CCCPaste

FirewallState

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I had a need to be able to turn Windows Defender firewall on/off at will and it was getting to be a pain. This script will give you a tray icon you can use. Click on, click off. In case you forget, it includes a timer that will turn it back on 10 minutes after you disable it in case you forget.

SS - NovaWright Studios
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I just had a dream where society has been collapsed for like 5 years, because all of the structure’s frames are intact, and the power is still running because the elevators still kind of work, but you can’t get in them because the box is totally destroyed, mostly only the frame remains. It’s basically an elevator
I kept getting stolen from in person. When I first arrived, I walk around some of the ruined objects for about 30 seconds. Then this guy comes up to me, and I start trying to ask him why things are the way they are here, he just sighs and gives me a 10 dollar bill.
Next, I come across this old car that’s stopped in the middle of the road diagonally. This guy died in his car, I presume he was murdered. Then I take his case out of his car and I dump everything out so I can examine. I find a few things, including a wallet and a little bag, that when I turned it around, I saw had a bunch of used medical syringes. For some reason I took this as the reason he was murdered, even though that doesn’t make sense since they were still there, but when I got up to leave, these 2 guys jump me, and basically just want to kill me. They’re not asking for anything except for a fight. I check my (now) wallet, and I have about 75 bucks in it in different bills, but knowing this, I just hand them the 10 dollar bill that guy from before handed me earlier, since I hadn’t put it away yet. They took it but still perused me. I don’t remember what happened next but I assume I outrun them and escape, because I end up with a few “friends” in this overrun school lunch table kind of area with those silver metal benches. There’s a lot of people in this area, none of them look sane, but they’re all hanging out and talking to each other. I overanalyze everything I see in real life, so naturally I’m able to notice the most dangerous looking group in this area. So I’m talking to my friends, and this tall dude with a smirk on his face comes from that dangerous group, picks up my wallet, walks off with it, and puts it on his group’s side of that table. I run over, intending to take it right back, not fearing what would happen, and when I pick my wallet up, I see that this group has been busy doing basically the same thing to everyone, because there’s about 10 more wallets stacked up on their table.
I take my wallet back, and run back to my “friends” table. I see that tall guy get up again, and start heading toward me looking right at me, and I put 2 and 2 together. I get up and start backing up, looking for something to grab to fight with, and I settle on my metal “chug jug”, which is basically the one I have in real life, my huge Stanley thermos. This ought to do some damage. So I analyze his behavior a little bit moving around, before I go in for an attack. He starts grabbing chairs and stuff to move out of his way in his advance, but I just run around the whole bench area for about 10 seconds, then I move in when he for some reason decides to sit in one of the chairs he’s trying to move (but still clearly trying to advance), and I whack him on the left side of the head with my Stanley about 3 times before I’m realizing this isn’t doing much, so I try the other side once. He was still alive, so I just ran. I ran as far as I felt I should without getting “too lost”. This place was a wreck. I ran over scaffolding looking stuff, I ran between these kind of square metal air duct looking things that go between buildings, I take a few turns before I jump into this half-husk of a.. what I think used to be a warehouse building. I stop in it because I think I see that it has an elevator, and that it goes… SOMEWHERE. I don’t know exactly where I am in relation to sea level, up or down, I just felt like I needed to try something at least.
There’s dishevelment everywhere. Broken wooden signs, huge paper things torn apart flat on the floor, and you can see a lot of the structure’s main structural beams and things on display.

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“Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.”
“I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done is done. Now you have to live with it.”

Gideon the Ninth - Epilogue

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“Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you s**t. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn’t, I don’t know jack, Harrow, I never did—except for one thing.”
She lifted Harrow’s arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, moved Harrow’s other hand into place above the pommel.
“I know the sword,” she said. “And now, so do you.”
Gideon brought them into position: weight on the forward foot, knee bent a little, light on the right. She tilted the blade so that it was held with the blade pointed high before them, a perfect line. She moved Harrow’s head up and corrected her hips.
Time sped up, blurred, moved in bright lights before them. Now the old Lyctor Cytherea—wretchedly old, it seemed impossible that they could have ever taken her for anything else—stood there at the bottom of the stairs. Her radioactive blue eyes were quiet; her sword was held at the ready. She was smiling with colourless lips.

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Her arms were whole again. Her most beloved and true companion—her plain two-hander, unadorned and perfect—smashed through tendrils and teeth like a jackhammer drill. Stinging flails of bone met her blade and exploded into grey foam as she stood her ground and pummelled them with great, swinging arcs of good cold Ninth House steel.
With Harrow there, suddenly it was easy, and her horror of the monster turned to the ferocious joy of vengeance. Long years of warfare meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand—every arc of a sword, every jostling scapula. No hole in the other’s defences went unshielded. They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a second’s thought.
Gideon pushed for space. She forced a path, step by careful step, toward the centre of the construct. A tentacle lashed out at her leg; she sliced it open on the downswing and danced away from a stiff whip of molars aimed straight at her heart. Behind her, Harrow took it: it trembled into its component parts, then became a dust of teeth, which settled into a glue that stuck wobbling tendrils together so they broke themselves into pieces trying to smash away. What Harrow did not take, Gideon struck down. She struck at spines with the mad fury and sudden belief that if she just hit and hit and hit—accurately enough and hard enough and well enough—she could rewrite time and save Isaac and Jeannemary; save Abigail, save Magnus.
But the size of the thing defied thought, and every strike created shrapnel. Harrow was doing something, shielding her somehow; the air was a hail of sharp particles that ought to have shredded her skin, and yet none of them seemed to reach her. Even so, the white-out of pinging, ricocheting chips made it hard to see her target. From the corner of her eye, she saw Camilla running through a blizzard of teeth and spines and swinging bone lappets with both knives crossed in front of her chest—then she was gone, lost to view.
Gideon ploughed through a veil of flimsy bone shafts. They were under the bulk of the construct now. Six more skeletons sprang to life and formed a perimeter—these were pillars without legs, thrust through the floor, with the big plated arms and bone-wadded shoulders of the construct in the Response room. They grappled great breadths of the construct’s tendrils to themselves, and in the clearing between their backs Harrow flexed her fingers together. She shook finger bones out of her sleeves and slapped the trembling phalanges between her hands like clay. Gideon was busy shearing off questing tentacles that snaked past the skeleton guard and went for her necromancer, catching only a confused glimpse of the slim rosary of knuckles that Harrow was looping around her arm. Then Harrow flung it upward like a whip, and it punched straight through the monster’s midsection, burying itself somewhere deep.

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The construct crooned in its chains. The central rod that Harrow had somehow awled through its trunk was bowing dangerously. Gideon dove back into the affray of joint and gristle with her sword scything before her and, just as in the Response room, felt another presence slide into her mind like a knife into a pool of water. Her vision blurred out and something said in the back of her mind:
On your right. Eye level.
It wasn’t a voice, precisely, but it was Harrowhark. Gideon pivoted right, longsword held high. The first leg of the construct loomed before her, a weighty breadth of impenetrable bone, but the back of her mind told her: Wrong. Inch higher. Pierce.
Gideon rehefted the weight of her sword in her hands, steadied the pommel with the butt of one palm, and thrust it home. The bone was thinner here. Across her softened sight a light fizzed in and out of vision, the exact same corona of light that had happened a thousand years ago—a hundred thousand, a myriad of myriads—inside the first trial chamber. She pulled her sword free and the leg buckled.
Half a dozen tendrils came after her. They would have given her an interesting array of new airholes for speed, but a skeleton staggered out of the darkness and took most of the blows, jawbone crushed into powder as a tendril lashed open its skull. Another skeleton lurched in where its comrade had died—but this one dashed past Gideon, over to the glimmering wound she had carved into the leg, and it thrust its arm into the gash.

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There was a rustle from outside; the light scrape of a pin being pulled from a stud before it was pushed through the mesh of the peephole. Belatedly, Gideon scrambled up to toss it back, as one did a grenade; but the bead of Harrow’s earring had landed in her cell, and from that tiny mote of bone sprang humerus, radius, and ulna. A skeletal hand groped blindly at the key in the lock and turned it even as Gideon swung her boot around to smash it into splintery bits. It crumbled away to dust, including the stud. Harrowhark Nonagesimus swung open the door, haloed faintly in the electric lights from the tier, her acerbic little face as welcome as a knee to the groin.

Gideon the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Four

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************ : log created on : Tuesday August 18 2026 @ 16:41:24
00:00:00.000 : [sys] running on x86_64 / Windows 11 x64 (version 10.0.26200)
00:00:00.000 : [sys] Command line: C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\American Truck Simulator\bin\win_x64\amtrucks.exe -mm_pool_size 8192 -mm_max_resource_size 90 -mm_max_tmp_buffers_size 990 -nointro -unlimitedlog
00:00:00.000 : [cpu] AuthenticAMD [AMD Ryzen 5 5500 ] - 1 package, 6 cores, 12 threads.
00:00:00.000 : [cpu] logical_id : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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Air was displaced. The construct rushed her, and it was only just in time that she deflected two heavy overhand blows onto the naked black blade of her sword. Harrow let out a yelp as though she had touched her hand to a flame.
“Nonagesimus!”
Gideon considered the good news and the bad news. The good news: the blows that rained down on her were not as heavy as she had expected from something so enormous. They came down hard and fast, but no harder than the hand of Naberius Tern; lighter, for the lack of muscle. Osseous matter never weighed as much as blood and flesh, which was one of the problems with pure construct magic.
The bad news: she couldn’t do jack shit to it. Her light sword could barely deflect the blows. She had some small hope with her obsidian knuckle-knives—one good strong backhand bash and she had knocked out part of one arm, snapping the blade off near the tip—but then watched with a sickening weight in her gut as the blade reformed.

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Gideon said, “Take it down.”
And Harrow took it down. It was bafflingly simple. It was nothing more than a raised skeleton, and not one that had been formed with any particular grace. It was half gone already, having torn itself free like an animal from her trap. The head was just a chitinous plate. The trunk was a roll of bone. The remaining tentacles fell like rain, arrested in midswing. The bone responded to their call, and together they sailed the thing through the cracked glass panes of the terrace garden to fall—a huge white comet, with flailing tails of bone—into the rolling ocean.

Gideon the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Thirty-Seven