamax Pokemon shows up in Unite. Perhaps it was close enough to Galar that the phenomenon reached the island and allowed for it to rarely occur?
Though again, it's not out of the question this could be the result of Hoopa, as we also see Dynamax make an appearance on Pasio which is a hotspot for Hoopa activity, as mentioned. Eternatus somehow showed up on Pasio, and although Dynamax in Masters does seem to occur slightly differently from usual, we still do see standard examples of the phenomenon, such as Ash Gigantamaxing his Gengar in the 'A Blazing Battle with Ash' event.
Still, as Hoopa doesn't seem to be as involved in the events of Unite compared to Masters, I decided to place Aeos Island somewhat close to Galar.
Pasio itself, meanwhile, is also an island, as the game makes quite clear.

Brock (PML Chapter 1): "You might be surprised to know that Pasio is a completely artificial island!"

And although it's artificial, it is notable for being a hotspot of natural energy, the kind most associated with Hoenn. In fact, it's thought this natural energy is the reason Sync Stones, an item exclusive to Pasio, are found so frequently in the island's oceans.

Professor Bellis: "Natural energy is building deep in the ocean floor around Pasio. That may be one of the reasons why a lot of sync stones get dug up near there."
(...)
Steven: "A stone that can only be found at the bottom of the ocean near Pasio... A sync stone, of course!"

Granted, considering Sync Stones can't be found in Hoenn as far as we know, it seems natural energy only plays a part in their creation, rather than being the sole factor; after all, it's likely natural energy can be found everywhere, rather than just Hoenn and Pasio.
Or perhaps, these stones do appear outside of Pasio, they just take slightly different shapes and forms depending on the region. For instance, Ferrum, the region of Pokken, features items known as Synergy Stones, which just like Sync Stones in Pasio, are seemingly found exclusively in Ferrum.

Loading Screen Tip: "Stones with a mysterious power that are found in the Ferrum Region. Reacting to Gaia, the energy of the earth, they create Synergy Power that has the ability to vitalize living creatures."

These stones are both notable for having a connection to Mega Evolution, being capable of activating the phenomenon. Additionally, while Sync Stones are connected to natural energy, Synergy Stones are connected to a similar power known as Gaia. In fact, Gaia is so similar to natural energy, the two forces may even be the exact same thing.
Perhaps both Ferrum and Pasio are near Hoenn, with the two regions containing some unique element of their own that results in similar, but different types of stones. Ferrum does also occasionally feature NPCs in the background which have their designs based on those that appear in ORAS, plus XY. In fact, what if Ferrum is one of those landmasses between Hoenn and Kalos that was referenced by the Fossil Maniac earlier?
At the very least, we do know Ferrum's not connected to any other landmass, as Nia tells us at the start of Pokken, the whole region's an island.

Nia: "This is the Ferrum Region, where we are now. It's a huge island surrounded by nothing but the ocean itself."

As for the other two unnamed islands underneath the main landmass, well, those, plus the general shape of the main continent were both loosely inspired by a globe in LGPE, as were the next landmass and the unnamed continent underneath that.

Part 3: Pokemon America

One thing that was quickly made clear to us back when Unova first released was that it was far away from all the previous regions, and this actually meant something back then.

Skyla: "And you're talking as if places like Kanto and Sinnoh are right around the corner!"
Old Official Website: "Your adventures take place in the Unova region, located far away from the Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh regions."

But even so, just being told it's "far away" is pretty unhelpful at determining where exactly it's located in relation to the other regions.
Luckily, we do get a bit of a clue from SV. We already saw how Kitakami is supposedly 18 minutes, or 6 hours, ahead of Paldea. The same applies in reverse, with Blueberry Academy, which of course, is located in Unova, apparently being 18 minutes, or six hours, behind Paldea. Given Kitakami is to the east, that'd obviously mean Unova has to be located to the west.
Though, the location of Blueberry itself is a topic all on its own. We know the school's considered to be in Unova...

Briar: "I'm a teacher over at Blueberry Academy."
Jacq: "That's a school in the Unova region, you know."

Yet we never see anything like it in BW or B2W2. With how massive the school is, we definitely would've seen it on the Unova map, even back during the events of those games and if it was still under construction at the time.
Evidently, while it's part of Unova, it's still a fair distance away. I ultimately decided on placing it in the northeast. As the school itself is oriented with the entrance being to the south, plus the player arriving to said entrance via a subway, it'd be easiest if the school was to the north of Nimbasa City, as it'd be the straightest direction to build off of and connect to the school. Not the most solid reasoning, but not like there's much else to work with.

Blueberry Student (Entrance): "It's pretty wild the first time you come to school by riding a subway to an undersea elevator, huh?"

Peeking inside Blueberry though, we find an area resembling another location from the Unova games, the Nature Preserve. Some may suspect this area in Blueberry to literally be the Nature Preserve, as the two are quite similar looking, but that's pretty simple to disprove with the fact that while Blueberry is considered as part of Unova, the Nature Preserve isn't.

Flight Worker (Mistralton): "That lets you enter the Nature Preserve, which is far, far away from the Unova region!"

It's probably to the west, possibly a bit south given the direction Skyla's plane flies off in to travel there, but who knows. No way of knowing if it's even an island or not, but I decided to place it a bit further east than Blueberry around the north of Unova, as some of the Pokemon in the preserve do vaguely line up with those found in northern Unova. Who would've thought placing locations so closely associated with a region would be so difficult?
Of course, that pales in comparison to placing actual regions in relation to each other, especially one like Orre. Pokemon likes to pretend this region doesn't exist, and even in Colosseum and XD themselves, references to other regions are almost nonexistent; all we know for sure based on a few items that can be traded from the GBA games is that Orre is very far away from Kanto and Hoenn.
Given how remote and hostile Orre is in general, I ultimately decided to place it on the edge of this landmass, far away from most other regions. It could be tucked away anywhere really, but I chose this one due to Orre's real-world inspiration. Not much to work with.
Unlike Orre though, Alola doesn't match up with its real-world inspiration, as in order for Orre to be alone and forgotten, it wouldn't make much sense for Alola to be closer to it than other regions.
Alola is clearly quite far from Kanto, as the games make clear.

Kukui (SM): "We sure are a long way from Kanto out here in Alola. It's still daytime / nighttime out here, yeah!"
Mother (USUM): "And just look! It's already daytime / night here! It's completely the opposite of Kanto."

Plus, with Alolan Exeggutor and the more explicit tropical climate and aesthetic of the region, it's likely further south than Hoenn is.
On the topic of Alolan Exeggutor though, regional forms once again serve as an indication as to the location of another region: Lental.
Just like the original Snap, I don't believe New Snap is canon to the main series games, but also just like the original Snap, I figured, why not put Lental on the map anyway?
Although most Pokemon with regional forms in Lental use their original appearances, there are notably a few Alolan form Pokemon that also show up, with no space-time nonsense being implied or the characters even being surprised about them.
On top of that, with the vague similarities between Z-Power and the Illumina phenomenon, the case could definitely be made the Lental is somewhat close to Alola. Perhaps not that close, but along the same lines, if not a bit closer, than Ryme City is to Galar.
Either way, definitely more to work with for Lental than certain other regions.

Part 4: Ranger and Eastern Continent

To Ranger's benefit, I can at least say the games do provide a few loose clues as to where the regions are located; certainly more than Orre.
At least in regards to each other, the three Ranger regions do seem pretty close together, as, for one, Almia's newspaper, the Almia Times, reports on incidents in Fiore. Additionally, a photographer in Oblivia, Yoran, is excited to take pictures of Pokemon and show them to the people of Almia and Fiore, yet apparently nowhere else.

"Yoran, the Pokemon photographer, has a new lease on life! It is my duty to show to the people of Almia and Fiore all the Pokemon from Oblivia!

Even so, Oblivia does seem to be rather distant even from Fiore and Almia.

Murph: "Let me give you a brief explanation of the Oblivia region. In a sense, it's a place the rest of the world has forgotten about. It's a carefree and peaceful paradise!"

Although we don't get too much information about how these regions connect to the main series, it does seem they're quite far and isolated from regions with Poke Balls, most likely somewhere out of the way of people traveling between the main series regions.

Boy (Pueltown): "A Voltorb looks like one of the Pokemon Ball things you throw."

Though, given the few mentions of main series regions we do get, it does seem like the Ranger regions are closest to the first landmass we looked at, Pokemon Japan.

Hastings: "Hm? Murph, what did you just say? Somewhere far away? Brilliant! There is that option! For example, in the Sinnoh region, there should be many highly skilled Pokemon Trainers."
Woman (Ringtown): "It's too bad, but there are no Trainers in the Fiore region. There are many, many Trainers in far-off places like Kanto and Hoenn."

With Hastings deciding the best region to send the Fiore Manaphy egg is Sinnoh, that would imply it's one of the closest regions with Pokemon trainers, as it wouldn't make much sense to spend more time and effort sending the egg further away if the Ranger regions were closer to Unova or Paldea.
This does present a bit of a problem though, as there's another landmass implied to exist that we haven't seen yet: the Eastern region. Many may recognize it as the area where the Treasures of Ruin originate from, but those aren't the only Pokemon connected to this region, as so is Arcanine.

LGPE Pokedex: "A legendary Pokémon in the East. Many people are charmed by the grace and beauty of its running."

Which indicates this Eastern land has to be somewhere to the east of not just Paldea, but Kanto as well, which throws a wrench into the idea that Sinnoh's the closest region with Pokemon trainers.
It could be argued that perhaps the Treasures of Ruin and Arcanine come from different locations, but not only would that be redundant, it'd still imply there's some Eastern landmass that likely has Pokemon trainers.
Maybe it's as simple as characters in Ranger simply not having direct connections to anyone in this Eastern region. After all, Hastings at least does have direct connections to Sinnoh, as he mentions near the start of the Manaphy mission in the original Ranger.

Hastings: "That's it! I've remembered! This is a Pokemon Egg! It's very similar to those in the reference papers on Pokemon I ordered from the Sinnoh region!"

Perhaps the Ranger landmass is further north and closer to Sinnoh, or the Eastern land is located more to the south or even further east. The problem is that if the Ranger and Eastern lands are too close, or if the Eastern land is between the main Ranger landmass and Oblivia, you'd expect some overlap between the two countries, such as the Ranger regions having the occasional trainer, or the Eastern land being under the control of rangers. Hopefully one day we'll see this Eastern land and learn a bit more about it. Maybe there will be rangers, though probably not.
But until another new region gets introduced, that's the Pokemon world for you. Can't wait for that next region to unintentionally mess everything up and make things even more confusing.
Not the biggest fan of this one, I gotta say. There is some evidence backing up certain placements, but there's also a huge lack of information in general. Like I said, the main reason I made this was to present the little bits of information we do get moreso than actually making a map.
There are admittedly more locations I could've placed on the map, most notably, the region of Go. Despite logic suggesting the area of Go is simply the entire world, there is implication that "Earth" is just another region, as I touched on in part of my timeline theory. But even though Go is canon, I decided against including "Earth", since it would've looked really dumb. I guess I'd put it on the west if anywhere? I don't know.
At least, Go's the only more canon game I didn't include. There are other areas I didn't add such as the two PokeParks from those games, areas from the TCG, Ransei, the setting of games like Battle Trozei and Duel, and so on. Most of these I left out due to a lack of even vague clues as to their location, plus questionable canonicity for many of them, even moreso than Snap. PokePark in particular I also left out because those games could potentially take place in the far future, such as around the time of Mystery Dungeon, when the world has drastically changed appearance. Weird how we got a world map for MD, but not the main series, huh?
Maybe I'll add all these locations to the next iteration of this map if I ever make another one, though that's probably not going to be for a long while.

So I finally talked to someone for real today. This girl came to my door about 9 or 10am this morning. Some girl a few years less than my age by the looks of her. She knocked on the door and of course given these past events I was on edge answering. She was shy and asked to come in. Honestly she seemed nice enough, you're typical petite ginger girl so, even with everything that's happened, I didn't think anything of inviting her in for a cup of coffee. If anything I was kinda looking forward to trying to make a connection for once with a neighbor and maybe hookup with her if we really did connect, call me a perv or horny or whatever, but it's been about three months if you know what I mean. Apparently her name is Macy, she's been living here since she was little, she gave me her number.
We joked around a bit while I let a pot of coffee brew. She's funny, quirky and a bit awkward but funny. She made some comments about it being weird living here, like how she hasn't seen anyone herself. I instantly agreed with her, finally someone who could relate. I didn't want to freak her out or anything with everything that's been going on that I've seen and heard, and like I said she's cute so I was putting on my best 'rizz'.
I did the best I could to keep my composure, but when she mentioned the knocking... I started shaking a little bit. I tried to keep my cool and sort of played it off, obviously still curious what she had heard and knew of it. I said "Hah oh you heard that too? Yea we have some noisy ass neighbors" The coffee pot finished and I poured both of us a steaming cup, a thin plume of smoke emanating from both of ours. "Yea that was annoying right?" Trying in one way to keep calm, hoping to maybe get a chance with this girl, and in the other way hoping I didn't lose my shit in general, finally realizing that I'm not insane and someone else actually does see what's going on here too. But she insisted on talking about the knocking when she brought it up.
i couldn't help myself. "Soo wait..what do you mean about the knocking..?" "What do you mean what do I mean?? The knocking! The fucking knocking!!!" She almost broke her cup. We were sitting on the balcony so it's not like it'd be an issue to clean it up. But still it made me jump the way she slammed the cup down, I watched caramel colored liquid splash from it. I asked finally directly, "So...what did you hear with the knocking too?" Trying to sound calm and understanding. "The fucking knocking!" she again, now yelling and a bit more frantic "You didn't hear that too??" My heart racing of course, I tried to catch my breath.
"I-I'm sorry I didn't mean to be so..." "You're fine seriously, yes of course I heard the knocking...I thought you didn't...that I didn't... I didn't wanna sound nuts or scare you or anything.." "It's ok.. It's ok..." And she looked up at me too. "It scares me too.." I said to her. At that point I was just trying to be reassuring to her. I'd felt what she was clearly feeling so many times already and could even see it through her glassy, I will say beautiful, eyes. I didn't dare tell her about the box or the key in fear of making her more scared and antagonistic. So I just looked at her. I looked at her and what you think would happen in that moment happened.
We had a good day. A long day. And finally around 9pm or so she decided to leave. She was still nice, gave me a cute, bracey smile and all in that shy way she was the whole time. I know that sounds exaggerated given what we had been doing all day but even with our day together she was coy and quiet.Nothing like I had seen for the past hours.
It was nice, one for the obvious reasons, two because now I know there's someone else here that understands what's happening too. Someone else has heard the knocking...I never asked her about the man with the box. Or if she got a key or anything. Obviously I'm not going to interrupt our own fun to be like "Hey did you get a key too??" What idiot would throw that out there in the middle of being with a girl like that and ruin the moment. But I'm still now wondering, what else does she know. What else has she gotten on her door or balcony or, fuck, maybe even through her window or something like that.
That was about six or seven hours ago that she left. And I can't sleep again now because the screaming is back. It's not like it was before, the last time, when it sounded like it was on my balcony. It sounds like it's in here. And before you say, I've checked. Trust me, I'm still checking. I can't find where it's coming from but I swear it sounds like it's in here. I just can't find it. So again obviously, I feel like I'm losing my mind here.
About an hour ago I figured to text Macy, it's so late so I didn't expect an answer. I just figured she would understand, so I texted anyway "Hey... do you hear that?" and almost instantly I got a message back saying "I don't know this person." Which sounds like something you might think normal from someone you only met once and especially because you only did once, I thought maybe I typed the number in wrong or something.., But still obviously the way she said it threw me off. I wasn't sure, with everything, if she meant she doesn't know me or she doesn't know whoever is screaming. What got really strange though was that as soon as she texted back, the screaming stopped. Instantly. I haven't heard anything for a while now and Macy hasn't texted back. I'm gonna watch more youtube and have a drink.I won't lie though, the key has my focus now.

Hi everybody, first time posting here and i wouldn't call myself a wireshark expert. Recently I started a capture of ethernet traffic with filter "not port 5101 and not port 21117 and not port 21116". It is set to create a new file automatically after 500 megabytes and to use a circularing buffer with 800 files.
The capture is meant to keep going indefinitely and in the options tab, the "stop capture after" options are all unchecked/deactivated. The problem is that seemingly at random the capture stops after some days, to my knowledge the device on which the capture runs has never been disconnected from the internet or power.
So far it happened 3 times, each time, the dimension of the last file captured, the amount of time/days passed since start of capture (as well as the time in which capture stops) and total file size of all capture files are not consistent/the same.
What is consistent however is the application error that shows up in the event viewer, i tried looking it up on google but i haven't really found any helpful information, so I'm posting it here, i'd much appreciate if you could share some insight on it
https://preview.redd.it/0zsol0n2ox2d1.png?width=635&format=png&auto=webp&s=823bfd5ec9c53f3768ffeeaf32d7e41d1ce44338
Has anybody ever run into this issue? Is there a way i can access wireshark capture logs (if they even exist)? I checked the windows temp folder but couldn't find any relevant information regarding Wireshark.
Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance to the kind soul that'll take their time to read all this. Have a good day.

Hi,
when a client is joined to a domain there is apparently a self-signed certificate created. After renaming the client this certificate is not recreated so that the common name is the old name of the client. The problem is we get a call from our soc everytime a client is renamed because a rogue certificate is detected. This certificate is used in kerberos pre-authentication. The event below appears in the security log of the domain controller. Does anybody know where to find this certificate? I want to create a new one everytime a client is renamed.
Best regards, Peter
Event:
Log Name: Security
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing
Date: 21.05.2024 09:41:44
Event ID: 4768
Task Category: Kerberos Authentication Service
Level: Information
Keywords: Audit Success
User: N/A
Computer: DCXXX.abcd.de
Description:
A Kerberos authentication ticket (TGT) was requested.

Account Information:
Account Name: xyz-04984$
Supplied Realm Name: abcd.DE
User ID: abcd\xyz-04984$

Service Information:
Service Name: krbtgt
Service ID: abcd\krbtgt

Network Information:
Client Address: ::ffff:10.173.11.3
Client Port: 49769

Additional Information:
Ticket Options: 0x40810010
Result Code: 0x0
Ticket Encryption Type: 0x12
Pre-Authentication Type: 16

Certificate Information:
Certificate Issuer Name: CN=xyz-04985
Certificate Serial Number: 01
Certificate Thumbprint: 703991D789FB9EA207109495F2548221A47665C8

Certificate information is only provided if a certificate was used for pre-authentication.

Pre-authentication types, ticket options, encryption types and result codes are defined in RFC 4120.
Event Xml:



4768
0
0
14339
0
0x8020000000000000

1267985383


Security
DCXXX.abcd.de



xyz-04984$
abcd.DE
S-1-5-21-2488104018-388895284-3282500454-15729
krbtgt
S-1-5-21-2488104018-388895284-3282500454-502
0x40810010
0x0
0x12
16
::ffff:10.173.11.3
49769
CN=xyz-04985
01
703991D789FB9EA207109495F2548221A47665C8