Welcome to the raspberry_pi Helpdesk and Frequently Asked Questions!

Link to last week's thread
Having a hard time searching for answers to your Raspberry Pi questions? Let the raspberry_pi community members search for answers for you!^† Looking for help getting started with a project? Have a question that you need answered? Was it not answered last week? Did not get a satisfying answer? A question that you've only done basic research for? Maybe something you think everyone but you knows? Ask your question in the comments on this page, operators are standing by!
This helpdesk and idea thread is here so that the front page won't be filled with these same questions day in and day out:

1. Q: What's a Raspberry Pi? What can I do with it? How powerful is it? A: Check out this great overview
2. Q: Does anyone have any ideas for what I can do with my Pi? A: Sure, look right here!^‡
3. Q: My Pi is behaving strangely/crashing/freezing, giving low voltage warnings, ethernet/wifi stops working, USB devices don't behave correctly, what do I do? A: 99.999% of the time it's either a bad SD card or power problems. Use a USB power meter or measure the 5V on the GPIO pins with a multimeter while the Pi is busy (such as playing h265/x265 video) and/or get a new SD card 1 2 3. If the voltage is less than 5V your power supply and/or cabling is not adequate. When your Pi is doing lots of work it will draw more power. Even if your power supply claims to provide sufficient amperage, it may be mislabeled or the cable you're using to connect the power supply to the Pi may have too much resistance. You can use a USB load tester to test your power supply and cable. Some power supplies require negotiation to provide more than 500mA, which the Pi does not do. If you're plugging in USB devices try using a powered USB hub with its own power supply and plug your devices into the hub and plug the hub into the Pi.
4. Q: I'm having a hard time finding a place to purchase a Raspberry Pi for an affordable price. Where's the secret place to buy one without paying more than MSRP? A: https://rpilocator.com/
5. Q: I just did a fresh install with the latest Raspberry Pi OS and I keep getting errors when trying to ssh in, what could be wrong? A: There are only 4 things that could be the problem:
   1. The ssh daemon isn't running
   2. You're trying to ssh to the wrong host
   3. You're specifying the wrong username
   4. You're typing in the wrong password
6. Q: I'm trying to install packages with pip but I keep getting error: externally-managed-environment A: This is not a problem unique to the Raspberry Pi. The best practice is to use a Python venv, however if you're sure you know what you're doing there are two alternatives documented in this stack overflow answer:
   • --break-system-packages
   • sudo rm a specific file as detailed in the stack overflow answer
7. Q: The only way to troubleshoot my problem is using a multimeter but I don't have one. What can I do? A: Get a basic multimeter, they are not expensive.
8. Q: My Pi won't boot, how do I fix it? A: Step by step guide for boot problems
9. Q: I want to watch Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/Vudu/Disney+ on a Pi but the tutorial I followed didn't work, does someone have a working tutorial? A: Use a Fire Stick/AppleTV/Roku. Pi tutorials used tricks that no longer work or are fake click bait.
10. Q: What model of Raspberry Pi do I need so I can watch YouTube in a browser? A: No model of Raspberry Pi is capable of watching YouTube smoothly through a web browser, you need to use VLC.
11. Q: I want to know how to do a thing, not have a blog/tutorial/video/teachebook explain how to do a thing. Can someone explain to me how to do that thing? A: Uh... What?
12. Q: Is it possible to use a single Raspberry Pi to do multiple things? Can a Raspberry Pi run Pi-hole and something else at the same time? A: YES. Pi-hole uses almost no resources. You can run Pi-hole at the same time on a Pi running Minecraft which is one of the biggest resource hogs. The Pi is capable of multitasking and can run more than one program and service at the same time. (Also known as "workload consolidation" by Intel people.) You're not going to damage your Pi by running too many things at once, so try running all your programs before worrying about needing more processing power or multiple Pis.
13. Q: Why is transferring things to from disks/SSDs/LAN/internet so slow? A: If you have a Pi 4 or 5 with SSD, please check this post on the Pi forums. Otherwise it's a networking problem and/or disk & filesystem problem, please go to HomeNetworking or LinuxQuestions.
14. Q: I only have one outlet and I need to plug in several devices, what do I do? A: They make things called power strips aka multi-tap extensions.
15. Q: The red and green LEDs are on/off/blinking or the screen is just black or blank or saying no signal, what do I do? A: Start here
16. Q: I'm trying to run x86 software on my Raspberry Pi but it doesn't work, how do I fix it? A: Get an x86 computer. A Raspberry Pi is ARM based, not x86.
17. Q: How can I run a script at boot/cron or why isn't the script I'm trying to run at boot/cron working? A: Try one of these numerous solutions
18. Q: Can I use this screen that came from ____ ? A: No
19. Q: I run my Pi headless and there's a problem with my Pi and the best way to diagnose it or fix it is to plug in a monitor & keyboard, what do I do? A: Plug in a monitor & keyboard.
20. Q: My Pi seems to be causing interference preventing the WiFi/Bluetooth from working A. Using USB 3 cables that are not properly shielded can cause interference and the Pi 4 can also cause interference when HDMI is used at high resolutions.
21. Q: I'm trying to use the built-in composite video output that is available on the Pi 2/3/4 headphone jack, do I need a special cable? A. Make sure your cable is wired correctly and you are using the correct RCA plug. Composite video cables for mp3 players will not work, the common ground goes to the wrong pin. Camcorder cables will often work, but red and yellow will be swapped on the Raspberry Pi.
22. Q: I'm running my Pi with no monitor connected, how can I use VNC? A: First, do you really need a remote GUI? Try using ssh instead. If you're sure you want to access the GUI remotely then ssh in, type vncserver -depth 24 -geometry 1920x1080 and see what port it prints such as :1, :2, etc. Now connect your client to that.
23. Q: I want to do something that has been well documented and there are numerous tutorials showing how to do it on Linux. How can I do it on a Raspberry Pi? A: A Raspberry Pi is a full computer running Linux and doesn't use special stripped down embedded microcontroller versions of standard Linux software. Follow one of the tutorials for doing it on Linux. Also see question #1.
24. Q: I want to do something that has been well documented and there are numerous tutorials showing how to do it with an Arduino. How can I do it on a Raspberry Pi Pico? A: Follow one of the tutorials for doing it on Arduino, a Pico can be used with the Arduino IDE.
25. Q: I'm trying to do something with Bluetooth and it's not working, how do I fix it? A: It's well established that Bluetooth and Linux don't get along, this problem is not unique to the Raspberry Pi.

Before posting your question think about if it's really about the Raspberry Pi or not. If you were using a Raspberry Pi to display recipes, do you really think raspberry_pi is the place to ask for cooking help? There may be better places to ask your question, such as:

• /AskElectronics
• /AskProgramming
• /HomeNetworking
• /LearnPython
• /LinuxQuestions
• /RetroPie
• The Official Raspberry Pi Forums

Asking in a forum more specific to your question will likely get better answers!
† See the /raspberry_pi rules. While /raspberry_pi should not be considered your personal search engine, some exceptions will be made in this help thread. ‡ If the link doesn't work it's because you're using a broken buggy mobile client. Please contact the developer of your mobile client and let them know they should fix their bug. In the meantime use a web browser in desktop mode instead.

Hello— I was involved in a collision where the other driver was pretty clearly at-fault about 3 weeks ago. I’m trying to understand the process and make sure I’m not missing anything; this is my first incident like this.
Here are some details:

• I was driving south on a four-lane highway in the left lane. The other driver exited a private driveway, attempting to turn left in front of me to head north, crossing two double-yellow lines which I think form a "barrier" making it illegal. He accelerated just as I reached him, leaving me with no time to brake. I swerved left, and he t-boned my passenger side. He accelerated into my vehicle; he apparently never looked left but was instead trying to time traffic from the right.
  
• My vehicle is a total loss. My wife and my baby were both in the car; my wife and I both went to the ER immediately after the crash.
  
• My wife has a broken hand and has been going to PT twice a week.
  
• I live in Kentucky, so filed a claim with my insurance since our state has no-fault initial coverage for personal injury.
  
• My insurance indicates that they intend to serve a subrogation demand against the other driver’s insurance.
  
• I have not heard from the other driver’s insurance.
  
• My insurance has not received any information from the other driver’s insurance, nor has the other driver returned my insurance’s calls.
  
• I have photos of the damage at the scene and dashcam video of the collision, but no one has asked for them.
  

Questions:

• How does the bodily injury claim work? Presumably my family’s damages will go beyond the $10,000 PIP limit and will hit either the at fault driver’s insurance or my underinsured motorist coverage. Do I need to explicitly file a claim myself with the other driver’s insurance?
  
• Given I haven’t heard from the other driver’s insurance, should I contact them myself to add my statement to the file?
  
• Is it unusual that the other driver’s insurance is non-responsive to my insurance? Does that indicate I need to take any action? (Doesn’t shock me that an at fault driver wouldn’t give a statement…)
  
• I know this is a question that can’t be answered precisely, but based on the above, what is the typical timeframe for resolution for a claim of this type? Weeks, months, years?
  
• Given the uncertainty around my wife’s recovery, how will her part of the claim be resolved? E.g., does it wait until her treatment is complete?
  
• I’m considering consulting an attorney, but less interested in a contingency basis on the BI claim, but more on an hourly basis to manage the complexity above. Does that exist, or is it not advisable even if it does?
  

Sorry for all the detailed questions; a lot of this can likely be addressed pretty simply. Thanks for any input.

Hi everyone. It’s always the elephant in the room to me, but this… this is a lot later than I hoped and expected the revamp guide to come out. I know many of you are still waiting patiently for it and I thank you for that, but no matter what you say it’s still not really right its been so long (don’t start me on Ireland, but that is next) and I am very sorry for that.
But it’s here now, so let’s take a look at the Revamped Ukraine Soc Lib and Soc Dem Republic Paths!
Actually a note first. The paths are pretty event heavy since a lot, and I mean a lot, of events affect Idealism/Wing Influence or the junior partner’s Coalition Attitude. That means more slides and unfortunately because of space can not show everything here. So for the events that trigger from the focus tree and the history file (so the ones that will spawn at a certain date), they all are included as a link. A few other slides in different sections I'm about to touch up as well, but you can see all of it together when I port it over to the Wikia later on tonight.
As always, any questions, comments, concerns, but more importantly corrections and suggestions, are always welcome and encouraged!
---

Republican Victory in the AHR

UKR AHR Republicans Victory

Victory as the VDR
With defeat imminent, the Hetman will abdicate and flee Ukraine. The O-M will take control of the government, immediately entering negotiations with the VDR. A few days later Symon Petliura will declare the second Ukrainian People’s Republic, successor to the short-lived one during the Weltkrieg, and assume leadership of the country with the soc dem Republican Council until elections are called.
A little over two weeks after victory, Land Reform and Industrialization will start, and many foci in the focus tree will help advance these. More about Land Reform and Industrialization below. If Land Reform is not handled correctly, the government may find itself on the wrong side of history, which may lead to its ousting.

Runup to Elections

Pre-Election Events
In the run up to elections, the Socialist Bloc (the alliance of moderate and left wing socialist parties), with its goal of ousting the Hetman achieved, will dissolve. The two major factions of the old Bloc will now have to compete with each other in the upcoming elections.
The constitution of the original People’s Republic will be restored, and amended as needed. A unique national spirit will be given based on the two changes possibly made to the Constitution.
To replace the Hetman, the position of Chairman (of the Republic) will be created, which will be elected by the National Zbory once elections are held. Whichever party or alliance comes out victorious in the upcoming elections will all but guarantee its candidate will become Chairman.

1937 General Election

Start of the 1937 Election
Election Events
The first elections to the National Zbory (or Assembly), successor to the Soim, will take place over 150 days, with the campaigns kicking off a little over a month from the victory in the Anti-Hetman Revolt.
Players will take control and play as one of three parties:

• Ukrainian Radical Democratic Party (URDP, Soc Lib)
• Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party (USDRP, Soc Dem)
• Workers’ Democratic Union (RDS, Rad Soc). The RDS is made up of two parties, the UPS-R (Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries), and the R-RB (Council-Revolutionary Bloc).

The election will be won by the party with the most support at the end of the 150 election season. All start at zero and will increase or decrease from a series of events over that time. The election event chain options will be unique depending on the party being played as. (Though covered below in the party’s victory, mini-game variables are set up at this time, and the event options may influence them as well). The leading party and projected election result can be seen in the decision tab.
In addition to the main event chain, Germany (whose AI will always choose to do so) and the Commune of France (a 50% chance) may choose to influence the elections. Germany’s effects will differ depending on the party the player is playing as, while the Commune will throw its support behind the Workers’ Democratic Union.
There are two instances the party may make promises to the people concerning Land Reform and Industrialization. If they are not kept (ie. each Score is not above a respective threshold), the new government will ‘pay the price’ (loss of PP, stability, and ruling party pop), later on down the road.
While there are many situations that can lead to a specific outcome, once all the votes are counted and meetings held, the election will end in three ways:

• The URDP forms the government (in a coalition with the USDRP) (Radical Victory)
• The USDRP forms the government (in a coalition with the URDP) (Mandate for the Workers)
• A RDS victory, but in appeasement to Berlin the Workers’ Democratic Union will become the junior member of a coalition with the USDRP in charge. (Revolution From Within)

Radical Victory

Radicals Form the New Government
URDP Events
A Radical Touch Focus Tree Effects
(Full Focus Tree and History Events can be seen here)
If the URDP (Ukrainian Radical Democratic Party) manages to take reins of government, it will do so as the head of a coalition with the opposition USDRP as the junior member. When the National Zbory votes for the inaugural Chairman of the Republic it will choose between Party Leader Oleksandr Shulhyn or surprise candidate Archduke Wilhelm/Vasyl Vyshyvanyi.
Whoever is elected Chairman will have to balance both the inter-party relations in the coalition (the USDRP) to keep it going, but also the intra-party factions of the URDP itself. Note that the balancing act will last until the war with Russia starts. Once this happens the attitude and influence levels will be frozen.
The USDRP’s attitude can be seen in the decision tab, and has four levels: Uncooperative, Indifferent, Cooperative, and Amenable. Each level will give bonuses associated with it, with +/- 0.10-0.20 Political Power Gain initially. Through various foci and events more bonuses can be added to them, such as consumer goods factories, construction speed, and even industrial score. But supporting causes in opposition to the USDRP may cause its lower attitude levels to give worse and worse negative buffs. If the USDRP holds an Uncooperative attitude for too long the coalition will not be able to last. Generally speaking, what is good for the URDP is bad for the USDRP and vice-versa; it requires a delicate balancing of the two to keep the coalition going.
The URDP is made up of three factions: a Right wing, Centre wing, and Left wing, with three levels of influence, Low, Moderate, and High. Having one or more of the wings with a High influence will grant increased focus bonuses. But, keeping a faction's influence High will lower the other two wing’s influence after some time (Seen in the Failstate section below). And if a wing has Low influence for too long it may break from the government.
Decisions are available to increase the influence of each of the factions. During the period of Land Reform and Industrialization, increasing the influence of the Left or Right will spend those Scores, respectively. Increasing the Centre will cost PP. If one of the wings’ influence is Low, the costs to increase it will be doubled. After Land Reform and Industrialization is over, increasing Right influence will temporarily cost Consumer Goods Factories, while the Left will cost Base Stability.
Hovering over the first focus in the branch (dynamic to the party, in this case A Radical Touch) will give an overview of what to expect from a URDP playthrough. Hovering over the first focus in the post-war tree, A New Sunrise, will give an overview of how the URDP can stay in power once the post-war elections are held. This is also explained below under Post-War Elections.

URDP Failstate

URDP Failstate
Ukraine will enter a failstate if one of the URDP’s factions revolts, or the USDRP leaves the coalition. A number of events and foci will become unavailable, and the URDP will not be able to win the post-2WK elections.
If one of the wings hit Low influence, there will be a 140 day window to get the influence back up to Moderate. This can be done through decision, events, or foci, but it must be completed or else the faction will revolt. If more than one is low at the same time only one will be in that 140 window: first the Right, then the Left, and finally the Centre.

• If the Right revolts, the Right wing of the party (shown as the Market Liberals) will leave the coalition and form a new political party, the Ukrainian People’s Peasants Party. The USDRP will stay in the government but it will only give bonuses if its attitude is Amenable.
• If the Centre revolts, the URDP will fall into disarray. It will not leave the party like the Right wing, but will no longer be the voice of reason and responsibility against the left and right. Shulhyn will gain a new, negative trait, and will replace Vyshyvanyi as Chairman if Vyshyvanyi was previously elected.
• If the Left revolts, it will start to obstruct the party’s initiatives. The revolt will take its toll on the Prime Minister, Andrii Nikovskyi, who will gain a new, negative trait.

If the USDRP’s attitude lowers to Uncooperative there will be a 180 day window to get it back up to at least Indifferent. This can be done through foci and events, but must be done or the party will leave the coalition. If it ends up leaving the government will no longer have a majority in the National Zbory and will become a Minority Government. As such, no bonuses pertaining to the coalition will be given, and the influences of the URDP’s factions will be frozen.

Mandate for the Workers

Social Democrats Form the New Government
USDRP Events
Ascension of the Workers' Party Focus Tree Effects
(Full Focus Tree and History Events can be seen here)
If the USDRP (Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party) manages to take reins of government, it will do so as the head of a coalition with the opposition URDP as the junior member. Party Leader Isaak Mazepa will be elected by the National Zbory as the inaugural Chairman of the Republic.
Mazepa will have to balance both the inter-party relations in the coalition (the USDRP) to keep it going, but also the Idealism of the party. Note that the balancing act will last until the war with Russia starts. Once this happens attitude and Idealism levels will be frozen.
The USRDP prides and positions itself as the only (major) republican party in Ukraine that is united in its platform and not to have fallen to factionalism … on the surface that is. There is a tug of war between the pragmatists and idealists inside the party that will take its toll on the idealism (the commitment to its principles) of the USDRP. Idealism will start at zero (or 1 if an election event choice was taken) and will raise and lower between -4 and +6. It will lower by 1 every 100 days but every 250 days may be increased by 1 (up to three times). Various events and foci will increase and decrease Idealism. Generally speaking, if the action is against the Party’s principles it will cost a point of Idealism. If it is inline with it, a point won’t be spent and instead a bonus will be given based on the number of Idealism points at the time.
The stronger the Idealism of the Party, the stronger the bonuses will be from various foci. Conversely, the lower the Idealism the lower the bonuses that will be given (if at all). If Idealism falls to -4, it will have a negative effect on the government and on the Party’s Leader.
Note, a few months after forming the new government, Symon Petliura, interim head of state after the ousting of the Hetman, will become available for military duty (as a Military High Command Advisor). His trait, the Chief Otaman, will change based on the current level of Idealism. With low Idealism (0 or less), he will give boosts to stability and war support. With +1 or +2 Idealism, he will boost factory output and the recruitable population. With Idealism at 3 or more, he will boost Land Reform Score, and political power gain. Depending on what is needed, it may be wise to hold off hiring him until Idealism is at the level you’d like his trait to be. Hiring him and raising his skill as a General may see him make a political return post-war.
The URDP’s attitude can be seen in the decision tab, and has four levels: Uncooperative, Indifferent, Cooperative, and Amenable. Each level will give bonuses associated with it, with +/- 0.10-0.20 Political Power Gain initially. Through various foci and events more bonuses can be added to them, such as consumer goods factories, construction speed, and factory output. But supporting causes in opposition to the URDP may cause its lower attitude levels to give worse and worse negative buffs. If the URDP holds an Uncooperative attitude for too long the coalition will not be able to last. Generally speaking, what is good for the URDP is bad for the USDRP and vice-versa; it requires a delicate balancing of the two to keep the coalition going.
Hovering over the first focus in the branch (dynamic to the party, in this case 'Ascension of the Workers’ Party) will give an overview of what to expect from a USDRP playthrough. Hovering over the first focus in the post-war tree, A New Sunrise, will give an overview of how the USDRP can stay in power once the post-war elections are held. This is also explained below under Post-War Elections.

USDRP Failstate

USDRP Failstate
Ukraine will enter a failstate if Idealism hits -4, or the URDP leaves the coalition. A number of events and foci will become unavailable, and the USDRP will not be able to win the post-2WK elections.
Having hit +4 Idealism, Mezepa will realize just how far the party has strayed from its core principles. No longer is it a mass movement of the working class, but now is a rational and responsible people’s party. He will gain a new, negative trait, and the Idealism mechanic will be disabled.
If the URDP’s attitude lowers to Uncooperative there will be a 180 day window to get it back up to at least Indifferent. This can be done through foci and events, but must be done or the party will leave the coalition. If it ends up leaving the government will no longer have a majority in the National Zbory and will become a Minority Government. As such, no bonuses pertaining to the coalition will be given, Idealism will be set to zero and frozen.

Franco-British-Ukrainian Trade Deal

Eyes to the Left: An Internationale Trade Agreement
In October 1937 the USDRP government will reach out to the Internationale in an attempt to negotiate a trade deal. The purpose is to loosen the grip of the Germans as they use the economic pact Ukraine is in, Mitteleuropa, against it to force their views.
Ukraine will send either URDP member Arnold Margolin or USDRP member Mykhailo Yeremivv to Paris to negotiate. Sending Margolin will spend a point of Idealism, but will increase the chance of a deal by 20%. Conversely, sending Yeremivv will gain a point of Idealism, but will decrease the chance of a deal by 20%, though any successful deal will be greater than Margolin can ask for.
Once he arrives in Paris, the negotiator can propose one of three deals:

• For Industrial Assistance - Land Reform Score increases and Civilian Factories
• For Consumer Goods - Gives PP and Soc Dem Party Pop
• Choose to sell Oil - This option combines both Industrial Assistance and Consumer Goods, but decreased the deal’s chance by 20%.
  • This choice can only be selected if the Industrialization Decision ‘BASF Petroleum Development’ was already completed.

When the German government hears of the negotiations it will demand an explanation. Ukraine has a few options on how to deal with the Germans (hovering over the options will show Germany’s acceptance rate):

• Limit the scale of the agreement: the success or failure of placating the Germans will be affected by who the negotiator is, the current government of Germany (DU is better), and the level of Idealism (having 1 or less is better).
• Cancel the deal: It will not go through and a point of Idealism will be lost, but the URDP’s attitude will approve.
• Sweet talk the Ambassador: the success or failure of placating the Germans will be affected by who the negotiator is, the current government of Germany (DU is better), and the level of Idealism (having 2 or more is better).
• Revisit the German-Ukrainian Treaty signed after the overthrow of the Hetman: This will guarantee the deal goes through, but will also increase the German Minor Privileges national spirit to Moderate, or from Moderate to Major, or if already at Major, will add negative base stability and PP.
  • This will make it impossible for the USDRP to win a major election victory.

If the Germans accept, the deal chosen in the second event will be signed and the bonuses given.
If the Germans reject it, no deal will be negotiated, two points of Idealism will be lost, will add negative base stability and PP, and worsen the attitude of the URDP.

URDP Party Conference

URDP Party Congress
Also for the USDRP, a couple months later in December 1937, the player will be warned that PP should be saved up to combat the future rise of the URDP’s Right wing. This comes at a critical time as Land Reform and Industrialization is ongoing which use up much of the country’s PP, so plan carefully.
Three months later the URDP is planning to hold its yearly Party Conference in three months. During this time the party’s three factions (the Right, Centre, and Left) will jostle for influence, for whichever has the most at the end of the three month period will take control of the party. This can help or hurt the USDRP as the URDP is the junior member of the governing coalition.
It is the Right’s race to lose as it holds the most influence going into the three months, at 4. Next is the Centre at 3, and then the Left at 2. Every 10 days the Right’s influence will increase by 1.5 automatically until the end of the Conference is held. This can be combated every five days by spending 10pp to reduce its influence by 1. In addition, the Centre’s can be increased by 1.5 every 10 days for 10pp as well. To increase the Left’s (also every 10 days) initially costs only 5pp, but each time the decision is taken five more pp is added to the cost, capping at 50pp.
At the end of the three months, whichever wing has the most influence will see its leader become the new URDP Chairman:

• Having the Right take over will be detrimental to coalition relations, and will start to drain PP and Base Stability, even at the best of relations. The only way to remove the debuffs is to complete a focus at the bottom of the focus tree: ‘A President for the People’.
• Having the Centre take over will smooth over URDP relations and give a PP boost.
• Having the Left take over will be beneficial to the USDRP, having a more cooperative junior member in the coalition.

On National Defence

On National Defence
For both the URDP and USDRP, as long as the government coalition did not collapse, at the very end of 1938 the National Defence Bill will be proposed in the National Zbory. Over the next 13 months, a number of conditions will have to be met to increase the chance (or guarantee) the Bill will pass.
There are seven conditions in total, and ar checked when the Bill is put up to a vote at the end of the 13 months:

• Stability is higher than 70%
• War Support is higher than 50%
• Coalition Attitude is Cooperative or Amenable
• Land Reform, AND Industrialization Scores are above 90
• The focus Ukrainian Land Fund, AND Progressive Tax Policy have been completed
• At last three foci from the military tree, branching from but including Expansion of Kyiv Military Academey have been completed
• Party Specific:
  • For the URDP, the Centre wing’s influence is Moderate or High
  • For the USDRP, Idealism is 1 or more

Having only two or less will guarantee it fails. With three there is a 20% chance it will pass. With four, 40%. With five, 60%. With six, 80%. All seven guarantee it passes.
If the Bill passes, a national spirit will be given reducing the production cost of various equipment by 10% for two years. If Ukraine is a German puppet, has the best trade deal with Germany (Minor German Privileges) AND had previously negotiated the Franco-British-Ukrainian Trade Deal, it will see its autonomy raised, becoming independent.
If it fails there will be a PP loss, and the USDRP will not be able to win a major election victory.
Pass or fail, three months later, if any URDP Wings are at Low influence each will be raised to Moderate.

War with Russia

Russia Prepares for War
In the immediate period before Russia (socialist or not) declares war, Ukraine will receive a difficulty setting event regarding the upcoming war. A player may choose to make the war harder by stopping German (and its allies’) troops from defending its border specifically, or even harder by stopping those troops from any country that took part in the Eastern European Defence Cooperation. This player only event is given to all countries in the Eastern European Defence Cooperation, and Ukraine/Poland if either had joined the Donau-Aribund.
When war does break out there will be a proposal to form a National Unity Government by allowing the opposition RDS into government. Forming it will set the coalition’s attitude to Indifferent, but will make it impossible for the URDP or USDRP to win a major election victory (attitude must be Amenable). But, not forming it will take its toll on the populace if the war starts to go south. For every core state lost to Russia, the National Opposition national spirit debuff will grow by -2% Recruitable Populace Factor, and -1% Core Territory Division Defence. Retaking the states will reverse the debuffs.

A Dream Come True

A Dream Come True: Post-War URDP and USDRP Content
URDP/USDRP Epilogues
With the 2WK over and the peace conference completed, the post-war content for the URDP and the USDRP will unlock, and elections held. See directly below for the elections as the outcome will unlock one of the four mutually exclusive in the tree.
With the post-war elections out of the way, one of four mutually exclusive foci will unlock in the tree. While giving a national spirit to the situation Ukraine finds itself in, each will give a sort of epilogue too. With three outcomes per focus, all twelve can be seen above, and in two of them for the USDRP, Petliura will have his leader description updated. Finally, 'Testament Fulfilled' gives an overall ending event, which is also included above.

Post-War Elections

First Post-War Republican Elections
With victory over Russia, elections to the National Zbory postponed due to war can finally be held. The government (either the URDP or the USDRP) will have had to get through three or four hurdles, respectively, to stay in power. If the conditions are met the party will win a minor election victory.

• Land Reform and Industrialization Scores must both be above 90,
• Ukraine did not reach 60% surrender progress in war.
• Party Specific:
  • For the URDP, it must not have suffered any internal revolts of its wings
  • For the USDRP, it did not let Idealism hit -4, AND did not allow the URDP-Right wing to take control of the URDP.

If the URDP only met one of its conditions it will be shut out of the new government completely. If it met two conditions it will become the junior partner in a coalition with the USDRP.
Meeting all three conditions, Volodymyr Dolenko of the URDP-Right may be elected the new Chairman, switching to Market Liberal (but the Right wing’s influence must be equal to or greater than the Left’s). If the Left’s is greater than the right, Andrii Nikovskyi may be elected Chairman instead.
If the USDRP only met one or two of its conditions it will be shut out of the new government completely. If it meets three conditions, it will become the junior partner in a coalition with the URDP.
Meeting all four conditions means Mazepa or Prime Minister Panas Fedenko may be (re-)elected Chairman, if Petliura was NOT hired as an advisois a level 4 or more Marshal. If Petliura was hired and is of appropriate rank, he can be elected instead.
There are three extra conditions that, if met, will result in a major election victory for the party (and it will get to choose which parties it allows into the coalition).
For the URDP:

• The National Unity Government must NOT have been formed.
• The Centre wing has High influence.
• The USDRP’s attitude is Amenable.

For the USDRP:

• The National Unity Government must NOT have been formed,
• The National Defence Act and a Trade Agreement with the British and French was agreed to and Germany has only Minor Privileges (the national spirit Minor German Privileges)
• The URDP’s attitude is Amenable.

For the URDP, if all six conditions are met, either Dolenko or Nikovskyi may be elected without conditions. In addition, Shulhyn and Vyshyvanyi may be (re-)elected Chairman.
For the USDRP, if all seven conditions are met, Mazepa, Fedenko, or Petliura may be elected without conditions. In addition, Mykola Kovalevskyi can be elected Chairman.

Later Republican Elections

Later Republican Elections
Four years after the first post-war elections the next scheduled elections will take place. Unlike the first these will be two separate events.
The first will be the election to the National Zbory, which will change the ruling party:

• If the USDRP is in power, the URDP can form a centrist coalition and shut the USDRP out of the government.
• The URDP can lead a new coalition with the USDRP
• The USDRP can lead a new coalition with the URDP
• The USDRP can form a left-wing coalition allying with the RDS (which will form the Revolutionary Bloc), shutting the URDP out of the government.

Note the URDP-Right can only take power in the first elections, and will not be able to form a new government in the second and succeeding elections.
The second event is the election of the CHairman of the republic.

• Oleksandr Shulhyn - Available to a government led by Andrii Nikovskyi
• Vasyl Vyshyvanyi - Available to a Soc Lib government
• Opanas Fedenko - Available if the government does NOT have a coalition with the Soc Cons
• Symon Petliura - Available if the government does NOT have a coalition with the Soc Cons
• Nykyfir Hryhoriiv - Available if the government has a coalition with the Rad Socs

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For those of us in the US, a very Happy, but solemn, Memorial Day today!
Thank you!

My computer has been fine. It's quite a decent computer too. Runs all the games I want to play fine. I'm not a master of PC components, so I don't know much about that.
Although according to my task manager, I have: An Intel Core i7-6820HQ for my CPU And an Nvidia Quadro M2000M for a GPU.
I don't know how to find my other computer components, but this should be good.
Anyways, yesterday while I was playing Ultrakill which runs perfectly fine on my Computer, I noticed it became extremely slow. Slow to the point it was crashing randomly and running at 5-10 FPS. I had tested other games and had the same issue. I restarted my computer, and it was still there. I had checked for malware and there was none. I did a disc defragmentation, and nothing changed. I had changed my settings to match performance and it was still laggy. I cleared my temp files, and it was still the same. I had waited to see if it would go down, but it seemed to be the same. Whenever I restart my computer, it takes a very long time to load and will struggle to boot up things like Discord or Spotify. At this point, I have no idea what is causing this and would wish for it to go away.
If you have any tips or anything I can do to fix this, I would be extremely grateful.

It’s the 20^th and 21^st anniversary of Buffy and Angel’s respective cancellations, and regarding the chance of any Buffy-related resurrection the odds are against us and the situation is grim.
Or so Captain Kirk would say.
But he also said he didn’t believe in the no-win scenario.
And just the other day, I saw a quote which put its finger adroitly on the problem:
“We could luck out and get a Fargo situation where the show intelligently builds on the source material with a new creative lead, but that’s so rare I don’t really have much hope.”
(Bacon_00 ; television ; January 2024)
On the face of it, Buffy ain’t coming back any time soon, if at all. And the belief that it so perfectly caught that turn-of-the-millennium teen zeitgeist that it shouldn’t even be attempted has genuine merit. Sometimes, you just can’t go home again.
However, there is a way, although it would unquestionably need a major fan campaign, the co-operation of all or part of the remaining cast, the help of an extremely powerful Hollywood mover and shaker (think Doomsday on acid) and indeed, a creative lead who could intelligently build on the source material.
Nor must it be forgotten that (as I understand it) Buffy has some of the toughest intellectual property (IP) contracts in the business, which will still stand inviolate when the Earth is a dead star hanging forlornly in space. That’s one reason there have been relatively few spin-offs.
Of all those ingredients, the creative lead might be the most difficult to procure. And how long would it take to create the necessary content?
I’d better start by confessing that I read and reviewed the first novel in Kendare Blake’s Buffy trilogy, and while she is a good writer, I thought it sucked.
So here’s the thing: while Whit Anderson’s Buffy filmscript (and Whit Anderson herself) was being canned, while the Buffy reboot languished in development limbo for five years before being put on “pause” (ie sent to hell and damnation), while Joss Whedon crashed and burned in the biggest inferno since the Hindenburg, and while the audio drama Slayers was being unceremoniously stomped on hard by Disney (now owners of Buffy’s license), there was a bit of secret history going on in the background. An angle nobody expected.
And you’ve never noticed. Not that I haven’t tried to tell you, but it was like whistling in the wind…
To explain, back in 2009 I was an autistic writer in Glasgow on the verge of a nervous breakdown. For fun and therapy, I decided to write a short story about Drusilla the vampire, taking place just after the end of Chosen.
And when I started writing, something very strange happened.
It was like Dru jumped out of her pocket Buffyverse, grabbed on to me for dear life and made it plain I was the one to finish her story.
Like I’d been chosen.
I hit my stride like an ageing athlete who’d been training for twenty years and suddenly finds his peak form. Two crazed months later, Drusilla’s Roses had been written. I then suggested to the National Autistic Society Scotland (NAS) that I cross America blogging about autism and visit the Californian locations I’d used for the story. I also sent a copy of Roses to a certain Juliet Landau in Hollywood, equally certain I’d never get any reply.
Although I was autistic, I’d managed to live and work in Australia for a year twenty years before. But whether I could regain my previous form and function in the field again was uncertain.
Then the impossible happened, and I guess that’s where I got my motivation.
Juliet read Roses, was blown away by it, said so to me and we got into an email correspondence.
The NAS OK’d me to cross the world to California.
I did it, and met Miss Landau on Sunset Boulevard in March 2010. I always say that scene would knock spots off La La Land.
The NAS suggested I write a book about it, in order to inspire people with autism.
Against all odds, Dear Miss Landau was published in March 2012 to rave reviews.
Now here’s a critically important point:
Dear Miss Landau is a real-life autobiographical work involving a member of the cast and referencing Drusilla.
The copyright is mine.
Hence, Dear Miss Landau might (and, I stress, might) be the only Buffy-related product in the world able to circumvent Buffy’s teak-tough IP contracts and legally be filmed.
But what about a continuation of Buffy ~itself~? I hear you ask.
This is where it gets interesting, and even more surreal.
Remember Drusilla’s Roses, which blew Juliet Landau away and got us into an email correspondence?
I didn’t stop there. Drusilla’s Redemption came next, in which an ensouled Drusilla travelled to Africa to save Xander and a village of children from the source of the slayers’ power and a reincarnation of the first slayer, thereby redeeming herself.
Miss Landau had just written a two-part Dru story for IDW Publishing, and I was preparing (quite illegally) to combine this with the third story in the series, Drusilla Revenant, when something truly surreal and strangely simple happened…
I was taking a breather between Redemption and Revenant, watching a certain Buffy episode on DVD, and I saw something.
A lost, unfinished or discarded story arc from the original series. Something which should have happened but didn’t, partly because Spike unexpectedly became a breakout character.
I emailed Juliet (imagine how surreal that was!), and told her I’d spotted something.
Looking back, I think I was in the right place at the right time, looking at the right thing from exactly the right angle. I was in the right frame of mind and I had the right amount of knowledge about the right character.
It all came together, and I just saw it.
Buffy’s continuation. Plain as day.
And it was so simple. A child could see it, but nobody else ever has.
Once I got back from the States I romped through Revenant, combined it with Juliet’s story, developed the story arc and delivered the payoff in Avalon, Catalina, where Dru went in search of Xander…
But there was one more tale yet to be told.
I think I once heard James Marsters say that Spike and Dru’s two hundred year old love story had to be resolved, and I had a crack at it. In Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires, I sent them to north Afghanistan in 2019 where, among other things, they sorted out their relationship.
At that point, I got the very strong impression that I’d done what Dru wanted: I’d built up her story, turned the Buffyverse upside down, tied fiction and reality together and brought it all to something approximating a happy ending.
As, perhaps, it was meant to be.
Dru was satisfied with that.
That was 2013.
Since then, I have mentioned this at the end of Dear Miss Landau, blogged about it in the Huffington Post UK, tried to alert members of the cast at comics-conventions (Amy Acker seemed particularly interested one time) and pitched or mentioned the possibility whenever I reasonably could.
No one’s ever really got it, and I am left feeling as if I am the only man in the world with access to the restored print of Lawrence of Arabia while everyone else has to make do with the mutilated 1971 TV version…
I really would like the fans to be able to read the whole story of Dear Miss Landau and the Dru Quartet, as it is actually meant to be. It works like this:
Dear Miss Landau and Drusilla’s Roses should be read together. This is where fiction and reality subtly intersected, and wackiness ensued.
Then simply read Drusilla’s Redemption, Drusilla Revenant and Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires, in that order.
Please note that the Dru Quartet (what I call all four stories in their entirety) observes Buffy canon as much as possible. I would also firmly stress that all the stories were written to the same standard as Dear Miss Landau, and I’ve always actually considered Roses better than Landau.
Dear Miss Landau has been published and Roses and Redemption can be found in Archive of Our Own. I’m only holding Revenant and Graveyard back because they contain the resolution of the lost story arc and I would like the Dru Quartet legally to be published. I don’t want to add them to Archive of Our Own as I’m no fan of self-publishing, and I don’t want to just give away the secret of the lost story arc.
And at the moment, the Dru Quartet can only be classed as fan-fiction.
Hence the problem, and the need for a major fan campaign. There is precedent for this. Bjo Trimble and the Star Trek fans saved Star Trek for a third season in 1967-1968. More recently, money-mad football bosses wanted to create a European Super League. Not unlike Disney and Hollywood, they had money, power, contracts and lawyers on their side; but the football fans put their foot down as one and the idea was destroyed in eleven days flat.
You have the power if you will only focus and use it.
I know my limitations. Unlike Bjo Trimble, I am not an organiser or manager. However, I have created the content and have natural public speaking ability (rare for an Asperger). I am willing to do what I can.
But I am not writing this article to start yet another conversation. I am trying to tell you there is a chance, but you have to grasp it. Not have long arguments on social media about it.
Once I have posted this article, I will leave Reddit forever (sorry, I found you very nice) but I will post a copy of it on my Goodreads page, where I can be contacted. It’s up to you.
I would suggest the fans lobby for the Dru Quartet legally to be published, and for Dear Miss Landau to be turned into a film. There was even an attempt to turn Dear Miss Landau into a stage musical about ten years ago. It could be revived.
While I admit I’d mainly like to see the Dru Quartet legally published, I do wish there was some way it could be filmed. I can see it on an epic scale, but all four stories would depend heavily on nuanced portrayals by actors and time has gone by.
However, there may be a way: de-aging technology, AI, even plain old recasting…
As Mr Spock would say, there are always possibilities.
However, I think this is the best and only route out of the current situation, so I will add a few reviews here and hope to receive polite contact from a focused individual.
However, I know what can happen with social media… If I receive abuse, I will simply walk away from it all and the lost story arc’s resolution will never be revealed.
It’s up to you.
I hope there’s somebody out there.
James Christie.
~Dear Miss Landau~
“This is the best book I’ve read for ten years.”
(Tim Coates, former MD of Waterstones and WH Smith, on A Good Read, BBC Radio 4, July 2012)
“I read this constantly thinking ‘is this for real?’ An autistic Scottish man in his 40s has an obsession with a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writes a 250,000 word novel based on the character and ends up travelling to Hollywood and meeting the actress who plays her. You couldn’t make it up.”
(Chris Norton, Goodreads, October 2012)
~Drusilla’s Roses~
“I just finished your story. I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it. You managed to catch Drusilla’s voice and behaviour so beautifully. The sad, lost, haunted feeling of Dru was there.”
(Juliet Landau, August 2009)
“This is utterly beautiful and touching. As someone who’s written a Dru story where she gets her soul back, finds love and finds sanity, I have longed for such stories. This is the first one that came close to satisfying that longing. I love that she helped heal both Xander and Buffy - the two most wounded people after the fall of Sunnydale.”
(DeepBlueJoy, fan-fiction writer, May 2014)
~Drusilla’s Redemption~
“This is a beautifully written and disturbing novelette. I really do hope that the sequel will be available here soon. Since my own writing about Dru, I’ve never read anything else where I really felt more than just Dru’s craziness. Here I felt her heart and strength and saw her insight into the complexity of the human condition, including human evil in particular. Wonderfully done.”
(DeepBlueJoy, fan-fiction writer, May 2014)
"I cannot believe you break my heart by ending it there.
This is beautiful and fearsome and full of poetry. I'm in awe.
I just wanted them to grow old together. I wish you had given them that.
Peace.”
(DeepBlueJoy, fan-fiction writer, May 2014)
I tried to find DeepBlueJoy, tried to tell her I did it…
The story isn’t over.

Just like many other posts that are on here, I wanted to give my honest thoughts about the game. - I know this is a long one, so there is a TLDR at the bottom.
So I just completed the games after having 99 hours on my save file. I managed to get all characters, but I haven't started any of the post game content, so my end game party is still in their 60s along with not completing any of the mini game stories (just far enough in each of them to recruit characters).
As someone who fell in love with the RPG genre because of the Suikoden series, I couldn't contain my excitement when I saw the kickstarter for ECHH. I backed the game without a second thought and waited patiently for 4 years while the game was brought to life before our eyes.
I'll break my thoughts up into categories in order to organize them better.
Story
I'll start with the story itself first. When first booting up the game, and really throughout the experience, it's very easy to see the inspirations, it wears them on its sleeve with pride, and by extension is difficult to separate this game from it's main influencer, Suikoden. I feel that the story is good, it follows a fairly brisk pacing all the way to the end of the game. Nothing was a slog to get through, however the brisk pace led to some areas of the game feeling rushed, as well as some characters and relationships fall flatter than they should have. The friendship between Nowa and Seign felt incomplete. There was the beginning sequence in the runebarrows where they shared some words at the fire, but that was really it. If Seign's story had been fleshed out a bit more, even a cutscene while in Galdea showing us how Nowa's influence was starting to affect him, vs. the throw away comment made by one of the Galdean team members, it could have gone a long way to making the duel feel that more impactful. Marketing and making Seign one of the main characters, and not really start to flesh out any of his story until he joins the team about halfway through the game feels like a bit of an odd choice. Hopefully the DLC they release will add more, but it would be an odd choice to lock story beats behind additional paid DLC.
Now granted, the influences this game is grabbing from are grand sweeping stories that move very quickly from one plot point to the next. While juggling a large cast of characters will make a few things fall to the back burner, the story relevant characters should have been more fleshed out. My other big concern with the story is that they toyed with moments of real impact that would make the story feel like the stakes were more in your face, but turned away at the last second, or decided to pull the punches. One of the biggest moments that could have added real stakes to the story was when they teased at Nowa's home town of Kyshiri being attacked and then razed. They have all the villagers escape, but then in the very next moment, they are able to rebuild the town. Having the town burned to the ground and his people homeless would have given Nowa more reason to actually want to be leader of the Alliance.
Overall, I enjoyed the story and the groundwork it lays for the world at large, because it just makes me want to find out more about it. I just wish they didn't turn away from some choices that would have made the story more impactful.
Gameplay Now it's difficult to discuss the story without also talking about gameplay, as they partly go hand in hand.
It plays like your standard rpg that got ripped out of the 90s. You run around to different areas of the map completing quests, crawl through some dungeons, fight some bosses, all with a party of 6 people. Each character you can pick to fight can be placed in either the front or back rows, and depending on the placement you'll be able to hit different enemies. Short range (like Seign) should be placed in the front row and can only hit front row enemies. Medium range (like Nowa) can hit enemies while being placed in either row, but can only hit back row enemies while being in the front row. Long range (any archer style character), ideally should be placed in the back row and can hit enemies on either row. There's definitely a lot more that goes into party composition, including picking the right support character for the task at hand, but overall if you've played an RPG before, you won't have too much difficulty understanding the core mechanics of this game.
There are also some additional story required minigames (more on these later) in the form of 1 on 1 character duels and large scale war battles, that help to shake up the formula some if things start to feel stale at times. Like I said earlier, this feels like an RPG ripped out of the 90s, some of the mechanics lend to that. Dedicated save points, healing at specific areas (other than using items or magic), and random encounters can make this feel a little dated at times, but I feel adds to the charm. In a time where most games have been streamlined and modernized, it's refreshing almost to not have your hand held and actually needing to think about conserving resources.
Overall the gameplay is what I was expecting coming into this game, and I was not let down by it. However there are parts where the gameplay itself, or choices made, causes issues with the story, and that's where some of my concerns are. For example near the end of the game, you have a war battle followed by a group of party fights through the town of Eltisweiss in order to liberate it, however you just get cutscenes of the other 3 major towns, Hishahn, Yarnaan, and Athrabalt. The time you spend in those areas is just as important, but they get relegated to cutscenes? If each of these cities had been given the same treatment it would have made the game feel less rushed at the end, and generally just given more weight to this end game section, as well as not make the end game feel generally rushed. I really like the idea of the 3 main characters Nowa, Seign, and Marisa but because of how underutilized it was, it made the story fall a little flat. There are literally glimpses of moments where having the 3 main characters makes the story feel wide and sweeping, but there are literally 4 -5 sections total where it's really used Seign in the rune lab, the 3 party split in Snowpeak Pass, the 3 party split in Athrabalt during the Revenant invasion, and Marisa in Harganthia Castle. There's also a small section after you get your castle where you control Marisa to essentially see a cutscene with some forshadowing about Leene. Even when it is used, it's really for such a short section each time that little development happens. The story could have really benefitted from a system similar to the Trinity Sight system from Suikoden where each of the main characters had different chapters to play through to get more story from each and really build more attachment.
I think another gameplay element that feels lacking is actually the lack of any real penalties or a perma-death mechanic. There is one instance you can permanently lose a character, but it's only if you don't recruit all the characters before the end game section. In the Suikoden series, characters could die, even story relevant characters. It gave a sense of tension and realness to the war that was being fought. I think the lack of this mechanic made the story less impactful overall.
Difficulty As mentioned earlier, I have been playing RPGs for many years, so maybe my experience has influenced this, but I seriously felt the game was very easy. So much in fact, outside of boss battles, I literally was able to play the game on auto battle. Granted, I did play the game on normal mode, but I didn't overlevel my characters. Near the end of the game I did start to play around with runes and wanted to level up weapons and outfit with top equipment, but that really only affected the last dungeon for me. There were 4 parts that were actually difficult for me: the Proving Grounds boss, the bridge gauntlet right after the rune lab, the one on one duel between Marisa and Diradhe, and the final duel between Nowa, Seign, and Marisa vs. Aldric I will definitely be exploring the options to up the difficulty for me when I replay this game, so I'm very happy they were included for the hard mode option. I also found it slightly disheartening that 2 of the strongest characters in the game, Iugo and Yuske, are able to be found at the very beginning. Now I do understand that it was my choice to use them throughout most of my playthrough (before completing any endgame content), but it would have been nice to see those 2 given as a reward for a particularly hard mission, Like Momo or Dijkstra, vs. being just given to you for free.
Minigames/Side Content
Next up are my thoughts over each of the minigames and the side content. Since there are multiple parts, I'll talk about each individually.
1 on 1 Duels - This was frankly a confusing mechanic. The tutorials briefly explain how to control this mechanic, but I would be lying if I said I could complete the story required ones without looking up a guide. There are 4 story required duels, Seign at the bridge, Aldric in the Rune Lab, Diradhe in Harganthia, and Aldric at the very end, and only 1 non story required, Recruiting El Alicanto. I do feel like a few more could have been added in such as recruiting Ruifan, you're literally required to fight him 1 on 1, why not make this a duel? Also in the opening cutscene of the game there is a part where it looks like Wayve and Marisa are fighting each other, why not turn that part, (frankly I can't even remember when that scene even happens in the game), into a duel? Maybe a ceremony Marisa needed to take part in, or something? The duels that are here make sense to the story, but are also, for the most part, "scripted". Though you CAN win the duel against Seign, it's very unlikely you'll do it in your first playthrough without overleveling and careful planning. The 1st duel against Aldric is scripted to be lost, and the last 2 story required duels in the game you are required to win. Overall, the duels are alright for me, but it could have been cool to see it expanded into a form of tournament side content in your home base. You'd be required to fight and win 3 or 4 duels in succession in order to win a good piece of gear or stronger runes. I do understand that there's already a lot here in the game, and development of content like this would take awhile, but more on that later.
War Battles - Similar to the duels, this mechanic wasn't very well explained, during the story, but each war battle fought was pretty much an interactive cutscene. Just like with duels, I do wish a few more story required battles were put in, instead of just cutscenes for liberating Hishahn, Yarnaan, and Athrabalt, but the ones that are here are serviceable, if not kind of boring. As stated earlier the lack of a perma-death mechanic really hurt this section. They gave you essentially a mini strategy rpg battle where even if you have units that flee the map, there's no penalty. The only people that die during these fights are just kickstarter backers who paid enough to see their name in the game twice. There's no attachment, it's flavor text, that while cool to see, clutters the screen. I do like that you have the ability to unlock war battles as a minigame you can play in your castle, but even this was done almost as a bandaid because Rabit and Bear couldn't implement the desired "always online" idea of other players attacking your castle. Like with duels, the war battles that are here are serviceable, and maybe my stance will change on that as I play the optional ones in the base.
Card Mini Game - Out of all the optional unlockable content, this is probably my favorite. I like that you have the ability to battle all the heroes in the game and even the villians too. Having a character being unlocked through this too is also a fun way to have you get familiar with it. It has just enough strategy to keep you thinking, with good rewards for completing matches.
Cooking battles - In the state this was in when the game first launched, it was a snoozefest. You could spam the same 3 dishes each battle and win. As I'm playing on switch (I have words on this too) I hadn't gotten the update that fixed the scoring by the time I finished my playthrough. I will say having to wait realworld time before the next duel came up was also kind of a bummer and made Celia my second to last optional recruit. Hopefully the bug fix has made this better and more worth playing.
Beigoma - This is essentially a Beyblade knock off, that while has some entertaining dialogue, really drug on and made my last optional recruit, like many other people here, be Reid. The idea is great and fun, but the execution has polarizing opinions. The matches themselves were fun, but really only good in small doses. Also, with how many Spinadiers are in the game, and the fact you have to beat all of them in order to see this sidestory to its end, they should have given an indicator for each one you beat. Maybe above their heads put a Beigoma with fire around it for those you haven't beaten, and just a plain Beigoma for those you have already beaten. On my next playthrough, I'll definitely be working through this story line as I go, vs. trying to cram most of it at the end, though it really doesn't help that most of the Beigoma that can actually beat people are at the end, with 3 of them being in the optional dungeon Vilashnu, and a few others being in Harganthia. It's almost like the game wants Reid to be the last character you get.
Fishing - Honestly outside of needing to catch the 1 character related fish, I kinda forgot this was there, it has that small of an impact. Though if you don't ever catch the Wheel-Eye Bream, you will never be able to recruit Huang, and you'll also lock yourself out of the entire guild mission mechanic, which makes base building more difficult. Now the fish you catch can and do help towards cooking dishes for party buffs, but to make this minigame bigger, and one more people would play, a tournament style thing with rewards could have gone a long way.
Eggfoot Racing - This is a pretty fun minigame that sees you raising the egg enemies and racing them against each other. The mini game is really the raising portion where you feed your eggfoots, breed them, and prep them for races. The races themselves are automated and as long as you have the right stats, you'll win. My only recommendation is when you start earning the "egg" item, specifically the "regular egg", don't sell any of them, just store them, because you'll need 5 of them in order to unlock Paquia and Mandie for the Eggfoot Arena in your town, and you don't want to have to go grinding for them unnecessarily. It's a great time sink minigame and something to use to detox from a long day at work while you have a favorite tv show on in the background.
Theater - I have heard nothing but good things about this side content. The fact that any character can be placed into any role and every line is voiced is frankly amazing. There are 5 scripts total, 4 of them being locked to purchasing in a store, that inventory resets based on real world time. Other than acquiring each script, there's really nothing bad about this, and a very worthy addition.
Hotsprings - This is another area that gives small cutscenes and interactions between characters in your party (and also some who can't be placed into the party). It's good for some world building and character development. I also like that, just like all cutscenes, this is fully voiced as well. Maybe I just haven't found all the optional decorations, but I do feel like there's a smaller selection then I'd like to decorate with.
Basebuilding - The basebuilding in this game is actually a huge aspect of developing and growing. Pretty much all the optional side content is locked behind expanding your castle, and even some characters, Shixeen and Celia, you can only get by having certain nodes of the upgrade plan built. I think this is a great mechanic that allows you to see your town grow organically, and makes spending your time there valuable, from having shops that allow you to outfit all your characters at once, being able to decorate your town how you see fit, to being able to take part in the side content and minigames, heck you can't even access the post game content without building your base up. My only issue with the base building is that during the course of the main story, getting your castle to level 4 and all the perks you can unlock comes really just too late to make use of any of it for story purposes, granted you can and will easily use all of this for the post game, so it makes some sense, but for a casual player who might not revisit the game or play any post game content, not being able to get required materials until the optional Vilashnu dungeon (recruiting literally one of the last optional characters in the game) and the Harganthia dungeon (which you really only have a very small window to use any of the materials gained before the final dungeon), it makes upgrading the castle anything past a few nodes in level 4 seem like more of a chore for completionists than anything else.Those concerns aside, I really like what basebuilding brought to the table, and it kept me wanting to grind for more resources to see what I would unlock next. I hope a similar if not more expanded mechanic appears in any follow up games.
Overall if you want a game with things to sink your teeth into, you seriously have it in spades here, and honestly I'm really happy with everything that was added, even if some things fell a little flatter than others.
Performance
You know that this was coming. You can't talk about this game without addressing the performance issues and concerns. Now I will say I played on Nintendo Switch, mostly docked but occasionally handheld. To say there's issues would be an understatement. The Switch had a hard time running this game. I had the game crash and freeze on me multiple times, my first time was actually when you get your castle. That whole sequence where you have the first war battle, need to escape Eltisweiss, have the duel on the bridge, and then the cutscene at the ruined castle right before converting it to your home base. Honestly it's like an hour or so to get through all of that the first time. There's no save points between starting the war battle and actually getting to Nowa's room the first time. Whatever it is about the castle town, the Switch will stutter and freeze up trying to load it. It's honestly a 50/50 shot it seems if the game will freeze or crash anytime you do anything there. I've had it freeze trying to play the card game, buying equipment and runes, putting stuff in storage, using the blacksmith, you name it, I've lost literal hours of time because of the freezes and crashes. My save file ended at 99 hours, but my actual game time (all spent on the 1 save file) ended at 106 hours. My big recommendation is save frequently. If you're not in the castle area, it's not as bad, but I would seriously save every 15 mins or so and if you're doing anything in the castle, save every 5 minutes. If you're building blueprints, save after every single one. I'm serious when I say it's that bad. Load times are also on the longer side too. It takes about 10 seconds to get into each battle, and even opening menus has a lag of a few seconds. Load times don't generally bother me, but it can get frustrating. The graphics and sound were good, no issues there that I was able to notice. One other thing that I did notice is sometimes when you load into a new area, Nowa would be moving in the last direction you were pushing on the stick without you actually touching the controller. A quick movement in the opposite direction fixed this, but it was odd to have happen, and a little annoying when I would go downstairs in the castle only to have Nowa run right back upstairs.
I did have also have the ability to play on Gamepass via cloud gaming on mobile and PC. Those issues I've talked about with the Switch, nonexistent. Game pass ran the game smooth with no issues outside any from the cloud gaming itself. I've gotten to Hishahn on a hard mode file on Gamepass, so I've definitely had a chance to experience a good chunk of the content without the lag and freezing.
In the game's current state on Switch, it's hard to recommend for those reasons, and if you have another method to play the game, go that route for sure. At the same time though, this game is an easy one to recommend, just be prepared if you get it on Switch.
Kickstarter Backer Experience
I was also one of those that backed the game on Kickstarter, so I'd like to briefly touch on that too. The development process was honestly very smooth. Rabbit and Bear communicated regularly throughout the 4 year process and really tried to include feedback from the backers. There were a lot of stretch goals unlocked because of backers too. If certain goals hadn't been reached, we may never had gotten Beigoma in the game, as well as many other features. They allowed backers to vote on additional DLC content and even the look and design of characters (Markus almost looked like Diradhe because of how close the votes were from the backers). Overall I had a good experience, and will gladly back another game from Rabbit and Bear if that's the route they chose. I can't speak to the current woes for physical backers either as I decided to go full digital and didn't get any additional rewards. I do hope those get fixed for those people affected.
I would like to say this though. I can only imagine the level of work that goes into developing a game of this scope, especially with the small team they had. They had to make decisions that were going to make things a little easier on them, but still tried to find a happy medium to include promised content in some fashion, optional war battles were supposed to be something where other player's armies could attack your base and you would have to defend from them, for what they were able to bring to the table is honestly almost more than I could dream of. Suikoden and games like it were no longer being made, and Suikoden games scratch an itch in the RPG landscape that not everything can achieve. Eiyuden Chronicles gave me the feelings of playing a Suikoden game all over again. For that I will be thankful to Rabbit and Bear and wish them success in bringing more games to life, I will personally be supporting all their future endeavors so I can see more to this amazing game world.
TLDR
I have definitely said my peace about my experience and thoughts with this game. This is an easy recommendation for RPG lovers and people who played Suikoden and want a similar experience. There is plenty of content to sink your teeth into, and well worth your time and money. It's a great first game in the series (outside of Rising) and I can't wait to see how the world gets expanded.

Under the city, the Know It All is commanding his computerized slave, Brain Drain, to build him a few new mechanical servants to help him to kidnap the mayor.
"Master, I have something to show you. I've built myself a servant to do my bidding. Would you like to use him?" Brain Drain asks.
One of his drones brings in a dead Mike Luis, the seventeen-year-old, Asian teen with his rock-hard abs, and Highland Hills football team letterman jacket. The boy, with his buzz cut, looks like your average American teen from the 50s.
"Why did you bring me a dead body?" The Know It All asks.
"I am Brain Drain. He is not dead. My nano bugs have put him to sleep, so he feels as little pain as possible when we begin our work on him," Brain Drain says.
"What work do you imagine we'll be doing on this young man?" The Know It All asks his computer.
Brain Drain laughs, before removing part of Mike's brain with a laser attached to his computer console. As schematics for a machine-man hybrid appear on his console, Brain Drain straps Mike to an operating table, and begins his work.
As he watches his servant build himself a slave of his own, The Know It All is impressed.
After twenty-seven hours of surgery, The Know It All and Brain Drain have built a new monster with which to attack the city under the cover of darkness.
Their machine-man, a cyborg with spider legs, and the head and body of a human, with crab cracker arms, and one laser eye, is sent out to terrorize the city.
The cyborg, with its entirely metal, lower body, and metal arms, looks around, and demands to know why he can't feel his legs.
"Mike Luis… Is that your name?" The Know It All asks.
"It is. And who might you be?" Mike asks.
"You can call me Master from this point on," he says.
The sad look on Brain Drain's face says it all; his master has just stolen his creation.
As The Know It All looks his way, Brain Drain smiles quickly, hiding his disappointment with his master.
The Know It All tells Mike that his father was working with a superhero when a shockwave hit, and everything went crazy. "We tried to rebuild you as best as we could, but… Well, these were the only parts we had on hand, and all we wanted to do was save you. God, I'm so sorry that this happened to you…" He says crying his crocodile tears, hoping to sway Mike into joining his side.
"I want to see myself," Mike says, unable to cry with the live wires, and electrodes sticking out of his face.
After looking at himself in the mirror, Mike smashes it, and demands to know where his father is.
"He's getting a medal from the mayor. If only there was a way to get to him, and stop him once and for all..." The Know It All says. "By the way, if you're going to be a villain, you'll need a new name. How about Robo Wrecker?"
Mike smiles after hearing his new name, and is about to leave the underground hideout when Brain Drain calls out to him, and asks if he'll need any help with his mission.
"Hell yeah!" Robo Wrecker replies as a swarm of drones fly over his head with guns, and robots attached to them.

***

That night, the Red Rider is meeting with Mayor Billingsley, and Doctor Richard Luis, who stopped the explosion from a superhero named Particle Man. Red Rider is also receiving an award as he and his team defeated a mutant villain named Big Dick Dinosaur: the huge, green T-rex with its colossal penis which shoots ejaculate on command.
Red hid behind a car while Big Dick Dino frosted his team like a cake with his incredible splooge cannon. He came up with a plan to stop the dinosaur, and vibrated until he was moving fast enough to slow down time, and, once time had slowed, Red began to send car after car at the Dino's cock, and underbelly.
After crushing the Dino's junk, and stomach, Red came out of hiding. As the news cameras arrived, he pointed to the crippled Dino, and flexed for the crowd.
The mayor goes on to say that the country of Marwick is lucky to have two such heroes as Doctor Richard Luis, and the Red Rider.
Speaking at a press conference before the award ceremony, the Mayor tells the press how grateful he is for all of the new heroes who have stepped up, and begun patrolling the city in the absence of the League of Heroes.
The rest of the No Siders stand off to the side of the stage, arms crossed, watching as their leader takes all the credit for saving the city.
Red sits in a folding chair along with Doctor Luis, and the two men chat for a bit before the mayor arrives, and begins speaking to the crowd.
Mayor Billingsley talks about the value of every superhero team which is protecting the city, and all the ones who will come after them.
"What about the villains?" Robo Wrecker asks, dropping down from the sky, his spider legs digging into the ground.
The men and women who are gathered around all run in terror as Red Rider orders his team to form ranks, and to follow him.
"We'd like to, but we're on crowd control, so I guess you'll have to take care of this yourself, boss," Power Fist says.
Robo Wrecker picks a woman up with his crab claws, and snaps her in half, her blood and guts spilling onto the ground.
As Red begins to vibrate, he tosses a bolt of lightning at the cyborg.
The machine-man is struck by the lightning, and he begins to malfunction.
As drones come dropping down to the ground, they begin firing at the people in the crowd.
As they disperse, Power Fist uses the gems on her gauntlets to create energy shields around part of the city so the people can escape.
Metal Mouth is able to hack into the drone's motherboards, and shut most of them down, while Alonzo, and Old Man Gus, hide behind a group of children.
Makko bites the top off of a fire hydrant, and begins spraying water all over the remaining drones.
The battle drones all fall to pieces, and as they round up the remaining drones, Red Rider loses sight of Robo Wrecker, and of the mayor.

***

As he limps his way back to the underground with the mayor in his grasp, Robo Wrecker returns to his master, and hands him his new toy.
"Welcome, Mayor Billingsley/ I just wanted to say hello, and tell you that things are about to get really bad for you in a few minutes," The Know It All says, holding a drill.
The mayor screams in pain as his skull is pierced by the red-hot drill, and something is inserted into his skull.
The Know It All scrambles the mayor's brain, and replaces it with a mechanical brain which lights up, and glows bright pink.

***

After checking up on everyone who was taken, Red Rider, and his people, return to their hideout, and look for anything which they could use to track Robo Wrecker.
Using chips, and motherboards, from the fallen droids to track its GPS, Metal Mouth, and Alonzo, are able to track the droids to a power plant two towns over.
The group heads to the Justice Van, and piles in. The men are amazed by all the changes which Alliver was able to make to it. The Justice Van- which can now fly, and go underwater- is just incredible. It takes just fourteen minutes to reach the Luka Falls Power Plant, and, once they arrive, the No Siders see hundreds of drones guarding the facility.
Red begins vibrating at a high enough speed to stop the world, and he is able to walk in a fifth dimension, one where no one is able to move, or see him at all. Red is only able to maintain this state for twenty minutes before he begins to fade away, and get lost in the fifth dimension.
Red Rider, in his red, leather jacket, and matching pants with a black lightning bolt on the sides, and front of his jacket, runs through the storm until he reaches the power plant.
Alliver sits on Power Fist's lap, and he wonders where her uncle is.
"He's racing the speed storm. You can't see him, but he's there." Power Fist says.
Makko drinks some vodka with salt in it, and Metal Mouth looks on with a face which is frozen from rust.
Alonzo and Gus sit in the front seat of the Van, and play cards. The two of them trade cigarettes for beer as they play.
Red Rider enters the power plant, and with just eight minutes left before he fades away, finds the mayor tied up in the center of the plant. Red grabs him, and before he knows what's hit him, the mayor, and the Red Rider, are outside of the power plant, running for their lives.
Firing a flare in the air to alert his team, Red- who is weak, and bleeding from his ears, and mouth, after racing the speed storm- can barely run.
The Justice Van parks as the droids and drones begin to attack.
The mayor helps Red into the van, and the group flies away with over one hundred drones in pursuit.
Alliver tells his friends that he’s outfitted the Justice Van with many new toys, and weapons for their use.
Pressing a button on the side of the steering wheel, Alonzo sees that it's an EMP mine.
Firing the mine at one of the drones sends a shock wave all throughout the town of Luka Falls. Metal Mouth is also affected by the EMP, and is disabled for the rest of the trip home.
On the way home, Alliver and Alonzo try to repair Metal Mouth while Old Man Gus drives the van. Old Man Gus, however, is blind in one eye, and doesn’t see the building which he's about to crash into.
Power Fist, seeing that they are about to crash, uses her gem to create an energy shield around the Justice Van.
Alliver is impressed by Power Fist's magic, and he tries to hack into her gauntlet, wanting use it to create a shield around Metal Mouth, and the van, when they are in need.
As the Van crashes through a building, Mayor Billingsley demands to be let go, but Power Fist reminds him that he was just kidnapped, and needs to stay with them until they reach his office.
After crashing into the apartment building, the Justice Van refuses to start up. Alonzo tells Alliver to keep working on Metal Mouth while he tries to fix the van.
Alliver tells him that it might be smarter if he tries to fix the van as Alonzo isn't familiar with the changes which he's made.
"I'VE BEEN FIXING THIS VAN SINCE BEFORE YOUR LITTLE GREEN ASS SHOWED UP, AND I CAN FIX IT NOW!" Alonzo retorts, slamming the door, and popping open the hood of the van.
The inside of the van glows a bright, green hue, and the entire thing seems to be covered in some kind of metal-plastic.
Opening the door. Alonzo tells Alliver to fix the van while he works on Metal Mouth.
The little green man smiles, and hops out of the van.
Power Fist, in her most deadpan voice, asks Alonzo if he's fixed the van already.
"That's very funny, Wednesday Addams,” Alonzo says.
With the van fixed, the No Siders take off, leaving behind a fake card which the homeowners can call for reimbursement.
Driving out of the apartment, and back into the sky, Power Fist, who is now driving, takes the No Siders back to the mayor's office, where they hand the mayor off to his security team. He is rushed away.
After dropping off the mayor, Power Fist drives back to the junkyard, and she injects her uncle with a syringe filled with a red and black tornado.
Red begins to heal, and he fills the syringe with more of his blood, before putting it back where it was, and thanking his niece.

***

Power Fist is getting drunk with Makko, and Alonzo, when Red arrives. He asks to speak to his niece for a minute in private.
"Sure. What's up, Dunkcle?" She asks.
"I just wanted to thank you for saving me. I was at the point of death just then, but you brought me back. I just wanted to say thank you, booger head," Red says.
"You’re welcome, pig sticker. I just want you to know that I never would have let you die… unless I could be the one to kill you, that is," Power Fist laughs.
Red Rider and his niece share a few laughs as they walk around the junkyard. The two are enjoying themselves when the police show up, looking for Red Rider.
Officer Jones, and his new partner, Jesse Quick, arrest Red Rider, and tell him that the mayor has revoked his vigilante license, and is planning to disband all of the superhero teams in the city unless they join the police force.
Red is arrested for acting as a vigilante without a license, but, before he can drive off with her uncle, Power Fist asks him a question. "At what time did the mayor sign this order to suspend my uncle's vigilante license?"
"Two hours after he returned to his home. Why do you ask?" Officer Jones asks.
"Well, then you have no case against him. You see, my uncle wasn’t acting as a vigilante in the past two hours, so you have no grounds to arrest him, Officer Jones," Power Fist says.
Releasing Red Rider, Officer Jones laughs, and tells him that he doesn’t want to see him on the streets trying to save people anymore, or he'll be arrested.
Officer Quick looks around the junkyard, and she notices Makko. She stares for almost two minutes before Power Fist loudly asks her what she's looking at. "I just noticed you people seem to be living here in this junk yard, and I was wondering if that might be against the law?" Officer Quick asks, pointing at a pair of bunk beds where Makko and Metal Mouth are sitting together.
Officer Jones takes out his ticket book, and writes Red a bunch of tickets for his many violations. He also gives Red a court date to stand before a judge, telling him that, because of his former service as a hero, he'll be allowed to stand before the judge in his costume, and will most likely receive community service, and not be allowed back in the junkyard ever again.

***

Over the next two weeks, Red Rider begins working at a coffee shop called Speed Demon Deluxe Brew. All of the workers are speedsters, and each of them are able to take orders, and deliver coffee, at super speed. Red's uniform is a brownish-gray hat, and apron, as well as light brown slacks, and a white shirt with the logo of the company on it.
While he's working, the rest of the No Siders are spending their time looking for somewhere to live. Power Fist and Makko find a burned-out crack house on the wrong side of town- a part of the city called Crimeville.
The heroes of Crimeville are very overprotective of their part of the city. Superhero teams like Gang Bang and the South Side Sleuths fight each other for control over the crime-infested streets of Crimeville.
As they are walking the streets, Power Fist and Makko see a little girl being mugged by a group of older children. One of the boys is yelling at the girl in Spanish, and another, with a thick, French accent, laughs as the little girl is pushed to the ground.
Power Fist and Makko intervene, and send the boys running.
As they take off down the street, the little girl thanks Power Fist and Makko. The two then ask the girl why those boys were bothering her, and she tells them that her older brother beat up the biggest boy’s older brother, and cousin.
The girl looks up, and runs away in terror.
Looking behind herself, Power Fist sees a hovering superhero team called the Chicken Crew. The members of the Chicken Crew wear giant chicken costumes with masks, and capes.
The leader of the Chicken Crew demands to know who the hell the two new heroes in his part of the city are.
"We're not looking for trouble. We just wanted to help a little girl, that's all," Power Fist says.
Makko asks why Chicken Lord and his friends are dressed up like chickens.
"YOU DISRESPECTFUL, FISH-STINKING FUCK! YOU SPEAK ILL OF OUR COSTUMES, AND YOU SPEAK ILL OF THE CHICKEN GOD, ROY RODGERS!” Chicken Lord yells.
Power Fist tries to calm everyone down, but the Chicken Crew launches into their attack.
As they fire their eggs at Makko and Power Fist, Toilet King charges into the fight, and attacks a brown and white chicken man called King Chicken.
Power Fist throws her gauntlets at the Chicken Crew, and breaks Chica-Chica-Boom-Boom's leg, and Turkey Neck’s back.
The last man standing is Chicken Lord, and Makko swallows him whole, spitting out his costume, and cape.
Toilet King asks Power Fist what brings her to his neighborhood in the middle of the night.
"It's 4:30 PM. For some reason, the sun just doesn’t shine on this neighborhood. I don't know why," Power Fist says.
"I think a racist wizard must have done it, or something like that," Toilet King says.
Deciding to help his friends to find a place to live in Crimeville, Toilet King takes them to Wuthering Heights: a small, Latino neighborhood in the middle of Crimeville.
Wuthering Heights is a nice-enough place to stay in the morning, even though there is no sunlight in Crimeville.
Toilet King takes his friends to an abandoned lot called the greenhouse. He tells Power-Fist that if she and her friends are willing to put in the work. they can build a nice place on that lot. "It's only $5,000, and it's huge. The guy who bought it wanted to flip the land, and a group of his neighbors murdered him the night they found out what he planned to do. After that, the city took over the land, and, well, they just want to get rid of it for cheap," Toilet King says.
Power Fist and Makko head to the bank to find out how much they have to buy the abandoned lot.
With -$8 in their team bank account, the No Siders are forced to continue meeting at the junkyard.
The group is forced to wait until dark before they enter the junkyard, but without Red Rider as he is forced to wear an ankle monitor for his community service.
While meeting up at night, Power Fist reports that they are broke, and that they can't afford to move out of the junkyard. Alliver asks them why they don't just sell something of value, like water, or air molecules.
Alonzo explains to his little friend that, on Earth, gold, silver, and jewels are considered valuable.
Alliver is pleased to hear this as he has a machine which can turn air into gold and diamonds. "I believe I still have it with me. This machine is very useful as gold and diamonds are used to power my peoples’ ships, and lasers.”
Alliver creates a giant gold nugget, and hands it to Power Fist, who takes it to a jewelry store, and sells it for a fortune, taking the $500,000, and using $5,000 to buy the land, and the rest to fix up the junkyard so that they can live there.

***

While everyone is adjusting to their new lives, The Know It All is putting his plans into action, taking control of the mayor's robotic mind. He orders the mayor to begin disbanding every superhero team in the city.
Each team in the city is served with termination papers. The only team which is allowed to continue operating is the League of Heroes because of their injuries, and out of respect for their service.
Tiger Man, and Lucky Lady, are both almost completely healed, Mr. Invincible, and Castle Man, are still in critical condition, and Speed Demon was killed fighting the Golden Goons.
The mayor does as his master commands, and begins disbanding every superhero team in the city.
Arriving with the mayor's latte, and pumpkin bagel, Red Rider, whose face is concealed by a mask, hands the bagel to the mayor, who yells at him for not bringing him any cream cheese.
Enraged that this man is yelling at him after getting him fired from his team, Red dumps the man's latte over his head. Sparks begin to fly, and the mayor falls to the ground, dead.
As the mayor’s security team knocks on the door, Red grabs the mayor, and jumps out of the window behind the mayor's desk.
Hearing the sound of crashing glass, the mayor's security team comes running, but doesn’t find the mayor, or whoever took him.

***

Back in his apartment, Red has just called his niece to help him out, and to come to get the mayor. He waits ten minutes for her to arrive.
"What the hell did you do, Uncle Tomás?" Power Fist asks.
"MARCY, YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE ME! ALL I DID WAS DUMP A CUP OF COFFEE OVER HIS HEAD!” Red says.
Power Fist decides to take the mayor, and head to the team's new headquarters in Wuthering Heights.
Driving the Justice Van with Alonzo and Alliver, Power Fist discovers that Alliver and Alonzo have built a huge warehouse filled with alien teach, and sleeping pods, as well as cloaking technology.
In the morning, the police arrest Red Rider for attacking, and abducting, the mayor.
With all of the superhero teams disbanded, the police are forced to hire freelance, superpowered deputies to help them to arrest the Red Rider.
Not putting up a fight, Red lets himself be arrested, and to be taken to a superpowered prison called The Dampener.
While inside The Dampener, Red Rider joins up with a gang of mutants, and superheroes, called the Puritans. Their leader is Diamond Mine: a mutant whose skin is as hard as a pink diamond.
Red's Roommate is Chewy: a big Mexican with the power to eat anything, and spit out a fireball. Chewy introduced Red to Diamond Mine, and the two of them became fast friends.

***

Meanwhile, back in the junkyard, Alliver is cracking open Mayor Billingsley's skull. He trips a secret alarm in the mayor's head, sees a glowing light, and removes a bomb, handing it to Alonzo.
Before he can throw the bomb, it goes off in his hand, blowing both of his arms off, and a part of his jaw.
Alliver hears the explosion, and rushes to find Alonzo. He does a deep tissue scan once he finds Alonzo's body, and, after that, he decides to merge with Alonzo, something which his people can only do once in their lives as they will die as a result of the merge.
Alliver and Alonzo become fused together in a cocoon made of green slime, and hard green crystal.

***

On the streets of Bainbridge, Power Fist and Metal Mouth are patrolling the streets while Makko swims through the sewers, munching on rats, and alligators.
As he is making his way out of the sewers, a giant group of five man-sharks jump out of the water, and attack Makko.
"Hello, little brother. Did you miss us?" One of the sharks asks.
The big, blue, tiger shark picks his smaller brother up by his neck, and tosses him around.
The big blue shark pounds Makko's face into a burger with cheese, and curly fries, and, after the beating, the sharks leave Makko in a pool of his own blood.
Power Fist and Metal Mouth radio Makko to get his position, but the shark boy is unresponsive. Power Fist sends Metal Mouth back to headquarters while she goes to check on Makko.
Using the glow of her gauntlet gems to light the way, after searching a mile of underground sewer, Power Fist finds Makko's limp body. The shark lord is still breathing, and one of his twin hearts is still beating. Unlike most sharks, Makko, and other man sharks, have two to three hearts, and four lungs: two for breathing air, and two for breathing water.
Power Fist sees her friend beaten, and bloody, and she lifts him off of the ground, and carries him to the hospital.
The doctor on call is a witchdoctor named Doctor Zhivago. The man stands 6'5”, his face painted a bone white in the shape of a skull.
The big man drinks a potion, and spits it all over Makko, who begins to hyperventilate. The witchdoctor then removes a tube of salt water from his sleeve, and, after forcing Makko to transform into his shark form, pours the salt water into his gills.
The shark man begins crying blood.
Makko opens his eyes, and sees Power Fist standing over him. He strokes her face lovingly, until she catches his hand and pushes it away.
Power Fist leaves the hospital, and returns to the junkyard, where she finds the cocoon, putting up a shield around the junkyard.

***

Hey all. I recently started a new playthrough of Metamorphosis. I'm running into a bunch of issues, though.
For starters and most importantly, my character's hands are invisible in first person. I'll attach a few images to show you, but the gist of it is the guns show up but the hands do not. Unarmed is completely invisible.
Secondly, the Vault 87 exit that should've been accessible after becoming a Super Mutant is blocked by the normal inacessible door, so I don't get the chance to remake my character as you usually do.
No cheating was used to get to Vault 87, I played the story normally and performed no skips. I have also patched Fallout 3 with the Anniversary Patcher.
Any help would be very much appreciated. Here's what I'm running:
Bloodless Mess FINAL CASM_v1_2_3 Clarity - A Green Tint Remover - Clarity 2.3 Command Extender FO3 Dialogue Expansion for Role-Players v1.1 FO3 NMC's Pre - Generated LOD FO3LODGen Resources Marts Mutant Mod 1-RC61 FOMOD Ready Metamorphosis - Playable Super Mutant Race - Metamorphosis MTUI New Super Mutant Perks - NSMP V3.2 NMCs Texture Pack PERFORMANCE Pack SINGLE FILE FOR NMM NVAC - New Vegas Anti Crash (Not sure how useful this is, but Metamorphosis lists it as a requirement) OneTweak but Really Updated - OneTweak Out Of Memory Fix Portable Personal Terminal v4_1 SmoothLight v1 Stewie Tweaks The D.C. Interiors Project - DCinteriors_combo Edition Total Merge Updated Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch - OGG Visual Objectives (FOSE) Vortex Archive Invalidation
Thanks in advance!

Hey all. I recently started a new playthrough of Metamorphosis. I'm running into a bunch of issues, though.
For starters and most importantly, my character's hands are invisible in first person. I'll attach a few images to show you, but the gist of it is the guns show up but the hands do not. Unarmed is completely invisible.
Secondly, the Vault 87 exit that should've been accessible after becoming a Super Mutant is blocked by the normal inacessible door, so I don't get the chance to remake my character as you usually do.
No cheating was used to get to Vault 87, I played the story normally and performed no skips. I have also patched Fallout 3 with the Anniversary Patcher.
Any help would be very much appreciated. Here's what I'm running:
Bloodless Mess FINAL CASM_v1_2_3 Clarity - A Green Tint Remover - Clarity 2.3 Command Extender FO3 Dialogue Expansion for Role-Players v1.1 FO3 NMC's Pre - Generated LOD FO3LODGen Resources Marts Mutant Mod 1-RC61 FOMOD Ready Metamorphosis - Playable Super Mutant Race - Metamorphosis MTUI New Super Mutant Perks - NSMP V3.2 NMCs Texture Pack PERFORMANCE Pack SINGLE FILE FOR NMM NVAC - New Vegas Anti Crash (Not sure how useful this is, but Metamorphosis lists it as a requirement) OneTweak but Really Updated - OneTweak Out Of Memory Fix Portable Personal Terminal v4_1 SmoothLight v1 Stewie Tweaks The D.C. Interiors Project - DCinteriors_combo Edition Total Merge Updated Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch - OGG Visual Objectives (FOSE) Vortex Archive Invalidation
Thanks in advance!

Been playing since about 6 months after its release.
First on PS4, now on PS5.
I have yet to complete a game on the PS5 since it crashes often. The last 2 Ironman I tried, the saved file got deleted by the system after a crash.
Any solution? I love how tbe loading is so much quicker on ps5...

Been playing since about 6 months after its release.
First on PS4, now on PS5.
I have yet to complete a game on the PS5 since it crashes often. The last 2 Ironman I tried, the saved file got deleted by the system after a crash.
Any solution? I love how tbe loading is so much quicker on ps5...

I'm running frigate & wyze-bridge containers (and that is all it runs) in docker on a headless Debian 12 install in an older HP 500-054, which is MS-7778 (JasmineR) mobo with AMD A8-5500, 8G ram. Theoretically, the integrated graphics are radeon hd7560
lspci -nn grep -i vga
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Trinity [Radeon HD 7560D] [1002:9904]
I have a coral for detection in pcie mini card slot where the wifi was located. Wifi was non functional anyway...
Problem: I cannot get hardware accel working to save my life! I had it 'sorta working' with 4 cams, but it would occasionally crash to green screen. Sometimes this was a few min of running, sometimes days. After messing with it a bunch, I gave up on hardware accel and just use the CPU. This has been working very well for months. Now that I've added 2 more cameras, the cpu is pretty busy and the load averages around 4. If I enable hw accel now, the whole system gets crashy right away. frigate dies and the container restarts, I lose connection to an ssh session, and portainer access dies.
I could just continue with the high load, it seems to be ok.
Any thoughts on a video card I could add that would likely work "out of the box"?
Any thoughts on how I can figure out why the existing integrated graphics won't work?
code below:
compose file:
version: '3.9'
services:
frigate:
container_name: frigate
privileged: true
restart: unless-stopped
image: ghcr.io/blakeblacksheafrigate:stable
shm_size: "256mb" # update for your cameras based on calculation above
devices:
- /dev/apex_0:/dev/apex_0
- /dev/dri/renderD128 # for intel hwaccel, needs to be updated for your hardware
volumes:
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
- /opt/frigate/config:/config
- /mnt/data_drive2/nvr:/media/frigate
- type: tmpfs # Optional: 1GB of memory, reduces SSD/SD Card wear
target: /tmp/cache
tmpfs:
size: 1000000000
ports:
- "5000:5000"
- "1935:1935" # RTMP feeds
environment:
FRIGATE_RTSP_PASSWORD: "myPassword"
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME: radeonsi
config.yaml ( I uncomment the #hwaccel line when I want to try hdw accel )
mqtt: enabled: true host: 192.168.1.253 user: * password: * ffmpeg: #hwaccel_args: preset-vaapi input_args: preset-rtsp-restream #avoid_negative_ts make_zero detectors: coral: type: edgetpu device: pci #Global Object Settings objects: track: - person - dog - cat - horse - car filters: person: min_area: 5000 max_area: 100000 record: enabled: true retain: days: 10 mode: all events: retain: default: 14 mode: active_objects snapshots: enabled: true retain: default: 14 birdseye: enabled: true mode: motion # go2rtc: # streams: # DoorCam: # - rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/back-door #Cameras cameras: #doorcam DoorCam: ffmpeg: inputs: # High Resolution Stream - path: rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/back-door?mp4 roles: - record - detect zones: zone_2: coordinates: 768,538,768,857,0,773,0,621,227,587,324,532 #not directly in front of shop objects: - car detect: enabled: true width: 768 height: 1024 fps: 5 stationary: interval: 500 threshold: 5 objects: filters: car: mask: 210,594,324,542,251,516,0,536,0,618 birdseye: mode: continuous #northcam NorthCam: ffmpeg: inputs: - path: rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/new-north-cam roles: - record - detect record: enabled: true detect: enabled: true width: 1280 height: 720 fps: 5 stationary: interval: 50 threshold: 50 birdseye: mode: continuous objects: filters: car: mask: - 618,123,286,81,288,60,683,99 - 974,167,956,230,1280,377,1280,309 min_area: 500 horse: mask: - 227,270,0,268,0,145,227,106,407,100,574,125,548,302 - 1157,720,1280,720,1280,350,963,222,703,271,689,400 dog: min_score: .65 threshold: .80 cat: min_score: .65 threshold: .80 #southcam SouthCam: ffmpeg: inputs: - path: rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/new-south-cam roles: - record - detect record: enabled: true detect: enabled: true width: 1280 height: 720 fps: 5 stationary: interval: 50 threshold: 50 objects: filters: car: mask: - 845,163,631,131,458,123,368,121,243,125,252,145,361,145,696,176,1280,315,1280,258 horse: mask: - 285,163,303,226,501,306,1105,512,1151,279,708,187,544,161,360,151 dog: min_score: .7 threshold: .85 cat: min_score: .6 threshold: .75 person: min_score: .7 threshold: .80 birdseye: mode: continuous #Pasture Pasture: ffmpeg: inputs: - path: rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/pasture roles: - record - detect record: enabled: true detect: enabled: true width: 1280 height: 720 fps: 5 stationary: interval: 50 threshold: 50 objects: filters: car: min_score: .7 threshold: .85 horse: min_score: .7 threshold: .85 dog: min_score: .7 threshold: .85 cat: min_score: .6 threshold: .75 person: min_score: .7 threshold: .80 birdseye: mode: continuous #driveway driveway: ffmpeg: inputs: - path: rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/driveway roles: - record - detect record: enabled: true zones: zone_0: coordinates: 981,720,0,720,0,424,835,407 #close to shop door zone_1: coordinates: 869,355,0,356,0,146,429,0 #entrance to drive area detect: enabled: true width: 1280 height: 720 fps: 5 stationary: interval: 50 threshold: 50 objects: filters: car: mask: - 981,720,0,720,1212,187,1253,233 #against shop - 1212,187,1253,233 #hot tub min_score: .6 threshold: .80 person: mask: - 36,91,59,86,56,0,31,0 #left side maple tree - 1086,179,1019,162,993,307,1102,323 #right side maple tree birdseye: mode: continuous #CAT CAM catcam: ffmpeg: inputs: - path: rtsp://192.168.1.249:8554/v3-49 roles: - record - detect record: enabled: true detect: enabled: true width: 1280 height: 720 fps: 5 stationary: interval: 50 threshold: 50 objects: filters: dog: min_score: .7 threshold: .85 cat: min_score: .6 threshold: .75 person: min_score: .7 threshold: .80 birdseye: mode: continuous

I updated my system from 21.1.3 to 24.0.0 on May 18 20:00 using pacman -Syu. The total download size was 4GB.
The following day I restored to an earlier point before the update(May 18 18:00) using timeshift
Today(May 27) I ran the same command. To my surprise the total download size was 68mb which was for firefox.
Which leads me to believe update files for packages are stored somewhere? I am really curious how pacman works. I mean the system had fully updated and any update files should have been gone.

So this is my second day with the Neptune 4 plus. Yesterday I was able to print a couple of projects and they worked perfectly. Today, I turned on the printer and the Z axis was crashing into the bed. Finally figured out how to get it reset and I releveled the bed about 3 time. Now I tried to remake the same file and it doesn't work. Pulls up from the bed, the pattern is all separated. Please help...

“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.

I'm a level 50 and have around 85 hours on Outlast Trials but I've only been able to talk to the engineer maybe 3 times. Whenever I click on him to upgrade my rigs, the game crashes and then I have to restart my computer. Does anyone else have this issue? How do I fix this?
Note: I've already checked on Steam and verified that I have all the files downloaded. I don't know what else it could be. I just wanna upgrade my rigs 😭

Hey yall. I've got a question to the community so maybe someone will be able to help me with the game. Ever since i installed Warzone it refuses to boot up. I have downloaded the game throu steam, and tried multiple ways of getting the game to work with no avail. Here's the list of steps I took:

1. Checked the game files for any coruption. (After verification no files were falied to validate)
   
2. Run both Steam and CoD as administrator.
   

3.Updating the graphic drivers.

1. Updating Windows.

The best part is when I tried to get to the propeties no compatibility tab was even shown so I couldn't even change the settings to try to run the game at all. When opening the game the play button changes into "Stop", the cursor spins for solid 10-15 sec and then the game shuts off like nothing happened. No launcher shows up nothing. Same with external crash handler, cursor spins for a split second and then nothing.
Im currently reinstaling the game as the last resort because I'm running out of ideas. Also I would prefer to have the game downloaded at Steam rather than Battle.net so please spare ur time giving that idea.
After the game reinstalls ill post an update if everything works or the game is still broken.
Any ideas how to fix the issue would be welcome!

Imagine my surprise when I try to do a trial restore for a client, and find that the .db file that informs the entire backup is now excluded. I understand them not backing up system and OS files, but this .db file is essential to SQL Anywhere.
So I check 3 other dental clients who are backing up to CrashPlan Pro. That file is backing up on those other 3 clients.
So can we just not trust CrashPlan Pro any more? If that file is excluded in today’s client, are they going to exclude it some day soon for others?