What are your experiences with memory loss due to your epilepsy? I'm talking long or short-term.
Lots of us experience the loss after an episode.
How is that for you? Do you remember the whole day up to the episode? Do you black out? Do you have auras, and if so, do you remember the day that they showed up or the days before and after?
Please share your experience with memory loss. I have had a very hard time lately and need some support over this.
I have grand mals. I used to average 4 per day. They started at 17- can't find any reason, not eligible for any surgery due to the electrical activity not being isolated - aka they'd have to take my whole brain out, lol. Thanks to medicine, I am now down to just a few episodes a year! They range from 2-6 seizures within a 48-hour period, usually.
Without medication, my seizures are very long. The longest I've spent convulsing at one time was 17 minutes. I have almost died multiple times and experienced wild injuries from it.
Epilepsy lost me a full ride athletic scholarship to the best place in the world (unimportant, being relatively vague for internet reasons, haha). It has taken too much from me. But we just keep swimming. Ironically, another activity I'm not supposed to participate in.
Anyway, I'm just giving some background info. Feel free to share yours, too.
My brain damage is awful. I'm able to learn new skills/information, but if I don't repeat it every day, I lose it in about 4 days or so. I mis-remember many things and have lost a LOT of long-term memory. I don't remember childhood, and I can't remember what my family's voices sound like when I'm away from them for just a week or so. One of my favorite things to do is research, but it seems pointless in the long run. I still do it as a hobby, seeing as how it is fairly risk-free.
I was away from someone who was apparently one of my best friends for just a few years. When we reconnected, I didn't even know their name or face. I thought they were joking until they showed me pictures.
My short term is very bad as well. When I feel down about these things, I watch 50 First Dates to remind myself that people still care about me, good or bad brain, haha. It hurts because I am (not to brag) VERY smart. I have so much potential, but epilepsy kills it.
I could say a million more things, but I wanted to vent & ask about your experiences. You're never alone.
Cheers to good health, guys
edit lol, forgot the point of my title
I have all these issues, but I can learn songs within a day and always retain the lyrics and flow. Even just hearing a couple of seconds of a song clip, I usually can easily identify it. The brain is a wild instrument. I just wish I could tune mine.

This is going to be a long one. Firstly, the Confession of Dositheus, a confession ratified by the Pan-Orthodox Council of Jerusalem in 1672 and signed by all Patriarchs since the Council of Crete in 2016, says the following in its second decree (you can read it here https://www.crivoice.org/creeddositheus.html ):
"but the Catholic Church, as never having spoken, or speaking from herself, but from the Spirit of God – who being her teacher, she is ever unfailingly rich – it is impossible for her to in any wise err, or to at all deceive, or be deceived; but like the Divine Scriptures, is infallible, and hath perpetual authority." (Confession of Dositheus, Decree 2)
However, it appears as if the Orthodox Church has erred in at least two places in its councils. Firstly, the Council of Jassy in 1642 ratified the Confession of Peter Moghila, which states the following in its 104th decree (https://maksimologija.org/mogila-orthodox-confession ):
"The ointment of chrism is the second mystery; and this had its beginning at the time when the Holy Spirit came down from heaven and rested upon the Apostles, and sealed them with his divine grace, that they might preach the faith of Christ steadfastly and without ceasing. Of this blessing and divine assistance hath every one need who becometh a Christian; and as then the Holy Spirit came down in the visible form of fire and bestowed his grace, or gifts, upon the Apostles, so now, when the priest anointeth the newly baptised person with the holy oil, he becomes endued from above with the gifts of the Holy Spirit: As appears from the words which the priest (as appointed) useth in the celebration of this Mystery; namely, the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, Amen. As if he should say, By the anointing of this holy ointment thou art sealed and confirmed into the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which thou dost receive for a confirmation of thy Christian faith. Agreeable hereto are the words of the Apostle (2 Cor. 1.21), He which establisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God: Who hath also sealed us, and given the Earnest of the Spirit in our hearts. This Anointing, or rather the bestowing the Efficacy of this Unction, was done in the times of the Apostles by laying on of hands; according to the Scripture (Acts 8.17), Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. This was afterwards performed by anointing with ointment, as we learn from St Dionysius the Areopagite, who was the Disciple of St Paul (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, chs. 2 and 4)."
^ The text above clearly attributes the work of Pseudo-Dionysius to Dionysius the Areopagite as mentioned in the book of acts. By citing Ecclesiastical Hierarchy here, it is saying that this text was written by a disciple of the historical Paul. The problem is that scholarship is unanimous that the works of Pseudo-Dionysius are dependant on Proclus, who wrote in the late 5th century. Even if this is not true, we do not have any unambiguous mentions of the work of Dionysius before the sixth century, which would be odd if he was a prominent apostle, who, according to Church tradition, later became the Bishop of Athens. Furthermore, this work, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, contains references to ecclesiastical structures that were not present in the first century. Furthermore, Pseudo-Dionysius contains references to theurgy, yet this term first appears in the Chaldean Oracles, the earliest of which were written in the third century. There are no references to theurgy from the first century.
A= 'we learn [that it was performed by anointing with oitment] from St Dionysius the Areopagite, who was the Disciple of St Paul'
B= St Dionysius the Areopagite was the Disciple of St Paul
A ⊨ B
B = false
∴ A is false
Below I have attached some resources on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05013a.htm
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717171?searchText=pseudo-dionysius&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dpseudo-dionysius%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A989329de8aa08b25bc69195915261da6
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jmedirelicult.43.1.0001?searchText=pseudo-dionysius&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dpseudo-dionysius%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A0cf11a64bb46b55bdcccfcdfc0cf3e38
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20474890?searchText=pseudo-dionysius&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dpseudo-dionysius%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A17c51552dad6f7378aaae7441274950f
It is considered completely untenable that he was a disciple of St. Paul by modern scholarship. Regarding earlier texts that seem to mention him, modern scholarship has shown that instead, Pseudo-Dionysius was dependant on these: "Until more recently more credit was given to other lines of evidence on which Franz Hipler endeavoured to support his entirely new thesis, to the effect that the author of the writings lived about the year 375 in Egypt, as Abbot of Rhinokorura. Hipler's attempts, however, at removing the textual difficulties, ekleipsis, adelphotheos, soma, proved to be unsuccessful. In fact, those very passages in which Hipler thought that the Fathers had made use of the Areopagite (e.g., in Gregory of Nazianzus and Jerome) do not tell in favor of this hypothesis; on the contrary, they are much better explained if the converse be assumed, namely, that Pseudo-Dionysius drew from them. Hipler himself, convinced by the results of recent research, has abandoned his opinion." (Catholic Encyclopedia)
Note that the letter describing the reception of the Confession of Peter Moghila describes it as such:
"…vested with the most full and plenary power of the whole sacred Synod; he went into Moldavia, as we have said, together with Porphyrius; whither also, sent from the Russians, came Isaias Trophinus, and Conovicius, and Xenovicius; men truly excellent, adorned with all kind of learning and liberal knowledge. These three taking God only for their guide and master, who is the giver of all knowledge, and of all true holiness and understanding, brought the book to this excellent conclusion; having by much mutual disquisition and disputation thoroughly purged it from all foreign doctrines and defilements of novelty, and then forthwith he sent it to the most holy four orthodox patriarchs, the successors in the seats of the Apostles, to be reviewed and considered of. They also confirmed it with their approbation, as containing the true and genuine doctrines, and in nothing departing from the sincere and catholic faith of the Greeks, and declared it to be pure and uncorrupt; by the universal judgement, determination and consent of all, and furthermore by their own proper subscription, and of their clergy as appears hereunto annexed, they decreed and confirmed it; and entitled it, not only of the Russians, but by a more universal Appellation, The orthodox Confession of all the Greeks. Yet however, this book as it was but lately to be had in print among the Russians, so among the Greeks it was only to be had in manuscripts, and that but very rarely. Whereupon, the Lord Panagiota, Interpreter to his imperial Majesty of the East and West, a person of wisdom and piety, and entirely devoted to true religion; as he is most regardful and affectionate of our Greek nation, and zealous contender for the orthodox faith; among his many other magnificent works and public employments, wherein he is daily and hourly engaged, he willingly undertook the care and patronage of this also; and caused this book to be printed at his own expense in our and the latin languages, that every one, who was desirous to increase in piety, might without any expense (for he caused the copies to be distributed to all gratis) be provided with a book, from when as from a source of pure and living water, and out of the genuine fountain of salvation draw the sacred doctrine of our Church, unpolluted with the muddy and foreign opinions of sectaries. And now, let no one marvel, that this book is expressed in a plain style, and unadorned with eloquence; seeing that thereby, it is not only fitted for the learned, but the unlearned multitude also. For the wise and prudent reader ought not to regard the unfinished manner of expression, but the truth of the words and thoughts." (Prefatory Letter of Patriarch Nectarius of Jerusalem)
The above quote can once again be found here: https://maksimologija.org/mogila-orthodox-confession/
This letter describes the way in which the Confession was declared as ‘containing the true and genuine doctrines, and in nothing departing from the sincere and catholic faith of the Greeks, and declared it to be pure and uncorrupt; by the universal judgement, determination and consent of all’ by the patriarchs who signed off on it. As such, it seems that it was viewed as infallible.
The Pan-Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem, in ratifying the Confession of Peter Moghila, says this: "And only some six or seven years ago at the most there was published a book intituled The Orthodox Confession of the Eastern Church, which the IVTost Holy Metropolitan, Peter of Kieff, compiled ; and which was revised* and corrected, where revision and correction were needed, at the instance of the Synod of Jassy, by the Protosyncellus and Preacher of the Great Church at Constantinople, Meletius Syrigus, from Crete. And this the Eastern Church hath entirely received, and doth receive ; and the same was published" (Dositheus et al. 2011: pp. 15)
You can find this text on internet archive: https://archive.org/details/actsanddecreess00lucagoog/page/n26/mode/2up?q=Kieff
Dositheos, Robertson James Nathaniel William Beauchamp, and Cyril Lucaris. The acts and decrees of the synod of jerusalem: Sometimes called the Council of Bethlehem, Holden under Dositheus, patriarch of jerusalem in 1672. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2011.
The Holy Spirit didn't lead the Synod of Jassy to correct the authorship of the Dionysian corpus? This part implies that correction and revision were not needed in decree 104 of the Confession of Peter Moghila, and, furthermore, that the Church entirely receives the confession as dogmatic.
Secondly, the Horos of the Photian Council of 879, considered the eighth ecumenical council by Orthodox Christians, says this (read it here https://www.oodegr.com/english/dogma/synodoi/8th_Synod_Dragas.htm ):
"Jointly sanctifying and preserving intact the venerable and divine teaching of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which has been established in the bosom of our mind, with unhesitating resolve and purity of faith, as well as the sacred ordinances and canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles with an unwavering judgment, and indeed, those Seven holy and ecumenical Synods which were directed by the inspiration of the one and the same Holy Spirit and effected the [Christian] preaching, and jointly guarding with a most honest and unshakeable resolve the canonical institutions invulnerable and unfalsified, we expel those who removed themselves from the Church, and embrace and regard worthy of receiving those of the same faith or teachers of orthodoxy to whom honor and sacred respect is due as they themselves ordered."
In this statement, there is an entailment that the disciples have sacred ordinances and canonical stipulations.
The entailment is as follows:
We expel those… → ([we are] Jointly sanctifying and preserving intact… the sacred ordinances and canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles with an unwavering judgment (based on sentence structure) → The Apostles have canonical stipulations)
Here, the structure of the sentence shows that "we expel those who removed themselves from the Church, and embrace and regard worthy of receiving those of the same faith or teachers of orthodoxy to whom honor and sacred respect is due as they themselves ordered" is dependent upon 'jointly sanctifying and preserving in tact...the sacred ordinances and canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles'
A = 'we expel those who removed themselves from the Church, and embrace and regard worthy of receiving those of the same faith or teachers of orthodoxy to whom honor and sacred respect is due as they themselves ordered.'
The sentence structure indicates that this entails (⊨) B:
B = [we are] Jointly sanctifying and preserving intact… the sacred ordinances and canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles with an unwavering judgment
C= The Apostles have canonical stipulations
A ⊨ (B ⊨ C) = (A ˄ B) ⊨ C
For example, if I say 'keeping in mind the letter that Obama wrote me, I will do x', this entails that Obama wrote me a letter. If my statement entails something false, the statement is false: If p is false and q is true or p is true and q is false, the statement is still false.
P. Q. P + Q
TRUE. TRUE. TRUE FALSE. TRUE. FALSE
TRUE. FALSE. FALSE
FALSE FALSE. FALSE
So lets say that p + q is '(we are) Jointly sanctifying and preserving intact...the sacred ordinances and canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles with an unwavering judgment'
p = (we are) Jointly sanctifying and preserving intact...the sacred ordinances...of his holy disciples and Apostles with an unwavering judgment
q= (we are) Jointly sanctifying and preserving intact...canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles with an unwavering judgment'
Even if the Disciples have ordinances, if p+q =B above (based on the text) and q entails C then if C is false q is false and p + q is also false.
B = p+q
B ⊨ C
p+q ⊨ C
p ⊭ C
q ⊨ C
C= false
∴ q = false
∴ p + q = false
A ⊨ B and B = p + q
A ⊨ (p + q)
∴ A = false
The problem is, it is considered completely untenable that the canons of the apostles actually go back to the apostles, as they quote canons from the Council of Antioch in 341 and reference a type of Church hierarchy not present in authentic writings from the first century written by presumed successors of the apostles. They are also not mentioned before the 4th century, which is very suspect for a canonical collection supposedly left by the apostles to help govern the Church. If the council of Antioch is instead dependent on the canons, why does it not cite them? If there are other canons that go back to the Apostles, where are they, and what is the evidence that they do? Certainly no other canonical collection states that it has a directly apostolic origin. Thus, it can be said that the Horos of the Eighth Ecumenical Council entails something false, which means in no ambiguous terms that it has erred.
Note that the statement from the Confession of Dositheus reads: "it is impossible for her to in any wise err, or to at all deceive, or be deceived; but like the Divine Scriptures, is infallible, and hath perpetual authority" (Decree 2) and again "In like manner the Church is taught indeed by the Life-giving Spirit, but through the medium of the holy Fathers and Doctors (whose rule is acknowledged to be the Holy and Ecumenical Synods; for we shall not cease to say this ten thousand times); and, therefore, not only are we persuaded, but do profess as true and undoubtedly certain, that it is impossible for the Catholic Church to err, or at all be deceived, or ever to choose falsehood instead of truth. For the All-holy Spirit continually operating through the holy Fathers and Leaders faithfully ministering, delivers the Church from error of every kind." (Decree 12)
If we call the second quote above x, it seems that x entails the truth of all other binding statements the church has made. Statement A from further above is binding because of its presence in a Horos (definition) from an ecumenical council.
Horoi from Ecumenical Councils are binding and infallible
A is a Horos
∴ A is binding and infallible
x from decree 12 ⊨ A
A is false
∴ x is false
You can read the following sources on the Canons of the 'Apostles' and why scholarship is unanimous as to their status as a forgery or fraud: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23947920?searchText=apostolic+canons&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dapostolic%2Bcanons%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Afb0f4deadf16b447c63b049972f4248e
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23948013?searchText=apostolic+canons+authorship&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dapostolic%2Bcanons%2Bauthorship%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aef8cb9e3774f5026b5fccc1979d79eb1&seq=8
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03279a.htm
https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/encyc01/encyc01.html?term=Apostolic%20Constitutions%20and%20Canons
etc.
Note that 'canonical stipulations of his holy disciples and Apostles' is not the name of a document, and, if the statement should be analyzed [canonical] [stipulations] rather than [canonical stipulations], why would there be stipulations of the Apostles that wouldn't be canonical if they are the guardians of Church tradition received from Christ?
From these two arguments, it is clear that the Orthodox Church has erred and been deceived into thinking that forgeries are legitimate and actually originate from their pseudonymous attributions. Error and deception are just what the Holy Spirit was supposed to prevent according to the Pan-Orthodox and binding Confession of Dositheus. If a pan-Orthodox council signed by all Patriarchs with the same authority as other ecumenical councils as per i.e. the acts of the seventh ecumenical council (https://ubipetrusibiecclesia.com/2020/07/03/what-makes-a-council-ecumenical/#nicaea2 ) can be wrong, how can anything in Orthodox tradition be trusted? Keep in mind these are not disciplinary canons either, the texts cited are meant to be a binding confession of faith (for the Confession of Peter Moghila), and the definition (Horos) of an ecumenical council (the Horos of the Photian Council of 879). On the ecumenical status of the latter in the east, see https://www.oodegr.com/english/dogma/synodoi/8th_Synod_Dragas.htm and https://orthodoxwiki.org/Eighth_Ecumenical_Council
On the ecumenical status of the Council of Jassy see https://orthodoxchristiantheology.com/2022/12/21/the-delayed-synodical-receptions-of-the-councils-of-jasy-1642-and-jerusalem-1672/
The Photian Council was also ecumenical in Rome for a while before they opted to go with the earlier robber council as the legitimate one, so this post may also falsify Roman Catholicism.

Isa akong batang laking mahirap. All the kinds of bullying naranasan kona and kahit I am on my adult stage na bakat na bakat padin sa ala ala ko kung ano ang mga napagdaanan ko during my years of schooling.
During my elementary days way back mga 2004-2010, baon ko 2 pesos a day pero hindi pa araw araw may baon. Minsan nag aabot sila mama at papa ng 5 pesos ng monday and that's it for the whole week. I am too innocent in those time kasi Im proud to say na never ako nag cocomplain to my parents regarding that,siguro dahil alam kong wala din naman magbabago if I ask them kasi I know na walang wala din naman talaga sila. Minsan yung mga kaklasmayt ko pa noon tinatawanan ako pag tinutulog ko lang ng recess time namin kahit yung tiyan ko tumutunog sa gutom, while them enjoying their meals and have money on their hands to show off. They don't wanna be friend with me either kasi di ako nakakasabay sa kung anong meron sila kaya ako yung typical na batang PAPASOK sa skul ,UUPO,TAHIMIK at magsasalita lang pag kinakausap. Ang tanging alam ko lang non is disiplinado ako ng mga magulang ko kaya naman never ako nanlimos ng kahit ano or nainvolve sa gulo or na guidance sa skul, if my conflict man non sakin at sa klasmayt ko, umiiwas nalang ako at mananahimik kasi takot akong magkamali eventhough sinasabihan na nila ako "DUWAG" "LAMPA" etc.... One time may pinapa project si teacher sakin that requires money to buy it. Sinabi ko din naman kila mama pero they can't provide so pagpasok ko ng umaga sa skul, sobrang kabado ako kasi lahat sila may maipapasang project and ako lang wala. Then when my name called by our teacher sinabi ko yung totoo but the teacher just say "Baka gusto ako pa magprovide para sayo" sabay tawa. Until then naging hobby na nya akong pagtawanan infront of his co teachers at sa mga students at ako lagi inuutusan taga bunot ng puting buhok nya.🤣 well nakakatawa nalang sya sakin now pag naaalala ko
Fast forward... 2011 Highschool days... I enter highschool like elem na walang wala din. All my things are old, from bag to notebooks, yung lapis ko parang nasa 3 inches nalang ang haba kasi di ko napapalitan. Even my slippers have butas na which is naging reason ng bullying din. Yung ibang klasmayts ko laging kinukwestyon bakit daw ganun di ako mabilhan ng mga magulang ko pero di ko sila sinasagot. Just like elem days, ako yung tipo ng stujanteng tahimik lang sa upuan, kaya ang tingin ng guro namin sakin "MABAIT" pero may mga guro padin na hindi talaga ako nagugustuhan dahil sa bagay na wala ako na meron madalas mga klasmayts ko. Malayo ang skul namin sa mga bahay namin kaya nagbabaon kami ng pang lunch namin. Madalas baon ko araw araw is itlog,pancit canton na isang piraso tapos ginagawa kong pang recess at lunch na yun. Even that thing I was questioned lagi by my klasmayts but I don't answer them. I was so lonely nun kasi wala naman gustong makipagkaibigan sakin, even if may groupings, I was left alone and doing my activity alone. If you guys are wondering how's my marks in school? I was a regular student and never ako na fail sa subject ko kasi yun din habilin ng magulang ko sakin. I was so obedient to my parents even those times na pinag aabsent nila ako para magtrabaho sa bukid at para may baon ako sa school.Then the next day, I will be punished in school for being absent without telling them my reasons. I know how hard my life is kaya nangangako ako sa sarili ko na I have to finish my studies kahit anong mangyari. There are some teachers who love humiliating me in front of many students for the things I have, such meron daw ako shoes na old pero walang socks, butas ang pantalon, and ngilaw na ngilaw ang puting uniporme signs of it being old enough. One thing I am struggling about is yung yellow pad paper, yun kasi gamit namin ng highschool and most of them have it tapos ako pag humihingi ako ayaw din naman ako bigyan, kaya ang ending I'm using notebooks as alternative for it. My teacher would question it again pero same thing, my silence is my response. In those years, teachers are allowed to beat students as sign of disiplina and I was beaten as a punishments for not providing projects and unattended classes dahil sa need ko kumita ng pera para may pambaon. Pag binabalikan ko siya, awang awa ako sa sarili ko. And those people who treated me that bad, I still remember them but I forgave them. Masakit lang pag naaalala ko😭 I just can't imagine na nalagpasan ko siya na ako lang magisa at walang nasandalan even my parents. All those bullying I have received from my society, inako ko lang magisa yun at none from my siblings and parents knows about it.
Fast forward...2015- 2019 College... This one is the most legit na sobrang hirap. Pero bago pa mag umpisa ang semester nun I confront my self na kahit anong mangyari " I have to be a regular students,walang bibitiw at wag na wag babagsak sa kahit anong subjects
1st -2nd year college ko, I tried everything I can, to provide for my own tuition fees and allowances. Yes nagbibigay sila mama at papa pero hindi kasya, minsan 150- 200 lang kaya nila iabot for a week allowance, ang bording house ko laging delayed ang bayad, and my tuition is always on hold kaya laging suki ako ng special exam. Pinasok ko mag work as taga dilig ng halaman and care taker ng isang bar and grill for the night and study in the morning. I have no choice but to do it cause ayokong mag stop sa pagaaral. Kaya naman pag sumasahod ako sa part time ko, binibili ko ng mga sapatos sa shoppee and then I resell it on facebook market online around the city. After my class ng afternoon dun ko sila minimeet up sa city and there I earned money. Tho, of all the efforts and hardships na ginagawa ko still my studies is my top priority. I was so payat sa sobrang pagod, puyat at stress.lagi pa akong nag nose bleeding and I was so worried for my health pero tuloy ang laban. Again, none from my siblings and parents knows about it. I kept it all alone and di din naman sila nag tatanong kasi they thought I am doing fine dahil wala din naman silang narerecieved na reklamo sakin. BULLYING? ofcourse di padin ako nakaligtas jan, I was called "EWW ANG ITIM, MUKHANG MATANDA kasi di nakakapag ahit ng balbas at nakapagpagupit" minsan sasabihin pa nila "Huy kumain ka naman para ka nang kalansay" without knowing my whole story. One time I cried inside the confort room kasi I couldn't help myself na mainggit sa mga classmates ko nun na after class they will be having a talk about san sila mag lulunch if sa Jollibee ba, mcdo or sangyup. Samantalang ako, after class I was so busy meeting people with their orders. Minsan nadadaanan ko pa sila sa fast food having a good time while ako may bitbit na malaking basket puno ng sapatos na idedeliver.🙂 If my mandatory na event sa skul na need attendan, I used to ask people I don't know if may pwede ba akong mahihiraman ng susuotin tapos sasabihin nila try nila hanapan ako pero they then laugh at me afterwards. I feel so ashamed of doing it but I have to. So ayun na nga iniignore ko lang yung mga moment na tinatawanan ako sa looks ko, sa mga bagay na wala ako na meron sila. Basta focused ako sa acads ko nun at sa pagkita ng pera.
During my 3rd yr college. Yung part time kong work nagsara so I was forced to stop working with them na. And so yung pagbebenta ko ng sapatos nalang ginagawa ko. I was so lost that time kasi diko alam ako gagawin ko. Malaking tulong yun sakin lalo na 2yrs nalang kailangan kong tapusin sa pagaaral at mas malaki ang expenses ko na.Isang araw papasok ako ng gate sa skul and there are posters around our campus about scholarships and yung minimum qualified average. I have know idea if abot ba ng average ko dun sa offer ng scholars. so I run towards our registrar to request for a certificate of my grades. My world just stop for a while and I'm in tears kasi naabot nga. 86.04 yung average ko and the asking is 85.0.lang. moving forward, I got the scholarship and it helps me with my tuition fees. Kaya ang pinoproblema ko nalang non is bording house ko. Until meron na namang ibang offered na scholarships sa city so kahit sobrang haba ng pila,tiniis ko kasi I know it will save me. Luckily God is so good to me kaya I got them. That's why sa huling taon na pagaaral bago grumaduate, everything goes well and smooth because of those 3 scholarships. I Gave up selling shoes and focus sa exams nalang until I manage to graduate.....
July 2019.... FINALLY GRADUATED AND A CERTIFIED DEGREE HOLDER OF PSYCHOLOGY....
2024 update about me? I am now in a good path, I took a career that is relevant to my degree and still want exploring more things...

i know there’s something in the 145-1 regulations about cross commissioning from army rotc to other branches, but i was wondering, does anyone know how this works if you’re on a GRFD scholarship? can you serve that reserve contract in a different branches reserve component?
my wife is a Marine and i read an old 145-1 from 2011 saying that you can commission into the reserve component if your spouse was currently serving in that branch but obviously it doesn’t hit on the scholarship portion.

There have been a few posts lately related to books and referees and which ones to buy. This is an updated repost of my own survey of books and who they might be useful for, so here I present Frescanation’s Incredibly Incomplete Guide to Ancient Numismatic Literature. It is incomplete because there are tons of books and other scholarship on ancient coins, some of it going back hundreds of years. An exhaustive study would be worth its own book, and this is a guide for new and new-ish collectors. All of these books will be helpful to you in some way as you go on a collecting journey, but not all of them are necessary by any means. Many are out of print, often long so, and books on ancient coins are specialty works and frequently expensive (like a college textbook is). The out of print books can be hard to find and might require using a used or even specialty bookseller (which is often easy now thanks to Amazon and B&N). I am primarily going over the general references. There are plenty of specialty texts, often looking at a single ruler or city or a narrow time period. Warning - this will be a long post.
Books for Complete Beginners
Handbook of Ancient Greek and Roman Coins, Zander Klawans ($15 new)
This is a small paperback book about half devoted to Greek and half to Roman coins. The Greek section is a survey by city and region. The Roman section has a survey by ruler. There is a good intro to reading inscriptions and recognizing reverse types (if you have wondered how someone tells the difference between Fortuna and Providentia, this is a good place to start).
Pros: Cheap, small and easily portable. Readily available. Very easy to use and understand.
Cons: Extremely limited in scope. If you stick with the hobby, you will outgrow this book pretty quickly, replace it with something below, and never look at it again.
Ancient Coin Collecting, Wayne Sayles (6 volumes, $25-50 each used)
This series came out in the late 90s and was a gateway drug for many of us. The series consists of 6 slim hardbound books with great photos and clear text by one of the great educators of the hobby. The six volumes are on General Collecting, Greek, Roman, Roman Provincial, Byzantine, and Non-Classical Cultures in that order. You certainly don’t need a volume for a field you aren’t interested in, but they are all good reads (and might get you interested in something you currently know little about).
Pros: Relatively inexpensive. Gorgeous photographs. If you want to get into ancients but you aren’t sure which segment to collect, this will help you choose.
Cons: This is very much an introduction and not a set of reference books. They won’t help you identify coins beyond the absolute basics. Like Klawans, you will outgrow these and likely not look at them again.
Handbook of Roman Imperial Coins, David Van Meter ($40-75 used)
This book was an attempt to create a “pro” reference for the Everyman collector. The book presents a broad survey of coins by ruler and type from Augustus to the fall of the Western Empire. It contains all of the inscriptions and the majority of the reverse types for each emperor. This is the first book on this list that will really help you identify and date a coin from scratch (you’ll be able to use it help answer those “hey what is this” posts here). There is a decent but limited amount of history on each ruler.
Pros: Reasonably complete. If your budget is very limited and you can only get one reference book, this is a good choice. It is particularly easy to use.
Cons: The production quality is not the best. This is still not a standard reference, and you will never see a coin cited by Van Meter number.
Coinage and History of the Roman Empire, David Vagi, (2 volumes, $50-200 used)
This is an unusual reference. The first volume is all history, and contains pretty complete biographical information for everyone who was on a Roman coin. Some of these are quire extensive, such as the sections on Augustus and Trajan, and some are very limited, as there are many men known only to history by their coins. The value of the history volume may be questionable in the days when a guy like Majorian can easily be looked up online, but Vagi is a good and engaging writer and the whole volume is an entertaining read. The second volume is all coinage, and somewhere between the single and five-volume Sear in scope. Rough values are given in terms of “rarity bands”, and the photography is quite good. If you buy this online, make sure you are getting the complete set.
Pros - Very well-written history. The coin reference is very easy to use.
Cons - This never quite became standard, and you won’t see coins cited by Vagi number. The book doesn’t go into minor variations of type, and is actually much more limited than Van Meter in this regard. Photos are limited to one per ruler, and you won’t get much help identifying a coin with incomplete legends. Pretty much everything in the history volume is on Wikipedia and similar.
Late Roman Bronze Coinage, Guido Bruck ($25 new)
Disclaimer - I don’t own this, but a friend recommended it. This book is designed to help collectors attribute Roman 4th and 5th century bronzes, especially if poorly preserved or damaged. Since these are often the exact coins a beginner first encounters, it might be useful, especially if you have a coin and all you can read is D N CON and part of a reverse legend.
Pros - Cheap, and If you are collecting a lot of $20 and under bronzes, this will save you a lot of trips to Reddit for attribution help (or you can start providing it)
Cons - Very limited in scope, not a true reference
Books for Intermediate Collectors
Roman Coins and Their Values, David Sear (5 volumes, $50-100 each new)
If you are serious about Roman coin collecting, this series is about as close to must-have as you can get. This is the current printing and massive revision of one of the classic Roman coin references. It presents a highly complete ruler by ruler list with a complete catalogue of legends. It then goes through each known reverse type of each denomination in alphabetical order, including minor variations. Each volume contains the same full section on identifying reverse types and dating, so if you only get one or two volumes, you still have it. Each type is listed with a value. These are not always accurate, but very useful in a relative sense. If a coin is listed at $20,000, odds are you didn’t find it for $15 on Ebay. There are photographs for every reverse type (although not for every variation), which helps enormously with attribution. This is always the first place I go when researching a coin. If your focus is narrow, you can easily get by with just one volume.
Pros - This is a standard reference, and citing a coin by Sear number is pretty common. You will be highly unlikely to come across a Roman coin that is not listed here. The culmination of the life’s work of a numismatic legend. It is still available new, and will likely get pricier over time.
Cons - Harder to use, and you do need some idea of what is on the coin to get started. The complete set will run over $300, which is going to seem daunting if buying a $30 coin is a big deal for you, and you’d rather buy coins than books about them.
Special Note- the older, single volume edition is still widely available used for around $50 and under. It only contains about 20% of what is in the new edition, but that 20% is great, and includes most coins you will likely encounter. The photography is not quite as good, and the values are wildly out of date, but it can easily serve as the only reference you ever have.
Encyclopedia of Roman Imperial Coins, 2nd Edition (ERIC II), Rasiel Suarez ($80 new)
This is the newest entry into the field of general Roman coin references and was published in 2011. I really like this book, and if you are a Roman coin collector with a limited budget, get this. Like Sear, it goes ruler by ruler, gives an exhaustive list of legends, obverse types and reverse types, and has representative photography of all reverses. Like Sear, if you know who is on the coin and can read most of the legend, you can can use this to attribute the coin. As a bonus, the book covers the entire Roman period including the East after 476. I’m unaware of any other reference that includes Eastern/Byzantine and traditional Imperial coinage in one volume.
Pros - Aims to a be a single-volume resource for all things from Augustus to Constantine XI, and largely succeeds. Photography is in color and excellent. An absolute bargain for what you get
Cons - You need to know who is on the coin to get started. It’s a big, heavy book. A lot of what it does can be duplicated by online databases.
Roman Silver Coins, H.A. Seaby et al (5 volumes, $25-50 each used)
All silver, nothing but silver, but extending from Republican times through the end of the Western Empire. The best feature of this book is the extensive photography which covers basically all silver reverse types. It is also the best easily available reference that covers Republican silver in any kind of detail. Values are given, but the most recent edition is from 1982 and these are wildly out of date, to put it mildly. (Who’d like to buy an EID MAR denarius for 7000 GBP? Everyone!)
Pros - A lot of collectors focus on denarii, and if you do, these books are hard to beat. The first two volumes will take you from the Republic to Commodus, which will cover Twelve Caesars and Adoptive Emperors, which covers two of the major areas of specialty collecting.
Cons - Obviously, not a bronze coin to be found. For the money, I’d rather have the 5 volume Sear if I had to choose one.
Greek Coins and their Values, David Sear (2 volumes, $50-75 each)
This is the first appearance of a Greek-only reference on this list. Greek Coins are a lot harder to reference and far fewer books have been written for newer collectors.. Roman coins can easily be arranged by ruler and denomination. Greek Coins are arranged by geography, starting in Western Europe and going clockwise around to Africa. Looking up a coin requires knowing that Tarentum is in southern Italy, or that Athens is in Attica and and is listed after Boetia. This was written in the late 70s and has not been revised.
Pros - If you want to collect Greek coins, and don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on books, this is about it.
Cons - Substantially harder to use than Sear Roman, but that’s mostly the fault of the coin series itself rather than Sear.
Greek Imperial Coins and Their Values, David Sear ($40-75 used)
Greek Imperial (now usually called Roman Provincial) coins are frequently neglected by newer collectors. The Romans typically allowed cities to continue to strike their own coins, and many places int he Roman East did so for many years. The legends are in Greek but the types are usually Roman. Sear’s volume is the simplest reference for a diverse series of coins. As a disclaimer, I don’t collect these coins and don’t own this book.
Byzantine Coins and their Values, David Sear ($40-75 used)
Chronologically the last in Sear’s trip through ancient coinage, this is the best introductory reference for coins of the Roman East from the reforms of Anastasius to the fall of Constantinople. As a disclaimer, I don’t collect these coins and don’t own this book.
Coinage of the Roman Republic, Michael Crawford ($130 new)
This is the moist comprehensive and definitive reference for the coins of the Republic. If you collect Republican coinage to any great degree, you need this book. Fortunately, the whole thing is also available online for free at http://numismatics.org/crro/
The History and Coinage of the Roman Imperators, David Sear ($75 new)
This is a very limited book, covering only the period from Caesar crossing the Rubicon to the defeat of Mark Antony at Actium. But that short, tumultuous period is covered in great detail. There is a ton of history, and the book is exhaustive for the period covered. If you are interested in Caesar, Antony, Pompey, or the other figures of the period, this is an irreplaceable book.
Late Roman Bronze Coinage, Carson/Hill/Kent ($50 used)
Note that this is not the same book as the Bruck title noted earlier. This borders on advanced and goes over every minor variation from every mint. This is probably a book that if you really need it, you already know about it.
Books for advanced collectors
I will mention these to mention them. If you are into ancient coins enough to potentially need any of these, you are already well aware of their existence.
The Roman Imperial Coinage, Mattingly et al (10 volumes, $100-250 each)
This is the major scholarly reference for Roman coinage. It is exhaustive to the point that “not in RIC” is a big deal. It is not very user friendly, but if you are advanced enough to need it, you can probably figure it out. If you are a specialized collector, you might only need one volume of this. A full set will easily run $1500, but it will hold its value very well and will likely be easier to later sell than any coin in your collection.
Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum. Various (many volumes, $100-500 each)
There is no RIC for Greek Coins, but this series probably comes closest. It started as a British project to catalogue the great collections of Greek coins. There are 13 volumes in the original series. The project spread to other countries, and there are now over 120 individual volumes under the SNG umbrella. They are usually referred to by the country they come from (e.g. SNG Copenhagen is the Danish Royal collection, SNG America is the American Numismatic Society collection). A specialized Greek collector would be interested in the various volumes regarding their special interest. By the time you need SNG, you won't need my advice on getting it.
Byzantine Coins, Phillip Grierson ($200-400 used)
Probably the best respected single volume reference for Byzantine coinage. Mainly for advanced collectors, but would qualify as the only volume on Byzantine coins you are ever likely to need. Note that Grierson also wrote a book called Byzantine Coinage that is a much more general survey, as well as an intro to the Dumbarton Oaks collection (see below). This book is much cheaper (around $75) and shouldn’t be confused with the more expansive reference.
Catalogue of Byzantine Coins in the Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Grierson et al (6 volumes, $200 each)
There is no RIC for Byzantine coinage either, but this probably comes closest. It is the catalogue of what is easily the best Byzantine/late Roman collection in the world. The collection itself is searchable at https://www.doaks.org/resources/coins/catalogue#b_start=0

Hello all, I have never posted something on Reddit so I'm a little new to this. I'm currently in college (online) and have two highly disabled siblings who are five years younger on the Autism spectrum. Both are semi-potty trained with one being completely non-verbal with temper issues and the other being echoic with epilepsy. My family has 3-4 ABA therapists who perform in-home therapy 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I live a very stressful life and due to having no other siblings and one 1st cousin that I have not talked to in years, I feel pretty alone with this situation. I have tried reaching out to some of my friends about this but they are pretty clueless on what to say. I'm a little scared about starting to date since the prospect of not having 1 but 2 disabled siblings can really turn a guy away. I'm pretty amazed that I have not ended up completely losing it by now lol but are there any resources for support and any advice to give to someone trying to navigate their life?
This is totally off-topic but would anyone happen to know if there are any disabled sibling scholarships in the United States? If not, that is absurd.

From 1973, Drake and Lamar have played four times in their history, most recently in 1980 when Drake beat Lamar 38-7. The series is currently 3-1 in favor of Drake, Lamar’s only win coming in 1974 where they won 18-6.
Lamar has had many struggles throughout its history, but has momentum going into this year after going 6-5 (5-2 in Southland Conference play) under new head coach Peter Rossomando. Meanwhile, Drake dominated in the non-scholarship Pioneer league, going 8-0 in conference play, but lost big to North Dakota and South Dakota State in the regular season, and North Dakota State in the playoffs. Drake also saw defeat last year in a close game that went into overtime against NAIA Northwestern of Iowa.
Both Drake and Lamar are hoping to keep the momentum going after solid years prior, Drake hoping to repeat as conference champions for the first time since 2011-2012, and Lamar is hoping to secure its first conference championship since 1971, and for the first time since the football program was resurrected in 2010.
But in a head-to-head game, who would you all pick to win?

Isa akong batang laking mahirap. All the kinds of bullying naranasan kona and kahit I am on my adult stage na bakat na bakat padin sa ala ala ko kung ano ang mga napagdaanan ko during my years of schooling.
During my elementary days way back mga 2004-2010, baon ko 2 pesos a day pero hindi pa araw araw may baon. Minsan nag aabot sila mama at papa ng 5 pesos ng monday and that's it for the whole week. I am too innocent in those time kasi Im proud to say na never ako nag cocomplain to my parents regarding that,siguro dahil alam kong wala din naman magbabago if I ask them kasi I know na walang wala din naman talaga sila. Minsan yung mga kaklasmayt ko pa noon tinatawanan ako pag tinutulog ko lang ng recess time namin kahit yung tiyan ko tumutunog sa gutom, while them enjoying their meals and have money on their hands to show off. They don't wanna be friend with me either kasi di ako nakakasabay sa kung anong meron sila kaya ako yung typical na batang PAPASOK sa skul ,UUPO,TAHIMIK at magsasalita lang pag kinakausap. Ang tanging alam ko lang non is disiplinado ako ng mga magulang ko kaya naman never ako nanlimos ng kahit ano or nainvolve sa gulo or na guidance sa skul, if my conflict man non sakin at sa klasmayt ko, umiiwas nalang ako at mananahimik kasi takot akong magkamali eventhough sinasabihan na nila ako "DUWAG" "LAMPA" etc.... One time may pinapa project si teacher sakin that requires money to buy it. Sinabi ko din naman kila mama pero they can't provide so pagpasok ko ng umaga sa skul, sobrang kabado ako kasi lahat sila may maipapasang project and ako lang wala. Then when my name called by our teacher sinabi ko yung totoo but the teacher just say "Baka gusto ako pa magprovide para sayo" sabay tawa. Until then naging hobby na nya akong pagtawanan infront of his co teachers at sa mga students at ako lagi inuutusan taga bunot ng puting buhok nya.🤣 well nakakatawa nalang sya sakin now pag naaalala ko
Fast forward... 2011 Highschool days... I enter highschool like elem na walang wala din. All my things are old, from bag to notebooks, yung lapis ko parang nasa 3 inches nalang ang haba kasi di ko napapalitan. Even my slippers have butas na which is naging reason ng bullying din. Yung ibang klasmayts ko laging kinukwestyon bakit daw ganun di ako mabilhan ng mga magulang ko pero di ko sila sinasagot. Just like elem days, ako yung tipo ng stujanteng tahimik lang sa upuan, kaya ang tingin ng guro namin sakin "MABAIT" pero may mga guro padin na hindi talaga ako nagugustuhan dahil sa bagay na wala ako na meron madalas mga klasmayts ko. Malayo ang skul namin sa mga bahay namin kaya nagbabaon kami ng pang lunch namin. Madalas baon ko araw araw is itlog,pancit canton na isang piraso tapos ginagawa kong pang recess at lunch na yun. Even that thing I was questioned lagi by my klasmayts but I don't answer them. I was so lonely nun kasi wala naman gustong makipagkaibigan sakin, even if may groupings, I was left alone and doing my activity alone. If you guys are wondering how's my marks in school? I was a regular student and never ako na fail sa subject ko kasi yun din habilin ng magulang ko sakin. I was so obedient to my parents even those times na pinag aabsent nila ako para magtrabaho sa bukid at para may baon ako sa school.Then the next day, I will be punished in school for being absent without telling them my reasons. I know how hard my life is kaya nangangako ako sa sarili ko na I have to finish my studies kahit anong mangyari. There are some teachers who love humiliating me in front of many students for the things I have, such meron daw ako shoes na old pero walang socks, butas ang pantalon, and ngilaw na ngilaw ang puting uniporme signs of it being old enough. One thing I am struggling about is yung yellow pad paper, yun kasi gamit namin ng highschool and most of them have it tapos ako pag humihingi ako ayaw din naman ako bigyan, kaya ang ending I'm using notebooks as alternative for it. My teacher would question it again pero same thing, my silence is my response. In those years, teachers are allowed to beat students as sign of disiplina and I was beaten as a punishments for not providing projects and unattended classes dahil sa need ko kumita ng pera para may pambaon. Pag binabalikan ko siya, awang awa ako sa sarili ko. And those people who treated me that bad, I still remember them but I forgave them. Masakit lang pag naaalala ko😭 I just can't imagine na nalagpasan ko siya na ako lang magisa at walang nasandalan even my parents. All those bullying I have received from my society, inako ko lang magisa yun at none from my siblings and parents knows about it.
Fast forward...2015- 2019 College... This one is the most legit na sobrang hirap. Pero bago pa mag umpisa ang semester nun I confront my self na kahit anong mangyari " I have to be a regular students,walang bibitiw at wag na wag babagsak sa kahit anong subjects
1st -2nd year college ko, I tried everything I can, to provide for my own tuition fees and allowances. Yes nagbibigay sila mama at papa pero hindi kasya, minsan 150- 200 lang kaya nila iabot for a week allowance, ang bording house ko laging delayed ang bayad, and my tuition is always on hold kaya laging suki ako ng special exam. Pinasok ko mag work as taga dilig ng halaman and care taker ng isang bar and grill for the night and study in the morning. I have no choice but to do it cause ayokong mag stop sa pagaaral. Kaya naman pag sumasahod ako sa part time ko, binibili ko ng mga sapatos sa shoppee and then I resell it on facebook market online around the city. After my class ng afternoon dun ko sila minimeet up sa city and there I earned money. Tho, of all the efforts and hardships na ginagawa ko still my studies is my top priority. I was so payat sa sobrang pagod, puyat at stress.lagi pa akong nag nose bleeding and I was so worried for my health pero tuloy ang laban. Again, none from my siblings and parents knows about it. I kept it all alone and di din naman sila nag tatanong kasi they thought I am doing fine dahil wala din naman silang narerecieved na reklamo sakin. BULLYING? ofcourse di padin ako nakaligtas jan, I was called "EWW ANG ITIM, MUKHANG MATANDA kasi di nakakapag ahit ng balbas at nakapagpagupit" minsan sasabihin pa nila "Huy kumain ka naman para ka nang kalansay" without knowing my whole story. One time I cried inside the confort room kasi I couldn't help myself na mainggit sa mga classmates ko nun na after class they will be having a talk about san sila mag lulunch if sa Jollibee ba, mcdo or sangyup. Samantalang ako, after class I was so busy meeting people with their orders. Minsan nadadaanan ko pa sila sa fast food having a good time while ako may bitbit na malaking basket puno ng sapatos na idedeliver.🙂 If my mandatory na event sa skul na need attendan, I used to ask people I don't know if may pwede ba akong mahihiraman ng susuotin tapos sasabihin nila try nila hanapan ako pero they then laugh at me afterwards. I feel so ashamed of doing it but I have to. So ayun na nga iniignore ko lang yung mga moment na tinatawanan ako sa looks ko, sa mga bagay na wala ako na meron sila. Basta focused ako sa acads ko nun at sa pagkita ng pera.
During my 3rd yr college. Yung part time kong work nagsara so I was forced to stop working with them na. And so yung pagbebenta ko ng sapatos nalang ginagawa ko. I was so lost that time kasi diko alam ako gagawin ko. Malaking tulong yun sakin lalo na 2yrs nalang kailangan kong tapusin sa pagaaral at mas malaki ang expenses ko na.Isang araw papasok ako ng gate sa skul and there are posters around our campus about scholarships and yung minimum qualified average. I have know idea if abot ba ng average ko dun sa offer ng scholars. so I run towards our registrar to request for a certificate of my grades. My world just stop for a while and I'm in tears kasi naabot nga. 86.04 yung average ko and the asking is 85.0.lang. moving forward, I got the scholarship and it helps me with my tuition fees. Kaya ang pinoproblema ko nalang non is bording house ko. Until meron na namang ibang offered na scholarships sa city so kahit sobrang haba ng pila,tiniis ko kasi I know it will save me. Luckily God is so good to me kaya I got them. That's why sa huling taon na pagaaral bago grumaduate, everything goes well and smooth because of those 3 scholarships. I Gave up selling shoes and focus sa exams nalang until I manage to graduate.....
July 2019.... FINALLY GRADUATED AND A CERTIFIED DEGREE HOLDER OF PSYCHOLOGY....
2024 update about me? I am now in a good path, I took a career that is relevant to my degree and still want exploring more things...

I met my husband when my stepdaughter (Lisa) was 18. She had seizures when she was little and was on some heavy duty meds to stop them. The meds made her very sleepy and out of it. Her mother was an alcoholic/serial cheater and had Borderline Personality Disorder. She said she would homeschool Lisa. Surprise! She didn't do it. Husband worked 2 jobs to make ends meet so she she could stay home with Lisa. (They also had 3 other kids, Lisa was youngest).
The first time I met Lisa I was knocked over by her smell. She was 18 and had never been taught to use deodorant, shower regularly, wrap her menstrual pads etc. She also has extreme BO even when she showers. She had no table manners either, it's like she was feral. When I met hubs, he had custody of her for about a year, he had gotten her off all of her meds (sometimes people grow out of childhood epilepsy).
The first thing I did when I moved in with hubs and Lisa is make her shower DAILY, use clinical strength deodorant, and wrap her pads in toilet paper. We got her into high school and the special needs program that goes to age 21. She was learning how to read a little and was being social for the first time in her life. She did really well. About the time that she aged out of the program, a college about 2 hours from home was doing a pilot program for students like her. She lived in the dorms, went to special Ed classes, and regular college classes with a mentor, real college experience. She even interned at the college art gallery. She was doing so well! Her scholarship was for four years and she didn't want to go after two. She came home and got a job graveyards at Walmart in custodial. Still not being able to read, but doing better after having had some education.
She met her boyfriend about 7 years ago and moved in with him about 6 years ago. Since then, she has done absolutely nothing to learn to read even though EVERYONE in her life is willing to do anything to help her. Her boyfriend has paid for tutoring, and has set up many opportunities to learn. She refuses, it's hard, I know but everyone is putting so much more effort into it than she will.
The first years of their relationship, she put in the effort to be a partner. She quit her job after covid and just stayed home and played on her computer. About a year ago, boyfriend said she needed to go back to work (whenever we asked her why she wasn't working, she would explode on us). Since then she sleeps all day and evening, works, comes home in the morning and is on her computer for hours. She doesn't schedule her sleeping around his work schedule, doesn't do housework, doesn't cook (I taught her how). Just nothing. Boyfriend had enough and told us he is going to have her move out for a month to see if that lights a fire under her. Wednesday night she came home and was devastated, of course who wouldn't be? Her old room is now the office, it took me at least a year to get her BO smell out of that room. Now she is in the guest room and it smells like a barnyard already. She gave me a hug yesterday and wouldn't let go and I kept trying to push her off because my nose was in her disgusting armpit. She is absolutely the grossest person I have ever known, she used to wipe her snot on her bedroom walls. She constantly stinks and the smell absorbs into absolutely everything.
I don't want to live with her. We have space in our basement for an apartment (part of the reason we bought this house, we thought she would be with us forever). Hubs retired and we now don't have the money to build an apartment. She is snippy and explodes easily, will NOT talk about going to a doctor to see if she is depressed etc. Since she has been gone, I have gotten a medical card so I smoke weed sometimes. She pulled a judgmental face when I told her that she will smell it.
We might put her in our 5th wheel until we can pull the money out to build the apartment.
We love our time alone and our life together and I forgot how absolutely disgusting she is.
TLDR: smelly stepdaughter might move back in and I don't want it.

Hi y'all,
I am a Ph.D. in Chemistry graduating this summer 2024. I am actively seeking for Scientist I/II (mid-senior level) or bioinformatic scientist positions. I've been sending out my resumes since March but haven't got any interview yet. If you guys can take a look at my resume and give me some recommendations, it would be much appreciated.
https://preview.redd.it/q5ylw8a928yc1.png?width=1482&format=png&auto=webp&s=c50add70ea2b51d675ac55d76a0fcb4a91fc9033
https://preview.redd.it/ruvhjaa928yc1.png?width=1487&format=png&auto=webp&s=6065c66511a4170e6cb8745f8f84932f013a45d4

So I'm in Bye Bye Birdie for the first time. There are SO many references that I feel like I had to do research to figure out. I can't believe how much I miss of the references and context. The only place I found these compiled was this text-based personal website last dated 16 years ago, and even then it's only a few (though really key ones!) and some of them don't show up in my 2024 copy - I wonder if they were pared down. Regardless, figured I'd make a context and reference list based on the copy I have!
I can't fit it all in one post, I exceed the text limit, so we'll start with Act 1 with general context stuff and the second post will be Act 2 only :)

Context

How Dated Was the Musical When Released?
Bye Bye Birdie is famously a direct reference to Elvis Presley getting drafted in 1957 and the stir it caused. But note the musical was written and published in 1958, and went on Broadway in 1960. It's like if a musical went on Broadway this year (2024) about a blonde-haired pop star named Tay-lee Quick (instead of Taylor Swift) who performed a world tour, but didn't initially book any dates in Canada, causing a massive outcry, leading to several Canadian officials and the president "Justice Troodoo" to beg her to stop there and... something else silly happens involving her, then she gets punched by a jealous girlfriend, and silliness ensues.
That is how on-the-nose this musical really is. There are many references to what would have been VERY modern events in this musical. For that reason, I'll try to give some equivalences of how the references in the musical would sound if it was written today.
Elvis' Perception in America
This extensive Wikipedia article does a great job of saying in many words that Elvis was insanely influential and deeply controversial. 1956 was a major year of stardom for Elvis -
Phone Calls
Phones are obviously a huge part of this musical! Wanted to combine all the phone references here.
Kim's Phone Number: Kim's number is, according to Rosie in Act 1, Scene 1, "Capitol 7 - 8820". In the 50s, the previous system which used 6-digit phone numbers started to be replaced by one that used an "exchange prefix" and 5 digits after. (Source) (Source) At the time, phone numbers that didn't connect to anyone were given out for shows like I Love Lucy, so that may be what happened here as well, though I don't know.
One Phone Line to Share: Kim's mother asks her to get off the phone early in the play so she can take a phone call. For a long time before cell phones, each home had a "home number" and you couldn't use it at the same time. This is why Kim's mother is asking her to finish up her call so she can call someone and eventually get a phone call as well.
Picking Kim's Number: Rosie uses a rolodex she randomly flips through to pick Kim - which would have been very standard in the 1950s.
The Operator Trying to Get Through: Calls were pushed through using real people, usually women, plugging lines into a "switchboard" to connect them manually. So when Kim's mom says the operator has been trying to get through for nearly three quarters of an hour, she's been trying to not get a busy signal when manually connecting the lines for 45 minutes! That's dedication!
Mr. MacAfee Frustrated with Long Distance Calls: Cost of international calls at this time was per-minute - so calls to New York, Chicago, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Hong Kong would have cost a pretty penny - over $100 for the first 3 minutes in a similar estimation! It sounds like Conrad and Albert didn't really offer to cover this cost, so you can see why Mr. MacAfee is so cross.
Getting Pinned/Going Steady
"Going steady" referred to, in short, being exclusive with someone. "As Time reported in 1957, "Boys and girls who go steady dance together exclusively (cutting in is frowned upon), sip their sodas, absorb their double features and spin their platters in each other's company or not at all. Steady-going girls indicate their unavailability in various ways, [like] the old-fashioned fraternity pins." (Source) It's mentioned in other sources that this could also be school pins, or rings. Something to show your commitment. One of the heads of my production described it like a "promise ring". It's definitely a firmer promise and commitment then just going out with someone, but not quite an engagement.
However, why, if this is such a sweet gesture of romantic love and commitment, would everyone be freaking out about it, and Kim's parents potentially not reacting well to "getting pinned" or "going steady"? (Kim has a line where she exclaims to her mother that she thinks her dad took the announcement "awfully well"). Truth be told, going steady in high school was actually highly discouraged by adults and especially church at the time. This article/Reddit thread sheds some light. I'll copy the first comment here by u/Gfrisse1. "It was felt that going steady would encourage the relationship to develop into one of physical intimacy, something parents wished to avoid. On the other hand, dating a wider, more diverse number of individuals would give them the experience of being exposed to a greater number of character and personality types, thereby helping to hone their mate-selection skills for later on. In the meantime, the short-term relationships were not expected to get much beyond the first- or second-date stage of intimacy. (One-night-stands, or casual hook-ups were not as common-place as they are today.)"
Cigarettes/Age
There are many references to smoking, cigarettes, and how old you should be in this play. It's complicated, but just know that in the 1950s, EVERYONE smoked. Everywhere. In the early 1950s, though, the first studies were coming out with the link to lung cancer, and tobacco companies used every trick in the book to try to squash that. It's genuinely fascinating (and terrifying) how much money and strategy was poured into this misinformation campaign. Read about it here. Anyway, what this means is in the late 1950s, it's not like most were giving up smoking, but because tobacco companies had started more explicitly advertising to minors, several states were in debate about the smoking age. It varied from 21 to 16, but just know that Kim was not considered old enough to be doing it. (Source.)) However, MANY minors did. Think of it like underaged drinking today as the best analogy. There's some specific cigarette references that will pop up in specific scenes, but just know that's the standard.
Patriotism
Fresh(ish) off of the victory of World War II, which was filled with MASSIVE pushes for increased American patriotism (to the degree that Disney even got in on it!), love for the USA was very culturally acceptable and a way to show you were a good person! It was easy to rally around (especially if you ignored the growing civil rights movement of Black people trying to achieve equality, which many white people at the time were very happy to do until they could no longer ignore it - obviously, not touched on in this musical, but significant. Several racist references have been either removed or are requested to be removed by current versions.) But that's why we hear so many classic American anthems in this play!

References by Order of Appearance (Act 1)

Almaelou Music Corporation

This is the end of Almaelou Music Corporation!

Almaelou may very well be a parody of Aldon Music, which would fit due to its major success being in the late 50s, and it's influence in music written for teen girls at the time.
Arpege

Rosie: A five-dollar raise in 1954 and a bottle of Arpege last Christmas.

Arpege is a perfume that was released in 1927 and remained the best-selling perfume of well-loved fashion line Levine for decades. (Source) Albert is quoting a commercial tagline tied to the perfume that was very well-known at the time. It continued to be used in commercials for many years. (Commercial example). It was possible to see 1/2 oz bottles at the time (Source), but Albert gave her a laughably small amount at 1/16 of an ounce. You can still buy this perfume today!
A five-dollar raise in 1954. Secretaries in metropolitan areas could earn around $75 a week. (Source) A five-dollar raise bringing that to $80 a week would, ironically, be about a 1/16 increase in earnings. Also, Rosie is pointing out in an earlier line she has put in 90 hour weeks and hasn't gotten a raise in four years.
Modern example:

Rosie: My last raise was four years ago and you got me that jewelry from Kay Jewelers once
Albert: "Every Kiss Begins with Kay", Rosie. Rosie: Not when that "Kay" is a .25 karat discontinued friendship ring!

Music Business Bum Vs. English Teacher
This is related to the prestige of being an English teacher who is helping people learn a scholarly subject vs. the "seedy" music industry.
Ugga Bugga Boo

"When you wrote Conrad's last hit 'Ugga Bugga Boo' then I knew this was it/You were thru with English forever."

Ugga Bugga Boo is a real song released 1947. It's a comedy song, written by voice acting legend and radio host Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and many others) for his comedy radio show. I do wonder if Elvis had a song in this vein, as the Jetsons did a similar parody with an Elvis expy a few years later, but I couldn't find one.
Geoffrey ChauceWilliam Morris

"It was goodbye, Geoffrey ChauceHello, William Morris"

Geoffrey Chaucer is considered one of the greatest English writers, specifically poets, of all time. Born in the 1400s.
As for William Morris, this could be two references, possibly combining.
William Morris Agency was an incredibly famous music talent agency that would have likely been known by some audience members in the 1950s. They've represented tons of major talent. This is what I believe is the most likely reference given the song context.
However William Morris was a man also considered a legendary poet during his life, born in the 1830s. However, he also made wallpapers and textiles. After his passing, he became infinitely more famous in the public eye for his wallpaper designs than he did for his poetry. This is could be a dig at that Alfred could be great in the English world, but like Morris, his legacy will be for something "silly" instead. (Important to note that his works, both art and poetry, had great impact - and this may just be a coincidence reference, I don't know)
Bliss! Kiss! That rhymes! I wonder if anyone's ever used it before?
Many people had and have, this is a joke of him being unaware of current trends. Dean Martin had a #1 song in 1955 with this very rhyme for instance that audiences may have remembered at the time.
Dentifrice

Albert: Oh one last kiss; it gives so much bliss... what is your dentifrice! No, that's too clinical...

Basically, toothpaste. Which is, kind of, related to kissing? It could actually be a paste or powder for cleaning the teeth, though in the 50s it wouldn't have been the default way to refer to what you used it seems from my research, like in this commercial. May be a way to show off that Albert really does have an excellent English teacher level vocabulary!
A modern example may be "do you use fluoride? No, that's too clinical..."
"What's the story? Morning glory?"
This is most likely a reference to the song "What's Your Story, Morning Glory?" by jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald released in 1958, another topical reference. It's very possible Helen, the teen who says this line, would be aware of the song because Ella Fitzgerald in 1956 had released her "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book" album, her attempt to pull in a non-jazz audience. (Source on Ella's Discography)
"What's the tale, nightingale" is most likely an original line to match the "Morning glory" one, same with the hummingbird line.
"Go to a fancy night club and stay out after ten!"
A nightclub was different from what we think of today. Think tables and chairs, late night musical performances (not the NSFW kind), and in some of the most famous like the Copacabana night club, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. And drinking, of course! Source on Nightclub Definition
18 in World War II

Mr. MacAfee: I am not an old man! I was 18 in World War II.

This is one that may get a bit better with time. WWII ended in 1945, but the play is in 1958 at the earliest. It's better to demonstrate with a modern example written for 2024. "I am not an old man! I was 18 when Facebook first launched." Not quite the same impact as WWII, but the timeline is similar. Essentially this is not a flex and just shows he definitely is old to a teenager.
No Smoking 'Till You're 14

Albert: Remember the Conrad Birdie Creed dear. No smoking till you're fourteen.

As mentioned in my blurb above, 14 was too young to smoke. A modern version may say "No drinking 'till you're 16" or something. Similar to the line "and stay out of the bar!" later on.
"Go down to Track 12"

Albert: Why don't you girls go down to Track 12 and I'll talk to her.

This is one of the many train tracks that must have run through this station. This station is located in New York, so it would make sense for there to be at least 12.
Wear your rubbers

"Keep your money in your inside pocket. Wear your rubbers. And eat a hot lunch..."

While "rubber" as slang for a condom definitely did exist in the 1950s, I believe it's far more likely Mae is referring to overshoes due to the context, though to be fair, I can't find a source to this being "official slang" besides casual mention in posts like these. Something tells me Mae is not randomly mentioning condoms lol.
A Plain G.I.

Albert: Proud to be a plain G.I.!

Mentioning this because it's faded away from current use and surged in usage most recently at WWII, this is just referring to being a soldier. (Source) Hence, G.I. Joe, if you're old enough to remember that.
Appealing for the Draft

Albert: And that's why he volunteered for...

Men were drafted to join the US armed forces until 1973. (Source)
Jerries

Albert: "Say Mr. Peterson," he cried eagerly, "Do you suppose I can get assigned to the front-line trenches? That way I'll be sure to get one of those dirty jerries..."

"Jerries" is slang for German soldiers and was most popular during WWII. The joke here is that WWII is over at this point - the enemies Conrad would be facing at this time would be the Vietnamese, not the Germans. When Rosie tries to correct him, he just says "whoever's dirty this time!".
2024 equivalent: "Conrad said 'Is there any way I could be placed on Seal Team 6? That way I'll be sure to get that Osama Bin Laden for sure!'" "Albert!" "...Or whoever the terrorist is this time!"
Rosie + Albert's "Origin Stories" for Conrad
Just a few references from Rosie's and Albert's stories in "Healthy Normal American Boy" that may be interesting.
Old Virginie - This may be known as a historical fact for people in Virginia, but Carry Me Back to Old Virginny was popular enough in the state of Virginia that it was the state song starting in 1940. In 1940, the version that became the state song had "Virginia" instead of "Virginny", but people watching the musical would definitely be familiar with the original version as this play was only 20 years later.
Indo-China - An eastern territory that got independence from France claim in 1954, and comprised Cambodia, Laos, and parts of Vietnam. Audiences would have been very aware of what Indochina was - according to Wikipedia, "The events of [Indochina getting independence in 1954 through the Geneva Convention and the political tensions of that between S/N Vietnam and other countries] marked the beginnings of serious United States involvement in Vietnam and the ensuing Vietnam War." (Source) Remember, that's the current war during the events of the play!
Dirty Hong Kong moon - We had a complicated relationship with Hong Kong in the 1950s-60s. Read more here. Though I'm not sure if this is meant to be a mis-insult like when Albert said "dirty Jerries".
A wire to New York

Another Reporter: I'll make sure we've got a wire to New York.

This is almost certainly setting up a telegraph communication to New York, which was still happening (though declining in popularity) by 1960. (Source)
I mean I really feel that girl

Conrad: When I sing about a tree/I really feel that tree!/When I sing about a girl,/I really feel that girl,/I mean I really feel sincere!

This isn't necessarily specific to the 50s or 60s but I think this joke gets missed because it seems so tame today. A huge part of Elvis' appeal was his explicit sex appeal at the time (in the form of - gasp! - hip thrusts!) so he's slipping in accidentally a reference to "feeling up" a girl%20for%20sexual%20pleasure) here. Yeah, that slang started in the 1930s!
Mr. MacAfee's Speech
Just know that this is a lot of great historical references, nothing specific to 1950 - 60.
Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan was the nationwide sensation that lead The Ed Sullivan Show, a TV program considered one of the most iconic of all time in US television history. You have to understand just how influential and huge the Ed Sullivan Show was at this time. It's genuinely difficult to think of an equivalent in 2024 - today, people get entertainment from tons of sources on the internet, TV, etc. but in 1960 there were THREE television channels. That was it. THREE. To be fair, there were many, many more radio stations that could deliver information and entertainment, but by 1960 it was a TV nation - as the Library of Congress says, "In 1950 only 9 percent of American households had a television set, but by 1960 the figure had reached 90 percent." The Ed Sullivan Show was well watched and well loved by all of the United States. (And Albert saying that they would appear on Sunday at 8:05 was right, as that's when it aired in real life!)
One reason Ed Sullivan is specifically picked is the absolute bombshell of a privilege to be a normal family on this show beamed in practically every household in the United States. But another is Elvis' relationship with the show. When Elvis finally appeared on the show in 1956, it set a record of the most-viewed TV program ever in the US. In fact, it still holds the record TODAY of having the highest share of TV viewers in all of television history in the US. No other TV program has ever had a higher percentage of people tune in vs. other stations. (I mean, that's helped by the fact that there were only 3 choices, but still!) So yeah - this was a cultural phenomenon that was easy to reference in this show!
Margo out of Shangri-La

Mrs. Peterson: She looks like Margo when they took her out of Shangri-La.

Going to take this one right from that personal website I referenced above!

In the 1937 [movie] "Lost Horizon)" [...] a group of travelers are stuck in a utopia called Shangri-La, somewhere in the Himalayas. One of the residents of Shangri-La is Maria, played by Margo), a Mexican dancer and actress. When the travelers finally escape, Maria insists on going with them. But outside the realm of Shangri-La, her youthful beauty can no longer be maintained and she reverts to her true age, causing her to die and her appearance to transform to the hideously withered, wrinkled features of someone who has lived way beyond a normal life span.

You can watch the movie free with ads here, if you're curious! Also, according to the synopsis, Maria never actually escapes Shangri-La. She just dies and "reverts to her true age". AKA looks very very very decrepit. I'm guessing this is more of an easy thing to misremember and better shorthand, though. See the face at 2 hr 3 minutes in abouts!
Suwannee River

Gloria: Mae, can you hum Suwannee River?

While this is a nice convenient copyright-free tune, it would definitely have been publicly known at the time. It had been sung at least partially by Bing Crosby, on the Honeymooners, etc. in recent years before the musical premiered. Unsure if this is what they were going for, but the original lyrics are racist - no wonder it was Mae's "favorite selection".
Ruby Keeler

(Stage direction) Gloria tap dances as Mrs. Peterson hums gaily. Sort of Ruby Keeler-ish steps with a lot of feet-slapping.

Ruby was a well known actress and dancer in the 1920s-30s (and then later after a break). Here's some footage of her dancing! Interestingly, in her early career she was cast in a musical called Bye, Bye, Bonnie. In a newspaper article review, it seems the plot wasn't very similar to Bye Bye Birdie, though it did involve someone going to jail. (Source)
The Touch System

Mrs. Peterson: I'll find you a typewriter (Exits) Albert: [TO GLORIA] Do you use the touch system? Gloria: Whenever possible.

Albert is just referring to the touch system of typing - basically, not looking at the keyboard while you type. Still relevant today, though not with typewriters, which were standard until the 1980s, so that fits here. Of course, Gloria is of course referring to, uh, something a bit more sensual. (Read: She wants to touch him and not like a friend.)
Kodak Ad

Sullivan: So remember: your surest way to the best in color slides is to insist on the new Kodak! And now, the young man you've all been waiting to see.

Just like media today, the Ed Sullivan Show certainly included ads. This included ad deals where Ed himself would promote a product, kind of like YouTubers do with "This video is sponsored by...". And, as you can guess, one of those products was Kodak cameras and camera related products. Kodak was still a huge brand at the time (there were not cell phone cameras as competition, so it was way more likely your home owned a camera or two), Kodak absolutely was sponsoring the Ed Sullivan show and had been for a few years (Source). Here's an example from the time period. What you may miss about this ad in the musical is that it's not actually advertising a camera! Cameras at the time required physical film be loaded into them, and wouldn't you know it, Kodak released a new high-speed color film in 1959! (I think this may be a coincidence, as Kodak had been selling color film for quite a bit before this) Yet another reference that's right on the nose of the current times (of the time)!
Wear it in good health

Albert: Who let that kid in here? Rosie: I did Albert. Albert: Rosie! Rosie: It's a sort of farewell present to you and Miss Rasputin. Wear it in good health.

Not invented in the 50s by any means, but this phrase really isn't used as much today I think. There's not really a deeper meaning here besides sarcasm that I can find - it's just wishing someone well. Obviously, the sarcasm is dripping here lol.
Dinah Shore

STAGE DIRECTION: ...as Mr. MacAfee throws a tremendous Dinah Shore kiss to the audience.

Dinah Shore was an actress and entertainer that had been popular for years at that point. Super interesting career if you want to give it a read. This is referencing her famous "Dinah Shore kiss" that she would give at the end of her show broadcasts and was a huge part of her brand. Here's an example!
Stay tuned for Part 2! :)

Abstract: This article provides an analysis of “teaming,” or allying with a competitor, in battle-royale video games. Allying with a competitor is a normal strategy in social-deduction games, but it is often considered to be cheating in battle royale. Persistent complaints about teaming can be seen across a variety of social media platforms. This article surveys the controversy and outlines the major attempts to address such problems, including developer changes to matchmaking systems, automated moderation and opposition to stream sniping. These approaches are substantially successful, and yet there appear to be social and ludic conditions that make teaming an intractable problem. This article appeals to established economic and typological analyses of game goals to rethink the social dilemma of teaming in battle royale. The thesis argues that the major attempts to address the problem of teaming typically assume teaming is necessarily an unskilled strategy that circumvents the game goal of having a sporting contest of skills, but a comprehensive analysis of teaming allows us to recognize that it is conceptually possible to design regulatory mechanisms for teaming such that teaming requires skill. The conclusion begins to chart future research on sporting designs for regulating teaming.

Introduction

“Cross-teaming” or simply “teaming” in competitive multiplayer games is a strategy wherein a competitor temporarily cooperates with another competitor. Teaming is a central feature of social-deduction games centered on cunning negotiations, alliances and betrayals, for example the boardgame Diplomacy (Wizards of the Coast, 1954), the party game Mafia (Davidoff, 1986), the card game Are You a Werewolf? (Looney Labs, 1997) and the video game Among Us (Innersloth, 2018). In battle-royale video games, however, teaming has been a popular form of cheating. Battle-royale games are competitive, multiplayer survival games in which the last competitor alive wins the game. A match of battle royale typically has a large number of competitors in an arena with a variety of weapons. There are various game mechanics to decrease hiding/ camping and increase encounters between competitors, for example shrinking the arena area over time. Teaming in battle royale can provide a major advantage by allowing two competitors to outnumber a third competitor.

The analysis in this article begins with a brief history of battle royale and the crux of the problem with teaming. Teaming is a volatile practice that is randomized by the whims of other competitors, so teaming appears to provide an advantage based on luck within an otherwise sporting contest of skills. Players of battle royale use social media to complain about teaming, and game designers have addressed this problem in a variety of innovative ways inspired by both popular and academic conversations. However, illicit teaming remains a significant problem for the gaming community. How can we complicate our understanding of this problem and address it in new ways?

There are nuanced theoretical frameworks for unpacking the dynamics of teaming. The analysis in this article introduces and combines existing scholarship on the economics and typology of game goals. Jonas Heide Smith (2007) argues that cheating in online video games gives rise to a social dilemma, and I show how Smith’s economic framework can be extended to illicit teaming. Debus, Zagal and Cardona-Rivera (2020) argue that the goals of video games can be deeply equivocal, and I extend their analysis to consider alternate ways of framing the social dilemma of teaming. I argue that in the case of battle-royale video games, game developers have been largely prohibitive of teaming, but combining Smith with Debus et al. allows us to recognize that there can also be permissive and regulativeapproaches to teaming that substantially address the social dilemma. The major attempts to address the problem of teaming typically assume teaming is necessarily an unskilled strategy that circumvents the game goal of having a sporting contest of skills, but a comprehensive analysis of teaming allows us to recognize that it is conceptually possible to design regulatory mechanisms for teaming such that teaming requires skill. This article concludes by gesturing toward skillful regulatory mechanisms for addressing the social dilemma of teaming, including the innovative mechanism of “assimilation” in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2022).

Battle Royale and Illicit Teaming

Teaming has been a part of battle royale since its inception. According to Teemu Pesonen’s article “The History of Battle Royale Esports” (2023), the Japanese film Battle Royale (Fukasaku, 2000) inspired the video-game genre. The plot of the film includes a government forcing students to fight each other to the death on an island, where only the last student alive may leave the island. The film also clearly includes cunning betrayals and alliances between competitors.

The genre of battle royale was further popularized by the American film The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012). Pesonen tells us that The Hunger Games directly inspired the first battle-royale modification for the video game Minecraft(Mojang Studios, 2011). In 2013 Brendan Greene, also known as “PlayerUnknown,” developed a mod called “DayZ: Battle Royale,” a battle-royale modification for the video game Arma II (Bohemia Interactive, 2012). Greene was inspired by other Arma II mods like Brian Hicks’ and Jordan Taylor’s mod for Arma II, “DayZ: Survivor Gamez” (McCarthy, 2017), and Green introduced to the battle-royale genre “items and weapons that were randomly spread across the map” (Pesonen, 2023). The first battle-royale video game to be officially published was PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Krafton, 2017). The collaborative, online, multiplayer-vs-environment, survival video game Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) added a dedicated mode for battle royale within a year of its release, contributing to the battle-royale genre both in-game building mechanics and cross-platform play.

Other major battle-royale games include Vigor (Bohemia Interactive, 2018), Apex Legends (Respawn Entertainment, 2019) and Call of Duty: Warzone (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2020), but I will foreground Fortnite for illustration. Fortnite debuted right when teaming was exploding in popularity in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but unlike Battlegrounds, Fortnite was initially designed to be a cooperative game, and elements of this cooperative spirit made it into the battle-royale mode, including the ability to communicate with others by dancing with them and expressing emotions. Fortnite’s battle-royale mode also implicitly encourages teaming insofar as it regularly awards prizes like virtual clothing and accessories to competitors who complete non-competitive challenges (for example, Dance on a Giant Cup of Coffee), which often leads to competitors cooperating until they can complete the challenge.

The most common, overt way to initiate teaming in Fortnite is to stop fighting and start dancing. If the dancing is reciprocated, the two competitors have indicated to one another that they want to cooperate temporarily. Other overt ways to initiate teaming include disarming yourself in front of a competitor, dropping healing items, building heart-shaped constructs and rapidly switching between ducking and standing stances. Subtle ways to initiate teaming can include pretending not to see someone, running away instead of attacking and defensively “boxing up” (hiding in your own building) without taking opportunities to attack. In each of these cases the initiation procedures take place during a match. However, teaming can also occur prior to a match when two or more people communicate their intention to first enter a match as competitors and then cooperate by identifying one another via coded behavior, for example meeting at a certain location or using peculiar virtual clothing.

Unlike a sporting contest of skills, teaming in battle royale currently has deeply random elements from beginning to end. The tension between a sporting contest of skills and random game elements goes to the heart of the controversy around teaming. Attempting to initiate teaming is a gamble. Dancing, disarming or deliberately passing up opportunities to attack exposes vulnerabilities. Competitors have short-term incentive to eliminate anyone who is initiating teaming because the initiator’s defenses are down. Not everyone has an equal opportunity to team because reciprocation relies on the whims of others. Even when there is an established collusion, there is still an incentive to be the first to betray the other, which makes the long-term benefits of teaming precarious. If teamers are the last competitors in a match, a competitor may betray the other, eliminate themselves or wait until environmental damage randomly decides who wins. Ultimately, teaming introduces a volatile element of luck into a sporting competition of skill.

Controversies and Proposed Solutions

I searched for and surveyed comments about the teaming controversy on live-streams, blog archives, developer patch notes and game-specific discussion forums, including twitch.com, youtube.com, bohemia.net, hypixel.net and reddit.com. This article only cites about two dozen posts and forums, but I believe these sources on teaming are representative of the thousands of ephemeral commentaries I have seen across a variety of platforms. The arguments both for and against teaming display strong emotion (sleaches, 2020; Seahawks12, 2022; ThatOneRedditBro, 2022; Clix, 2023). In my assessment there is a general trend in the dispute. Across the major battle-royale games, game players have complained about teaming for being an unfair advantage and, usually, against the official rules. Posts that defend teaming may be dismissive of the seriousness of casual teaming, but these defenses can also be passionate appeals to the enjoyability of cunning alliances and betrayals (successXX, 2016; Emble12, 2021; SzzzMK47, 2021). Fans who defend teaming have been insultingly dismissed as unskilled competitors who can only win by cheating. The controversy over teaming has led game designers to propose a number of creative solutions, but the persistence of teaming despite these innovations speaks to the practical intractability of this problem.

Certain solutions to illicit teaming speak to the perceived motivations of teaming. Early in the teaming controversy, developers discerned in teaming a simple desire on the part of solo competitors to compete in teams, and the result has been optional game modes for legitimate team-based battle royale, namely Duos, Trios or Quads. However, illicit teaming continued to be common in Solos as well as team-based modes. Another widespread interpretation of teaming is that it is used by unskilled competitors who simply want a sporting chance against vastly higher-skilled players, and the result has been skill-based matchmaking, wherein competitors are matched equally according to an automated index of their perceived skill. Teaming remained common.

Game designers have attempted to prevent teaming by addressing the tools used for teaming. Competitors who can communicate prior to joining the matchmaking queue may conspire to join the queue at the exact same time, which increases the odds of getting into the same match and allows the competitors to find one another to team. This problem led game designers to implement a randomized matchmaking time-delay so that it does not matter when someone joins the queue (swapode, 2017). Game designers may also use a filter to prevent competitors from entering the same match if they are one another’s “Friends” list. Streamers have proposed anonymizing competitor names and appearances to prevent this kind of teaming (Amos, 2019). These approaches have been effective, but teaming remained a substantial problem.

Matches can also contain automated moderators that help gaming communities police teaming. In the article “Collusion Detection in Team-Based Multiplayer Games” the authors Laura Greige, Fernando De Mesentier Silva, Meredith Trotter, Chris Lawrence, Peter Chin and Dilip Varadarajan explain how automatic moderation works to help catch teamers in tournaments (Greige et al., 2022). Competitors who use teaming to climb the ranks of a tournament show an improbable consistency in their respective match rankings over time. Therefore, automated moderators compare gameplay data over several matches to identify these improbable correlations and flag competitors. The moderator assigns to a pair of competitors a higher index of teaming the more frequently that those two competitors begin a match close to one another, stay close to one another and end a match with similar ranking. The goal of automatic moderation is to select cases for further review by human moderators. A majority (but not all) of the cases flagged by the automated moderator were confirmed by human moderators to be genuine cases of teaming, so the system is largely effective. However, automatic moderation does not necessarily aspire to perfection or even to identify collusion itself. Rather, automatic moderation works by identifying the probability that two competitors are colluding, “Hence, human intervention is still essential and further investigation by human experts is required before taking any enforcement action against the potential colluders flagged by our model” (Greige et al., 2022, p. 13).

Human moderators may observe or review matches in order to remove competitors who act like teamers, that is, competitors who are in proximity, do not attack one another and/ or simultaneously attack a third party. Unfortunately, these are also the behaviors of legitimate competitors who are camping, stealthy, short on resources (if not empty), low on health and/ or ambushing ongoing fights, namely “third-partying.” Complaints about people who ambush ongoing fights consider this tactic to be unsporting, but it would make no sense to demand that such an integral strategy should be banned from battle royale simply due to its affinity with teaming. It is not possible to entirely prevent the appearance of teaming because teaming is an implied product of games where players must be selective about which competitors they move against. When competitors in the end game must be selective about which other two competitors they move against, two competitors can have a legitimate ceasefire and mutual third target without any intention to team. Competitors complain about being removed from matches or even banned due to moderators mistaking their legitimate behavior for teaming (simon-whitehead, 2020). The intention to team can be difficult to discern even for human moderators.

One curious case of persistent, illicit teaming is one-way teaming. This occurs when a competitor helps another competitor without their consent. This typically happens when a fan of a streamer gets into the same match as the streamer, and the fan (while watching the live-stream) does whatever they can to benefit the streamer--leaving resources in their path, healing them from a distance (for example, with health splashes), or intentionally getting eliminated by the streamer (thus awarding the streamer loot and credit for the elimination). Sometimes this is benign, like when fans enter a streamer’s match only to build heart-shaped constructs for them to see, but this form of teaming can cause significant social friction.

In April of 2023, Epic Games banned the Fortnite streamer Cody “Clix” Conrod for two weeks due to illicit teaming (Gan, 2023). This meant that Clix was also effectively banned for the following lucrative Fortnite Championship Series tournaments. The teaming occurred due to the actions of a stream sniper who healed and supplied Clix largely without Clix’s consent (Gan, 2023). Stream sniping refers to a competitor watching another competitor’s live stream to see what their competitor sees. In this case the stream sniper was a malevolent troll with an account named “N1 Clix Hater,” and the troll was likely deliberately trying to get Clix banned (Clix, 2023). However, the penalties would be the same if the one-way teaming was from a benevolent fan. Clix admits some responsibility for teaming because Clix solicited certain helpful behavior from the stream sniper over the live stream, although this solicitation was solely to catch the sniper in the act of stream sniping, that is, to get them banned (Clix, 2023).

One-way teaming had a lasting impact on Clix. Following the end of the two-week ban, Clix streamed his first match, and a competitor began healing him with the same splash items that “N1 Clix Hater” used. For fear of being banned again, Clix started screaming out loud and running from the one-way teamer to avoid the appearance of receiving a competitor’s beneficial items (again), then Clix abruptly backtracked to aggressively attack the one-way teamer for fear of appearing to be too non-confrontational or even intentionally leading the teamer. Audience members joked that Clix had a flashback from the PTSD of being banned, but Clix has made it clear to his viewers that being banned from the tournament really was a deeply serious, extremely stressful event for him (Clix, 2023). It was a serious threat to his career and reputation, and more generally it highlights the way in which streamers have a real burden of altering their gameplay to avoid the appearance of benefiting from one-way teamers.

These cases suggest that despite the attempts to address the controversy over teaming by appealing to competitors’ desires behind teaming, by moderating matches and by avoiding stream snipers, teaming remains an intractable problem for the battle-royale community. The teaming controversy lies in a tension between competitors’ desire for a sporting contest of skills in a battle-royale format on one hand, and on the other hand the fact that battle royale is basically, structurally permissive of nonsporting conditions like the volatile dynamics of teaming or third-partying. The basic setup of the battle royale genre seems to make teaming--however impermissible--always theoretically possible.

Collective Action Theory and Social Dilemmas

In the article “Tragedies of the Ludic Commons--Understanding Cooperation in Multiplayer Games,” the author Jonas Heide Smith uses collective action theory to understand how competitive games have cooperative aspects that give rise to social dilemmas (Smith, 2007). Understanding how these social dilemmas work is important for addressing social problems like cheating in online multiplayer games, including illicit teaming. Collective action theory is an economic lens that identifies the individualistic and cooperative forces in the production of collective goods. Individuals may have an incentive to enjoy the benefits of a collective good without contributing to its production, but without enough individuals cooperatively contributing, no individual could enjoy the benefits of a collective good. In this case there is a social dilemma, that is, when the individual and collective incentives are at odds in the production of a collective good.

An illustrative social dilemma is the problem of commons. This problem occurs when a collective good like global, environmental stability requires cooperation in, for example, not exterminating the last of any rare resource (like an endangered species), but the rarer a resource is, the more individuals are incentivized to capitalize on the resource. Social dilemmas are conflicts between a group and its individual members where individual members can benefit from “free-riding” so long as not so many members “free-ride” that the good of the group collapses, in which case there would be no benefit for any members. What counts as “free-riding” can vary greatly--Smith mentions cheating, griefing and irresponsible play (Smith, 2007). Here I am concerned with cheating as a social dilemma to better understand teaming.

On my reading of Smith’s analysis, cheating is a form of free-riding in a social dilemma insofar as cheating allows a competitor to gain a good--winning--at the cost of a greater collective good--having a sporting contest of skills. To clarify, team-based games normatively require cooperation between the members of a given team for the collective good of a team, namely winning. However, Smith points out that there is also a normative cooperation between otherwise competing teams because the greater collective good is a sporting contest of skills. Competitors cooperatively agree not to cheat to win, and this preserves the greater good of having sporting contest of skills. The collective good of a sporting contest of skills is greater than simply winning in the sense that a sporting contest can be enjoyed by all competitors, even losing teams. If players cheat, the contest is no longer about skills, so the remaining good is winning, and the collective good of a sporting contest of skills entirely collapses.

The use of a social-dilemma framework to address the problem of teaming has already been started by Rheem, Cho and Verma (Rheem et al., 2019). Here we have the idea that teaming can be prevented by interrupting the communication between teamers. For example, if competitors typically spin in place or rapidly duck and stand to initiate teaming, then perhaps matches could include bots (artificially intelligent competitors) who imitate this behavior but do not follow through on teaming. This would confuse competitors about which attempts to team are genuine, ultimately dissuading competitors from teaming. Other ideas from Rheem et al. include rushing competitors, separating competitors at the beginning of a match and separating competitors who have been previously flagged for teaming. Ultimately, it is important to dissuade teaming by altering the conditions of initial contact between competitors. I think Rheem et al.’s work can be extended further if we combine it with Smith’s analysis of collective goods and cheating in social dilemmas.

Illicit teaming, as a form of cheating, is a form of free-riding, and we might address teaming by applying Smith’s solutions. Smith first considers government as a solution to social dilemmas. Government would be parallel to the moderators of a match, that is, catching and banning teamers. However, we have seen above that teaming is a problem for even human moderators because teaming can appear identical to legitimate strategies at the end of a match. I would argue that Smith’s conceptual parallel for this problem is offensive-language censorship in online games, wherein Smith argues that moderators do not have a perfect way of determining what is sufficiently offensive to warrant censorship.

Smith also considers how “a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts” (Elinor Ostrom quoted in Smith, 2007). This solution primarily works when there is “a certain degree of permanence, the possibilities of monitoring the actions of other community members, and the prospect of future interaction” (Smith, 2007). In other words, like real marketplaces, cooperation is often obtained through systems of accountable reputation over time, for example, rating systems for online vendors/ buyers or for ride-share drivers/ passengers. Someone’s reputation for teaming may lead to their exclusion from a private clan, guild or association of battle-royale gamers.

Smith’s variety of solutions can be synthesized and extended to a wider, public base of players if competitors were to rate each over time in conjunction with automated moderators, perhaps leading to a reputation-based matchmaking system that parallels skill-based matchmaking. Reputation-based matchmaking could reward honest competitors by systematically matching them with other honest competitors and vice versa. Competitors who are repeatedly flagged for teaming might be matched more frequently with others who are flagged for teaming (as opposed to banning them). Of course, there would be disingenuous raters, but another system could filter out raters with anomalous behavior. Another difficulty would be applying such matchmaking to any game with anonymous competitors who can create new accounts to avoid the consequences of their reputation, but battle-royale games could require everyone to submit a verifiable personal identification to decrease the abuse of such fraudulent sock-puppet accounts. This is an extreme but not implausible solution to illicit teaming.

The Typology of Game Goals

Extending Smith’s economic framework to battle royale allowed us to imagine the extreme limits of solutions to illicit teaming as a social dilemma. One way to go beyond these limits is to rethink our implicit assumptions about the split goal of battle royale, namely winning and competing in a sporting contest of skills. What counts as a sporting contest of skills? Or, what counts as an even battlefield? To address this issue, we can begin with a broader theoretical examination of goals in games.

In the article “A Typology of Imperative Game Goals,” the authors Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera unpack the theoretical problem of what counts as the goal of a game (Debus et al., 2020). It can be easy to confuse a game’s goal with its end, with preventing its end, with getting points, with winning, with improving skills or with having a sporting contest of skills--these are very different things. There can exist a typology of game goals, but it must account for equivocations in casually framed goals. The authors note that the goal to “survive” or win in “the context of battle royale games” can be conceptually split between avoiding elimination and eliminating others, whether aggressively or passively (Debus et al., 2020).

Debus et al.’s analysis of surviving or winning can be extended to the goal of having a sporting contest of skills. I argue that it is important to recognize that a sporting contest of skills is conceptually split between a contest of skills where no competitor has an advantage on one hand and a contest where competitors use skills (not random conditions) to obtain an advantage on the other hand. This distinction allows us to recognize that the prohibition against teaming as “unfair” relies almost entirely on the first sense of a sporting contest of skills, that is, a contest where no competitor has an advantage. An extension of Debus et al.’s analysis allows us to see that this popular objection to teaming is not necessarily valid. If competitors must use skills to obtain an advantageous position, then it can be entirely sporting for one competitor to have an advantage over the other. Of course, the prohibition against teaming assumes that it takes no skill to obtain a cooperating competitor because the opportunity to team is randomly decided by the whims of competitors. But is this assumption valid? If we put Debus et al. together with Smith, we can raise the important question, is there a way to design battle royale such that skills are required for teaming?

Skillfully Regulating Teaming in Battle Royale

There are battle-royale video games that prohibit most forms of teaming yet permit teaming under specific conditions, and these games can contain mechanisms for skillfully regulating teaming to preserve a sporting contest of skills. For example, in 2020 the battle-royale mod of Fortnite added a recruiting mechanism that enables an artificially intelligent, Non-player character (NPC) to be hired to cooperate for the duration of the match (Çakir, 2021). These AI-controlled NPCs are not necessarily competitors, but they are potential competitors insofar as anyone can hire them to fight on their team. This mechanism satisfies the desire to recruit without entirely spoiling a contest of skills in Fortnite because the skill level of NPCs is artificially kept quite low. NPCs often clumsily expose the location of whoever hired them, which balances out the advantage they provide. Further, anyone may hire an NPC, so there is an equal opportunity to team. However, the number of hirable NPCs in a given location is limited, which makes the opportunity to team with an NPC somewhat precarious. This NPC-recruiting mechanism has the effect of making each match into a race to hire the only NPC in a given location, which then significantly skews the following fights. Yet, there is significant skill involved in a race to hire an NPC. In Fortnite this race looks like competitors skillfully timing their jump from a moving starting point (a flying autobus) and skillfully timing their deployment of a paraglider to get to a location as efficiently as possible. The NPC-recruiting mechanism is a small but not insignificant step toward regulating teaming such that obtaining a cooperative competitor requires skill, namely the skill of racing to a location as efficiently as possible. Nevertheless, there remain substantial concerns that hired NPCs ruin the fairness of the game (IMainSpyAndImNoWeeb, 2023; emotx, 2023).

The battle-royale video game Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2022) introduced a skillful regulatory mechanism for teaming called “assimilation” (Rain et al., 2022). There are four regulatory features of the assimilation mechanism. First, there is a communication option to explicitly invite a competitor to one’s team. The invited person can explicitly accept or reject the invitation to join the team. Second, the game prevents members of a team from damaging their teammates, and this mutual immunity extends to assimilated competitors. Third, assimilation is limited to teams that have lost a teammate. A player can assimilate as many competitors as teammates they have lost and no more. This also means that assimilation does not work in Solo competition modes. This mechanism prevents teaming from spoiling the contest of skills by keeping the maximum size of official teams consistent. Of course, it is still random whether or not a competitor accepts an invitation to team. Even when faced with the choice to be eliminated or cooperate with a competitor, players may simply choose to be eliminated, for example in order to spite an enemy or in order to begin a new match with the friends they had been playing with. A fourth feature of assimilation is that an assimilated competitor can choose to leave their team at any time. This is problematic for a sporting contest of skills insofar as it unevenly enables cunning betrayals through surprise defection. Of course, these regulatory mechanisms do not prevent unofficial, illicit teaming over the maximum size-permitted limit, but such illicit teaming would not have the protection of mutual immunity.

In November and December of 2022, Warzone 2.0 contained a Trios mode named “Unhinged” wherein the assimilation feature was no longer limited to a three-person team but a six-person team, meaning double the capacity of initial team sizes (Morton, 2022). In my view of player responses on reddit.com, Unhinged was polarizing for the Warzone fanbase (Boynus, 2022; Handbrake55, 2022; Infinitely_Infinity, 2022; Pmmeyourrocks, 2022; u/[deleted], 2022; C4ptainchr0nic, 2023). Defenders of Unhinged typically appealed to the fun of cunning alliances and betrayals, while others gave the usual complaints about teaming as an unskilled strategy.

Why was Unhinged removed from Warzone 2.0 on 14 December 2022? Fans of Unhinged wondered why they could not have an Unhinged mode while the complainers play a different mode more to their liking. We can make educated guesses about what happened based on player complaints. Unhinged had a problematic social and gameplay dynamic. First, players reported an increase in toxic communication (ThatOneRedditBro, 2022). Warzone 2.0 contains a mechanism called proximity chat wherein competitors can talk with one another if they are close enough to each other. This mechanism can be turned off, but proximity chat provides an advantage for inviting a competitor to team up, so Unhinged included more use of proximity chat relative to other game modes (SirDankz, 2022). The dynamics of competition and moreover betrayal seems to have encouraged toxic proximity chat between competitors. Complaints include the use of racial slurs. This made Unhinged extra problematic for popular streaming platforms that prohibited racist content. It is easy to imagine that the Unhinged mode was a liability in this sense, and I think proximity chat ultimately stifled the potential for Unhinged to further develop its explorations of regulated teaming via assimilation.

In terms of gameplay dynamics, players complained that the teaming dynamic in Unhinged effectively requires competitors to race to find a cooperative competitor if they are going to last to the end game, but not everyone can equally find a competitor. Competitors are incentivized to refuse cooperation in favor of betrayal to obtain the short-term benefits. Unlike Fortnite’s race to hire an NPC using a skillfully timed deployment, there was no parallel skill for racing to team up with another human competitor in Unhinged.

Conclusion

Further explorations in regulatory mechanisms for teaming can be developed on the basis of each element of teaming that would make it unskilled. Teaming is randomized or made unskilled by a number of things we can identify from the preceding analysis. We have seen that there has been randomness through an ambiguity in the communication of invitations to team, and the explicit invite function of assimilation resolves this issue. We have seen randomness in the whims of a teamer’s betrayal, and assimilation addresses this issue with mutual immunity to damage for competitors who accept an explicit invitation. Although assimilation currently allows teamers to defect at any time, which reintroduces the randomness of whimsical betrayals, it would be interesting to explore a mechanism that regulates defection by requiring a defection to be announced well ahead of time, say a thirty-second countdown until there is no more mutual immunity to damage. A defection countdown would eliminate the surprise element of defection.

Assimilation’s mechanism of explicit invitations currently does not address the randomness of the whims of competitor’s acceptance or rejection of an explicit invitation to team. However, the NPC-recruiting mechanism in Fortnite circumvents this randomness by forcing NPCs to accept the first invitation to team that they receive. We can easily imagine that assimilation can address the issue with human competitors similarly. When a competitor sends an explicit invitation to another competitor, a mechanism can make this invitation automatically accepted, immediately establishing damage immunity between the two competitors. Explicit invites would then be coercive invites, and the whims of the competitor’s interests in teaming no longer affect the opportunity to team.

I would argue that one current feature of assimilation is unnecessary to preserve a sporting contest of skills, namely a size cap on teams (inclusive of assimilated members). The idea of capping or limiting the combined size of a team is clearly meant to make the competition more even, but we have seen that a competition between unevenly sized teams can be sporting if teams use skills to retain teammates. Exploring the effects of different size caps for teaming would be interesting for future research, but a size cap is not necessarily needed to preserve a sporting contest of skills.

Given this robust revision of assimilation--coercive invitations, mutual immunity and a defection countdown but not necessarily with a size cap--the major randomizing elements of teaming are reduced, and skillful competition is preserved. However, new sets of issues emerge for the dynamics of teaming in battle royale, and game designers can benefit from exploring these new issues. I consider here a few questions for future research on the effects of skillful regulations of teaming in battle royale. What are different ways of regulating the duration of a coercive assimilation? What is the effect of implementing an indefinite duration until one member announces their defection? What is the effect of implementing a forced automatic defection of any assimilated members at the end of a match? What is the effect of establishing a determinate, short amount of time before auto-defection? What happens if competitors are given one or more options to renew their alliance? How can the ability to send a coercive invitation be distributed among players? What is the effect of giving players one or multiple chances to extend a coercive invitation at the beginning of the match? What happens if the ability to send a coercive invitation is regulated by possessing an in-game item to be found in the arena? What impact does the number of such items available make? How might the race to such items be regulated to require skills? What happens if an assimilated member can send a coercive invitation to a third party, and how might damage immunity be distributed in such a chain of assimilation? That is, if a first competitor coercively invites a second competitor, and the second competitor coercively invites a third competitor, do the first and third competitors have mutual immunity for the duration of the first assimilation? How can cooperation be encouraged between a coercive inviter and an assimilated member? What happens if teaming competitors receive bonuses by remaining proximate to one another? What happens if they receive penalties for straying too far from their teammates?

Finally, I want to note that robust mechanisms for skillfully regulating teaming can exist alongside prohibitions against teaming outside of these mechanisms, and in such a case skillfully regulating teaming would not really solve the intractable problem of illicit teaming. However, perhaps a well-regulated avenue for teaming would satisfy much of the desire to team, and there might be less incentive to team illicitly when official teaming offers sufficient protection against random betrayals. It remains to be seen how regulating the outlet of players’ drive to team will affect players’ engagement with prohibitive teaming.
References [Cut for Reddit Post Limit on Characters]

I am 30 years old live in Texas right outside of Houston and I have epilepsy. IE; I don't have many options for work as I am unable to drive, and everything is a highway and I have no nearby public transport means available. Regardless of my situation I am still eager to start a career after trying my hand in all sorts of jobs over the years and haven't been able to find anything to hold my interest.
1911s have always been of interest to me and just an iconic firearm. The rising popularity of the 2011/double stacked 1911 platform has peaked my interest even further, but I'd like to start small an work my way up the line to a professional. l need a starting point to begin.
Would school be the best option for a beginner? Whether online classes or in person, what would be the best course to start learning? Maybe get to slightly more advanced workings if possible within the next year?

(since our site is down)
Trevor Project
The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 to help prevent LGBTQ+ suicides and is available 24 hours a day. If you or a loved one needs help, text START to 678-678 or call 1-866-488-7386, you can also chat with a counselor on their site.
Trans Lifeline
The Trans Lifeline is a hotline run by trans people for trans and questioning people and are available even if you're not in a crisis or aren't sure about your gender. They are available 24 hours a day and your call can remain anonymous. If you are in the US, the Trans Lifeline can be reached at 877-565-8860, if you are in Canada the Trans Lifeline can be reached at 877-330-6366. Marca al 877-565-8860 en los Estados Unidos o al 877-330-6366 en Canadá y oprime el #2 para conectarte con operadors que hablan español.
Crisis Text Line
The Crisis Text Line is a hotline available 24/7 in the US to reach a counselor to help you through a crisis. Crisis does not always means thinking about ending your life, but can still severely impact our lives. To reach a counselor, text HELLO to 741741. You can also reach them on Whatsapp or on their site.
National Domestic Violence Hotline
Domestic violence can affect anyone and can be a terrifying experience, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 to help you create a plan to get out of a domestic abuse situation. If you are in a domestic abuse situation or believe your internet usage might be monitored, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800.799.SAFE (7233), text START to 88788 or chat with a live advocate.
HUD LGBTQ Discrimination Resources
Have you been denied housing because of your gender identity or orientation? You can file a complaint with you regional FHEO Office and have it investigated by HUD. You can find more information and additional resources from HUD here. You can learn how to file a complaint and find your regional FHEO Office.
Safe Schools Coalition (Washington Specific)
Safe Schools Coalition was founded in 1993 when they spun off The Schools Committee. the Safe Schools Committee aims to make schools safer for both LGBTQ+ students but also staff. If you need a speaker, trainer or are interested in getting involved, Safe Schoos Coalition can help.
Sylvia Rivera Law Project (New York Specific)
The Sylvia Rivera Law Project was launched in 2002 by trans activist and lawyer Dean Spade in memory of the 1969 Stonewall Riots veteran Sylvia Rivera. The SRLP aims to guarantee all people are able to self-determine their gender and to be able to express their gender, regardless of socioeconomic or ethnic backgrounds, free from violence and transphobic acts. If you need legal support, send their legal team an email (legal services can only be provided to people living int he five boroughs of New York City and people incarcerated by the State of New York.)
Suicide & Crisis Hotline
The suicide and prevention hotline is available 24 hours per day and provides free help to people experiencing crisis or suicidal feelings. If you or a loved one needs help, call 988 or chat with a counselor on their site. Additionally you can call an international hotline here.
Point Foundation
Point Foundation has a mission to uplift LGBTQ students who have high leadership and academic potential as well as a positive outlook on the future despite the challenges they face to make an impact on society by providing financial support and training to US college students from around the world. Are you interested in a scholarship? Apply today!
Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund
The TLDEF fights discrimination based upon gender identity and expression as well as working for the equality of transgender people through public policy, litigation, direct legal services and education.
NCTE Health Care Guide
The National Center for Transgender Equality has put together a comprehensive guide to healthcare as a transgender person, including what your plan covers, how to determine what insurance is best for you and applying for pre-authorization.
Transgender Law Center
The TLC is the largest organization in the US that is made up of trans people, working for the equality of all people. For over twenty years, they have been assisting, organizing and informing community members and leaders to achieve liberation.
Cerebral Palsy Guide
The Cerebral Palsy Guide s working hard to educate the public on cerebral palsy. In addition to raising awareness, they also provide important information to those affected by cerebral palsy and helps over 8,000 families in getting aid. The Cerebral Palsy Guide has a dedicated page to helping families prevent youth with cerebral palsy from being bullied and how to help their child is they're being bullied which can be found on their site.
The LGBTQ+ Bar
The LGBTQ+ Bar was launched in 1988, partly in response the HIV/AIDs crisis. The LGBTQ+ Bar has a mission of promoting justice for the LGBTQ+ community through its network of affiliated lawyers, judges, legal professionals, activists and affiliated organizations. If you or someone you know needs an attorney, visit their State & Local Affiliate Organizations Page.
Lambda Legal
In 1973, Bill Thom filed incorporation paperwork for a 501(c)(3) but the panel denied the application. After an appeal, Lambda Legal was born, ready to represent LGBTQ+ folks in court. Lambda Legal had a prominent role in major cases such as Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Henkle v. Gregory (2001), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Glenn v. Brumby et Al. (2011) and most recently Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). If you or someone you know needs legal assistance, call your nearest branch and ask for the Help Desk.
American Civil Liberties Union
The ACLU has roots that dates back to January of 1920 and has along history of fighting for civil liberties. The ACLU was the sole critic of President Roosevelt's internment camps, the ACLU was also instrumental in the cases of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Roe v. Wade (1973), Doe v. Bolton (1973), they helped persuade the court in the case of Lawrence v. Texas (2003). If you need legal assistance, please contact your local affiliate.
Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders
SAGE proudly stands up for the elder LGBTQ+ pioneers who have been fighting for their right to live and love. They currently have staff in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco as well as a network to help LGBTQ+ people nationally. If you need assistance planning long term care, finding housing or need and advocates contact SAGE.
Cutter Law Cyber Bullying Guide (California Specific)
Cyber bullying is a very serious issue in our society and unfortunately the LGBTQ+ community reports higher rates of cyber bullying¹. Cyber bullying can be destructive on mental health, impacting grades, social interactions and can cause depression in youth. To better understand why cyber bullies bully and how to address these issues Cutter Law, PLC has written a guide that can be read here. If you are in California and need an attorney, visit Cutter Law, PC.
Feeding America
Feeding America is a national network of assistance programs and food banks dedicated to helping get food and groceries to those who need them. If you need assistance with food or signing up for SNAP or WIC, find your local food bank.

Hello folks,
(Long post ahead, but interested students, do give it a read.)
There has been a lot of posts in the past few days where students are seeking guidance on good engineering colleges to join in Indore. I thought of taking time to make this post for general awareness of such students.
A little background about myself to establish some credibility:

1. I secured AIR 41 in IIT-JAM (IIT Joint Admission Test for Masters) 2008.
   
2. I secured AIR 141 in NIMCET (NIT MCA Common Entrance Test) 2008.
   
3. I earned my Masters in Computer Applications from NITK Surathkal in 2011.
   

Frankly speaking, if you are unable to make it through with a good rank in entrance exams, all is still not lost. There's a wonderful degree program being offered by IIT Madras which you can enroll in while also being admitted into any tier-3 college.
I also have experience enrolling in this program myself and have even attended classes and done assignments for a semester. (You can ask me anything about these courses)
For those who are not aware, IIT Madras runs two Non-Campus Undergraduate Programs:

1. BS (Bachelor of Science) in Data Science and Application
   
2. BS (Bachelor of Science) in Electronic Systems
   

Taking this approach has two clear benefits:

1. You will graduate with two degrees in your hands and you will be called an official IIT Madras alumnus.
   
2. You will get to attend campus placements at the IIT Madras campus, right alongside the full-time IIT Madras students.
   

In my opinion, you can opt to take admission in any tier-3 college and simultaneously enroll in any of the above programs offered directly by IIT Madras.
Some of the key highlights and benefits of these programs are:

1. These are full time, off campus courses. Off-campus meaning you will attend classes and submit assignments from your home.
   
2. You do not have to go through a rigorous and competitive IIT entrance exam; admission can be secured in the BS program by clearing a much simpler exam.
   
3. The semester exams and quizzes are conducted approximately once a month, and students from the Indore region will have to visit IIT Indore (Simrol) campus to take them.
   
4. You'll be considered an official student of IIT Madras and will be called an IIT Madras alumnus upon completion of the four-year degree. Students completing the full degree will even get to attend a convocation and receive their degree on campus at IIT Madras.
   
5. The courses in the program are self-paced, and you can choose the number of courses you wish to pursue in a semester
   
6. There are certain exit paths you can take, such as graduate with a foundation (1 year) diploma, (2 years) or full degree (4 years).
   
7. Most important part; graduating students will even get to attend campus placements at IIT Madras.
   
8. The fee for the courses is very reasonable compared to what you pay for private colleges with okayish academics and low placements.
   
9. There are also a lot of scholarships being offered to eligible students by IIT Madras.
   
10. Both tracks, Data Science and Application, and Electronic Systems, are highly prestigious and offer good job opportunities.
    

Any students who are interested in learning more about this program can Ask Me Anything. Post your questions, and I'll try to answer them here.
You can learn more about the programs by visiting the IITM official website:
https://study.iitm.ac.in/