Context: I model small buidlings & do my best to learn all I can online, however now I have been asked to complete a tiny home in a traditional Japanese style.
Issue: I have found some good books, but theyre written in Japanese for Japanese & I am Australian and cannot speak Japanese. 😥
Note: No I am not the architect, my drawings/renderings/cad will have to be checked/OK'd/finalised by an architect. But Id like to do more than just 'sketch an idea'.
Seeking recommendations for books that not only show pictures (seems all there is?) but explain the traditional types of houses, the 'sections' of the house and reason for them being there, their use, building techniques, home plans/sketches, materials, etc.
Im sure I will need multiple books in a mini-library to complete the research; maybe Im looking for architecture textbooks to go with the picture books on gardens & aesthetics (?) which is why I suppose I need recommendations.
Thank you in advance.

Tried to post this with a throwaway but the rules wouldn't allow it, never mind.
About 9 months ago I went No Contact with my MIL after she behaved so unforgivably awfully she caused my husband to have a nervous breakdown requiring months of therapy and medication. My husband went extremely low contact. He visited her on her birthday and at Christmas but has asked her repeatedly not to contact him.
She changed her abusive tactics and her current game now is to text him to say how much she misses him (not me, or her grandchild, but never mind). And when he doesn't reply (he never does) the next text is a demand for him to return some random item she gave us that we've had for years.
So, last month when he didn't reply, she demanded her towel rail back. An old, rickety wooden thing that we've had for years, that she has no room for.
She knows we use it as it matches our bathroom aesthetic (old and rickety lol). Whatever.
Well, I was fed up with her. So I went round the house and boxed up every darn thing I could find that had been given/lent to us. Baking tins, books, random mugs.
Then I urinated on her towel rail.
Really well. I even soaked some cotton wool and left it on the cracks in the paint so it would soak through into the wood.
I was hoping that the scent of my p1ss would send her new puppies into a peeing frenzy. I don't know if it did. But I like to imagine it!
That's all. She peed me off so I peed on her things.
I haven't told my husband. But it's too funny not to share.
Thanks xx

There are more questionnaires in my pdb profile
Part 1: Logic
Section 1 How do you work? Why do people go to work? Are there any parameters that determine whether you can do work or not? What are they? How do you determine the quality of work? How do you determine the quality of a purchase? Do you pay any attention to it? There is a professional next to you. How do you know they are a professional? How do you evaluate their skill? If you struggle to do something, how do you fix that? Do you know if your performance is better or worse than others? How do you measure the success of a job? What standard do you use? Do you pay attention to it? When should you deviate from this standard?
I usually study in a stable pace and it's not an extensive routine, since it's not necessary for me to spend five hours looking at a book to learn what I need. A work is greatly done if it reaches the purpose it was started for in the first place. With a purchase, it's the same thing. The success of a job is defined by the same metric: something is successful if it can do what it was supposed to. Someone works well if they are capable to do what their job demands or ever more than the necessary. If I struggle to do something, I'll research how to make it correctly and observe how the people who know do that. The quality of my performance depends, if I don't care I won't put much effort, if I care, I try hard to do something great and I'm going to feel very bad if it does not work.
Section 2 What is a whole? Can you identify its parts? Are the parts equivalent to the whole? What does "logical" mean? What is your understanding? Do you think that it correlates with the common view? How do you know you are being logical? What is hierarchy? Give examples of hierarchies. Do you need to follow it? Why or why not? Explain how hierarchy is used in a system you are familiar with. What is classification? How does classification work? Why is it needed and where is it applied? Give examples. Are your ideas consistent? How do you know they are consistent? How do you spot inconsistency in others' ideas?
A whole is the 100%, something formed by a lot of smaller parts that are formed by even smaller parts and it's an eternal cycle of composition. The parts are identifiable, and they are a whole for itself, that together with other intire structures form an even bigger one, that can form something even more complex with other structures, and so go on. Logic is deciding by impartial means what is correct and what is incorrect, and if I'm doing this, I'm being logical. Since it's something affected by perception, it can show up in many ways. Some kinds of logic can correlate with common sense, but I don't think my views do so, mostly. Hierarchy is a podium that characterises the strength of a determined trait in it's elements, like the one existing in biology to classify the animal kingdom by it's complexity, that goes from porifera to chordates, and social hierarchies present in the intire world, usually measuring wealth of those who live in a certain society. Hierarchies in areas of study is useful since it organizes similar concepts to facilitate our lives, but the social ones I simply have no respect for and I can't even understand it. It doesn't make sense that people are treated better or worse because of characteristics they can't control. Classifications are groupings made due to one or more common characteristics that their elements have. It's needed everywhere for the same reason hierarchies are needed in areas of study. Another biology example: animals are characterized by being vertebrates or invertebrates due to the presence or absence of skull and spine. I think my ideas are consistent. They aren't unchangeable, but I make an effort to make them make sense. I reflect about them a lot to spot contradictions and fix it. I spot inconsistencies in other's train of thought almost immediately. I often don't feel like I'm paying attention to what someone is saying till they contradict themselves. I wake up in less than one second and point it. They usually get mad at this but is not my problem they didn't reflect before speaking. Sometimes I do this to help or only to show the person discussing with me don't have a coherent discourse. It's cool.
Part 2: Sensing
Section 3 Can you press people? What methods do you use? How does it happen? How do you get what you want? What do you do if you have to work to get what you want? How do you deal with opposition? What methods do you use to defend your interests? When do you think it's ok to occupy someone's space? Do you recognize it? Do others think you are a strong-willed person? Do you think you have a strong will?
I can but it's kinda difficult because of my shy behavior. I do so by persuasion so the person notice what not doing something would be bad for them (only for them, I know people are egoistic and this is the only way to affect them). I don't usually push other people around, unless their actitude is putting me in disadvantage, then, I'll make an effort to make the person do something. I am cautious and analytical with opposition, but not openly hostile. I try to live in peace unless the other person wants to invade my space. This isn't tolerable and I"ll just do what I always do: reasoning and asking so many questions that the person will contradict itself, I will point it and they're gonna hate me for the rest of their lives (or just reflect, whatever). It's worth it. Well, if the person is not doing harm to anybody, no. My approach to life is much about reciprocity, if you don't mess with me I won't mess with you and vice-versa. I'm never hostile to people first. If I act this way, it wasn't me who started (100% of time, really). I'm really sensitive to invasions of my space, so I always try to be careful and not make them uncomfortable. I don't think I'm known for being strong willed, but I don't think it's thar easy for me to give up. When I want something, I become extremely argumentative and persistent on getting it. It doesn't matter if it's material or a life goal, if I really want it I will try to find a way to reach without harming myself.
Section 4 How do you satisfy your physical senses? What examples can you give? What physical experiences are you drawn to? How do you find harmony with your environment? How do you build a harmonious environment? What happens if this harmony is disturbed? What does comfort mean to you? How do you create it? How do you express yourself in your hobbies? How do you engage yourself with those things? Tell us how you'd design any room, house or an office. Do you do it yourself, or trust someone else to do it? Why?
Being alone in my bedroom while reading something I like, talking to my friends online or listening to loud chaotic music while running around the room like crazy. If I can't control the experience, I'll always take something more peaceful since I'm easily overwhelmed. It's difficult to build the perfect conditions to make me feel at ease and at home, usually I need help with it. I put things I like around me but it doesn't seem enough. When I don't like the environment, I just leave. It's not that complex. I engage on drawing or reading whenever I want. I don't think I express myself emotionally on those, tbh. I'll try to design my room alone, but help is welcome. Just don't be pushy and listen to me. In the end, what I want is want will prevail, after all.
Part 3: Ethics
Section 5 Is it acceptable to express emotions in public? Give examples of inappropriate expression of emotions. How do you express your emotions? Can you tell how your expressions affect others in a positive or negative way? Are you able to change your demeanor in order to interact with your environment in a more or less suitable way? How do you determine what is suitable? In what situations do you feel others' feelings? Can you give examples of when you wanted to improve the mood of others? How do others' emotions affect you? How does your internal emotional state correlate or contrast with what you express?
It depends what kind of emotion it is and the context where you are. Like, if would be really weird if someone started laughing in the middle of a funeral or throwed a tantrum at someone's wedding party. I don't express myself that much, it feels unnatural. It's difficult to notice if my mood affects others if they don't show it explicitly, like demonstrating concern or smiling when I'm around. I think I am adaptable to my environment but social interaction overwhelms me, so I just stay silent looking at what others do and mimicking them. It's difficult to feel what others feel if they don't show it explicitly as well, like suddenly starting to cry in front of me. I try to comfort them by suggesting solutions and awkwardly petting their back. I'm not great with emotional support. Other people's mood affect me as well. If I'm in a place where everyone are happy, I will at least try to smile and not break the atmosphere. I often don't think the way I express myself match with my feelings, tbh.
Section 6 How can you tell how much emotional space there is between yourself and others? How can you affect this space? How do you determine how much you like or dislike someone else? How does this affect your relationships? How do you move from a distant relationship to a close one? What are the distinguishing characteristics of a close relationship? How do you know that you are a moral person? Where do you draw your morality from? Do you believe others should share your beliefs on what's moral? Why? Someone you care about is acting distant to you. How do you know when this attitude is a reflection of your relationship?
To be honest, not really. My conscience of it is weak, I often tend to act like an intimate and to people that I'm not and vice versa. I notice if I act with uneasiness towards someone. If I am, I probably don't like them and it's better to maintain a bigger distance. If I don't, I probably like em. But even if I don't like someone, I won't be hostile, I'll just be kinda cold and distant. I'm easily overwhelmed by social interaction so... relationship problems aren't lacking. Even if I like someone, I tend to maintain a distance from them, and sometimes it makes them think I don't like them, which isn't the case, and I have to explain myself. Really bad fr. To get close to people, I try to interact with them more often and with time we will become closer. Ig a close relationship has more sharing of personal information than a more superficial one. A moral person is someone who take their values very seriously and don't sacrifice them easily. I am strict with my principles, so... guess I can considerate myself one. I care if people only respect and share basic values such as honesty and respect. The more complex ones I don't really care if it's different unless it puts me in risk. I don't worry that much if this happens for a small amount of time, I'll only think the person wants space. But if they ignore me for weeks I'll get worried if something happened.
Part 4: Intuition
Section 7 How can you tell someone has the potential to be a successful person? What qualities make a successful person and why? Where would you start when looking for a new hobby? How do you find new opportunities and how do you choose which would be best? How do you interpret the following statement: "Ideas don't need to be feasible in order to be worthwhile." Do you agree or disagree, and why? Describe your thought process when relating the following ideas: swimming, chicken, sciences. Do you think that others would draw the same or different connections? How would you summarize the qualities that are essential to who you are? What kind of potential in you has yet to be actualized and why?
I think so. When someone have an affinity with a subject and is really passionate and determined to reach something, I already see a potential. Looking at what my friends do to chill and researching. Mostly researching. I like looking for new opportunities even if I won't put them into practice. It's really refreshing. I choose what possibility to follow based on what I like, what I can handle and the benefits it will give me. I agree, having ideas is fun for itself. Of course is great to put an idea to life, but it isn't always necessary. Sometimes people just wanna have fun with brainstorming. I'll create a phrase because idk how to relate those 3 things: someone went swimming in the pool to rescue the chicken that will be used for the science experiment. Idk If people would create the same phrase but I can't imagine other. Prudent, quiet, observant, curious, intelligent, gentle. They're great now, but I still wanna improve all this traits. Once my psychiatrist said that I'm really good at arithmetics and have potential to become an incredible architect based on the way I mix calculus with aesthetic patterns.
Section 8 How do people change? Can you describe how various events change people? Can others see those changes? How do you feel and experience time? Can time be wasted? How? Is there anything that cannot be described with words? What is it? If so, how can we understand what it is if language does not work? How do you anticipate events unfolding? How can you observe such unfoldments in your environment? In what situations is timing important? How do you know the time is right to act? How do you feel about waiting for the right moment?
People change gradually and for a ridiculous huge amount of reasons. They aren't really perceptive at first, but if you analyze how the person thought and acted in the past and how they act know, it's possible to see differences. If they are for the better or worse... Well it depends. Time is a non-living force of nature that passes mercilessly with those under it, doesn't matter if you're ready or not, this isn't relevant. I wish I could still be a child, but time doesn't wait, right? It's fast when I don't want it to be and slow if I want it to be faster. I don't think time can be wasted, to be honest. Some things can be more worth it than others, but you can learn something with everything you do. And also: rest isn't a waste of time. Not being conventionally productive doesn't mean you don't care about your time. I only means you choose part of it to take care of yourself and respect your limitations. Some things are difficult to explain in words, but I don't think is impossible. If it's difficult for you to express something, try reflecting on this concept while writing buzzwords about it in a paper. You will be able to find a coherent way to explain. This always works for me. Everything is formed of patterns and they often repeat, so is just paying attention to it and see what happened in the last cicle(s). I do think timing matters. I wouldn't give bad news immediately for someone that's celebrating an achievement, for example. I tend to wait for a better moment that the people aren't feeling anything strongly and can react prudently, since it will have the best chance of something working.

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Memory Transcription Subject: Shasha, arxur student at the AIS
Date [Standardized human time]: June 24, 2161
The first thing to greet me on the AIS Minecraft Server was a menu. My avatar was a blocky arxur with a pixelated texture generated from my student ID photograph. Luckily I was able to fix up that texture a bit but I still downloaded it to give it a better workover later.
I spawned into the world. Apparently I was on some kind of balcony overlooking a quite large town. It had no cohesive style whatsoever. One building could have come from an arxur history book, the next wouldn't be amiss today on a former federal world and the one beside that was basically a mashup of a Gojid fortification and at least three different human religious buildings.
The streets were busy but not overcrowded and while most traveled on foot some had mounts, based on earth animals. The skies were similarly but less busy, with flying species and the occasional flying mount. And… was that guy rowing a golden boat through the air?
I looked around the room and saw the glances of amazement in my dormmates eyes. In-game the square sun started to set. The others had gathered around me and we're staring at the town as well.
"All right, have you looked enough? We still have some paperwork to file."
With that said I turned around and looked at the building. It was like a massive fantasy castle but with a kind of cyberpunk aesthetic. All over the towers were lights in any and all colors. On a screen that actually gave off light it looked even more amazing than the comics I had read back home.
Following a wide staircase down I reached the immigrations hall. Large screens informed me of where to go to receive full player status. The paperwork included a few questions on general server rules, Netiquette and some personal questions. After a couple of minutes I was trough and left on the other side.
Bill and Bob, who must have entered immigrations after me, were already out waiting in front of a fountain. I sat down beside them and we waited for the others who exited shortly after me. This side of the spawn building looked more like a massive park, with fountains and statues and some trees. Once we all had gathered we made our way over to the guild registry.
The building itself looked like a wealthy artisans house straight out of a fantasy rpg’s illustration. The humans did the actual work here, the others and I just endorsed the funding of our guild called ‘The Thrilling Three’. Of course we were six not three but we hadn’t thought about it and now had to come up with a name on the spot.
Leaving the guild registry we headed over the town arsenal, a relatively unassuming building of muted pastel yellow sandstone. Inside we received some initial gear: tools, mostly of wood, but a single pickaxe of stone, wooden swords, bows and some arrows as well as armor of leather and cotton. Additionally each of us received a full stack of bread each. With this equipment we set off towards the spawn town’s nether portal.
This part of town was much busier than the previous parts. Dozens of people came out of the portal station and just as much got in. The portal itself was inside an underground station, accessible by two stairwells, one for people going to the portal the other for those coming from it. The actual portal chamber was large and except for the floor dimly lit. Our group approached the purple swirls. People before us vanished while others appeared. Our turn.
The purple engulfed me. Aaaaaand… Loading screen!
Moments later we were down in the nether. The portal chamber looked pretty much like the one in the overworld, except the brickwork was red instead of gray. And just like there we were out with the masses within moments. The stairs down were shorter this time and ended in an area overlooking multiple platforms for trains going in all directions. Bob and Bill told us to wait before going down to one of the platforms.
“Any Idea what Bill and Bob are up to?”
“Well” Sorkol said “They mentioned something about knowing server staff…”
“We are” “still in the” “same room” “as y’all,” “you know?” they reminded us “And yes” “we’re talking” “to a friend” “to get us a nice” ”piece of land.”
“May I please have some more garlic bread?” Liria asked.
“Sure” “anyone else?” Bill and Bob responded. And this time I tried some too. Delicious. Now I need to find someone nice to figure out whether it’s truly better than sex. But at least in theory they’re humans and no known species has a libido as strong as them.
A minute or so later they reemerged and beckoned us to follow to the southwards express platform. A train designated 'special service' entered shortly after us. Bill and Bob gave each of us a ticket and we boarded that train.
It started slowly, taking a quite confusing way through turns, climbs and points. Then we reached a straight line of two parallel rails stretching into the distance and the train started accelerating.
The rather boring dark red of the tunnel was soon replaced by a glass corridor allowing a full view of the nether caverns. Below lay an ocean of lava above floated massive ghasts. The ocean flew by in a matter of moments. Between a coast of black rock with a massive lava river and a turquoise forest lay a little village of weird people Bob and Bill called piglins.
But it all flew by in moments. Different forest, lava ocean, tunnel through a red wall of rock. All interspersed with piglins, skeletons, ghasts and magma cubes as well as the occasional station for the slow rails meandering below us. It began to drag on. Another twenty or so minutes later the train started to slow down again.
Another minute or two later we arrived at the half finished station. Instead of intricate lanterns this was lit by torches and candles. Half the walls were missing and exposed various conduits, tubes and pipes. The portal back to the overworld just regular size in a room clearly meant to upsize later. It wasn’t even connected to the central area by stairs but a simple ladder. But this time I was able to see what was up in the upper levels of the chamber: several platforms, some with oversized crossbows mounted to them. A defensive installment.
Another purple journey into a loading screen later, we reappeared in the overworld. The station was just a hole in the ground with a ladder leading out. Nothing more. Up on the surface however there was a small outpost surrounded by a fence. A forge, a storehouse and some houses as well as an empty lot designated ‘tavern’.
Bill and Bob seemed to have an idea of where to head from here so we all just followed. Any question about our destination was just met with “You’ll see” from one, both or the other. And after about one ingame day we saw. Right at the coast of an ocean stood a single, almost needle shaped mountain.
“Our idea was” “hollowing the whole thing out” “add a lake to the top” “with a glass bottom” “and then just build rooms into the side!” the human twins explained.
“And maybe a harbor on the ground…” Sorkol mused.
“And a lighthouse on top” Liria finished.
I looked over at Kalsa. “Sounds good to me, how about you?”
“Sure, as long as I get some balconies to fly off,” she answered.
And so we had found our home in the marvelous world of Minecraft.
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Squinting slightly against the glaring sunshine, I make my way into the beach. It's early morning, clear and bright. After a period of orientating myself with the layout of the beach, I select a suitable spot and take a seat.
I am glancing casually out at the bay, not looking for anything in particular, just generally surveying the sunkissed sands, and rolling seas. Holidaymakers and tourists lie in various states of undress, sipping drinks, chatting happily and sunbathing in the unyielding morning sun. Locals tour the beach in wide brimmed straw hats hawking fruits and insects to snack on, or brightly coloured woven bracelets, small wooden carvings of various creatures or skulls. Meanwhile surfers skim over waves, splashing and delighting in the fractious strength of the waves as seabirds whirl overhead. There is a deep sense of joy in the air, bright mornings give the feel of unlimited potential - the day could still take any shape.
I inhale deeply, breathing in the early morning sun, the almost oppressive heat, tempered by the salty ocean breeze. I feel the suns heat, steady and warm on my skin. Another deep breath. A moment's contentment. No demand is laid upon me, no request is made of me.
I let my thoughts wander, lazily, as if my very mind is also soporifically sunning itself. I, for once, am able to clear my mind, breathing deeply. This is a beautiful moment. A perfect moment. I wish I could live in this moment forever, the sun fixed in the sky, forbidden from continuing it's inevitable journey. As I sit, I feel the moment stretch, the waves crash a little slower, the hubbub of a busy beach quietens, subdues. For a moment, just an instant, I feel as though I reside within a painting, a snapshot insulated from time.
As soon as I think that, the moment is over, and cloud rolls in front of the sun, casting a shadow over the once golden sands.
I have, almost my whole life, played host to a shapeless sadness, it lives in the pit of my chest. Understand, this is not the sadness of of a grieving mother, nor the sadness of the broken gambler. It is nothing so specific. It swells in my breast like an animal, feeding on happiness. It is sadness without reason or cause, remorse or recause. It lives like a great tick, greedily glutting itself on any joy I inadvertently feed it. Sensing my momentary contentment in my perfect moment, it stabs sharply at my heart, creasing the lines in my face. The moment is ruined, and misery crawls out from my chest, voraciously devouring every scrap of golden sunlight that I had temporarily housed within my heart.
My journey to this coastal town, retracing steps of my youth to return to a place I remember warmth and joy, was supposed to reawaken those old feelings. The simple joys of delighting in nature's beauty, basking in sun. I realise, as the breeze picks up, the coolness sharply piercing the suns warmth, that this journey has been a terrible mistake.
The flickers, dying embers of the flame I used to bear, cannot be rekindled.
My mind wanders, as seabirds listlessly whirl overhead, to the women I have loved in my life, now hopelessly lost to me. I recall old friends, acquaintances all scattered and lost throughout my life. I realise that I don't really care about them, I am instead mourning for my youth, forever beyond recall, but not recollection. It's ironic that my fading memory (hastened I'm sure by my frequent chemical refuges from misery) saddens me, making me wonder what I might have lost, while the memories that persist bring me no joy anyway - either the memory is already cocooned sadness, or the joy of the memory taunts me that it is forever beyond my ability to repeat.
It's getting later. I've lain here for a long time. The coldness of the breeze is starting to develop a bitter edge, as the warmth of the sun is fading, as the sun is chased lower and lower in the sky by the encroaching cloak of night. Stars shine feebly, a pale imitation of that morning sun, similar in aesthetic perhaps, but without warmth or light. Instead of calling to mind azure seas kissed with golden sun, they fill me with the hideous chill of the universe - infinite void stretching beyond imagination - an eternity of cold and dark. And it beckons us all, doesn't it?
There are very few holiday makers left now, the herd thins. Drawn away, I suppose, to other lighter pursuits. I remain, sitting and thinking. I recall the morning sun, how it's incandescent splendour gave me that perfect moment of respite. Peace.
The stars darken now. The night sky is becoming only black, as the celestial fireflies splutter out. Darker and darker.
I wonder who will find me. I wonder if anyone will care. Appropriately enough, as I post this message, I am indeed choosing to eschew sleep, forsaking dreams in favour of daydreams of my youth. Happier times, perhaps. But, as much as I struggle to stay awake, seeking refuge in my sepia soaked memory, the cold and dark of night closes in around me, calling me - as it does you, as it does us all.
And so I sign off, forgive me.
It may seem like I am signing off before the end of the story, but the doorway I am about to cross, is one we all cross through alone.
It feels I ought to leave you with some wisdom, some lesson you can take from me.
Surely, with a lifetimes knowledge, there must be something valuable. But all I can think is that night calls us all, and however you chose to live your life, the choices you make and people you love, all of it, eventually is enveloped by the oncoming night. I suppose, in the end, all I can tell you is that you should try to enjoy your day at the beach.

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To begin with, the shutters are an element that enhances security. Their existence forms a barrier against attempts of assault through the property. Privacy is one of the aspects that guarantee the bars, to fully enjoy your home is something you can not despise. After all, it is the place where you can rest and relax without any external disturbance.
Wood is a material widely used in construction since ancient times. It has been used to make tools since Paleolithic times. Later, as cutting and carving techniques improved, its use spread to other areas, including construction. Today, the use of wood is so widespread that an entire house can be built from it alone.
These railings will prevent prying eyes by simply closing them. In short, wooden grilles offer us a series of benefits that you can't pass up. In addition, you have already seen the number of types that you have at your fingertips.
Wood is a very versatile material, which allows the user to completely transform any room and professionals, create all kinds of wooden shutters, in addition to its aesthetic warmth, wood also acts as a great thermal insulator, which resists well to inclement weather and, with good maintenance, has a great lifespan.
Unquestionably the best material when it comes to putting fences in your garden, wood will help you to give a distinctive point in your property, so look for the experts, we are the best fence company Chicago you can find, call now and take advantage of our prices! 773-278-4762

Hello everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster here! Apologies for any wonky grammasyntax, English isn't my first language! I was also unsure whether to flair this post "discussion", "fashion" or "story", they all fit in their own way!
Lately, I've been getting more into goth aesthetics. I've always been into the music and admired certain looks born out of certain goth subcultures, but I'd been reluctant to give it a shot myself because I was too afraid that some elements of the goth/alt masculine styles I admire (such as long(er) hair, certain types of black makeup, flamboyant accessories and black nail polish) which lean more androgynous would just be read as feminine on me, and "negate" my butchness, which I consider as both my sexuality and my gender identity (I'm genderqueer and go by he/they pronouns)
(Also another thing that was stopping me was that I was never really allowed to dress goth as a tween/teen, but now that I'm an adult in uni and out of the house, I can do whatever with my appearance)
Well, at some point I said "screw it" and just decided to go for it. And I loved it! It felt good, I felt like myself (something that doesn't happen when I do stuff like try on a dress) and the makeup didn't make me look "feminine", as I feared, it just made me look way cooler! I also keep my hair in a deathhawk with long bangs now, I used to have it in a sort of mullet before but I think I like this better on me. (Also, I adore shaving my sides in my bathroom using a haibeard trimmer and a handheld mirror, it's downright euphoric!)
I don't go goth full time, few people do that. But when I do, I don't feel any "less butch" than I feel in my usual bare face, hoodie/t-shirt from the men's section and cargo pants.
There are some lines I won't cross, however. I don't want to wear white foundation and don't want to shave off my eyebrows, as both of these actions would cover up features of mine such as my olive skin tone and my very dark, bushy eyebrows, which have always been a pride of mine, and I don't want to wear dresses, skirts or tops with certain cuts (staples of more feminine goth fashion), because amazing as they might look, they're really not for me.
So, anyway, my question is if there's any other goth/alt butches here, or really any butches who have more of an unconventional or androgynous masc aesthetic. If so, how does that intersect with your butchness? Do you have any experiences or tips you want to share?

It's me!
These are my notes for my video on Blood Meridian. Will also upload reviews of Chapters 11 and 23 specifically, as requested by a few people. Enjoy!
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blood meridian notes
This lecture is founded specifically on the work of Dr. Michael Lynn Crews, assistant professor at Regent University in Virginia. In a 2014 paper he plumbed the Wittliff Collection at Alkek Library in San Marcos, Texas, where McCarthy has provided all of his notes, drafts, and correspondences. He essentially made a list of influences and explored evidential links. We’ll be looking at some of the most prominent today, but the link to the study itself is in the description if you would like to look into it more. All of the authors are very pertinent to McCarthy’s work, and he is an insanely well-read person, but I chose these three in particular because they are, as far as I can see, most relevant to the narrative itself. We will be looking at Oswald Spengler, Herman Melville, and Lord Byron - but there is no reason to stop at these. I strongly encourage you to look through all of Dr. Crews’ study in order to get a bigger picture of the work.
Now, this discussion will primarily be designed to help early understanding of the book. Byron and Melville constitute kind of a spinal role in this book while Spengler has thematic presence in the book’s events. Other authors feature just as heavily and centrally, but the three I’ve chosen bear the signature of the book pretty well: will to power, the concept of nature, the human heart. The will to power is obviously a hegelian and Nietzschean concept, which we will touch on, but we will do it by looking at Spengler, who was directly influenced by the predecessor. This will be about a one-hour video just to be square - so that it’s long enough to listen to but not too long to turn off too early.
Introduce McCarthy and Blood Meridian
Today, we’re actually going to start with Byron. This is the easiest road into Blood Meridian in particular for a very specific reason. Crews notes a 1981 letter in which McCarthy MENTIONS Byron - “which is not surprising.” Lord Byron is one of the most famous writers in the English language and McCarthy frequents classic literary avenues. Crews quotes McCarthy as writing:
“I don’t know if I agree about writers being the only dependable readers. I remember reading once the names of the writers Byron admired – none of whom anyone has heard of since.”
We will be returning to this quote again. For now, we know that McCarthy knows who Byron is. Crews notes the similarities between Byron’s anti-hero and many of McCarthy’s protagonists - not least of which is the protag of Blood Meridian, The Kid. But as we move through the first paragraph of the book, the poet’s influence on McCarthy will become very clear.
Byron traveled a lot and made an incredible impression on culture in his day. His poetry is authoritative, full-bodied and existential. Among his most famous works is Stanzas to the Po. Byron was in Italy at the time, near the end of his life: he was in love with a married woman named Teresa Gamba Ghiselli. His infatuation was so intense that it would follow him to his grave. Ghiselli was brilliant, sociable, and in many ways a celebrity in Venice. When she became gravely ill in 1819 Byron was ready to end his own life. They eloped in 1821 and grew bored, then Byron left for Greece, where he would die a few years later. Stanzas to the Po was composed in 1819, when he confronted the river Po itself as a kind of counsel, and felt affirmed in his romantic ambitions. This is the 11th verse:
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• stanzas to the po:

A stranger loves the Lady of the land;
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the black wind that chills the polar flood.
Byron was a man controlled by his extraordinary vision of the world, controlled by passion and a slave to beauty in every sense. It is this obsession with what is beautiful that will feature centrally in Blood Meridian - but the beauty itself will be a fact of the will, and perhaps not a remark about the world itself.
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• Valery, on the Ya Lu
• “For you, intelligence is not one thing among many. Every day it devours everything. It would like to put an end to a new state of society every morning. A man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decisions or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring beings.
• “This is the law by which the intelligence despises law, and you encourage its violence! You are in love with Intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were Irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.”
• The Chinese man in Valery’s short story seems to be suggesting that Western ideals improperly conflate our whims with law itself. To him, war and blood are mere facts of life, a matter of business. But somehow he harangues the visitor, a European, for his fear of blood and his obsession with revolution, a kind of improper mode of thinking. Of course, Valery himself was a European, and so the story is really a Westerner haranguing the West as weak-willed, incapable of discerning things that are old hat to other more ancient civilizations. This would invite the reader to reconsider their squeamishness and be on the alert for entities that might lead us astray by taking hold of our naivete.

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• Jacob Boehme, 1575-1624, Lutheran theologian and mystic
• Boehme was influential among the enlightenment-era philosophers like Goethe and Hegel, helping to inspire movements like German idealism and romanticism
• Boehme was sometimes seen as heretical in his lifetime, and his genius was not recognized until the very end of his life. He was actually what we’d call “working class” but still had command of theological rhetoric.
• Interestingly, Boehme believed that Adam & Eve’s expulsion from paradise was necessary in the formation of the world. This was not a popular view at the time, but it illustrates his singular voice, and it’s an element to understanding Blood Meridian.
• Six Theosophic Points

Discusses the nature of darkness and evil. He quotes Christ as saying, in John 8:44, “The devil is a liar and murderer from the beginning.” He describes “all forms” as being adverse to one another, each of them a figure of deception. He says darkness is “terrified” of light, even though the light seems to exist within each dark form. A dark form is a shapeshifter, can take on many forms. Point 11 reads:
“The dark life is like a terror, where the flash and terror is always mounting upwards, as if it would quit the life and fly out above it. And hence arises pride, so that the devil is always wishing to be above God; it is his proprium, his life’s figure is so, and he cannot do otherwise. Just as a poison rages and pierces, as if it would break loose from the member;”
Then, the translation I found had slightly more breadth than McCarthy’s edition:
“And yet it is not to be thought that the life of darkness therefore sinks down into misery, that it would forget itself as if it were sorrowful. there is no sorrowing; but what with us on earth is sorrowing according to this property, is in the darkness power and joy according to the property of the darkness. For sorrowfulness is a thing that is swallowed up in death. But death and dying is the life of the darkness, just as anguish is the life of the poison. The greater the anguish becomes in the poison, the stronger becomes the poison-life, as is to be seen in the external poison.”
proprium:
ˈprōprēəm. plural propria. -ēə : property, attribute.
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• yuma daily sun article:

Actually refers to the Bodo cranium, which is a fossil from an extinct hominin. It was found in 1976 and is actually 600,000 years old, not 300,000. Further reinforces McCarthy’s point, that this kind of “evil” or lust for violence predates civilization by a dizzying margin.
SOURCE: member, “Glass” on cormac mccarthy forums
03 Jan 2015 at 6:10 pm
[First page]
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• first page, go line by line

Comment on Wordsworth poem:
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• wordsworth my heart leaps up:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
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• “blacks in the field”
• People marginalized and conquered by the machinery of history. Early reference to Spengler.
• He is shot after leading a brief stint as a pugilist, and when he recovers McCarthy includes this narrative monologue:
• “Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
• The Kid is disconnected both from his origins and from his destiny. Both are currently indeterminate. He continues to harbor a lust for “mindless violence.” What we see here is a free or otherwise unvexed soul. He could do anything at this point, but he maintains the will to determine his own fate.
• [The Judge will be a kind of antagonist in this way: he wants to control others and enlist them in his war against creation. The Kid will be freed from physical slavery by the Judge, but will be forced to conform to his habit as a scalper and murderer and deceiver. The Kid will resist determination and slavery by digressing from the Judge’s precepts. It is clear from the event soon after this section that the Judge has powers of manipulation. The Kid will only follow the scalpers because they freed him from literal bondage; his heart cannot be molded like other people’s; he will act in his own interests alone, which infuriates the Judge.]
• But to continue along:
• “The passengers are a diffident lot. They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall. Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of the pelicans coastwise above the gray swells.”
• Frequent allusion to animal-like imagery. The Kid seems intent on distinguishing himself from others, and when he’s a pugilist he is happy to distance himself from others. He will refuse to be defined or restrained by others, and is liberated in his destruction of unfamiliar things.
• The animal imagery shows how the natural world is set in very rigid motions and patterns. Animals are like machines, devices that respond to and operate within nature. People who are slave to reason or patterns of thought are “dumb animals,” as will be later described by the Kid. Death and violence are both a liberation from this enslaved, sundered moral existence and an affirmation of the killer. Those who do not embrace violence, who remain ambivalent, are prey to those who believe. We will also see that religion is a poor refuge from this matter.
• Ultimately, the Kid is able to serve as the narrative keyhole AND as the protagonist because he seems to be one of the only people left with powers of observation. So many characters in this book, or even the animals, seem so set in their ways and blind to the world that you rarely feel bad when they die. One of the true horrors in this book is the loss of consciousness, even if the world is almost too horrifying to continue looking at. What we fear more than anything else is weakness, which would betray the truth, that we are struggling to master the waves, so to speak. That “strength” of spirit will actually be replaced by brutality, which is a mark of weakness. Only the Kid seems to realize that his peers are actually weak, rather than strong in this sense. And only a few people even seem to have a preserved will. The Will is possibly the largest set piece in this book.

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• We come to Nacogdoches, where the Kid joins a revival tent hosted by a preacher who has apparently been at it for “two weeks,” so long before the protag arrives. Reverend Green is warning that Christ will walk beside you no matter what, so he asks if the crowd would allow Christ to follow them down into “hellhole yonder,” or into temptation and sin.
• At that moment the Kid is approached by someone described as a “teamster” who suddenly enters the tent and asks him, “You ever see such a place for rain?”
• The Kid says that he only just got there, and the man says “Well it beats all I ever seen.”
• We are entering into a scene of sorrow. Something tragic is about to happen, but we will judge people’s behavior in this situation.
• Another man enters who is towering and bald, and he will later be revealed as The Judge, a central character in the novel. The Judge walks to the front of the congregation and announces confidently that the Reverend is a fraud and has been charged with having “congress” with an eleven-year-old girl and a goat. The crowd is incensed and descends upon the reverend as people swear on his life and gunshots erupt. The Kid and the teamster escape before the whole tent collapses and they meet at the bar, where the bald man buys everyone a drink, described as the judge for the first time. The Judge admits that he completely made all of it up and had never even heard of the Reverend before he arrived. Everyone laughs, despite the fact that he had just suborned murder.
• The fact that everyone hesitates before they laugh is absolutely crucial to this novel. They wait a moment to reflect on what had just happened. Remember that it is pouring rain, almost like an enjoinder to sorrow, and the crowd murdered the reverend, and those who rose to the occasion of violence are absolutely guilty. But they just laugh. They find the whole thing funny, probably because they do not want to take responsibility for themselves. They don’t want to admit to the sorrow just perpetrated. They would rather focus on the judge, almost as a sanctuary from their own culpability. Those who follow the Judge’s words, who commit atrocity, think vicariously through the Judge and become enslaved by him. By forcing culpability into their hearts, they rescind their individuality and become automatons to his will. The secret sauce in this process is intelligence and the spoken word, which is weaponized to seize men’s souls.
• The Judge has already matched Boehme’s description of “the darkness.” Darkness is a state hostile to light, in which nothing “sorrowful” is actually such, but is a kind of rapture. This scene occurred while it was raining heavily, as if to emphasize everyone’s indifference to the sorrowfulness of the event.
• The kid is there for “sixteen days” drinking his money away. He gets in a fight and is seemingly saved by Toadvine, who brings him along to brutally murder a man in a hotel, which leads to them razing the structure. As the kid is leaving town on a mule he sees men standing around the burning saloon with “empty buckets,” as if nothing can stop such an inferno, and the judge regards him as he leaves town, smiling at the Kid.
• What we have witnessed in the first chapter of Blood Meridian is a complete sacrifice of our moral precepts in exchange for our enjoinder to exact reckoning. The Judge’s falsehood lampooned the congregation’s credulousness and sense of moral obligation. The destruction of the Reverend was, in fact, a total affirmation of the Will, callous to truth or moral uprightness or mediation. In a world governed purely by unleashed will, things tend to burn down.

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• Michael Crews, Oswald Spengler on page 186

Judge: “our mother the earth . . . was round like an egg and contained all good things within her” (McCarthy 130).
FAUST:
A figure in German folklore championed by Goethe’s representation. Faust was a learned person who sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for all knowledge. Something being “Faustian” means that one exchanges their moral or ethical stature for material or intellectual gain. The devil was represented by Mephistopheles, who appears as a black dog.
WILL TO POWER:
Schopenhauer first coined the idea of “will to live” to describe biological motivations. Interestingly, Schopenhauer held that the Will itself is the most important, even more than our sense of safety or our. very concept of existence, because the Will somehow exists without acknowledgement of either.
From his “Psychological Observations”:
“The will to live, which forms the inmost core of every living being, exhibits itself most conspicuously in the higher order of animals, that is, the cleverer ones; and so in them the nature of the will may be seen and examined most clearly. For in the lower orders its activity is not so evident; it has a lower degree of objectivation; whereas, in the class which stands above the higher order of animals, that is, in men, reason enters in; and with reason comes discretion, and with discretion, the capacity of dissimulation, which throws a veil over the operations of the will. And in mankind, consequently, the will appears without its mask only in the affections and the passions.
“And this is the reason why passion, when it speaks, always wins credence, no matter what the passion may be; and rightly so. For the same reason the passions are the main theme of poets and the stalking horse of actors. The conspicuousness of the will in the lower order of animals explains the delight we take in dogs, apes, cats, etc.; it is the entirely naive way in which they express themselves that gives us so much pleasure.
“The sight of any free animal going about its business undisturbed, seeking its food, or looking after its young, or mixing in the company of its kind, all the time being exactly what it ought to be and can be,—what a strange pleasure it gives us! Even if it is only a bird, I can watch it for a long time with delight; or a water rat or a hedgehog; or better still, a weasel, a deer, or a stag. The main reason why we take so much pleasure in looking at animals is that we like to see our own nature in such a simplified form. There is only one mendacious being in the world, and that is man. Every other is true and sincere, and makes no attempt to conceal what it is, expressing its feelings just as they are.”
Nietzsche, looking back on philosophers from the first half of the 19th century, took this idea and formed it into “Machtgelüst,” or “desire for power.”
From “Human, All too Human”:
“Herder.—Herder fails to be all that he made people think he was and himself wished to think he was. He was no great thinker or discoverer, no newly fertile soil with the unexhausted strength of a virgin forest. But he possessed in the highest degree the power of scenting the future, he saw and picked the first-fruits of the seasons earlier than all others, and they then believed that he had made them grow. Between darkness and light, youth and age, his mind was like a hunter on the watch, looking everywhere for transitions, depressions, convulsions, the outward and visible signs of internal growth. The unrest of spring drove him to and fro, but he was himself not the spring.”
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• Nietzsche furthers discussion in The Gay Science, under item 13:
• “On the doctrine of the feeling of power. - Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power over them - that is all one wants in such cases! We hurt those to whom we need to make our power perceptible, for pain is a much more sensitive means to that end than pleasure: pain always asks for the cause, while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself and not look back. We benefit and show benevolence toward those who already depend on us in some way (that is, who are used to thinking of us as their causes); we want to increase their power because we thus increase our own, or we want to show them the advantage of being in our power - that way, they will be more satisfied with their situation and more hostile towards and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.”
• He concludes by saying, “Compassion is the most agreeable feeling for those who have little pride and no prospect of great conquests; for them, easy prey - and that is what those who suffer are - is something enchanting. Compassion is praised as the virtue of prostitutes.”
• But the concept of Will to Power came into fuller form in Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, a book about a hermit (Zarathrustra) sequestered for a century who comes out to learn that God has died. He travels to a nearby town and finds people witnessing a spectacle, telling them that in the absence of God they must allow for an “overman” or “übermensch” to claim this position. They scorn him for his views. He states that people must be willing to die in order to allow this übermensch to succeed. Eventually, there’s an accident, and a man on a tight rope falls to his death. Only the hermit has any concern for the dead, hiding his body in the woods and vowing to never mix with the crowds again.
• Later, the hermit has a vision in which he conceives of the Wille zur Macht, or will to power. It is an elusive concept, but he illustrates it through examples:
• “The ignorant, to be sure, the people—they are like a river on which a boat floateth along: and in the boat sit the estimates of value, solemn and disguised.”
• The river reminds me directly of Byron, who is essentially addressing the Po as a stage for his passions.
• In TSZ, rather than trying to fit the “Will” into a mechanistic scheme of biological motivations, he simply asserts that the will to power transcends all other motivations, even the will to survive. It is even permissible for the weak to support the strong in their place:
• “That to the stronger the weaker shall serve—thereto persuadeth he his will who would be master over a still weaker one. That delight alone he is unwilling to forego.
• “And as the lesser surrendereth himself to the greater that he may have delight and power over the least of all, so doth even the greatest surrender himself, and staketh—life, for the sake of power.”
• It even transcends the concept of good and evil, and here we see an idea later paraphrased by the Judge:
• “Verily, I say unto you: good and evil which would be everlasting—it doth not exist! Of its own accord must it ever surpass itself anew.
• With your values and formulae of good and evil, ye exercise power, ye valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.
• But a stronger power groweth out of your values, and a new surpassing: by it breaketh egg and egg-shell.
• And he who hath to be a creator in good and evil—verily, he hath first to be a destroyer, and break values in pieces.”

Oswald Spengler, 1880-1936, was a German philosopher and scholar. He wrote “The Decline of the West” in 1922, which was hugely popular. He would not live to see the cataclysmic Second World War, and despite initially voting for Hitler he soon turned around and was ostracized for his opposition to the status quo. Spengler opposed antisemitism. He is still known for his general criticism of liberalism among Islamist circles.
In Decline of the West, Spengler casts a society as a cultural organism that can live and die in intervals, and asserts that the Western project is coming to an end. Rather than taking an overtly pessimistic view, however, he aquires Goethe’s concept of becoming and changing. The German word in the title, Untergang, is often translated as “Decline,” but “untergang” did not have necessarily doom-like resonance with Spengler. He nearly used the word “vollendung,” which is more like “fulfillment.” This probably concerns the Judge’s ideas directly — the idea that the sunset or twilight of mankind is somehow also the completion of his project. But “completion” is a complicated reality and not necessarily straightforward; the completion could be a realization of the warfaring creature or a concession to our nature in a more abstract sense. I don’t think there’s a straightforward solution to this obscure detail: I believe the book simply illustrates the triumph of the will over all other conventions, with violence merely serving as a means to an end for the Judge.
Spengler discusses Goethe and Nietzsche almost back to back in Decline of the West. He describes classical civilization as a situation of breaks from destiny: the advancements from classical to new, like Athens to Paris, Aristotle to Kant, Alexander to Napoleon. Rather than purchasing the idea that his contemporary West “inherited” and continued classical tradition, he actually believes the connection is aesthetic and superficial. He suggests that it is more productive to identify how “alien” the classical world truly is to us moderns: as if we share anything with them.
But Spengler actually frames Nietzsche as being lost in his idealization of the classical world, an accuses him of speaking to a “philological mirror.” And rather than buying into the “ancient-medieval-modern” theory of history, Spengler believes history occurs more organically as a sequence in which successive iterations do not necessarily resemble past examples, exactly like a transforming organism.
So when we see the word “Evening” or “Sunset” or “Twilight” of the West in this sense, what we are actually observing, at the moment it is uttered, is the product of this historical sequence. In the context of Blood Meridian, The Evening Redness in the West, we are observing a new iteration of history derived not from an original point but from what has developed in the interim.
This gives new meaning to characters being “remote from their origins,” and it casts light on the Kid’s abandonment of the “poets whose names are now lost” in a house where his birth sacrificed his own mother. Moving West, the human race must become something new, but maybe we are not willing to admit what it is we must become.
The Judge’s destruction of artifacts may also serve to drive a wedge between the truth of history and our fallacious inclination to depict history as one long, linear narrative. The “thread” of history, according to Spengler, is frayed and tangential. Ossification of worldviews may act against our interests — Spengler distinguishes between cultural and zoological determinisms in history. While the “West,” which is a cultural construct, may come to an end, this is trivial in the grand scheme of things. In light of Spengler’s book “Man and Technics,” however, which does have quite a pessimistic outlook, he warns that whereas “culture” was previously our focus, soon its moment’s slow expiration will give way to the often-overlooked technical world, which can effortlessly replace our sacred concerns with the absolutely mundane. But what he truly fears is the sacrifice of the soul in exchange for a purely technical life:
“ For, in reality, technics is immemorially old, and moreover it is not
something historically specific, but something immensely general. It
extends far beyond mankind, back into the life of the animals, indeed of all animals. It is distinctive of the animal, in contrast to the plantwise, type of living that it is capable of moving freely in space and possesses some measure, great or small, of self-will and independence of Nature as a whole, and that, in possessing these, it is obliged to maintain itself against Nature and to give its own being some sort of a significance, some sort of a content, and some sort of a superiority. If, then, we would attach a significance to technics, we must start from the soul, and that alone. ”
With regard to Decline of the West, Spengler is consistent in distinguishing the cultural arc of history from the purely biological, asserting that technique is a hallmark of all life. He then issues some startingly Judge-like remarks:
“Technics is the tactics of living; it is the inner form of which the procedure of conflict — the conflict that is identical with Life itself — is the outward expression. This is the second error that has to be avoided. Technics is not to be understood in terms of the implement. What matters is not how one fashions things, but what one does with them; not the weapon, but the battle. Modern warfare, in which the decisive element is tactics — that is, the technique of running the war, the techniques of inventing, producing, and handling the weapons being only items in the process as a whole — points to a general truth.”
Spengler’s approach to technique is almost frighteningly sober, identifying that our underlying nature is not beholden to ephemeral conceptions, but extends far beyond the narrow horizon of our conceits. As we consider “The Evening Redness in the West,” it is helpful to identify that we are coming into a twilight of an era and into a more faithful inheritance of our nature, one that preceded our short-lived projects and will long outlive it.
Spengler, in Decline, notes the marginalization of great cities, people, and cultures throughout history — how Florence, Rome, Athens hardly command the renown they once did, and that this is typical in history.
“…that many famous old-noble families, descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the Samnites, lost their ancestral homes through standing apart from the wild rush of speculation and were reduced to renting wretched apartments; that, while along the Appian Way there arose the splendid and still wonderful tombs of the financial magnates, the corpses of the people were thrown along with animal carcases and town refuse into a monstrous common grave — till in Augustus’s time it was banked over for the avoidance of pestilence and so became the site of Maecenas’s renowned park…”
The decline of the “West” is little more than a natural progression of time to Spengler, and it may be that some refuse to be cast out of the limelight of history.
To summarize and conclude:
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• The Judge as a faustian figure no longer wishes to exist as a piece of the environment. He would not like to remain in his earthly nature.
• Dr. Crews calls McCarthy’s view of history “pessimistic,” which I have already disagreed with. But he expounds on Spengler’s theory of the Faustian exchange, describing how Europe has sold its soul in order to unlock boundless intelligence and capability.
• Crews notes a quote from the Judge:
• “our mother the earth . . . was round like an egg and contained all good things within her”
• He wishes to crack into the earth, break into forms in order to harvest and acquire the power within them. The earth as an egg is something precious, that we instinctually wish to preserve; he would like to break it open and take that which lies within. This is in reference to the harvesting of phosphorous for gunpowder.
• Crews quotes Milton, Satan instructing minions to harvest the materials of the earth for warfare on 189
• Crews 193-4, discussion of Tobin’s story about the Jobian old man, “Grace comes in the absence of will” from Spengler.
• 194, Suttree passage that describes the Spenglerian need for an opponent, description of the Kid being “swallowed up” by the Judge.
• The book Blood Meridian essentially discusses how to preserve the “I” through all of nature’s horrors. Renunciation of the will is a destruction of this I, which is preserved through an accession to power. How do you maintain yourself when the heart is beset by such a hell as the real world? Melville

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• Michael Crews, Melville on 166
• Melville was an American author who worked on ships for a large part of his life and tried to create a career as a writer. Although his work was rarely acknowledged or even noticed in his lifetime, posthumously he would go down as one of the greatest writers in the English language. Never give up, folks.
• His magnum opus is Moby Dick, the story of a whaling vessel whose captain is determined to capture a legendary “white” sperm whale that had once lamed him. Of course it ends in tragedy, but the plot itself is almost entirely irrelevant. Every “chapter” is actually like a prosaic tone poem, featuring paralyzng turns of phrase and flourishes that strike at the heart of our existential and moral concerns. Some of the most innocuous subjects create some of the most piercing and unforgettable passages. Combined with Milton’s Paradise Lost, the scope and intensity of Melville’s prose almost certainly had a direct influence on McCarthy’s own work, which embodies King James rhetoric, epic meditation and jaw-dropping visuals. Possibly the first high-definition book?
• There are multiple passages in Blood Meridian that draw almost directly from Moby Dick, as Crews points out. Crews’ key is the term “federated along one keel,” a famous term Melville used to describe how the sailors, despite hailing from a multitude of backgrounds, are now in the same boat, literally. McCarthy writes in Blood Meridian: “Each man scanned the terrain and the movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance and advanced upon that landscape with a single resonance.”
• McC also betrays the current state of the will within these men — they are all strung along together like a chain gang almost, seeing the world with one eye. In the same way, Captain Ahab’s men are stuck on the boat with him and they slowly realize that Ahab is out of his mind and probably on a suicide mission. The Judge has a similar fatalism, but it seems to be a fatalism he will invariably survive.
• Crews’ associations between the authors is not very long, but I think he is avoiding the infinitely larger question of the union of meaning, which is simply too large in scope for a study showing literary infulences.
• Moby Dick is a long, elaborate, Homeric and very enigmatic work. No one seems to have a clear idea about what Melville is actually saying, and it has been construed as a huge number of things. Obviously, he is commenting on a Christian worldview and makes plenty of transparent comments on existence directly, but there is clearly a world beyond the words themselves. Also, feel free to send your own interpretations of Moby Dick and I’ll read them out on the next video; I will not pretend to have any authority on Moby Dick, which really does deserve a wide interpretation.
• In Moby Dick, the narrator invites the reader, “Call me Ishmael.” This injunction to “call” him Ishmael may already cast suspicion on the reality of the author’s words. Is that his name, or only in the story? Ishmael was a bastard of Abraham who was disowned, and Ahab was the name of a mad king of Israel who worshiped idols. Captain Ahab seems to have a huge idol — the whale — which (and this is no spoiler) leads to the destruction of the crew. Ishmael is saved at the very end by a ship called Rachel. Rachel was known for her care and love for her son Joseph, who was also trafficked by his jealous brothers. In its most general reading, Moby Dick describes a tragic jaunt into idolatrous infatuation with the passions and the furthest extent of human ingenuity. But this all seems to be a pointless extension that causes incredible tragedy. Chapter for chapter, Moby Dick is far too elaborate to hold to one standard. But Ishmael’s “exile” on the ship is a theme for rich moral and existential discourse, which you can find in every punctual and head-slappingly vibrant chapter.
• More than anything else, the essential connection between Moby Dick and Blood Meridian is the human spirit in the face of nature. This is even too broad to mean anything. The nature in Blood Meridian is novel in itself: McCarthy may be describing a nature of which we were previously unaware. Both books give insight into the futility of human inventions and genius against nature; the Judge, for all his brilliance, is still just a creature of impulse. Intelligence has technical value in Blood Meridian — serving only, it seems, to increase the agony inflicted by those who lord it over the weak, a direct and sobering insight into the “Will to Power” that invokes great pause on the subject. Even without a towering intellect like the Judge, the Kid can clearly see through everything happening and can effortlessly denote the futility of contemplation in the face of the truth. In the final chapter, the Kid (now the Man)’s responses are clear and right, but he seems to be digging his own grave in front of the Judge.
• “Even a dumb animal can dance”
• More valuable in Blood Meridian, it seems, is the resistance to illusions. All men seem taken by something: by ideology, by conquest, by money. The Judge reaps all of these but none are his object; he is a machine, it seems, that will run itself forever, a creature of pure intelligence that does not check itself and would cast all of reality into bondage for its benefit. The Judge, in my opinion, simply represents human ingenuity itself, which is not something to be proud of. It is separate from our better judgment, which we find in the Kid. “Remote from his origins,” the Kid can approach the real world soberly — that is, he sees that there is nothing there. His rejection of his father’s “poets whose names are now lost” closes the world’s semantics from him, as though saving him from the tragic tyranny of the mind.
• Ishmael’s description of the Pequod’s journey has full regard for meaning in the natural world, almost as a perfect contrast to the Kid. The Kid’s narrative seems to acknowledge and comprehend the nightmarish and vivid world while casually moving past it, either as a betrayal of foolishness or simple sobriety. Ishmael, however, notes the world’s messages as they pertain to Ahab’s journey — the captain seems immune or deaf to them, to his detriment. If anything, Moby Dick outlines the importance of listening to the world; to ignore it is folly. The Judge, who stands directly opposed to everything, comprehends and notes everything while also destroying it, replacing it with his own metrics, while the Kid passively enters into nature and allows it to guide him. The Kid acknowledges the moral and spiritual travails while the Judge steps over it all on a quest for unlimited power, closing his heart to the pure tragedy of it all. It would seem that by casting the cultural imperative aside, we are able to effortlessly seize on the object of our designs. The “Will to Power” is only inhibited by the human spirit. Therefore I think the “nature” in Blood Meridian is actually our own nature, which is antagonistic to the staggering and terrifying genius we command. Beneath the imperium of invention nothing will be spared.
• I do not believe McCarthy has imbued Blood Meridian with any specific union among these distinguishing features — like a proper author, he describes and expounds on the real world without forcing opinions and uses a controlled flow of information to explore the questions themselves, rather than narrowing the whole book down to a handful of possible conclusions. Blood Meridian can withstand criticisms that it is incoherent because it is too detailed to fail; the discussion of intelligence, morality and our position in the cosmos is so thorough as to far exceed whatever you pay for the paper itself. This is what it shares most intensely with Moby Dick: both are books of exponentially more value than the sum of their parts, probing adjacent topics with fluency and mastery over the discussion itself.

*** Find passages from Moby Dick relevant to understanding Blood Meridian.
Ch 114 — directly relevant to Blood Meridian

State of Play

I use to have a bay window. Back when I was six years old I lived in a small three bedroom, one bath house and it had this bay window that was sort of the forefront of the home. That section was where I’d play with my action figures. That section was where I guess you could say made the world that I was living in currently, bigger, larger than my own self. My imagination was at its high when posted up at that bay window. If you ask anyone who really seen me in action over at the bay window, they would tell you it seemed like I was invincible.
As much as I’m not really here to talk about bay windows and little coming-of-age homes, I’m just as equally here to tell you how much it plays apart in what I am here to talk about, and that’s the state of play. I recently wrote on my Facebook page on how it’s important to let kids be kids, be silly in a sense. It’s important to let their minds flourish with the most outlandish ideas in my opinion. That thought, has awarded me the opportunity to think like I do today. The opportunity to choose how I would like to process ideas and drive my emotions into certain directions and in result, be my own person. What does this have to do with the Paradise video? Everything.
I’ve lost touch. Wait, correction. I’ve been in and out of touch with the “state of play” idea. Life, more specifically adulthood sort of takes over and puts you in the position of immediate choices. Some people don’t grow straight with that sort of responsibility or, again, more specifically, the immediate choices, the “state of urgency” I’ll call it. I, me, ironically grew comfortable with the “state of urgency”. I’m good under pressure, focused and able to drown out noise. The “state of play” idea may seem to be the contrast to the “state of urgency” but the more I thought about it for this piece, I thought how similar they really are, or how they really complement each other. The eureka moment being that in the “state of play” mindset, you are in the moment of “state of urgency” because whatever is that task at hand while submissive to that “state of play” world, is most definitely urgent. Adulthood just makes you forget how similar they are. Think about Peter Pan and the Lost boys. I’m not going to dive too deep into that rabbit hole but you can sort of see where I’m going with all of this. Don’t grow up or DO IN FACT grow up because growing up is the only way you’ll find the similarities. Next.

Fly on the Wall

I crack open a beer in a low light setting painted in hues of purple and dust. I can’t speak on the bands psychological state but I can speak on what I see and what I see is growth. Something growing right before your eyes may seem like watching paint dry but, have you ever watched paint dry? It’s beautiful. What’s even more astounding is having the patience to watch something grow. I’m a father of two so I know what I’m talking about. The low light setting sends a guitar chord into existence, meaning, this is all real now. Another lesson I’ve learned while being this “fly on the wall” during a jam session is that nothing is real until you’ve played it. Once that thought became a stamp onto my brain, I thought about the chords I might play in life. I have plenty of streaming thoughts, ideas flowing into the nothingness that become the nothingness, a sea of nothingness. The jam session helps me realize how persistent these guys make ideas real. A strum on the guitar then a cord on the bass becomes a sonnet worth acknowledging, remember, In this world, in this “state of play”, IS, the “state of urgency”. The urgency makes it real right. It raises the question as I crack another Juicifur, in which if you have ever looked at the can of a Juicifur beer, it can send you into a world of possibilities while in that “state of play” mindset. The question being, how urgent are my ideas? Are they as urgent as these guitar strums, bass plucks? Purple dust, I take a sip and its fucking deep. We’re in it now boys I say to myself as NOW they’re laying down the foundation of something bigger than any of us in this room. “That section was where I guess you could say made the world that I was living in currently, bigger, larger than my own self” referrer back to paragraph one.
Flying Coach is their name, was their name, maybe still maybe THEIR name. I can’t say at this moment because I’m not them. What I’ve witnessed though is Flying Coach in my opinion. I’ve listen to their first album The Flying Five Family Funtime and comparing that to me being the “fly on the wall” during the jam session was all too familiar. So for the sake of this essay, they’re fucking Flying Coach. I hear the seat belt buckle tone go off and I’m prepared to ascend into what I’ve been calling the “state of play”. Listening to them jam out was only the slap in the face moment, “wake up”. I woke and from my slumber came the realization of adulthood and its way of saying, “I want to play”.

Fuckable Foundation

As I bleed the words out now, writing this, that’s the same effect I had when coming up with idea for the Paradise video. Talking Paradise though, I referred back to their album. Why Paradise? It’s simple. That’s my favorite song. Selfish as that may seem, in questioning the option to giving THEM the choice of what song should be made into a video I only referred back to the jam session that night. Low light levels and hues of purple dust you tend to become one of them in a sense. I trusted them to take me on a journey into the unknown and they did. Ultimately, I came out the other end KNOWING. As you’ve just read, KNOWING, everything up to this period (.) I wanted to pay it back in a way and do the same as they did for me. So I bleed. First reference for you, “I Bleed” by the Pixies from their 1989 album Doolittle, I played that song as typed up a five page essay on the “state of play” and it’s comparison to “the state of urgency” and youth and adulthood and fucking flies on walls, NOT actually “fucking” but fuck man i would say love was in the air at that moment and everywhere I look around it just got even more intimate. Making love to the essay I wrote led me to the birth of concept. As confusing as that may sound in terms of the actual human reproductive process, sex being conceiving, the act of creating, my process I guess, was that the essay I wrote was only foreplay.
So now I need to actually fuck. My belt is coming off to Drew Barrymore**. Second reference, I watched her opening performance to** the 1996 film Scream and I knew I wanted this to be the foundation to the video. A girl running up the stairs when she should be running out of the house, in which she did but that’s not the point. The whole idea being a “slasher film” type video. Blowing my load to this idea alone though, wouldn’t be all that intimate I thought. I didn’t want a one-night-stand type of idea. I want this idea to stick around for a while, I wanted it to know that I appreciated it. The sex had to have landmarks not pop-up shops. I referred back to my five page essay on the “state of play” and noticed the phrase I wrote in it, “He who dies with the most toys, wins”. It’s a quote by Malcolm Forbs, famous publisher of Forbs magazine. I referenced that quote in the essay because I seen it on a t-shirt once. As the sex became deeper that quote become prominent to the idea. “Toys”, being the idea of a slasher type of scene made up of toys. So instead of a live action video, it would be me playing with a bunch of toys in the world of Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream, THUS my fuckable foundation.

Mad Scientist Soundtrack

“We all go a little mad sometimes” the character Billy Loomis says, played by the actor Skeet Ulrich referencing to what Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins says in the 1960 film Psycho. “we all go a little mad sometimes” I heard while thinking about this idea as a whole. It’s mad, but it’s ALIVE and if I were a mad scientist creating my monster I’d have to step away from the sound of “Paradise” By Flying Coach. If I wanted this thing to have a tone, a feeling, I wouldn’t find it in that song. This is for the betterment of the song though. Too many music videos these days cater to the material almost TOO literal. Maybe that has something to do with the new age viewer and their lack of attention and/or short term attention but that’s a whole other issue to talk about. I’ll address it by finding a contrasting sound to Paradise, something that sounds NOT paradise. I thought about that HBO show “The White Lotus” and its opening theme song, it’s soundtrack in general actually. I related to that in terms of “NOT paradise”. I thought about how the composer to that show may have had that same exact idea**. Reference three, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the composer to** the White Lotus soundtrack. I listened to his music while figuring out how I wanted this video to sound. Again, on mute, this video is “NOT Paradise”. A mad scientist creating his monster would definitely be listing to Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s sound. I went mad to this.
Is this too rough? Am I hurting you? I thought about how acts of passion may bring out the worst of us. Fucking to a song called, “She who brings the gifts” really put that idea into motion. I honestly don’t know what lead me to thinking of the 2018 film Hereditary but it makes sense. I had to cling to this idea of passion bringing out the worst in someone but also stick to the innocence of childhood, “toys” for the sake of the video. How would this be visually represented? Reference four, Ari Aster, writedirector of the 2018 film Hereditary did it best when opening his film up to a doll house, A slow zoom into this idea of dooming passion. The part that made sense was my idea revolving around toys. A doll house would be a perfect fitting for the aesthetic. The whole thing would take place inside a doll house while the camera witnessed the story unfold.

Bird for Hire and “The Shape”

Scenes of a murder while hearing the tone of de Veer’s compositions all wrapped up in this “state of play” doll house setting was my targeted vision. At this point yes, I am going a little mad. It’s a wild and crazy idea but it’s so fucking passionate that it’s NOW a “landmark idea”. What makes it personal though? What makes it personal to the band? I have all sorts of blood in this thing it’s almost Hereditary. How can I let the band have some of their DNA be a part of this monster? Cum a little closer… They have a huge bird, on their album cover. As big as the idea seems to be for the sake of the cover art, I believe that that bird represents their most intimate image. My interpretation is that, in the world of Flying Coach, small things have big impacts, like the possibility a plane carrying 244 sols on board going down because of a small bird getting sucked into its engine system cause complete catastrophe. That’s what their cover art says to me. How can I relate that idea into the video? Who’s the plane in my video? Well obviously it’s the victim, the girl running up the stairs when she should be running out the house. Who’s the bird? At first I thought maybe the masked killer was the bird but then I thought why can’t the “bird” be the bird. To make my idea even more unique and mad, I thought about the killer just having a bird as his weapon of choice instead of the conventional knife, ax, chainsaw like you see in slasher films. This leads me to be drawn into who this masked killer really is.
I thought how I would never want Scooby Doo to solve this case. The masked killer is just a masked killer. He is who he is and nothing more. This brings me to “The shape”. If you’re a movie/film enthusiast like I am then you would have watch tons of “making of” “behind the scenes” docs like I have. Reference five, Halloween/Friday the 13th. In John Carpenters 1978 film Halloween, the mask that Michael Myers wears is actually a Captain Kirk mask, more specifically a William Shatner mask painted white with the eyes cut out. I wanted this idea and in vain of the original concept, instead of Captain Kirk, I chose Spock, Kirks right hand man in Star Trek. I chose to have my “shape” masked killer be a Spock figurine with the face painted blue. Blue being catchy on the eyes, with the eyes cut out. His persona would pair in the likes of Myers and Voorhees in the sense that they’re just them and nothing more, no mystery behind them. I also refer “it/him” to “them” because in the video you can come to an idea maybe that there is more than one. I like to leave that thought up to the viewer.

AI just figured it out

A gangbang of “Shapes” didn’t quite bring me to the point of edging though. I pretty much had the video in my head at this point and time was ticking to start putting pen to pad. I needed to have something “in the can” as Hollywood calls it. As ambitious as this idea started to form it was nearly impossible for me to execute without some sort of short cut. Midjourney came knocking on the doll house door like The Wolf from the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. Midjourney is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) art program that recently hit the web within the last past year. I won’t get into too much detail on how it works because they have numerous videos out there explaining the technology and its conception. The idea of me using this new technology as a tool to create the video was to me, a step above anyone else making ANYTHING today. Once I decided on using this as a tool, I felt like I was breaking new ground for the filmmaking world as a whole. I can hold the spirit stick of “it has never been done before” with this new idea and how I was to execute it. I think that’s what really separates this video from the norm. Take out all the sport fuck, meaning, all the bullshit, meaning, all the intricate backstory shit you’ve been reading up to this point. Take out all of that, and you still have something truly unique with the Paradise video.
“Make video horizontal again” I read on a hat as I was scrolling through Instagram advisements. I thought about how it’s so true. How we now live in a vertical world of viewing. It’s sort of strange also as to that’s how we decide to chew on content. The evolution process has had us go from monkeys to vertical video viewers. We didn’t gain an extra eye, we just skewed what the eyes should be looking at. In the thought of us looking at things long ways now, I became hung up on how I wanted to look at this particular video. It only makes sense for me to make the video horizontal for the sake of story but then I knew people might just think, “ew, fucking horizontal. Skip”. I would never fall lame to social constructs and their tribal-like influences but for this, I was sort of into exploring the psyche of the viewer themselves. Like one would tickle ones butthole, because remember, we’re still in foreplay, I decided to tickle the butthole of the masses and give them what they wanted by deciding on vertical video. I mean the path of the righteous “Shape” was already going to be strange enough. It’s nuts, so let’s play with them.

Cream color Wallpaper

Reference six, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. “Chivo” as his peers like to call him is a multi-awarded cinematographer. You might have noticed his most notable work in the 2014 film Birdman or the 2015 film The Revenant and if we’re sticking to sexual analogies for the sake of this essay, Chivo would be the strongest tongue to ever play the game. I chose him as a reference to lighting in saying to myself, Chivo plus John Carpenter, PLUS Ari Aster, introducing him into this world of animation might be a cool thing to see. Not just because he’s an award winning cinematographer but because of his lighting. If I wanted a whimsical tone I would have went with Robert Yeoman who does a lot of Wes Andersons stuff. I thought as a director for this project as to what needed to be divvied out accordingly. Chivo was the best fit for this project. So “Emmanuel Lubezki type kitchen lighting” goes into the Midjouney AI art prompt and it pops out what I need for the video. As easy as that sounds it’s hard to actually know what you want. For instance wallpaper played a huge part when it came to its lighting. These are all things that they’ll ask you on set. Set decorators I imagined hounding me with swabs of textures and colors of creams, colors in creams. “What’s a good lamp” they ask as I’m deciding on window shapes and design. This all went into the creation of the doll house effect.
It’s all about texture really. Feeling, i had to caress this monster before its climax. This video had to be sold in reality meaning, you had to believe it was actually something physical I was running a camera through. I learned that texture in visuals, texture in ANY visual are important but I noticed that THAT idea gets lost in most music videos today. I heard a movie review guy on YouTube state that it’s mostly tone and texture that frightens him. I thought about texture in pictures other than horror. What are romantic textures like? Action textures. A dramatic texture, not lighting, but to actually allow your audience to feel like they can physically feel a divorce or a miscarriage. I thought about this for the Paradise video and having Chivo’s lighting I knew I wanted to take drastic advantages. Maybe this beast would say, “stop, no”. Lust can only get you so far in this game of passion and if we’re playing for time, “stop, no” has to be persuaded to “yes, keep going”.

Was that Real?

Reference seven, the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project I remember infecting everything media when it first came out. I remember the wild west days of the internet and its vulnerability to content. Before content was what is considered content today, creativity was law. A thirty second video of a person doing the griddy wasn’t going to cut it back in the Windows 98 days. You’d hear about this video going around about this group of kids filming a documentary about a witch who killed children, then get lost in the woods while filming the doc. The seed of an image, grainy, shaky, eerie in asking yourself, “Why keep filming”. This short term urban legend eventually hit the press and supposedly the whole video was going to be released in theaters. It was called The Blair Witch Project. The wild west internet couldn’t keep up with its traffic at the time as people were flooding Ask Jeeves in asking, “is the Blair witch real”. No one knew what it was, this was all new, anything could be anything and everything was fucking exciting about it. Like watching a snuff film you WATCHED these kids get lost, freak out, cry, scream, beg for their lives as a fucking wooded witch terrorized them eventually, killing them. WTF! I mean ask Jeeves, go ahead and ask him. Still, nothing in 1999 was answered about this video. This idea of “WTF is happening”, I wanted for the Paradise video. I mean it was already WTF type of vibes but I think I can bring it closer to that, the concept being, a Blair Witch Project type of discovery but on TikTok. So as you watched mom do the griddy and baby laughing hysterical calling it “cute”, you flip your thumb up and there’s Paradise, this strange VHS looking video. VHS being the key ingredient I needed to get the panties off.

It was Nuttin’

The sex was okay. It’s not like painting. With painting your’re fucking right off the bat. It’s a continuous high. Assembling the video was tedious and not that I’m oppose to tidiness but, I’m trying to find that constant point of interest. Making something like the Paradise video, there was always a constant set back. My dick wouldn’t get hard at certain moments. I think the thing that keeps you afloat with something like this is the passion, the will to see the outcum. In the end I thought about “The Shape” (the killer) in the video and how he feels about the whole thing. How in the end his bird was always meant to be inside her and the meaning of word “paradise”. I figured that these are his words not ours. We don’t know what the fuck paradise is. He does though. He lives in a constant state of play, with urgency and as long as this video plays, he gets to play and she stays urgent. You only can understand this by growing into adulthood and until you understand the balance of adulthood, you can’t understand the balance between the “state of paly” and the “state of urgency” thus between the two, you’ll never be able to call it, “Paradise”.
"Lucky Day in Hell" by Eels

Hi
I'm going to upload my review of THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy later, and I wanted to drop the notes I used to guide the video here. I also have an article that I will post in a moment. The notes are not very structured by feature references to key passages and provide some insight. Feel free to respond with issues or thoughts, and be sure to pet your cat today.
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notes

p. 42, the agents interrogate Bobby
*** p. 47, Bobby mentions that he “left Oiler to get into the plane” while he went back up to the surface. It may be that the agents are constructing a story in order to fill the void, and will later take out Oiler as a possible tamperer. They would then logically take out Bobby for knowing too much. During the conversation, Bobby revealed that they did not take anything from the plane. This might also lay the groundwork for later suspicions of tampering. It’s clear the government does not want this plane to enter into public knowledge.
p. 49, The cohorts
p. 61
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• He has boated out to an island pursuing possible survivor of the plane crash. He finds evidence that someone had made it to an island, made a fire, and stashed a raft under a tree. The raft is described as “brand new.” He then goes back to the beach and watches the sunset.

“When he got back to the beaach the sun was low over the water and he stood there looking out to the west, the slow gray swells and the thin bight of shore beyond and somewhere beyond that the city where the lights would be coming up. He sat in the sand and dug in his heels and crossed his arms over his knees and watched the sunset and the light on the water. The thin reach of land to the south would be the Chandeleur Archipelago. Beyond that the hydra mouth of the river. Beyond that Mexico. The low tide lapped and drew back. He could be the first person in creation. Or the last. He rose and walked up the beach to the boat and pushed off and climbed in and went to the rear to ballast it off the sand. He took up the oar and poled his way out through the shallows and then sat there watching the deep red of the sunset darken and die.
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• Chandeleur islands are near New Orleans
• “Beyond that the hydra mouth of the river.” A reference to the many-headed beast. The fact that he mentions these landmarks in sequence means his direct line of sight is almost encyclopedic. He would be bisecting Port Sulphur and then straight on to Mexico. Chandeleur islands would be South of the island he is sitting on.
• In this scene, we get a sense that he knows something (aside from coming into literal knowledge of something) but is not happy about it. Knowledge is never a happy affair in this book. Pursuing this survivor also seems a big useless at this point because after they get back in the water it’s almost impossible to gauge where they went.

p. 109 “[Alicia] I suppose that sooner or later you’ll exhaust your little bag of tricks. What happens then?
[Kid] Time will tell.
[Alicia] Your shadow moving over the floor as you pass the lamp is a nice touch but I’m not buying it.
[Kid] Just an elementary observation I suppose. Well, you can’t say that we don’t try.
A Or the fact that you darken a mirror.
K Yeah, but can he cloud one?
A I don’t know. I dont know and I dont care. It’s not germane.
K Or Lucy or Mabel. Maybe I should pinch myself.
A That’s to see if you’re dreaming.
K And that’s not a reasonable inquiry I suppose. Well, we wont sweat it. There’s thornier issues on the table. When are you going back to school? Your grandmother’s not going to call in sick for you forever you know.
A I know.
K You keep odd hours.
A I’m an odd girl.
K Up all night scribbling calculations on your yellowpad. Maybe you should try counting sheep. Or in your case maybe logging sheep. For the numerically enhanced.
A I’ll keep it in mind.
K Or you just sit staring into space. I guess that’s part of the modus. How do you know it’s not all gibberish?
A You don’t. That’s what you’re trying to find out.
K When is Bobby Shafto coming?
A My brother will be here in two weeks.
K And then what?
A What do you mean then what?
K What are your intentions is what I mean by then what.
A My intentions?
K Yes.
A He’s my brother.
K Like you haven’t set your cap for him. To phrase it chastely.
A You don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway, it’s none of your business.
K Well. You know me.
… Afterwards he calls her “Sweet Sixteen,” and she denies that she is sixteen years old. This should indicate that they had had a remarkable encounter when she was 16.
p. 115
“In the evening he went down to the bar and got a hamburger and a beer. No one spoke to him. When he went out Josie tilted her chin at him. I’m sorry, Bobby, she said. He nodded. He walked up the street. The old paving stones wet with damp. New Orleans. November 29th 1980. He stood waiting to cross. The headlights of the car coming down the street doubled on the wet black stones. A ship’s horn in the river. The measured trip of the piledriver. He was cold standing there in the fine rain and he crossed the street and went on. When he got to the cathedral he went up the stairs and went in.”
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• We then see sacred imagery and Bobby recounts his father’s travels with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was considered one of the smartest people ever, and McCarthy notes how strange God must have been to create him. In this sense we see a correlation between intelligence and destruction. Oppenheimer is the one who muttered the Baghavad Gita as he watched his invention detonate.

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• Reddit posts:
• https://www.reddit.com/cormacmccarthy/comments/11rowcj/bobby_borges/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

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• In Stella Maris Alicia mentions how a brain must be able to “exist” itself. If I’m not wrong, this is an idea from Daniel Czepko (and of course it’s a general philosophical view), that the brain is a conception of the mind. It’s a chicken and egg issue describing intelligence. Ultimately, some conclude that the mind “creates” everything. This would completely change the meaning of the novel, then. When Oiler and Bobby saw the dead people in the plane, it may be that they “created” the dead. They created the plane. They will be held accountable for the knowledge that they helped to create. Of course, in my opinion this “creation” would be more like a creation of information, which is not necessarily the real world. That would mean the book is contained entirely in the animus; the narrator is not reliable. We can only see the world from Bobby and Alicia’s point of view, just as we can only see everything from our own view. Alicia is battling with her inner mind, while Bobby seems to struggle with the exterior world.

“There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.”
​

• Reminds me strongly of the passengers on the plane. The survivor of the plane probably escaped, took a raft, and then died somewhere. There is probably no story. But the interested parties might demand that there be a story, and it will drive Bobby to the point of madness.
• Knowledge chases away and corners the uncertain. In these books, it represents the rising waters. Bobby certainly identifies Alicia as being his “start of the sea.”
• The investigation will lose momentum throughout the book because Bobby comes to understand the futility of chasing answers. The plot “implodes,” as many people note.
• The description of Hiroshima also coincides with the very first paragraph. The glass “melting” out onto the street, not dissimilar to the headlights on the wet stones in New Orleans two paragraphs before.
• “Doubling” the lights on the “wet stone” also suggests that we are looking at binary worlds. Or, the mirror world to this one. The aphorism “seek and you will find” appears suitable here. Is information strictly created from within the mind? Are we going to find absolutely everything we are looking for? Do we realize that we are unconsciously wishing our own vaporization? Has science gone too far?

p. 165
​

• In Wartburg, Tennessee, as he is going to visit his grandma.
• I would like to mention something about the act of writing. Writing is the act of ascribing words or meaning to an idea that can be shared across the medium of text — books, websites, papers, etc. It’s a means of throwing our knowledge onto the world. As Bobby is walking through Tennessee here, he is expecting something and then seeing it. The roof and the bricks. The hawk, the genus, the measurements. He is creating this hawk based on interior knowledge.
• He sees a shotgun shell on the path and we find another mystery that won’t be solved. Did she shoot a fox? Did she ward off intruders? Was she aiming at the burglars who took things from the house?
• The “small bent hardwood trees rooted in rock and pointing out the way the wind had gone.” In The Passenger, I absolutely cannot get over the idea that McCarthy wants us to acknowledge a flood, something that is washing everything away, the current of history. And what will remain? We have to hold on to everything or else it will wash away. Bobby mentions his greatest fear is “the depths.” Is it drowning? No. It’s losing everything. Nothing can remain together. I think water is also squarely equated to an atomic blast. They both have similar effects. Both are just exploding and pulling everything apart, while also crushing and annihilating. It would seem that intelligence plays the same role. What we don’t want it knowledge; we want understanding. Knowledge, an addition of data to the existing set, requires us to continue revising our precepts. This is something Bobby perhaps does not want to do.“

“The rolling hills and ridges to the east. Somewhere beyond that the installation at Oak Ridge for enriching uranium that had led his father here from Princeton in 1943 and where he’d met the beauty queen he would marry. Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.”
“A hawk appeared out of the woods below and rose effortlessly and came about and drifted quarterwise down the wind and turned and rose again and hovered. Broadwing. Buteo platypterus. It passed so close he could see its eye. Eleven millimeters. The great horned owl’s were twenty-two. The same as the whitetailed deer. But rich in rods. Nighthunter. The hawk turned and dipped and skated off down the slope and then rose again, standing into the wind. Motionless. You should have migrated by now. The hawk turned once more and then it was gone. He looked again for his grandmother’s house. The green metal roof. The red brick chimney in need of tuckpointing. Her car in the driveway. How far is that? Two miles? He rose and hiked out along the crest of the ridge. A cold wind in the sun. Fox scat in the pathway. A twelvebore shotshell case trodden into the dirt. The small bent hardwood trees rooted in rock and pointing out the way the wind had gone.”
p. 198, Bobby racing
p. 199 any kind of reality he’d a stake in
p. 209, drilling, “news from another world”
p. 367, he is in Spain and imagining being on the beach with a woman. He interrupts his thoughts with this passage:
“Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darknes about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.”
​

• It would seem the true destruction was not material but spiritual. The spirit supplies life. In the sense that darkness is falling, he no longer possesses something that can guide him because he has lost an aspect of himself — certainly Alicia, if it’s Bobby — and there is no independent entity that is all knowing to which he can refer. Later, McCarthy describes some geckos skittering around. “Someone in the town had died,” he starts. The bells toll and he is sitting at a bodega.

“Pale woodslave lizards circled the rings of light cast upon the ceiling by the tablelamps. Stalking the moths like predators at a waterhole. Their tufted feet. Van der Waals forces. He nodded to the men and raised his glass.”
​

• “Van der Waals force” describes how atoms attract and repell based on polarization. It’s curious how to approach the analogy of the lizards in this context. It’s a predator-prey relationship regarding light and darkness. The bonding of atoms and molecules might have something to do with it — like how electrons move in and out of atoms.
• Overall, I think the book posits ideas about actual life. There seems to be a difference between the material world and something else. The “something else” doesn’t need to be defined — or at least someone will find something to define it. The spirit, the quantum, the religious, what have you. The idea of being a “passenger” is a spiritual state, ultimately, I think. In the same way that a spirit will leave a body upon death, the person is not equal to their constituent parts. The FBI agents only seem to ask about what is substantively true. But Bobby seems more interested in the process, the extensive life of the crash and where it leads. We see the tyranny of the present in this book. Czepko mentions that the future and the past are both illusions of the present. We are watching a process — time — unfold in the now. We are trapped in this present, victims of whatever may come. It fits the experience of someone at sea; there is no time at sea. Even the day cycle seems incidental, because there’s no activity that would require the sun or not. The sun only seems to drive creatures off of the beach, as we read in the laast chapter. And the information we come into while alive seems trivial compared to the universe’s more robust truths. What happened to the passenger? The answer is out there, but perhaps it is folly to know.

p. 369,
“He cycled through the small port. Down the thin graveled estuary road and out along the flats. Where the salt was once evaporated for the city of Carthage. Frumentaria. The Roman word. The lights of Ibiza coming up off to the north. He sat on a stone that held an ancient iron ring and worked on a flat tired against the coming darkness. His bike standing on its forks against the wall. He listened as he fed the rubber tube past his ear. He sorted a patch from the small leather satchel that hung from the underside of the bicycle seat.”
McCarthy is talking about the Punic Wars. Scipio Africanus and his grandson, Scipio Aemilianus, worked tirelessly to conquer the city, only for the junior Scipio to find it burning in 146 BC. He supposedly tried salting over the earth so that it would never rise again.
We all know that Cato the Elder would end every single speech by wishing destruction to Carthage. “Carthago delenda est.” At this point in the Roman Republic, the city-state was still attaining its status as an “empire” by gradually taking over specific geographic tracts. It did not have designs to be an “empire,” a concept that did not exist at that point in history, but they discovered that the central government was empowered by having assets and colonies abroad. The Punic Wars coincided with Rome’s attempts at sacking Greek states, which caused an influx of Greek culture to the eternal city. They were tasting the power of hegemony. Carthage, because it was so steadfast and so difficult to take down, acted as a kind of antithesis to Rome. It was intolerable. Throughout its history, as McCarthy notes by calling it “Frumentaria” (which is a vernacular way of describing how it supplies grain), Carthage was treated as a vassal state rather than one of the formerly most powerful polities in the Mediterranean. It had to be destroyed because its existence called the strength of Rome into question.
It is this antithesis that I think Bobby is noting, mentally. Just like how he is eventually described as “the last pagan,” his steadfastness is offensive to those who demand to know. The truth is, as he seems to implicitly maintain, knowledge does not exist. It’s a myth as powerful as God. Alicia also understands that most of what she knows is probably “gibberish” (the Kid’s words).
The state of being a “passenger” in this sense is to be accountable. The missing passenger represents that Carthaginian anomaly that cannot be tolerated. The unknowable ranks alongside Judge Holden as an antagonist, in my opinion. Both Bobby and his pursuers are victims of the same influence. Only Bobby seems to understand the beast, however. It’s as if Grendel had bribed the Danes to kill Beowulf. A creature that can never be known, or else it would be destroyed.

I’m just now getting into changing up my plaza and situating houses in different areas to go with the theme, aesthetic etc. I’m having a hard time with the little “hand”. Is it me or is it just crazy finicky. It’s takes me a stupid amount of time to place an item. Any tips? Or is this just the way it is for now? I hope it gets fixed, if that’s the case. Getting flashbacks to the days of terraforming in Animal Crossing - the rage is real 🤣🤣
Edit: I should mention I use the switch

I put together a few more little alt-floor ideas for the next two floors! Here ya go, tell me what you think!

THERMAL VENTS

• Alt variant of the Caves, themed around a lush cavern filled with both water and lava everywhere. Almost jungle-like aesthetics.
  • Diverse plant life has sprung up as the ocean above filters down into the molten depths of the Caves!
  • Yog’s corruption hasn’t ignored this place, though, both the flora and fauna here are out to get you.
  • Visually much greener and more vibrant than the standard Caves. Vines and plants line the walls and rooms are filled with rivers of water and lava!

ENEMIES

• Dart Gnolls replace Gnoll Warlocks. While they’re far less durable than their magic brethren, they’re much craftier, fleeing the player like Scorpios while pelting them with darts!
  • Like Warlocks, their sprites correspond to the type of dart they shoot. Red, Blue, Brown, and Purple.
  • Darts can be Burning, Chilling, Crippling, or Poisonous!
• Gnoll Hunters replace Brutes. These heavyset enemies travel in groups of two like Ghouls; While they cannot Rage, care must be taken to kill them both quickly.
  • If one Hunter of a pair is killed, the other will receive a very strong Rage-like buff until it dies, seeking to avenge its partner!
• Blind Bats replace Vampire Bats. These creatures have lost the ability to see, instead relying on sonar to track down adventurers.
  • 25% more durable and 25% more damaging than Vampire Bats, same Vampiric effect
  • Any movement or direct action near an awake Blind Bat will call its attention, even from far away, but standing completely still or throwing an object away from you can trick it, leading it away and making it vulnerable to ranged attacks!
• Swarm of Spiders replaced Swarm of Flies. Like the Flies, these tiny Cave Spiders split into two upon a successful hit.
  • They cannot shoot webs anymore nor can they Poison you, but their attacks do Cripple! Extra care should be taken not to be overrun.
• City Guardians replace DM-200s and 201s. These more defensive DM variants hold slightly less potent offensive capabilities compared to their previous models but also possess the ability to buff and shield nearby enemies by up to 5% their max HP per turn!
  • Will always spawn in rooms with other enemies.
  • If less than 2 other enemies are present, it will heal/shield itself by 20% HP per turn. This amount decreases by 10% for each enemy present that it is shielding besides itself!

ROOMS AND HAZARDS

• Hot rooms will appear from time to time, filled with molten lava and plumes of smoke! Staying in these rooms for too long will slowly damage you similar to toxic gas, pay close attention to the debuff icon to tell when you need to cool down!
• Vine Lashers grow all around the floors, hiding in the lush grass of the Vents and crippling unwary dungeoneers. Like the quest Rotberry Plant, they have a central core, which must be destroyed to progress onto the next floor. Doing so will destroy all undefeated Lashers on the floor!
• Idol rooms will appear from time to time in this area. Picking up the shiny golden statue at its end will send a giant, spiked log rolling after, trying to crush you! Adventurers must take care to avoid dart traps and pits while they escape.
  • Idols can be sold at the Shop for a hefty sum, providing a nice boost to your Gold count.

​

OLD KING'S PALACE

• Alt variant of the Dwarven Metropolis, themed around a regal castle that has fallen into heavy disrepair…
  • Heavy use of ethereal shades of blue and cyan to contrast the standard red of the base Metropolis
  • Like the Demon Halls, many rooms’ floors are half-broken and collapsed
  • Each floor is structurally similar but still randomized, consisting of a basic dungeon layout within a large cylindrical “tower” framework hanging over a pit
  • Long, wide bridges can appear on the cardinal sides of the tower on each floor (north, south, east, west) leading to exterior parapets that house special rooms

STRUCTURAL CHANGES

• After defeating the boss of the Caves, the player will find the path to the Metropolis beyond a wall of bluish, impassible flames. A doorway set into the brick wall to its left leads upwards…
• A powerful magical barrier blocks the player’s path into the Metropolis, and thus they must scale the palace of the Old King, standing on the ledge between the Caves and the Dwarven City, to find a way to dispel it.
• This zone of the dungeon goes up instead of down!

ENEMIES

• Lost Souls replace Dwarven Ghouls. The spirits of these emaciated, frail remains of neglected Ghouls are only tenuously holding onto their cursed life after the New King’s fall… Even more agile and fast to attack, they no longer travel in groups. Instead, they will explode with damaging dark energy and turn into angry Wraiths when killed.
• Newborn Elementals replace most Elemental types. The potent magic left unchecked in this place gives birth to a steady stream of these! Each type will apply their respective debuffs even if it’s the player attacking them, so extra care must be taken dealing with these. They’re not quite as dangerous as the Wandmaker Quest elemental, though.
• Crazed Warlocks replace Dwarf Warlocks. No longer possessing their Degrading magic, these warlocks instead fling bolts of potent, damaging dark energy that temporarily lower your maximum HP by 10%, but they have much stronger melee attacks compared to their other counterparts. The debuff doesn’t stack.
• Tainted Monks replace Dwarf Monks. Left without purpose after the Old King’s fall, their bodies have become increasingly tainted by demonic energy from below. They can no longer Focus, but their attacks are just as deadly, and can inflict Crippled and Bleed.
• Overgrown Golems replace Golems. Though they possess only 75% the health and armor of their more well-maintained counterparts, attacking these creatures directly may trigger a harmful plant effect.

ROOMS/HAZARDS

• Elemental Spawners appear on each floor; while they aren't required to progress, defeating them stops a steady flow of new Newborn Elementals from spawning.
• Magical pylons can appear in rooms similar to the ones in the DM boss fight. These will shield all enemies in the room from damage until they're destroyed.
• Royal Armories and Royal Libraries replace their typical special room types here, containing rarer and more powerful items and consumables. They're also considerably more ornate
• Probably some other special rooms I haven't thought of yet

BOSS/ESCAPE

• The boss here is not the Dwarf King, but the spirit of the Old King!
• Like his less-benevolent successor, the Old King guards the depths below, but wishes not to directly cause you harm; instead, he insists that you are tested for your might, as he refuses to dispel the seal to the demon-infested Metropolis for anyone short of a true hero.
• The fight proceeds quite normally to the typical Dwarf King fight but atop the Palace, with a sheer drop to the depths of the Caves on all sides…
• The main focus here are the waves of Palace enemies, with four of them of increasing intensity until the King deems you truly worthy.
• Warnings will flash throughout the fight as the King prepares potent magic, sending powerful gusts of wind through the arena that will cripple you at best and throw you off the sides at worst! This won’t always kill you, but will send you back to the previous floor with typical falling damage. Get behind the abundant pillars in the battlefield to avoid these attacks.
• Beating the King’s trials will have him grant you his Crown, allowing you to pass unhindered into the Metropolis. However, the King passing on causes the magic holding up the Palace to become unstable, the entire structure crumbling with each passing second…
• Escape! Once you go back to the previous floor a five-minute timer will begin to count down, granting you a few short minutes to flee the Palace before it falls apart and buries you.
  • Ankhs will break if the time runs out during the escape sequence. Unblessed ones add an extra +30s to the timer, blessed ones add +90s.
• Once you reach the bottom, you can finally pass into the final area of the game.

I thought it might be worth sharing my tactics for dealing with Laundry Mountain and curating a wardrobe!
As ADHDers, I think we have all gotten to Laundry Mountain before, but the below tactics managed to scale mine down to a Laundry Foothill, with at most 3 or 4 baskets of laundry that needed washing. I've also included a section at the bottom on permanently eliminating Laundry Mountain and curating a wardrobe - using this, I've managed to get and keep it down to two baskets maximum - one of normal wash and one of hand wash.
Both tactics are focused on doing just one load of laundry at a time.
1: The Quick Dopamine
Pick a colour, pull all the things of that colour out of the pile, do a load of that colour. While that colour is washing, let the obsessive joy of the totally inessential task of sorting laundry piles by colour (is light purple in with the blues? the pinks? where does mauve go?) flow over you. Turn everything the right way out and check your pockets as you go, then stack your piles neatly in a pleasing colour order. You haven't gotten rid of laundry mountain, but you've made it *aesthetic*, shrunk it a little, and gotten one step closer to Washing The Things - plus you can find what you're looking for (which is useful for the next tactic.)
2: The Capsule Wardrobe
Get an empty laundry basket. You're packing for a week-long trip: the basket is your suitcase. Think through your schedule for the week, from morning to night, and pick out all the clothes you want to wear. Put them in your 'suitcase'. Make sure you get underwear, pyjamas, socks, etc.!
As you're 'packing', you'll probably find things you would NEVER pack for a trip - they don't fit well, you don't really like them - put those into a separate heap. If you have a spare basket, put them in that. Anything damaged goes in another separate heap - you can't wear it without mending it, so it needs 2 steps before you can pack it for a trip. Again, if you have a spare basket, put it there (if you're not a menderecycler, go ahead and put it right into the bin! I find that I can usually bin underwear and socks, but not other items.)
Now, because it's a trip, make sure you pack extra of the essentials - I try to add 3 pairs of socks/underwear, a bra or 2, a change of pyjamas, and maybe one extra outfit. Wash your basket - well done! You have clothes for a whole week of normal life, and a nice little capsule wardrobe that you can keep washing and wearing ad infinitum.
Your only job now keep your capsule wardrobe separate from the rest of Laundry Mountain. When you take off your capsule wardrobe clothes, put them in their own heap or basket. The rest of it can just stay where it is, and it's not your problem. If something gets damaged, put it in the damaged pile/basket and replace it from the like and wear pile. If you really want to wear something from the like and wear pile, add it to the next week's washing and incorporate it into your capsule. You only need to do one basket of laundry a week to have everything you need.
If life is getting in your way, don't worry about the rest of Laundry Mountain, just keep on keeping on with the above. Nobody will ever know you have Laundry Mountain: you're doing a great job of looking and acting like a fully functional non-ADHD human adult. There is no shame in this; you do what you need to to make your life work.
If it isn't, the next bit is for ticking through the rest of your washing.
You now have the rest of Laundry Mountain sorted into three piles - clothes you like and wear, clothes you don't really like and don't really wear, and damaged things.
There are two ways to climb the rest of your laundry mountain; one for the schedule-oriented ADHDers and one for the LET THE DOPAMINE TAKE ME ADHDers. Combine as it suits you.
Schedule/List People
Set yourself a task/schedule item due repeatedly 2 days before you would run out of clothes - I do 7 days of capsule, so my task/schedule item happens every 5 days. Repeat the capsule wardrobe exercise, adding your capsule wardrobe stuff back into the like/wear pile, and then pulling out 7 days of capsule + extras and washing it. It can be slow going, but you'll chip away at the extra bits pretty quickly - one month of this is an extra 18 clean pairs of socks and a whole extra week's worth of clothing!
Dopamine Following People
If you're feeling super-frisky-let's-get-shit-done one day, repeat the capsule wardrobe exercise with your like and wear pile WITHOUT ADDING YOUR CURRENT CAPSULE BACK IN. Amazing - now you have TWO weeks worth of clean clothes (and THREE weeks of socks and underwear!) and you still only need to do one basket of laundry a week! Keep repeating until the whole like and wear pile is gone - either washed and put away or moved into the don't like/don't wear pile.
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Permanently Eliminating Laundry Mountain
Like an intrepid explorer, you've scaled Laundry Mountain. Your drawers are brimming with clean clothes you love to wear. You have one piddly little basket of laundry to do a week. All that remains ... is the pile of unwearables. If you're going to mend the damaged stuff, go ahead and wash it and move it to a mending pile. You can chip away at that over time; no shame in a mending pile.
Now take your basket to the don't like/don't wear pile. Load it up. Wash and dry everything. Get a big bag. Take everything directly from the rack/dryer and put it in the bag. Tie the bag. Put the bag by the door of your house. When you get the chance, get that bag out of your house - donate it, give it to friends in your size, whatever you need to do to get rid of it. You don't like those clothes. You don't wear those clothes. Those clothes are taking up space and energy you don't have to share.
Repeat as necessary until finally, you are free of Laundry Mountain!
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Preventing Laundry Mountain
The most effective thing I have found for preventing a Laundry Mountain has been reducing/curating my wardrobe. I don't really have a 'capsule' wardrobe, I just have a relatively small one.
I am fortunate to have friends that wear about the same size, so we tend to cycle clothes between us - this makes letting things go much easier, because once everyone has had a look through whatever clothes are circulating and they're ready to go to donation/resale (which usually takes a few months) we check back in with each other on anything that's left; I don't often find myself missing something I've gotten rid of, but knowing that I can get it back easily makes me feel better. If you don't have that option, box up your get rid things for a few months out of sight, and then pull them out and have a last pass through before you donate.
While you're going through this process, DO NOT BUY MORE CLOTHING UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. You'll get the chance to shop (lots!) at the end, but bringing things in while you curate just makes it more difficult.
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Sorting Clothes
To minimise your wardrobe, I do NOT recommend the conventional wisdom of 'dump everything out onto your bed so you can see it all.' This is a recipe for ADHD disaster. I suggest going through stuff one drawerack/box/pile at a time and as you're washing and putting things away.
General Principles - Do This First

1. If something is damaged, take it out and put it in a mending basket or get rid of it.
2. If something doesn't fit, put it in a box labeled with the size or get rid of it. A good question to ask yourself is whether or not it's worth paying to get it tailored. If the answer is no, it's probably a get rid.
3. If you LOVE something that falls into one of the two categories above, see if you can find it on poshmark/depop/vestiare/vinted. If you can, buy the new one - and get rid of the old.
4. If something is good quality but not your style, put it on poshmark/depop/vestiare/vinted. If it sells, yay money! If it doesn't, get rid.

Reducing The Rest - After The First Clear Out
Break your clothing (and shoes, accessories, coats, etc.) down into the following categories, and sort through what you have according to the principles for each category.
Foundation - socks, underwear, tights, bras. I have as many of these as will fit in my drawers.
Leisure - pyjamas, loungewear, lingerie. This clothing is all about comfort, so focus on how it makes you feel; cosy, sexy, luxurious. If it doesn't make you feel good, get rid.
Specific - sportswear, swimsuits, costumes, etc. Minimise this according to your lifestyle e.g.: I don't swim or run often, so I have two swimsuits (a functional everyday one for normal swimming and a fancy one for holidays) and only one pair of trainers.
Gardening/painting clothes fall into this category, and you should be brutal - most people only need to keep one or two sets of mucky clothes. This is not a repository for the 283734783748 free t-shirts that don't fit anymore. Get rid.
Special - event-specific clothing that you need infrequently - ballgowns, party dresses, heels, suits, etc. Try to only keep one of any given iteration of item, but you don't necessarily need to be practical. If you love ballgowns but never go to balls keep your ballgowns anyway, but if you rarely wear heels and have 5 pairs of black heels you don't love, keep only your favourite ones.
Everyday - the largest category: anything you would wear in the course of a normal week. Think about how each item makes you feel, how frequently you reach for it, and how it fits with your self-image. If it makes you feel good, you reach for it a lot, and it fits with how you want to look, keep! If not, get rid. I'm a fairly minimalist dresser, and have found that over time I've whittled this down significantly because I've developed an idea of what does and doesn't fit with my style.
The Final Touches
At this point, you should have a significantly smaller and more manageable wardrobe, a better idea of how you dress and how you want to dress, and what you have that puts you toward that goal. Now is the time to shop: make a list of the gaps you've noticed in your wardrobe, and set parameters for each item. When you come across an item that fits those parameters, buy it - if it doesn't fit the parameters, don't buy.
I've found that I shop significantly less after curating my wardrobe, and I buy higher-quality pieces I get more use out of. Because I'm not just chaos-shopping, I can take time over purchases, set alerts on secondhand sites, and wait for good deals - and because I haven't been spending hundreds of pounds on fast fashion, when I come across a totally stunning 100% silk vintage Givenchy cocktail dress for £75, I can treat myself.
I've also found it easier to let go of things that don't necessarily fit my parameters, but that I've kept anyway. I now get my dopamine from putting together outfits that I love and caring for beautiful things I already own, rather than buying things I don't really want/need. Dressing is easier than it ever has been, and takes up a very small amount of my mental energy - I often find it exciting and energising, rather than a chore!

To me the main purpose of a house is Mannequins & Weapon racks to display trophy armor & weapons, so more of those = better. But there are also other important factors like location, ease of access, Enchating/Potions/Smithing set ups, and aesthetically how it looks.

1. Myrwatch - Easiest house to obtain and a super awesome gallery room with plenty of space for a bunch of specific trophies (only 1, Keening's doesn't work) as well as ones of your chosing. Access to all crafting tables, including a staff enchanter, some fertile earth & special forge. First floor is cozy, all around very clean aesthetic. Biggest con is it's too close to a Dragon lair, having to deal with it everytime it respawns sucks (and unfortunately many CC houses have this problem) The Chaurus outside also occasionally respawns, and two zones is not ideal.
   
2. Shadowfoot Sanctum - Being in a sewer & having to either wade through the Ratway or jump in the Riften harbor kinda stinks, and the house area of it is very dense & cramped. However it has an awesome armory with a ton of mannequins, weapon racks & shield plaques. It also has some custom plaques, racks & shelves for Thieves Guild trophies, makes it a must have if you dip into that questline. Though the one for Chillrend is broken (sounds bad but most cc houses have something like this wrong with them, & this is minor in comparison)
   
3. Bloodchill Manor - Fun little quest to unlock, all the crafting tables (including a staff enchanter), as well as some fertile earth all in one zone, most of all amayzing trophy room in the back. Unfortunately the Dragon claw pegs don't work. Vampire aesthetic might not be for everyone, and despite that it has a plaque for Dawnguard-side exclusive weapons. Also the side rooms are pretty cramped.
   
4. Goldenhills Plantation - Takes some leg work to get up and running, but nice location (best of the central ones if your playing survival/no fast travel imo) and access to a ton of fertilized earth is huge. Even just for wheat & blue mountain flowers, that stockpile and can be picked over time. Generic but pleasant design and a decent amout of Trophy space for it's size. However if you replace the Display room with child's bedroom you can't change it back.
   
5. Hendaheim - Weapon racks in the basement (as well as the Ebony Blade's) are broken, which leaves you with much less space than you'd expect. Also too close to a Dragon burial mound, which can agro on the Forsworn on the other side of the mountain but still prevent you from fast travelling. Other than that it's very nice. Plenty of Mannequins & functional weapon racks & plaques. Nordic Longhouse aesthetic is great and works for any chatacter because it's located in Skyrim. All the regular crafting tables.
   
6. Tundra Homestead - Very pleasant and cozy vibe. However the trophy room being a seperate zone adds a loading screen, and inside of it the Dragon claw pegs don't work. It is also too close to a dragon lair that will attack you.
   
7. Hjerm - Have to complete a lot of quests (Notoriously buggy Blood on the ice + at least 5 civil war quests, more if you want to side with Imps) to unlock. It being a former murderer's lair & one of his victim's home, plus the uncomftrable segregation of Windhelm is enough to throw the vibe off. But despite all that I think Hjerm is the best base game house. Great armory on the second floor to display your trophies, and nice and roomy unlike most houses.
   
8. Honeyside - Small but cozy house. For it's size it has a good amount of weapon racks & 2 mannequins. Can enter it from outside or within the city of Riften is also very nice.
   

All 3 Hearthfire houses are a about the same; Great armory for displaying stuff, nice open but cozy rest of the house, and some very usefull farms available. But unfortunately they're super tedious to gather all the materials for & build, and the pros don't really outway the cons when pre/auto-furnished superior houses are much more easily accessible.

1. Lakeview - Beautiful location in the forest on the lake, Neighbor is a little sus though.
   
2. Heljarchen - Nice Central location, and the the Tundra & open sky can be pretty.
   
3. Windstad - Out in the Swamp kinda stinks.
   
4. Proudspire Manor - Most expensive & requires a few long quests to unlock, but unlike Hjerm doesn't justify it with barely any trophy space crammed in the basement. Solitude is a very nice city though.
   
5. Severin Manor - It's a pretty great house, but location really kills it, as most quests & things to do are on main land skyrim. Also eerie music and requires completing at least 3 decently-long quests to unlock (more if Raven Rock is enthralled to Miraak before you travel to Solsthiem) Just having storage space, crafting tables & a personal bed on Solsthiem is nice though.
   
6. Nchuanthumz - The only house that is too big, but still not much space for Trophies. I sometimes get a little lost in the layout. Looks nice but I'd rather not live in Dwarven Architecture. Also having to run through 'quick test cell' is a big con, adds another loading screen & the door sometimes doesn't work properly.
   
7. Gallows hall - Cool necromancer set up with a good creepy quest to unlock, Totally unique Staff of Worms & two usefull "crafting" tables within. But I wouldn't want to live there. Only space for trophies on the middle floor, and not much of it. Vibe here is generally too fucked up for me.
   
8. Vlindrel Hall - Markarth is full of corruption, Forsworn, & cannibals, the vibe is bad. Only 1 mannequin and you have to climb half the city to reach the house from either fast travel point. Kinda nice re-fitted Dwarven aesthetic though.
   
9. Breezehome - Unfortunately is just not very good. No manequins for armor, no enchanting table & pretty cramped. Great central location within the city of Whiterun, easily acessible early, and charming design. Buy outclassed in all categories by almost every other house in every category.
   
10. Dead man's Dread - minimum 4 loading screens to get in & out of. Hellish maze-like layout, and awfull groaning & ship creeking make it unpleasant to be in. Only 1 manequin & 1 weapon plaque. It's a fun quest to go there but not sure why it's counted as a home.
    

Thanks for reading all that! That's all just my opinion though. If you think I'm underating/overating anything let me know, I'm open to considering any of them besides Dead Man's Dread lol.

Hello GiftofGames and thanks for coming to my post!
My profile: https://steamcommunity.com/id/moonliight28/
Game: https://store.steampowered.com/sub/764692/
Why you want to play this game and why you can't buy it?
Hello I'm Nightlure, I am currently unemployed for reasons beyond my control, cause my former company couldn't continue with the contract, so i can't really waste my money on videogames, even if i would love to!
I'm a big fan of Resident Evil games and I have played all the games in the series (Yes, even Survivor and Gaiden), I remember when I was 7 years old and I bought a video game magazine where there was a map with the PS2 Ultimate Spider-Man collectibles (I bought it for that reason) but there was also a guide for the recently released Resident Evil 4, I read that guide excitedly imagining every move Leon made around that house, including that epic jump out the window. Back then I couldn't play games like that because they scared me, so I never bought it.
After a few years, around the age of 12, I bought Resident Evil 5 and played it cooperatively with my cousin, it was an amazing experience, it's true that it wasn't very scary anymore, but it was a lot of fun and the mutations were interesting.
Since then I have been playing all the games of the saga, until reaching Resident Evil 7, I was tired of the course that the saga took with RE5, RE6 and RE Operation Raccoon City, with a lot of the focus on the action and shooter elements, so this change of perspective, characters and setting suited brilliant. There was tension in the environment, and Ethan was just another ordinary person like me and you trying to rescue his missing wife, something that had been missing in the saga since Resident Evil 2. I found the game wonderful, terrifying, with a good setting and characters, and with the right dose of action to make it fun to use weapons.
And now we come to RE Village, which is the direct continuation of what happened in the previous game. Ethan has to fight monstrosities again, this time to save his daughter! The aesthetics and setting is very similar to my second favorite game in the series (Behind Resident Evil 2), Resident Evil 4, a rural town full of monstrous villagers, and you going to save someone there... Just a perfect setting, and I would like to be able to enjoy this game before the release of RE4: Remake. watching as the story of Ethan continues and enjoy accompanying Ethan, Rose and Mia for a while longer.
If it's okay I would like to receive the gold edition, because it brings the DLC of the story expansion, so it is super important in this case!
Thank you very much for your time, have a very good day!

Demographics

• Gender: Woman
• Race/Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latino/white
• Residence: Spain
• Income Bracket: low income (<20k)
• Type of School: Private, very privileged, almost a feeder.
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): I guess URM? Because of beign Latin American?

Intended Major(s): Neuroscience (Biomedical Computation for Stanford)
Academics

• GPA (UW/W): Before IB, 9.7/10
• Rank (or percentile): School doesn't rank but based on my knowledge, I'm in a third place tie. We were a small class of around 30 students.
• # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: Full IBPD; HL Chemistry, Biology, English A and Spanish A, SL Mathematics AA and Environemntal Systems (lol). Finished with a 42/45.

Standardized Testing
List the highest scores earned and all scores that were reported.

• SAT I: 1410 (720RW, 690M) Sent only to Bowdoin
• Cambridge CPE title, if it fits here... 222/230 :)

Extracurriculars/Activities

1. Internship at a local university in my country. I talked about what I do in the laboratory, didn't namedrop (I regret not doing so), 35 hours a week during my gap year. Nothing published yet...
2. Volunteering: created my city's first tutoring program. Administered over 100 volunteers and 20 families over a year. 14 hwk, 46 wk/yr. Grade 12.
3. Speaker at international TEDx event. Was given a scholarship to attend, the topic was neuroscience/pschology. Grade 12. I also did other TEDx events locally.
4. MUN organizer and chair. Just the school's MUN.
5. Coding team co-founder. Was named co-founder after enrolling in the Astro Pi contest. Self taught Python (with certificate from the University of Helsinki) for this project).
6. Class president and then prefect during all years of high school. It's funny because I went to 3+ different high schools, was elected class president at all of them. I mentioned my duties as class president (organizing sport comeptitions, arranging exam schedules...)
7. Eldest sister. As the first child of a monoparental family, I spent my summers and most evenings taking care of my sisters, cooking or tidying up the house. I thought it was something I should put in the commonapp because it consumed my summers and I couldn't attend many of the contests I wanted to go to.
8. Dance. Competition dancer (gymnastics and ballroom dances) until 11th grade (danced normally but without the competition hours because of my studies). I have been dancing since I'm 6 years old, won 2 silver metals in a big city in my country.
9. Film making. Ludopathy advocating through writing, directing and co-producing an award-winning short film on the topic.
10. Violin. Obligatory mention for the nerdy aesthetic: the violin. Had to stop playing in an orchestra because I moved cities in year 10. I have been playing at home ever since.

I mentioned other ECs such as aiding with the creation of a vegan and religious-respectful menus at my high school, participating in chess tournaments, working now as a tutor.
Awards/Honors

1. Full ride to the most prestigious school in my city, which allowed me to study the IB. Valued in 28k, only one recipient per year.
2. My team was Astro-Pi finalist (I love you guys), it's an international coding competition and they send robots to space for investigations planned my teenagers. You should definitely try for next year if you're a sophomore/junior reading this.
3. First place in a local's university contest for independent research.
4. Mathletics: 1st place in school, 6th place in Europe (I spent 52 hours in a single week doing this. I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT)

Letters of Recommendation
Environmentals teacher: good, but I don't expect it to be great. His last referees have gotten into oxford and UCL and really good colleges, so it will definitely not hurt. We have an amazing relationship.
Physics teachetutor: He is my teacher, just not the physics one. I sneaked into his lessons anyway because he is genuinely the best teacher ever. I'm sure he wrote an amazing LOR.
English teacher: I read the letter, it's comedic, mentions me as bubbly and genuine and talks about me in a less academic light (still mentions my work ethic with examples, etc), which I guess is a good combination with a more formal letter.
Interviews
Duke interview: He was Spanish but he hated biology. It was fun and very very relatable when we talked about anything other than my major. Overall I think he thinks I'm not a fit for Duke, but I liked him and I'd love to go there.
Northwestern: the first and best interview so far. He told me I'm the type of students Northwestern wants, that he'll do anything possible for me to get in, and told me to continue with my current path in life. Very encouraging and now I'm praying to get in because I love Northwestern.
Princeton: The interviewer cancelled on me TWICE and then finally intervewed me. Very sweet man, had many things to talk about but I don't think the interview will have a negative or positive impact on my application. I think it was very neutral.
Essays
Maaaaaan I don't know. I don't like my essays but they made my abusive mom angry so HEY that's a good sign. I tried my best to show how much I love each university and how I see myself there as a student. I hope the feeling is reciprocal. I am often called a good writer but I don't think I would stand out from a really good applicant pool because of my prose.
Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD)
Acceptances:

• Newcastle University in the UK :) for Medicine (I applied as an international there)

Waitlists:

• Deferred from Harvard REA

Rejections:

• Bowdoin
• U of Chicago
• Case Western Reserve
• Tufts

Awaiting on other T20s. I know it looks like I applied to only reaches, but honestly, as a European student, if I'm going to University of Nowhere, I rather stay in Europe. There's nothing wrong with ambition!
Additional Information:
I am losing hope but as a test optional international seeking full aid, I shouldn't have had any hope to begin with. I am honestly looking for a miracle right now. I am blaming my results on my need for money, but maybe the fault lies somewhere else. It's not like I can do anything to change the outcome now, but if you see a mistake please point it out so other internationals seeking full aid don't make the same mistake.

No one lives under the lighthouse Director’s cut FREE DOWNLOAD
No one lives under the lighthouse Director’s cut Free Download

About This Game

One of these days you finally decide to take out the box with old CDs, mostly old games, covered with 10-year old dust. But you can’t outstand the desire to look through all of them and prepare yourself for an hour full of nostalgia.
While browsing them, one of the PC games you found there attracts your attention. You don’t remember this game being here. You neither remember buying or playing it.
It seems really old, something from the early ’00s. The title says “No one lives under the lighthouse”.
The game description on the backside of the box seems to be poorly translated from some other language:
“You arrive at the old lighthouse on a small island near the coast of the United States. After the previous keeper has gone missing, you need to take over his duties and watch after the light. The member of the Establishment told you they’ll get you an assistant after a week or two, but right now you’re on your own.
Featuring:

• Island exploration
• Enjoy the loneliness and ultra-modern graphics
• Look after the lighthouse, light the lamp at the sunset
• Listen what seagulls speak to you
• No words said
• Don’t open the door that leads to the basement under the lighthouse
• No one lives under the lighthouse

This sounds weird and disturbing. Game screenshots on the box look a bit uncanny. If this game wasn’t so old you’ve probably decided it’s another pretentious walking sim with horror elements.
You need to check it. The box with other CDs stays in the corridor. You spent at least an hour looking for your old laptop, as your current PC doesn’t even have the CD port.
Install wizard completes and closes automatically in less than a minute. A text document named “Instructions.txt” opens immediately after that.
Instructions.txt:

• The keeper is responsible for the care and management of the light, and for the station in general.
• The keeper is responsible for the careful management and expenditure of stores and supplies.
• A lighthouse must never be left wholly unattended.
• Keepers must be courteous and polite to all visitors who conform to the regulations.
• The lighthouse basement should be locked up tight and not visited not by the keeper, nor anyone else.
• Lights must be lighted punctually at sunset and must be kept burning at full intensity until sunrise.
• All preparations must be made early, that there may be no delay in lightning.
• The lens and the glass of the lantern must be cleaned daily and always kept in the best possible condition.
• The keeper and his assistance, if he has any, should live in a house near the lighthouse. No one lives under the lighthouse.

“This doesn’t sound like proper instructions for a PC game”, you think. So you don’t bother closing the document and finally launch the game .exe file.
What could go wrong?

Game features:

• From 1 to 2 hours of playtime for single walkthrough
• A slow burn low-jumpscare-rated horror mystery with multiple interpretations
• Retro aesthetics
• 3 endings
• Achievements
• Full controller support

Director’s cut:

Director’s cut (also known previously as Isolated Year Update) introduces a remake of most of the late-game content, completely changing the 2nd hour of the game and also adding some new things to the earlier part of the game. Also all of game’s endings were remade and some of them became much harder to achieve than the others. Also, many achievements were remade according to the new content.
Title: No one lives under the lighthouse Director’s cut
Genre:Adventure, Indie
Developer:Marevo Collective
Publisher:Marevo Collective
Release Date: 21 Apr, 2020

System Requirements

WindowsmacOSSteamOS + Linux Minimum: - OS:Windows 7 - Processor:Intel Core Duo Q8300 @ 2.5GHz - Memory:4 GB RAM - Graphics:Intel HD Graphics 630 - Storage:400 MB available space - Sound Card:Onboard Sound
Recommended: - OS:Windows 10 - Processor:Intel Core i5 or higher - Storage:400 MB available space - Sound Card:GeForce GT 630 2GB DDR3 or Higher
Minimum: - OS:OS 10.10 - Processor:2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - Memory:4 GB RAM - Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256MB - Storage:400 MB available space - Sound Card:Onboard Sound
Recommended: - OS:OS 10.14 - Processor:Intel Core i5 2.7 GHz - Memory:4 GB RAM - Graphics:Intel Iris Graphics 6100 - Storage:400 MB available space - Sound Card:Onboard Sound
Minimum: - OS:Ubuntu 12.04+ or SteamOS+ - Processor:Intel Core Duo Q8300 @ 2.5GHz - Memory:4 GB RAM - Graphics:Intel HD Graphics 630 - Storage:400 MB available space - Sound Card:Onboard Sound
Recommended: - OS:Ubuntu 12.04+ or SteamOS+ - Processor:Intel Core i5 or higher - Memory:4 GB RAM - Graphics:GeForce GT 630 2GB DDR3 or Higher - Storage:400 MB available space - Sound Card:Onboard Sound
Free Download No one lives under the lighthouse Director’s cut
Full Game, Latest version. Download for Free, Multiplayer supported.
The post No one lives under the lighthouse Director’s cut appeared first on Surf 365.

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I just finished pinning to my "O" boards here: https://www.pinterest.com/lhowrish/ - Laine
I chose her Sometimes board: https://www.pinterest.com/lhowrish/s-o-m-e-t-i-m-e-s/
It's a lovely board with pins with quotes about 'sometimes' as well as 'sometimes' moments. Especially that sometimes a flower blooms, sometimes you fall in love, and sometimes there is beauty to be found amid the chaos.
SumX. Sum M. ER. Though when I hear the word "Sometimes" I think of that New Wave song "Sometimes" by DM and Britney Spears' song "Sometimes." I'm aesthetically trained in music, in what I hear. That's why there are q-tips all over the house. I'm always cleaning out my ears because hearing is my sense. There are 5 "known" senses, and the Fab 5 cover all 5. I'm hearing, Allison is sight, Danielle is Smell (Smell it Nell), Stef is Taste, and Ange is feel. Something like that. There are about actually 11 to 13 senses, unbeknownst to many, and something I must consider. I like that Michelangelo quote of him at 80 yo. - "I'm still learning."
"Sometimes I count the stars in my Mother's skies and weep for the lavender fields. Sometimes I'm with my Lola as she sits on a Rattan Rocking chair and sit at her feet while I silently caress the echoes of my youth. And sometimes, just sometimes, I'm kissing you."
Please check out her gorgeous profile and collection of pins. Please do pin respectfully.
~Emmaruth Allaire Zerna Concepción

My charging is done in my driveway, in the US, as I don't have a garage. Poking around these forums I learned about the Andersen charger, but it is apparently a UK product not available in the US.
I'm concerned both about aesthetics and about some idiot trying to steal the cord for the copper and electrocuting themselves. So I'd like a wall mount (to side of house) setup that keeps the cord hidden, if not locked but still permanently installed and stored outside when not in use, and a clean simple box.
Is there any such product for the US market? I'm thinking a box like with modern aesthetics like the Andersen where the front cover has the reel attached and when you unlatch it, it moves out to let you unloop the cord, then you can push it back in to store and lock. I also like that the Andersen covers the entire Jbox for the feed. It would be even better if it had a retractable cord, but since I see none of those available, I guess that is not advisable on something the size of a charger cord. Is there anything like this on the market, or are there parts available for a person to create something like this?

Tap water is one of our most important basic necessities. However, the tap water provided by the municipality is worrying because it contains a lot of substances harmful to the human body. You need a water filter that will allow you to drink safe and pure water and stay away from the threat of water pollution.
The Tap Water Guidelines specify that water "should contain no harmful concentrations of chemicals or pathogenic micro-organisms, and ideally it should be aesthetically pleasing in regard to appearance, taste and odour".
Water authorities use settling, coagulation, filtering and disinfecting to ensure the safety of our drinking water, using sufficient disinfectant to stop the re-growth of microorganisms as the water travels through the pipe system to your home.
The downside of ensuring safe drinking water is the lingering taste and smell of disinfectant. If you fill up a jug with tap water and leave it to sit for a couple of hours, the disinfectant smell and taste will gradually dissipate, but many people opt for a water filter system.
When you turn on your tap, you should see clear, uncloudy water. If not, or it tastes strange, then there are ways to find out why.
Water Filter Profiles
The basic pros and cons of each type of filtering system are included below, as well as a rough estimate of initial costs. Ongoing costs can be determined by checking the volume or time it claims to filter before requiring replacement.
Be sure to factor in the cost of replacement water filter cartridges and always replace as instructed, as spent cartridges can themselves harbour micro-organisms. What each cartridge can filter varies even within the different types of dispensers.
Jug Filter(Water Pitcher Filter)
Pros: Convenient, small, and easy to use and replace filters.
Cons: Some are slow, prone to clogging and have short filter lives, meaning higher ongoing costs.
Water Pitcher Filter is one of the commonly used household water filters. It is easy to use and you can place it directly on the table.
Tap Water Filter
Pros: Most convenient at tap filter, small, and easy to use and replace filters. Easily swap between filtered and non-filtered water.
Cons: Slows the flow of water and cannot be used on all taps.
The faucet filter can be mounted on the faucet for easy installation; however, you will need to change the water filter cartridge frequently to ensure that pure water is available for long periods of time.
Counter-top
Pros: Filters large amounts of water without plumbing modification. Less likely to clog than jug or tap-mounted filters.
Cons: Clutters countertops and cannot be used on all taps.
Under-sink
Pros: Filters large amounts of water without cluttering up countertop, or attaching to existing tap. Less likely to clog than jug or tap-mounted filters.
Cons: Takes up under-sink space and requires plumbing modification. Most expensive option.
The RO System is a common Under-sink water filter that filters almost all contaminants in the water. You can drink it directly from the filtered water.
Other Water Filter Options
You can also buy shower water filters or ones built into fridge ice and water systems. These are generally carbon filters.
There is also an option to fit out the entire house, but they're expensive and generally only justified in quite specific situations (for example, if you have a poor-quality water supply).
Water Filter Mediums
All the filter systems above can have different types or combinations of filter mediums. Your choice depends on what you want to filter out.
Filtration/Adsorption: Water Filter involves using a substance, typically carbon, to make contaminants adhere to the many pores (like pumice) within the carbon source, also called adsorption. The source of carbon can be coconut, charcoal, ceramic, etc. This helps remove odour, taste and particles in the water.
Softeners: If you have a hard water source, you will notice a build up in kettles, bathtubs and sinks. These are normally a result of large amounts of minerals in your water. A softener water filter medium will reduce the amount of minerals.
UV Treatment: This uses ultraviolet light to disinfect water. However, it only works on relatively clear water, otherwise the light doesn't penetrate sufficiently.
Reverse-Osmosis: This passes water under high pressure through a thin membrane. Most contaminants are physically blocked and washed away. It uses a lot of energy and water; up to 85 percent of the water can be wasted in the process. However, it does remove a wide range of contaminants.
Distillation: This is also energy intensive. It boils the water, collecting the condensing water to remove many contaminants, though not all.
Does Water Filter Work?
How can you be sure these water filters do what they say, without proof? One thing to look for is certification. The NSF International provides a range of certifications for products that involve initial and periodic testing:
NSF 42 covers aesthetic effects such as chlorine, taste, odour and particles.
NSF 53 covers health effects such as cysts (giardia, cryptosporidium), a range of organic chemicals (such as THM and pesticides) and heavy metals.
The Australian standard AS/NZS4348 covers a wide range of contaminants, such as taste, odour and microbiological and chemical impurities. There are also standards for water softeners (cation exchangers: (NSF 44), reverse-osmosis (NSF 58) and distillation (NSF 62) systems.