June 3rd to 6th, 2024 Leading up to our Vegas trip, one of the things I enjoyed most was visiting this subreddit and reading the experiences others shared about their time in the city. It was consistently insightful, helpful, and quite entertaining to read.
While this post may be none of those things, I still wanted to share on the off chance it provides a bit of relief for those planning and struggling to piece their own trips together.
As a brief background, both my wife and I have spent time in Vegas before, but, for reasons I won’t get into on this post, we never had a “Vegas experience.” We agreed that this would be that trip.
For context, we have been together for 15 years. We are both 35 and have two kids. Most vacations are family-oriented - lots of planning, budgeting, and sniping the best deals and the cheapest things to do. We agreed to do a little of that for this trip, but to mostly roll with the punches and see what would happen. Outside of booking the hotel, the only other thing I did to prepare for this trip was make two lists of food. Food list number one were places that sounded unique or different and were within a 5 to 10 minute walk. Food list number two was the same concept, except 20+ minute walk or bus ride away. My wife and I also agreed that if we couldn’t walk somewhere by staying in hotels, we weren’t going to walk there.
I’ll get the total cost out of the way. We spent about $370 on food, drinks, transportation, and entertainment. Our flight was $80 round trip ($40 each through Frontier). The hotel was $350 total for 3 nights. Thats about $800 for 3ish days and 3 nights in Vegas.
Monday: Both my wife and I had a bout of food poisoning a couple of days prior to leaving. We nearly canceled our trip, but on Sunday, made the decision to carry through, as the sitter arrangement was already made and figured that even if we just spent the time in our hotel room, it would still be fun. By Monday morning, I felt okay, but my wife was still a little ill.
The plane into Vegas landed at 11am. We decided to take an Uber from the airport to Total Wine and Whole Foods in Town Square. At Whole Foods, we bought emergency snacks (breakfast bars, nuts, chips, etc) and 3 gallons of water. At Total Wine, we bought our favorite rum, mostly in fear that we wouldn’t find it on the strip - one 750ml bottle of Kraken ($20) - and a 10 pack of mini Coke Zeroes.
From there, we took another Uber to the hotel - the Flamingo - mostly because we were carrying a lot of stuff (the bus was the original option). We arrived early, tried checking in early using a kiosk, but refused to pay the extra $20. Instead, we walked over to the food court, got comfy in a booth, and made a strong drink to sip on while we waited. I should mention that we stopped at the Starbucks in the hotel and paid $2 for two waters (ridiculous!). We used those cups to make our drinks.
By 3:30, we were two drinks in and decided to try checking in again. The lines were longer now, too, but the kiosk line moved quickly. This time we were given our keys to the room. Having never stayed on the Vegas strip before, we opted for the strip view (more on this later).
We rested, showered, changed, made another drink, bought a 24 hour bus pass, and headed out. We caught the bus in front of Harrah’s and went to Cookies for edibles. Their selection was meager compared to what we’re used to in New Mexico, but made the best of it. Ate an edible then hopped back on the bus, south this time, and took it aaaallll the waaaayyy down to the Mandalay Bay stop. We did not go to Mandalay Bay, though. Instead, we walked down a bit more and got some carne asada fries at a little place called Sayulitas. We consider ourselves carne asada fries experts because it is our go to when we drink and NM offers tons of delicious options. Sayulitas did an exceptional job - crispy fries, perfectly seasoned meat, tons of cheese and sour cream. Their salsa bar was stocked with some delicious and spicy salsas, as well.
From here, we caught the bus back North and decided to grab a dessert at Eataly - a place I had on one of my food lists, specifically for desserts. There, we spent $15 on an exceptionally delicious cream puff and chocolate square thing. Took them back to the room, ate them, and fell asleep.
Tuesday: The Vegas strip is loud. Even from the 11th floor of a hotel. The view was also kind of meh. I’m a light sleeper and that view wasn’t worth the terrible night of sleep. Before getting ready for the day, I went downstairs to inquire about a different room. The hotel staff was accommodating and friendly, but said that we would need to come back after 11am to see what was available.
With about 2 and a half hours to kill, we decided a breakfast adventure was the way to go. Eggslut is an often mentioned (and very popular) restaurant that can be found in the Cosmopolitan. Somehow, we missed the bus stop to go south (we walked south instead of north) and ended up walking to Eggslut by going through Bellagio. When we got there, the line was sufficiently long - about 20 minutes. Hungry and not wanting to walk, we decided to wait.
It was worth it for two reasons: 1. The food was delicious. The sauce, specifically, used on the sausage, egg, and cheese made my heart sing. 2. When we reached the front of the line, a dude who did not want to wait in line offered to buy our breakfast if we allowed him to add his order to ours. We agreed because who wouldn’t? Free breakfast? Absolutely.
With happy stomachs, we caught the bus and went back to the hotel. As mentioned earlier, the hotel staff was accommodating and switched our rooms without issue. Our new room had a view of the garden, the Sphere, and that big Ferris wheel thing - a MUCH nicer view. The room was also cleaner and so much quieter.
We rested, took another shower (NM is hot, but not like Vegas), got ready again, and decided it was time to start drinking. I should mention that we brought flasks with us, too. After taking a couple of shots each, we filled up our flasks and made a rum and coke to go (same Starbucks cups from the day before!).
Feeling rejuvenated from the new room and rest, a decent Kraken buzz in tow, we headed off without any specific plans. By the time we made it through The LINQ and to Harrah’s, we decided Fremont was the place to be. We downed our drinks, stored our cups in my drawstring backpack, and hopped on the bus. By the time we got off, we were feeling great and our time there became a little blurry, so here’s a quick rundown.
Went into a hotel to use the restroom, stumbled around until we found a Starbucks to get ice, took our 4th and 5th shots of the day in some alleys out of public view (drunk logic), saw a deal at Binion’s for a $6 burger and coke, watched some street performers, and by 4:30, we hopped back on the bus.
Craving a donut, we got off at Circus Circus to find the Krispy Kreme. After they rejected our free coupon, we headed up to the midway. The arcade games were expensive, so instead we talked with the game operators and waited for the 5:30 foot juggling show. The show, a whole 6 minutes in length, was AWESOME!
We stumbled around some more and at some point, we took another drink. Our 24 hour bus pass expired by 6:30, so we got on the bus again before then. Feeling tired, drunk, and hungry, we stayed on the bus all the way down the strip to enjoy the sights. By the time we made it to Town Square, we decided to get off, grab a bite, buy another bottle of Kraken, and go to the movies. We ate a $2 slice of Whole Foods pizza and watched Furiosa in IMAX.
It was after 10pm by the time the movie ended. We bought another 24 hour bus pass and went back to the hotel for a night of quiet and restful sleep.
Wednesday: We had a very slow morning. Which was nice because with kids, slow mornings don’t exist. We also spent much of our morning trying to decide whether we wanted to drink again or not. Inevitably, the Vegas logic set in, but it took some “pumping each other up” before it happened. Prior to that, however, we decided it was time to get a meal. As you could see, Monday and Tuesday involved a lot of snacking, so we wanted to sit down in a restaurant.
After much debate, Nacho Daddy was the winner. Our slow morning kept us in the hotel room until about 11am. We got ready, and refused to make the same mistake about the bus stop, so we walked north and crossed in front of The Linq to catch the bus down to the Cosmopolitan. Nacho Daddy was a short walk from there.
We did an order of the spicy grilled wings and fajita nachos. Both were yummy and exactly what we needed. As we were still in the “do we even want to drink again” phase, we stuck with water and our brunch, excluding tip, was $55.
Feeling full, we walked our food off in the Miracle Miles shops. It was quite empty and relaxing to walk through.
Walgreens was nearby, so on the way back to the hotel, we picked up more Coke Zero and another gallon of water. We grabbed the bus and went back to the hotel to rest.
It was around 4pm when we decided to start pumping each other up, and by 4:30pm, we had had another two shots each, a flask full of rum, and a couple mixed drinks in our Starbucks cups ready to go.
We left the hotel, heading north, and walking through The Linq again, Harrah’s and the Casino Royale. Feeling good, the moving walkways that lead into the Grand Canal Shoppes were calling our names.
While there, we did a ton of people watching. After some commentary on how a lot of the people look like replicas of Sims characters, we challenged each other to see who could complement more people the rest of the day. The only rule was that the compliment had to be genuine. Being together for 15 years, we know what the other person likes - cheating would take the fun out of the game.
As we left the Shoppes, we needed ice for another drink and Treasure Island was calling our names. On our way there, my wife complimented a person wearing a Seattle Krakens shirt - not because we’re fans…simply because we were drunk on Kraken (1-0).
Why are people so weird about filling up cups with ice in Vegas? Once in Treasure Island, I asked at Senior Frogs for ice. Rejected. Panda Express. Rejected. The lady that worked at Popeyes gave me ice, but I won’t lie…I had to turn on the charm. My wife socked me in the arm and we laughed as we took another shot and chewed those amazing ice cubes together.
As we left TI, I saw a dude wearing a Linkin Park Hybrid Theory shirt. The score was officially 1 to 1.
Sufficiently drunk at this point, we decided to catch the bus back to Fremont because we overheard people talking about the Neon Museum and our interest was piqued. On the walk to the bus, my wife complimented a guy with a lizard-shaped fanny pack (2-1).
Fremont was BUMPING by the time we got up there and the vibe was exactly what we wanted. We stumbled around, looked for ice, took pictures, and watched street performers. I spotted a gentleman with an incredible beard and tied up our score (2-2).
My wife chatted with a few ladies dressed as dominatrix, inquiring as to why they couldn’t leave their circle to take pictures with people and how difficult it was to get hours. She tipped them, we took some pictures, and, of course, she complimented them (3-2).
Afterwards, we saw an older man drinking McDonald’s coffee so my wife and I made a bet - was it coffee or something else? My wife said coffee. I said he was doing some secret drinking. A quick game of rock, paper, scissors, and my wife walked over to ask. It was coffee. I had to pay for the Neon Museum tickets. Fair enough.
We drank our last drink and headed off.
The Neon Museum is about a 10 minute walk from Fremont. If you go, I HIGHLY recommend a guided tour. Our tour guide, Steve, was INCREDIBLE and I made sure to tell him so…multiple times (3-3).
After the museum, we were fiercely hungry and decided that pizza, yes, again, was the best choice. My food list came in handy and Secret Pizza became our mission. A bus ride later, and we were back at the Cosmopolitan. It was fun, not having researched much about the pizza place but knowing it was meant to be hidden, to simply stumble around and find it.
By this time, my wife and I were incredibly drunk and making easy two-minute friends. We lost track of how many compliments we were throwing out. I tried engaging a dude wearing a Goku shirt about Dragon Ball Z, but he wanted to talk about his flight and the pizza he was waiting for, so I lost interest.
We got two slices of meat lovers and went on an adventure to find water.
We called it a night after this - it was close to 1am.
Thursday: Hungover and tired, we stayed in bed until it was time to check out. Grabbed a burger at Sickies Garage on the way to the airport and called it a trip.
We had plans to do more before leaving, but the best laid plans, amIright? Either way, it was a fun trip.
Was it a full “Vegas experience”? Maybe not to everyone that bothers to read this…We didn’t see any shows. We didn’t gamble a penny. We didn’t buy a single drink from a bar or a hotel and the latest we stayed up was 1am on Wednesday. Were we day drunk the entire time, though? Yep. Did we eat some good food? Yep. Did we talk to random people and see weird stuff? Yep.
What really defines a “Vegas experience,” after all? Tell me.
TLDR; We drank a lot and had a great time. Thanks, Vegas. :)

Hello all, what is the current consensus and evidence we have on the utility of these modified starch foods. There's several brands of "low-carb" or "keto" tortillas and breads that boast 30-60 kcals per piece vs 100-140 of the normal non-modified to be resistant starch/wheat counterparts. Additionally, the macronutrient profiles on these foods tend to be rather absurd.
For example, Nature's Own Keto white bread. Each slice is 35 kcals with 1g fat, 1g net carb, 9g fiber, 6g protein. In comparison a whole food highly recommended on here for its great fiber and protein content would be black beans. 35 kcals of black beans has 0.2g fat, 3.9g net carbs, 2.6g fiber, and 2.1g protein. Obviously, black beans are a whole food with likely 100s of metabolically active distinct vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients within it compared to processed keto bread composed of modified wheat starch, wheat protein isolate, soybean oil, and emulsifiers. However, most nutrient and weight loss discussions are more focused on macronutrients of foods with their more clear impact on the scale and metabolic health and these modified products are better than beans by a factor 3-4x on macros... If that's the case should it be recommend that these modified wheat / potato / corn starch foods that yield food products with high fiber and impressive protein:calorie ratio be added to everybody's diet? Seems like such a no-brainer.
Old wisdom suggests sometimes things are too good to be true and suspicions that these modified starch foods almost have to be bad for consumption are out there. Perhaps that's the caveman brain appealing to nature or maybe its just common sense intuition. Research into these food products seems oddly limited from my brief attempts to research the topic this past week.
What do is known about these foods? Can it be trusted that the chemical modifications to these starches result in non-digestible carbohydrate for all consumers? Will this novel form of fiber, in rather comical high amounts, lead to significant changes to the microbiota? Will those changes be beneficial? Surely the fiber of a high diverse vegetable and fruit diet is of a different quality than chemically modified wheat starch. Is it possible some consumer microbiome's will be able to digest these modified starches and yield short chain fatty acids for our digestive tract that secretly add to the real caloric load of these foods?

After a couple of hours of non-stop work, R’aart still puzzled as it cut out yet another section of bulkhead from around the galley. It was supposed to be a technician, repairing and maintaining, not a deconstruction element. It looked over at its fellow Dravitian, Lindr, who was loading cut sections of structural members onto a servoloader, and raised its voice over the sounds of the cutter, “Why are even doing this? Those Terrans have already used all our spare bar stock. This just feels wrong.”
Lindr turns its triangular head to face where R’aart was silhouetted against the sparks and glowing metal from the cutter’s action on the bulkhead. “They need more reinforcing for the cargo bay project. I do not understand how they plan to terraform the vacuum, though.” It paused, “Do you think that those geriatric Terrans have suffered neural damage from the extended time in cold-sleep?”
R’aart finished the last line of the cut and a section of plating with edges glowing orange clanged ti the deck. As it sent the cutter into its cool-down safety setting, it offered, “I suspect that could be the case. The noises that pass for their entertainment…” It shuddered slightly. “However, Engineer Allyson holds them in high esteem. She spoke of them as if they were super-beings.”
Lindr nodded slowly, “Yes. But if they flaunt safety limits at a degree proportionally higher than Engineer Allyson does, relative to how she speaks of them, I fear for our safety.”
R’aart turned on its lower four extremities, fully facing its fellow technician. “As opposed to the Jaxorians that are bound to catch us?”
-=-=-=-=-=-
“The two Jaxorian vessels are will be within weapons range within the hour.” The Dravitian Captain’s words came over the music that still came from the Terran’s console on the bridge.
William sighed. “Crap. Okay, sooner than I wanted, but we can work with that.” He thumbed the control on his console and the sounds of The The’s Infecteddied away as he leaned in toward the microphone on the side of the touchscreen. “Hey guys. We have an hour before they blast us. How close to ready are we?”
AJ’s voice came over the console speaker, “Capacitors are all charged, and we’ve reinforced all the wiring to take the extra amps. These reactors are showing some strain, though, so keep that in mind.”
Tony’s voice sounded sort of hollow with the echos, “These engines will flare, probably for three minutes give or take. Because of the way I had to disable these dampers, once the flare starts there’s no way of stopping it, so make sure we’re aimed at empty space, okay?”
Allyson’s voice came next, “Pete says that he’s almost done with welding the braces. Everything’s wired, and there’s a relay switch set back in engineering.” Her voice paused, then asked, “And, once we get this set, what is it going to do?”
William chuckled, “Allyson, thank Pete and have him explain about Puff, okay? AJ, Tony, great job guys. Harden up anything you can, then see if there’s anything you can rig up that might stop invaders if things go south, okay?”
As the crew’s voices chimed in with their agreement, William cued up Yaz’s Situation and went back to his coding.
The Dravitian navigator looked over at the Terran, “Sir? May I be filled in on your plan?”
William’s fingers continued to work on the virtual keys as he started to speak, “Sorry, I’ve just been focused here. I should have said something before. We’re going to pretend to lose power in one of the fusion reactors, and let the crab-guys catch up. Then, when we get close, we’ll attack the ship that’s going to want to board, and then we’ll peel out, doing some damage to the other ship.” He looks up from the keys and over to the insectoid, “I’ll just need you to maneuver us so that the ass-end of this ship is pointed toward the enemy and the nose is headed toward about 10 million miles of clear space.”
The navigator’s upper set of extremities moved in small circles, a Dravitian gesture indicative of anxiety. “But if they board, we will all end up as feeding matter.”
William grinned a lopsided grin and shook his head, “Oh, I guarantee you that if they actually get on-board, they will heartily regret it, and we won’t go out on a platter.”
-=-=-=-=-=-
“Primary Command Crew to stations!” The sound vibrations rippled through the hydodynamic fluid.
The Jaxorian scuttled sideways out of his bunk and reached up with pincers that had small gems crusting the carapace ridges, and opened the interior hatch, feeling the slightly warmer water swirl into the bunkroom. He swam out and into the corridor, and scuttled toward the Command Center.
As he entered the large cave of the command room, he scuttled around the large black carapace of the Commissar as he moved to the weapons station. Keeping his legs in as close as he could to make himself as small as possible, he settled in and looked at the readouts.
The Coalition vessel they were chasing was rapidly coming into range. The power readings had lowered from earlier in the chase. The Jaxiorian offered, “High One, the prize will be in range for the main cannon in approximately [2 minutes]. Shall I begin charging the coils?”
The Commissar swiveled its eyestalks and took in the enhanced image on the gel projector screen. “It is a cargo vessel, yes?” she asked. Her legs churned under her and she turned her carapace to a more comfortable position on the grippy surface of the commander’s mound.
“Yes, Commissar,” answered the bright green Jaxorian at the intelligence console. “It appears laden with goods, including not only colony gear and edible beings shipped as cargo. They will be easy prey.”
The Commissar flexed her ebony bulk, “We will not fire. We could damage the prize. Ready a boarding party. Plot an intercept solution. Communicate with the escort and have them stand ready, but not to fire until I command it.” She paused, “And communicate with the prize. Alert them that they are to stand down and prepare themselves to submit.”
Activity started around the bridge as these orders were put into motion. On the screen of the weapons station, the tiny shape of the CCV K’gara B’rak slid within the orange delimiter of the targeter’s range.
-=-=-=-=-=-
“Heads up! They’ve taken the bait, and should close to boarding distance in about three minutes. Crew, get to your emergency stations, Tony be ready for my signal, and AJ, spin that reactor back up at the same time. Pete, you and Allyson make sure that the terraformers are set, because they’re going off first.” William’s voice came through all the speakers and communicators throughout the ship. “And if anyone’s been waiting on a last minute question, this is the time.”
William removed his finger from the communication control and waited in the silence. There weren’t any questions, though he didn’t expect any from the guys. And the Dravitians were good at following protocol, so they wouldn’t be panicking, at least outwardly. He waited another few seconds, then cued up the next bit of media, a slow build of steady guitar and base leading into a sudden beat that started the steady, almost ominous, beat of Don Felder’s ”Heavy Metal (Takin' a Ride)”.
The Captain looked over from the navigation console, the chitinous plates of its face pale green at the edges, “The vessel closes toward our side with the main docking area. This is in accordance with your plan, yes?”
William nodded slowly, still watching the readouts and monitors that were displayed on his touchscreen. “Yeah, though I still hate these moments before we find out if everything works out. Oh, I know my guys did everything they could, but you never know what the other guy will do.”
The Captain cocked its head, “So we gave up running so that we could let the Jaxorians catch us, inviting capture rather than running until the very end?”
William chuckled, “Oh, they’d be able to run us down, but the only way to win that game is not to play. So what we needed to do is play with home field advantage and our tricks up our sleeves. It’s a classic FAFO situation.”
The Captain held its gaze steady, “I have no translation for ‘FAFO’, sir.”
William grinned, “Let’s just say that it’s one where someone gets the consequences they deserve for the actions they take.”
The Captain paused and looked back to the navigation console. “About two of your minutes, sir.” He poked at the touchscreen. “Did you realize that you have that noise playing on all of the broadcast communications channels as well?”
-=-=-=-=-=-
The Jaxorian communications manager continued to be perplexed. “Commissar, even once I have filtered the background noise and consulted the translator circuits, I do not understand this message. Perhaps it is in code? Perhaps the background noise is significant to interpreting the meaning?”
The Commissar shifted her bulky carapace, “Overlay the translation with the background noise and put it on speaker.”
”My, oh my, how this lady can fly, once she starts rollin’ beneath you. You know you just can’t lose, the way that she moves, you wait for her to finally release you. It’s not a big surprise to feel your temperature rise; you’ve got a touch of redline fever. ‘Cause there is just one cure that they know for sure; you just become a heavy metal believer.”
The Commissar scoffed. “Nonsense words. Continue the docking approach.”
-=-=-=-=-=-
The song had ended by the time the Jaxorian cruiser had matched speed and heading with the larger form of the old Terran combat freighter and was closing the distance between them, [meter] by [meter]. The cruiser extended a docking corridor to cover the [10 meter] distance that the ships would maintain once locked in place.
The smaller Jaxorian escort ship trailed behind slightly, as the Terran craft seemed to have something wrong with it’s engines and was making a sort of lazy curve that the cruiser was on the inside of to get to the Terran ship’s docking hatch.
Automated docking lights illuminated the main boarding hatch on the Terran craft, as if in invitation, and the corridor adjusted. Just as the seals touched, however, a Terran voice came across the open communication channels, yelling “WOLVERINES!”
The side of the combat freighter glowed orange, then yellow, then white, then boiled away into the pinkish-purple of plasma. As the engines continued their work, the metal burned away and joined the cloud, then arcs of lightning and superheated matter ripped and tore at the skin of the cruiser, boiling it away and adding its mass to the cloud.
The Terran’s voice came over the channels again, calling out, “Turbo boost, KITT! Everybody hang on!” Then came a steady drumbeat.
The ion engines at the aft of the Terran craft glowed blue, and grew brighter and brighter.
Across the channels a piano’s glissando running from high to low preceded its melody, adding to the drums which added a short run to the steady beat that they went back to.
As the flare behind it gave a powerful burst, like that of a nova, the hulking cargo ship lurched forward. The front quarter of the escort ship behind it shattered and peeled, as the freighter pushed ahead. As the freighter accelerated, the following blue-white flare from the four engines tore at the cruiser as it passed.
Again across the all the communication bands driving bass and guitar joined a female Terran who sang out, “Lying in your bed on a Saturday night; you're sweatin' buckets and it's not even hot. But your brain has got the message, and it's sending it out, to every nerve and every muscle you've got.”
The force of the flare cut straight to the central core of the cruiser, seeming to ‘unzip’ the ship, folding the two halves back from the longitudinal wound that the terraforming engines had formed. While the metal skin, structure, bulkheads, and decks peeled back, sections fractured and came away in shards, releasing the hydrodynamic liquid flowed out and boiled.
Explosions wracked the surviving portions of both Jaxorian vessels while the cargo freighter continued to accelerate, leaving the destruction farther and farther behind it.
-=-=-=-=-=-
Inside the CCV K’gara B’rak, crewmembers fought against the constant shuddering acceleration to move to where makeshift power cords had overheated and caused fires, or where the sudden thrust from the initial engine flares had caused bulkhead ruptures; where some slight flaw in the materials had given way as the ship had been taken far beyond the tolerances it had been built for.
While the Dravitian crew were frantically working in the corridors, the Terrans in the engineering bay were trying to take care of their pieces, but with grins.
Tony had a cut on his forehead from an unsecured tool from the workbench that had come straight back to the engine gantry where he’d braced himself. The force of the thrust had essentially changed ‘down’ by ninety degrees, putting him at the ‘bottom’ of the huge room. As he clambered from engine to engine, making manual adjustments, he had to keep wiping at it to keep the blood out of his eyes, and he was singing along with the music on the speakers.
”You've got so many dreams, that you don't know where to put 'em, so you'd better turn a few of 'em loose. Your body's got a feeling that it's starting to rust; you'd better rev it up and put it to use.”
AJ had tied himself to a rail by the control panels for the reactors, and was hanging near an open access panel with a heavy pair of gloves, holding something in place. His face was sporadically lit by electrical arcing from within the guts of the output transformers.
”And I don't know how I ever thought that I could make it all alone. When you only make it better, then it better be tonight. I'll be there for you tonight.”
Pete was climbing his way to one of the structural beams holding an engine in place. A crack had started halfway along it and wearing one of the cuttewelder backpack units that he never knew he needed so badly before, he was pulling himself along it to try to tack it back together.
”And if you don't have anywhere to go, you go down on the pedal and you're ready to roll. And your speed. Is all you'll ever need. All you'll ever need to know.”
Tony and Pete paused and belted out with the singer on the speakers, “Darlin’, darlin’! You and me we're goin' nowhere slowly. And we've gotta get away from the past. There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere, baby, but we should be goin' nowhere fast! It’s so much better goin’ nowhere fast.”
Allyson marveled as she worked on the main engineering controls, trying to direct the damage control teams that R’aart and Lindr led to the worst problems, and manage routing power through undamaged circuits to where it needed to go. She had to admit that the music fit the juddering speed in a way, but it was almost like these older men had simply come alive during this crisis, almost sustained by the continual playlist. It was probably the just the cold-sleep drugs wearing off, she told herself, but still…
-=-=-=-=-=-
On the bridge, William was using his console to try and help out the Captain, whose console with the Efficiency Interface was nearly useless in this situation. In the military code, there remained the ability to adjust how much power went to which engine within a few percentages of the synchronized setting. William had four different windows with their own sliders and readouts, one for each engine, and as Tony made a mechanical adjustment or some engine gave more or less thrust than the others, he tried to control it. The shuddering of the entire ship didn’t make this an easy job.
The music still came from his console as he worked, the singer’s voice continuing, ”Stalkin' in the shadows by the light of the moon; it's like a prison and the night is a cell. Goin' anywhere has gotta be heaven tonight, 'cause stayin' here has gotta be hell.”
William knew that all it would take was for one engine to get too far out of sync and they could rip the ship apart. The Space Venture crew all knew about that. They’d learned it the hard way. The first set of Troubleshooters bound for Mars, the ones to back up the team of Explorers who had been there for two months, and help them put together the parts for the permanent outpost that had landed a week before the ten Troubleshooters left LEO on the Space Venture.
”Dyin' in the city like a fire on the water. Let's go runnin' on the back of the wind. There's gotta' be some action on the face of the earth, and I've gotta see your face once again.”
The engines had flared that trip, and the smart controls didn’t have the capacity to stabilize them. One of the three engines had ripped off, tearing part of the cargo area open, and sending four of the first-generation cold-sleep capsules adrift. The other six capsules, along with the most of the tools, stayed in the hold while the two remaining engines flared them off into The Dark.
None of Earth’s space agencies of 2026 had ships capable of catching up to them, let alone rescuing them, so they had been written off as heroic figures and relegated to the list that included Soyuz 1, Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. Besides, those people in their fifties chosen for the one-way trip for being the practical engineers with that creative mindset knew that they were expendable. They were never meant to come back to Earth anyway.
”And I don' know where I ever got the bright idea that I was cool; so alone and independent. But I'm depending on you now.”
That trip that should have taken two weeks had turned into almost two hundred years. They were rescued by an asteroid mining facility, but with the limited medical facilities there, only five of the rescued Troubleshooters woke back up. Robert Federman never came out of cold-sleep, his brain functions at such a low level that only medical support was able to keep the body alive.
Without ready transport, they stayed on that mining facility for more than a standard year, chipping in to pay for their keep, even as it stretched the supplies of the small facility’s crew. While the survivors weren’t up on all the technological changes of the past centuries, they learned fast, and before too long, had made improvements to the facility, making life easier and more comfortable there, solidifying their reputation as Troubleshooters.
After that, there were more long, slow trips on cargo ships, again and again in cold-sleep. William wondered if the others felt that sense of dread getting back into the capsules each time. Mark Haynes sure did. He broke down and huddled into a little rocking ball, and refused to leave that space station a couple of trips back. The little furry medics had helped him away, and some Skynet was going to try and help coax him back to reality. Supposedly there would be updates.
But for the last four of the Troubleshooters, they couldn’t stop. Finally they were going to get their chance. This last voyage was supposed to take them to help set up a new colony; not a human colony, but every colony was going to have problems to solve, and that’s why they had all volunteered so long ago. There would be something solid, with real gravity to live on.
A real alien world. But they needed to survive to get there. The ship just needed to hold together. Allyson had said it was overbuilt, but still…
”And you'll always be the only thing that I just can't be without. And I'm out for you tonight. I'm comin' out for you tonight.”
“Sir! I read our acceleration slowing!” The Captain chittered. The carapace plates of the insectoid were all very pale green, and all of its extremities seemed to be trembling.
William nodded slowly and adjusted one of the sliders before he keyed the mic and leaned down toward the pickup. “Looks like the nitrous is about done, guys. Hang on for just a little longer.”
-=-=-=-=-=-
After confirming that they were no longer being chased, the CCV K’gara B’rak slowed as the engines cut out so that they could be returned to normal operating specs. Communications had been established to a nearby Coalition vessel that was on its way to provide aid. Allyson, R'aart, and Lindr were in their exosuits, working to rebuild the structure where the plasma had eaten through the ship's outer skin.
William and Pete were playing gofer and being a second set of hands for Tony and AJ as they worked to try and get the reactors and engines safe enough to make it to a real repair facility.
The Captain walked into the Engineering Bay and it paused as its head swiveled back and forth at the disarray. “How? How did this area get to such a state?”
William chuckled and looked over from where he passed AJ new relays to replace the stressed ones in a fusion reactor. “Captain? I assume that you’ve heard the rumors about the way we humans deal with engineering problems, yes?”
The Captain walked over, his four lower extremities carefully picking a clear path through the parts, tools, and coils of wire. “Well, yes, but… Those are just stories. No-one would really take those risks…”
William chuckled, “Yeah, well, now you know first hand that they aren’t just stories…”
From inside the access panel of the nearby reactor, AJ’s voice echoed, “Word. We can really make a mess when we get going…”
The Captain nodded slowly, “I can certainly attest to that. But I do want to pass on my thanks, on behalf of my crew. I must say that I have never seen such work, and I never really expected to escape from the Jaxorians.”
William nodded. “Sure. Glad we could help. We’re Troubleshooters, after all.”

I tried using this idea as a launch pad for discussion in various vegan debate sub-reddits. But, I'd also just be curious if most vegans agree, and if there's anything people would like to add, like other interesting reading that comes to mind.
Many meat eaters grapple with reaching for weak justifications for their meat eating such as appeals to nature and struggle with even putting these weak justifications into words.
I think Ted was a famous example of a person on the extreme end of this spectrum of stubbornly simply getting his views on what is right and wrong from a descriptive reality of how less intelligent animals kill each other to survive, so his attempts at logic are interesting to compare and contrast to many meat eaters arguments, similarly his emotional existential grappling with not being able to come up with a coherent argument whilst intuitively feeling sad about the actions he was taking is also interesting to compare and contrast.
Quoting from one of Ted Kaczynski's (the Unabomber's) journals:

Lately, to tell the truth, I’ve been getting a little sick of killing things. Neither the death struggles of the animal nor the blood bother me in the least; in fact, I rather enjoy the sight of blood; blood is appetizing because it makes rich soups. I enjoy the instant of the kill because it represents a success. But a moment afterward I often feel saddened that a thing so beautiful and full of life has suddenly been converted into just a piece of meat. Still, this is outweighed by the satisfaction of getting my food from the forest and mountain. Rabbits and grouse have beautiful eye; in both cases the whites don’t show and the iris’s are a lovely brown. And this grouse today I noticed that the pupil, black at first glance, is actually a deep blue, like clear, translucent blue glass.

Also, in a letter to his brother, Ted wrestled with the question of; 'is it a good thing that some people feel sad about the animals killed painfully by hunter-gatherers?'
For me, I think yes it is a good thing, I feel sad partly because I relate to hunter-gatherers as people who could be offered lessons in how to grow enough diversity of vegan food at their own desired level of technology such that they would not need to hunt. I also hope one day some people might be motivated to do that for them in a responsible way that only improves their quality of life.
I understand a meat eater might feel sad for many reasons also, even if for example it's just because we have higher level technology today such that we can potentially kill some animals faster today with less pain and less stress. But even though we have the means to blow up an animals head with exploding bullets without the animal ever seeing it coming doesn't mean we always use such methods, nor do I think it would justify cutting short the animal's interest to live.
I find some nihilists & primitivists like Ted's response to this question the most fascinating, they wish they could have been born into a world in which no one experienced sadness about killing animals, but this just feels like desiring a black and white world because it would help them make sense of their place in the universe.
Maybe they fear that if they said yes its good some people feel sad, that the only other track society would be left to go down is exterminating all carnivores and building robot carnivore imitations for entertainment.
However, I think there is a middle ground in simply relating to ourselves as an omnivore species who are intelligent enough to one day desire to build a global vegan social contract. Where among each other we decide that we generally wouldn't like to encourage in any of our fellow humans the act of breeding and killing other sentient animals. For reasons of; 'it has the strongly likely outcome of damaging to an unacceptable degree many people's ability to be compassionate with one another'. So, not an indictment on the subsistence hunter-gatherers and non-human animals who hunt to survive, but an aspirational future goal for humans.
Finally, here is the long meandering letter by Ted I mentioned for anyone curious:

I doubt that the pigmies have any guilt, conscious or otherwise, about killing animals. Guilt is a conflict between what we’re trained not to do and impulses that lead us to do it anyway. Apparently there is nothing in pygmy culture that leads them not to kill or inflict pain on animals. What the pygmies love and celebrate is their way of life, and they see no conflict between that and killing for meat; in fact, the hunting is an essential part of their way of life — they gotta eat. We tend to see a conflict there because we come from a world where there is a gross excess of people who even apart from hunting destroy the material world through their very presence in such numbers. But to the pygmies — until very recently anyway — there’s been no need for “conservation”. The forest is full of animals; with the pygmies primitive weapons and sparse population the question of exterminating the game never arises. The pygmies problem is to fill his belly. The civilized man can afford to feel sorry for wild animals because he can take his food for granted. Some psychologists claim that man is attracted to “death” as they call it. Certainly young men are attracted to action, violence, aggression, and that sort of thing. Note the amount of make-believe violence in the entertainment media — in spite of the fact that in our culture that sort of thing is considered bad and unwholesome and so forth. Since man has been a hunter for the last million years, it is possible that, like other predatory animals, he has some kind of a “killer instinct”. It would thus seem that the pygmies are just acting like perfectly good predatory animals. Why should they feel sorry for their prey any more than a hawk, a fox, or a leopard does? On the other hand, when a modern “sport” goes out with a high-powered rifle, you have a different situation. Some obvious differences are: much less skill is required with a rifle than with primitive weapons; the “sport” does it fun, not because he needs the meat; he is in a world where there are too many people and not enough wildlife, and a rifle makes it too easy to kill too many animals. Of course, the fish and game dept. will see to it that the animals don’t get exterminated, but this entails “wildlife management” — manipulation of nature which to me is even worse than extermination. Beyond that, while the pygmy lives in the wilderness and belongs to it, the “sport” is an alien intruder whose presence is a kind of desecration. In a sense, the sport hunter is a masturbator: His hunting is not the “real thing” — it’s not what hunting is for a primitive man — he is trying to satisfy an instinct in a debased and sordid way, just like when you rub your prick to crudely simulate what you really want, which is a love affair with a woman. Of course there’s nothing wrong with jagging off to relieve yourself when you get horny — it’s harmless. But — even apart from the question of depletion of wildlife — the presence of “sports” in the wilderness tends to spoil it for those who know better how to appreciate nature.

Maybe this isn't a sub for this and if so I'm sorry to the mods but I don't know where else to just scream until I numb my brain, I don't need to hear about how I should focus on actually reading theory and doing praxis I know that I don't know need to hear about how to just ignore the other kids because all I try to do is ignore ignore and ignore but here I am whining in an online forum because my Marxist brother who raised me is halfway across the country and busy working 3 jobs
People in my school are fucking stupid over Palestine. So fucking stupid I actually want to just lose my shit and scream at them one day but I know I can't. I'm very vocally pro-Palestine, I'm at every single demonstration downtown and I also post praxis pieces that explain the right to militant resistance and the PFLP and the general PLO. I very frequently link the struggle for a free Palestine to a struggle for socialism, I'm that communist bitch and I didn't care for the longest time but I swear to god a girl only has so much fucking patience
I'm so tired. I'm so goddamn tired and it's so embarassing to say it but I am so motherfucking tired. I am tired of people making gagging and grossed out faces when I mention Palestine, I'm tired of people using any Hamas related insult like a slur, I'm so mcfucking exhausted of people being shown bodies of literal children who died from starvation, their bodies are literally no shape but of their rib cage they are literal skeletons and these mfs decide to double down on their racism, I'm so tired of the constant backtalking as if I can't hear them or at least find out half the time.
Apparently seeing me give a speech at a decently big workers' union rally for Palestine through a screen wasn't as big of deal, seeing my social media posts saying much more radical stuff wasn't as big of a deal, but when I used a public speaking assignment in history class as an opportunity to speak about Palestine through a radical lens ("you shouldve gone softer" sir you don't know my classmates the ones that aren't already pro-Pal are straight up shamelessly racist teens there was no amount of softness getting to them) uncomparably people exploded in chatter about me all day.
"Do you know this girl named ___" "ohh what's the gossip now?" "yeah she gave an insane communist speech for Palsetine" "no way? wait I've seen her in the halls sometimes" "yeah do you see the clothes she wears" "her skirts are way too short' "didn't she get sexually assaulted?" "yeah lmao it happened to her twice" "are you friends with her?" "oh god no but I'm chill with one of the guys she said SAed her" "what are we talking about now?" "do you know a girl named ___" "isn't she the communist girl" "she doesnt even know what communism is" "she stopped being friends with [insert name of a kid who is a loud and proud zionist]?" "yeah it was becuase he's Jewish" "wait ___? isn't she the girl who got assaulted twice? the one who wears the short ass skirts" SHUT THE FUCK UP I'VE BEEN HEARING THIS NONSTOP FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS AND MONTHS
I'm a girl of course I can show the exact same amount of skin as a white girl in shorts and a tank top and still get called a slut because my clothes are feminine and that's obviously such hoe behavior, I'm a girl of course I'm not just a political person I'm a political whore, I'm a girl of course it's never just my politics or actions or words it's what I wear and who I date, I'm a girl of course people could straight up acknowledge that a man assaulted me and forced himself on me against my will and they'll still shamelessly say they're friends with that man and use it as a way to degrade my beliefs, I'm a girl of course other girls will put me down for male validation, I'm a girl of course my outift of the day makes my political scandal even more scandalous, I'm a girl of course my school admin of grown fkn adults acted liked 16 year olds and attacked me for my politics but under the guise of slut shaming me and going extra miles to protect my assaulters to make my politics look bad, I'm a girl of course I've been too fkn busy with all this repression bs to properly process the fact the guy I trusted pinned me down and breathed down my neck as he forced himself all over me for hours while I was completely voiceless because people are too fucking busy being the biggest reactionaries fucks ever to me, I'm a girl of course I'll voice the emotional personal public and political backlash I received after being SAed and boys will plug their ears with their fingers and go "not all men not all men not all men" instead of listening.
I can't at this point, I've read ten times more theory that all of my classmates combined (hell if any of them read a single essay) I go out and actually touch grass I protest I organize I mobilize I go out into the community and like do shit??? if you're so damn confident about your politics then I don't see you doing anything for it?
and the fucking racist ass Zionists literally hearing the worst atrocities ever livestreamed to billions of eyes doubling down on their racism, I can't at this point and then other leftists get mad that I don't "educate them" bitch what is there to educate with these mfs??? do you want me to get hate crimed??
maybe this isn't bullying and I'm overexaggerating, but I swear to god nobody stands up for me not even my friends because everyone's scared of being treated they way I am, I get harassed by boys regularly, nearly entire classes talk about me loudly and I'm so tired I'm going to implode
that was a long rant that went nowhere mb. I'm still a radical at the end of the day. I'm Korean, my country survived two waves of colonization (arguably second one is still ongoing)/two occupations, a massive genocide, and multiple dictatorships, I can make it. I have bigger fish to fry even if I'm on the verge of a mental break at school half the time So I'll be at the national rally tomorrow, get there nice and early to help my comrades organize and set up, and I won't lose sight of the goal in the end, I'll keep reading theory, I'll keep writing my little praxis pieces, I'll keep learning, and if it'll find me in this lifetime I'll be ready to go when the revolution strikes
Palestine freed us all, Palestine will be free.

Good morning, Night City!
I'm looking for a partner who'd like to join me in writing a story in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. I don't do fandom RPs very often, but this particular setting appeals to me more than enough to make an exception – although I still want to focus on our own original characters, keeping interactions with any pre-existing characters to a minimum. Naturally, for this to work you will need to be familiar with the game, but I don't expect you to have every last detail of the lore memorised – I certainly don't, and I'm fine with improvising to fill the gaps. I don't have a specific plot in mind yet, but the possibilities are endless. We could set the story in Night City or anywhere else in that world; we can use the existing gangs and factions or figure everything out from scratch. I think it's safe to say we can expect a lot of fun action scenes, a fair bit of dystopian hardships to put our characters through, and all kinds of juicy, complex dynamics and relationships for them to develop.
About me – I’m male, 26, I live in Central Europe (CEST time zone), and I have upwards of ten years of experience in roleplaying. I don’t limit myself to playing male characters, and I don’t have a preference as to the gender of yours. Perhaps more importantly, I’m not looking to write a story centred around romance – that is, I don’t want to make it a prerequisite that our characters absolutely have to be lovers at some point. If they have the right chemistry, sure, but it’s not something I’d like to have as a requirement. That being said, I'm all for interesting dynamics! The action and sci-fi elements are fun, but engaging relationships that feel real definitely elevate a story.
As far as requirements go, first of all, please be 18 or older. That aside, I’m looking for experienced, highly literate partners. Post length doesn’t matter that much to me – so long as you’re able to put out a few solid paragraphs per post – but quality does, so please send me a short sample of your writing so I can see if we’d be compatible. Of course I can send you one too if you want. I write in 3rd person, past tense, and my preferred platform is Discord. And the most important thing – please be active! I’m not a GM, and I neither want nor have the ability to drive the plot forward all by myself. I need you to contribute to the story, both in out-of-character discussions and in-character. It’s all fine and good to write a long and stylistically beautiful post, but if it’s self-contained and doesn’t offer the other writer anything to go off of, that makes it tough to come up with a response. I’m not going to start the discussion every time or always be the one coming up with what we need to develop next, so if you can’t or don’t want to be proactive in this collaboration, I’m not the right partner for you.
I think that about does it! If you’re interested, hit me with a chat message or a DM and we can get right to it. Hoping to hear from you soon!

Good morning, Night City!
I'm looking for a partner who'd like to join me in writing a story in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. I don't do fandom RPs very often, but this particular setting appeals to me more than enough to make an exception – although I still want to focus on our own original characters, keeping interactions with any pre-existing characters to a minimum. Naturally, for this to work you will need to be familiar with the game, but I don't expect you to have every last detail of the lore memorised – I certainly don't, and I'm fine with improvising to fill the gaps. I don't have a specific plot in mind yet, but the possibilities are endless. We could set the story in Night City or anywhere else in that world; we can use the existing gangs and factions or figure everything out from scratch. I think it's safe to say we can expect a lot of fun action scenes, a fair bit of dystopian hardships to put our characters through, and all kinds of juicy, complex dynamics and relationships for them to develop.
About me – I’m male, 26, I live in Central Europe (CEST time zone), and I have upwards of ten years of experience in roleplaying. I don’t limit myself to playing male characters, and I don’t have a preference as to the gender of yours. Perhaps more importantly, I’m not looking to write a story centred around romance – that is, I don’t want to make it a prerequisite that our characters absolutely have to be lovers at some point. If they have the right chemistry, sure, but it’s not something I’d like to have as a requirement. That being said, I'm all for interesting dynamics! The action and sci-fi elements are fun, but engaging relationships that feel real definitely elevate a story.
As far as requirements go, first of all, please be 18 or older. That aside, I’m looking for experienced, highly literate partners. Post length doesn’t matter that much to me – so long as you’re able to put out a few solid paragraphs per post – but quality does, so please send me a short sample of your writing so I can see if we’d be compatible. Of course I can send you one too if you want. I write in 3rd person, past tense, and my preferred platform is Discord. And the most important thing – please be active! I’m not a GM, and I neither want nor have the ability to drive the plot forward all by myself. I need you to contribute to the story, both in out-of-character discussions and in-character. It’s all fine and good to write a long and stylistically beautiful post, but if it’s self-contained and doesn’t offer the other writer anything to go off of, that makes it tough to come up with a response. I’m not going to start the discussion every time or always be the one coming up with what we need to develop next, so if you can’t or don’t want to be proactive in this collaboration, I’m not the right partner for you.
I think that about does it! If you’re interested, hit me with a chat message or a DM and we can get right to it. Hoping to hear from you soon!

I’ve (26M) struggled with depression and some suicidal ideation on and off since I was 16. It was a long road and took a lot of work on myself and countless hours of therapy, but around the end of 2023, I was in what I now consider to be the peak of my life. I was working a job I mostly liked, two semesters away from finishing my bachelor’s degree online and exercising almost every other day. After years of loneliness, I finally found a friend group I really adored spending time with, and I had a boyfriend with whom I hadn’t even realized I had fallen in love, whom I’d seen for about 6 months. For perhaps the first time, I had a generally positive outlook, I felt confident and attractive, and I had so much going for me. I had no clue that I was about to make a decision that would significantly alter that course and steer me off into the deepest, darkest depression and most relentless desire to end it all that I’ve ever felt. This is a very long and personal post about my decision to have surgery that I now, in hindsight, believe to have been unnecessary. The surgery itself has left me with chronic pain and probably lifelong negative consequences that are far worse than anything I ever experienced prior. I’ve kept most of this to myself other than sharing it with my therapist, and although I’m on the ledge, I think writing it all down and putting it out there may calm me somewhat. I haven’t spared some graphic details of some of the more sensitive changes to my body because I want this to be as detailed and accurate as possible. And anyway, why should I care? I may be dead soon anyway... My hope is that if I share my story, someone, somewhere, might benefit from it and might not make the same mistake I did that has me sincerely wanting to off myself. So here it goes.
Around NovembeDecember 2023, I started experiencing some strange stabbing pain in my upper right abdomen that would come on suddenly and then go away for no obvious reason. I also thought I saw trace amounts of blood in my stool, and this concerned me enough that I reached out to my primary care doctor at the beginning of January. My doctor is always booked for months, so they told me to go to the emergency room. The ER was packed, and I ended up sitting in the waiting room for about eight hours in between going for an ultrasound and a CT scan. I was getting very tired of waiting and was about ready to give up and leave as I had to work early in the morning the next day. Looking back, I wish I had left. Just before I was about to leave, they called me back and told me that they found something on the CT scan called an intussusception in my small bowel. This is a condition where the intestine gets caught on a “lead point” and folds in on itself, sort of like a telescope. It is most often found in infants and is very rarely found in people my age, yet I was told it is a medical emergency because the tissue of my bowel could die if left untreated, and/or the lead point could be a potentially cancerous tumor. They admitted me and told me they would scan me again in the morning because, despite the severity, there was a chance it could resolve. Hearing that I would be staying overnight shocked me, as I had never been hospitalized before, having always been in good physical health. I have never had digestive issues in the past, I’ve never been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis or anything of the sort, and I had never heard of this condition, but every medical professional I spoke to seemed very concerned that I had it. They didn’t have a bed for me in the hospital at that point, so I had to sleep in the packed and quite chaotic ER. About an hour after I was given a bed, a man was admitted a few feet from me who was very aggressive with all of the nurses, screaming and cursing at them throughout the night. I was not allowed to eat or drink, given the possibility of surgery. I struggled to get any sleep in that environment and woke up the next morning feeling very lethargic.
The surgeon and resident came by my bed and we spoke briefly. The surgeon explained that while the condition was serious, if it continued to show up in my CT scans, they could do minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery to resect the piece of my bowel that was telescoped and stitch it back together. I feel they really downplayed the severity of this procedure. I will never forget them saying, “It’s such a small piece of your bowel, you won’t miss it.” They felt that since I was young and otherwise healthy, I should have no problem making a full recovery. I felt confident in the fact that I was speaking to the chief of surgery at the hospital, who has more than twenty years of experience in the field. Then they brought me for my second scan, and within a few hours I was told the intussusception had not resolved. I was admitted to a hospital room, and the resident came to discuss moving forward with the surgery. My first impulse was “absolutely not,” but I quickly second-guessed myself. Everything I saw in the limited research I was able to do on my phone stated that this was indeed a serious condition that warranted surgery. In that moment, it seemed like the reasons not to go through with it were somewhat vain, such as not wanting the scars and having to forgo lifting weights at the gym for some time. Though it didn’t quite make sense to me that they wanted to operate on the complete opposite side of my body from the one that was in pain and which brought me into the ER in the first place. When I asked the resident about this, he responded, “We don’t understand how referred pain works,” Okay, fair enough, I thought. More than anything, I thought that if a doctor was in front of me, telling me what was going on with my body was an emergency situation that warranted immediate surgery, I should probably listen to them. They’re the “experts,” after all. And given the state I was in, having been in the hospital for over 24 hours at that point, running on very little sleep and nothing to eat, I don’t think I really had the capacity to fully parse what was going on, but given the doctors level of concern, it seemed like I urgently had to make a decision. After about an hour of talking it over with my mother, even though I never had any pain in the area they were about to operate on, I signed the consent papers. (Biggest fucking mistake of my life) I remember they listed risks of things that could go wrong during or shortly after the surgery, such as infection, bowel perforation, etc. They did not mention the procedure’s possible long-term consequences, and neither the surgeon nor resident ever mentioned possible long-term complications, and I didn’t think to ask. I had no experience with this kind of thing whatsoever; I am not a doctor, I don’t know any doctors, and no one I know has ever had abdominal surgery… I was so naive to trust these people, but I did. In fact, I trusted them so much that I was not terribly scared of the procedure I was about to undergo. Again, I chalk that up to the reduced mental capacity I was in, given a tough overnight stay in the ER. I remember the adrenaline rush as I was wheeled down to the operating room. I was singing one of my favorite songs in my head, hyping myself up for the procedure ahead of me. The last thing I remember was one of the OR nurses telling my mother not to worry, that the surgeon was “the best,” and that they had even operated on her husband.
I woke up high as a kite. I heard one of the nurses say I had been given fentanyl, which I remember freaked me out; I had forgotten it is more than a street drug and actually has legitimate uses. The procedure had gone fine, and I was discharged only a day or two later, with my only guidance upon discharge being not to lift heavy objects and “take it easy,” I was in some pain, but it was to be expected at that point and was well controlled by combining Tylenol and Advil. The surgeon called later that week to inform me that the pathology report had come back and that the lead point was simply “some swollen lymph nodes,” I was relieved to hear that it was not cancer. At my follow-up appointment two weeks later, I reported feeling pretty much fine. I had been granted medical leave and short-term disability from my job for six weeks following the surgery. This was the full length of time after which the surgeons expected I would recover fully. I used the time off to hang out with friends and my boyfriend and to focus on finishing what would have been my final semester of school. Those were the last few weeks that I felt somewhat normal despite what I had just gone through. I had no idea what was about to come.
About 5 weeks post-op is when I first began experiencing worse pain deep in my abdomen, right where I had the surgery, plus the pain in my upper right abdomen had not gone away. This new pain is crampy, yet sometimes stabbing, and had seemed to worsen with activity; I have experienced it every single day, nearly every hour, to varying degrees, since the beginning of February. That was also when I began regularly bloating and having difficulty going to the bathroom. No matter how hard I try to push, I can’t fully evacuate my bowels. (This is a nightmare for someone who has receptive anal sex like I used to do regularly. It is now impossible). With the emergence of all these symptoms, I felt very, very scared that there was something else wrong with me. And, of course, this all happened in the week when I was set to return to work. I have a physically demanding customer service job, and I was in so much pain that I found it impossible to be nice to the customers or even stand, so I left and, thankfully, was allowed to take the rest of the week off to figure things out. I obviously called my surgeon, but it also prompted me to do deeper research into the complications that can develop following abdominal surgery. I began pouring over medical journals, trying to figure out what was going on in my body on my own. That was when I first learned about “surgical adhesions.” These are fibrous bands of scar tissue that can develop due to the incisions made during surgery and handling of the bowel. As your body heals from the trauma of surgery, this scar tissue forms and can cause your intestine to stick to other organs or structures in your body. According to medical literature, they form in 90% of all patients who undergo abdominal surgery, but not all adhesions cause complications like what I’ve experienced. They are not easy to diagnose as they are impossible to visualize on any imaging tests, they do not go away on their own (it’s scar tissue), and the only treatment is surgically cutting them apart, which is risky, given that there’s a strong chance they will just grow back and possibly be even worse. This was obviously terrifying to me, but when I asked the surgeon about this, they said, “There’s very little chance that’s what’s happening,” given that the procedure was laparoscopic, not open. I scheduled another appointment with them, wherein they seemed quite dismissive of my concerns. They said the pain was likely “incisional” (it wasn’t and isn’t) but that they would order another CT scan so we could see what was going on. They also wrote me a script for gabapentin, an anticonvulsant meant to prevent seizures that is used off-label to treat pain and anxiety, with the qualifier that they would not write a script for anything stronger, basically implying that I was seeking narcotics, which was not at all the case, and which I found extremely offensive.
My next CT scan was scheduled about a month following that appointment in early March. In the interim, I began taking the gabapentin. I used more than I was prescribed because it was the only way I was able to control the pain and allow myself to feel comfortable at work. I didn’t anticipate the changes it would cause to my mood and behavior. In addition to feeling depressed and scared, I was also becoming easily emotionally dysregulated in ways I believe I would have been able to control prior to taking the medication. But when I didn’t take it, I was in pretty bad pain almost all the time, and I didn’t understand why at that point. My boyfriend noticed these changes in my mood and decided he needed space from me to protect his emotional wellbeing. I didn’t blame him then, and I still don’t, but I miss him terribly. We were supposed to remain “friends,” and he at least pretended he wanted that for a bit of time. At that point, I became determined to ween myself off the gabapentin and continue to work on improving my mental and physical health, for myself, but also for him; as I said, I really loved him. Later that week, after we split, I had my CT scan, and the surgeon called to tell me that it looked like I was just constipated. They advised me to take Miralax daily to ease that constipation, which should hopefully make me feel better. To me, this seemed like a huge relief. I started taking the Miralax, and at that point, I started exercising and lifting weights again. I also started trying to bulk up again, which had been an important part of my fitness journey prior to the surgery.
So April rolls around, and I am still trying my best to resume my normal life, which felt possible again at that point. I did end up successfully weening myself off gabapentin. With this newfound reinvigoration, I attempted to get my boyfriend back. We would make plans, but then he would reschedule again and again. Eventually, he kept our plans, and we met up for a talk in the park. We obviously had a lot to talk about in our relationship, at which point he told me that he simply was not attracted to me anymore. This was devastating news, as that was the first time I realized it was really over. Before I had thought that if I could show him how much I was trying to get back to the place I was before the surgery, he would stick around, but that was the moment I realized it was impossible for him to see me in the light he once did. Nevertheless, I tried to push on, kept going to the gym, and kept trying to get my life back. I was still seeing my friends regularly, and I was able to push myself to get through work, even though it was painful and hard. Plus, I was still working on my degree despite not feeling able to give it my best effort and focus with everything going on. I was still motivated to keep going, and I thought things might improve from there.
Well, lo and behold, they did not. One day in early April, I was sitting on the couch, sort of mindlessly snacking on some almonds before I was set to go have drinks with friends and see a concert. Immediately afterward, I felt that pain again in my abdomen. Despite that, I was really excited to see my friends and see the show. We met at a bar, where I had three cocktails before we made our way to the venue. I drank one or two more while the opener played. But by the time the headliner came on, I ended up in so much pain that I told my friends quite regrettably that I had to leave. I walked home and ate a small snack, wrongfully thinking it might make me feel better, before popping a melatonin and heading to bed. I woke up around 2 AM in the most intense pain I have experienced both before and after the surgery. I was extremely bloated and unable to pass gas or move my bowels. I had read somewhere that this was a sign of bowel obstruction and that I needed to seek medical attention. I made the decision to go to the ER. I walked down the stairs to leave, and as I did, I felt myself begin to vomit. Thankfully I was able to make it to the sink as I puked up what I imagine was that snack I’d had before bed. Shortly after, I arrived at the ER, this time choosing a different facility from the one where the surgeon had dismissed all of my post-surgical concerns. I was quickly admitted and given another CT scan. They confirmed my bowel was obstructed and told me they would place a tube into my nose down to my stomach to try to pump some of the blockage out. I asked the ER doctor if I was going to need to have surgery, to which he replied, “It’s a strong possibility.” This was horrifying to me. Getting the tube inserted into my nose was so painful, and I was screaming in agony the entire time. Then they gave me morphine, and I passed out. The details and timeline of that hospital stay are somewhat hazy in my mind, but I ended up being there for four days, over which I was given a “gastro graph challenge” test, wherein I was instructed to drink a contrast element which would be visualized by a series of Xrays so the doctors could monitor if anything was passing through my intestines. I met with another surgeon, whom I found to be much more attentive than my prior one, or at least simply possessing superior active listening skills. In fact, I felt that all of the staff at this second hospital were a lot more sensitive to my needs than the first. I really wish I had gone there the first time, as it’s the best hospital in the city. Add that to my long list of mistakes… Anyway.
Despite her more positive demeanor, she recommended another emergency surgery, this time a laparotomy (open) surgery to resect my bowel a second time. Her hypothesis was that the anastomosis (the medical term for the connection formed between my bowel loops during the first surgery) could be too narrow to allow food to pass through properly. I asked this new surgeon if it was possible I had adhesions causing this problem, and unlike the last one, she said, “It’s possible,” especially given that these symptoms began emerging a few weeks after the first surgery. But, like I said, they don’t really know what’s going on until they cut you open and go in there. Given that I am now much more aware of the risks of surgery and the risks of having a second procedure, I was fervently against going under the knife again. I simply couldn’t handle it. So I opted for conservative management, which meant waiting it out, taking an enema, and eventually getting back on a liquid and then solid diet. Thankfully, sitting in the hospital being NPO (Latin for nil per os - “nothing by mouth”) and taking the gastro graph made it pass eventually, and I didn’t have to have a second surgery. I was discharged from the hospital with instructions to schedule another diagnostic test called a “small bowel series,” in which they use xrays to track the amount of time it takes liquid to pass through your digestive system and to start a “low residue” diet- meaning eating very little fiber. Suddenly gone from my diet are all of the fruits and vegetables I once loved, and I can’t eat nuts or seeds (It seems to me that those almonds caused the obstruction in the first place). Basically, I’m now forced to exist on a diet of the most processed foods imaginable because although they are demonstrably unhealthy, that is all that my body is now able to safely digest.
After leaving that second hospital stay, I proceeded to delve even further into research about not only long-term abdominal surgery complications such as adhesions but also the nature of adult intussusceptions in general. I once again started furiously googling, finding results from medical journals and personal accounts from Reddit. I came to the conclusion that intussusceptions in adults, while ostensibly serious, have a strong possibility of resolving on their own, especially when they present in the small bowel, in the absence of vomiting (I never vomited before going to the hospital in January), when there is no obvious lead point (they couldn’t see it on my scans) and there is no obstruction (I was never obstructed before the surgery). Furthermore, while intussusception does present with blood in the stool, it is usually described as “currant jelly stool” (something I don’t recommend you google because it looks atrocious), which is not even close to the trace amounts of blood I saw in my own stool. (But no one ever asked, so how would I know the difference?) I never experienced any pain whatsoever in the area of my small bowel before the surgery. And yet I was told by a doctor that I was experiencing a medical emergency, which might have been caused by some malignant growth, which scared the shit out of me and made me feel at the time that immediate action was necessary. At one point, I even found a paper that attributed intussusception to cannabis use, which I had engaged in that week. In these papers, the authors highlight that these intussusceptions were transient and did not require surgical intervention. And on the point of adhesions, they are not easily diagnosed, and they are not easily treatable without surgical intervention; and said intervention is a cache 22 scenario because every time you get cut open, you risk growing back even more adhesions.
With all of this knowledge, I became absolutely distraught. I was never informed that by having this procedure performed, I would be at this increased risk of experiencing bowel obstruction. Like most people, I literally had no idea what an “adhesion” even was. What made me lose hope the most was that it seems as if doctors do these surgeries and simply ignore adhesion as a consequence because they don’t have any feasible way to prevent it or treat it without potentially creating more adhesion. So, although I was released from the hospital having avoided a second surgery, I felt more lost and hopeless than ever. I simply couldn’t cope with the realization that this would be something I would deal with for the rest of my life, something I could’ve avoided had I never agreed to get the first surgery because although I had that original pain I mentioned earlier- which has still continued to this day, it wasn’t and isn’t anything close to how excruciating the obstruction was, and it wasn’t really disrupting my life in the way the post-surgical pain has. But under the guidance of doctors, I opted to permanently alter my body, and there’s no going back. I feel so incredibly stupid for being deceived by these “medical professionals” who didn’t take the time to understand what was actually going on with me and chose to take an overly aggressive course of action that has left me permanently altered, in pain, and completely diminished my quality of life.
That week after leaving the hospital was truly the most suicidal I have ever felt. As I mentioned, I’ve dealt with suicidal ideation on and off since my adolescence. I’ve always had latent thoughts about wanting to die, wanting to escape, feeling like I’m hopeless and there’s no use trying to better myself. But this time, the desire to end my life was so much more intense. I became extremely disassociated from everything in life. In that week following my second hospitalization, there was absolutely nothing that could bring me joy. Before the surgery, I used to find deep pleasure in simply walking around my neighborhood for at least an hour every day. But I couldn’t do it anymore because walking gives me time to think, and thinking is too painful. It always leads back to the realization of the way I am now. Nothing could make me smile or laugh. I couldn’t even listen to music, one of my favorite things in the world. I became completely devoid of all emotions as my research transitioned away from my various new ailments and into ways I could end my life.
The rest of April and May passed by in a blur. Over that time, I’ve had two more appointments with the surgeons I met at the second hospital, a small bowel study (a more in-depth series of x-rays tracking the transit time of liquid through the GI tract), and a colonoscopy and endoscopy. Those have not yielded any significant findings as to what is going on, making me believe even more that all of these problems are being caused by adhesions. However, the small bowel study did reveal that my stomach is slightly herniated, which I believe is the cause of the original pain that I sought care for in the first place. At my last appointment, I was told to see a “small bowel specialist” GI doctor. But that was three weeks ago, and I haven’t even been able to get an appointment with them. I’m on a waiting list, but I imagine I’m looking at many months before I can get an appointment. I don’t know what they’re going to do for me. I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done besides more surgery, and I am very fearful about that. I fear the only way that these fucking doctors who fucked me up in the first place are going to even try to help me is if I’m obstructed again. But the changes to my diet, as much as I hate them, have kept me in a more manageable amount of pain and out of the hospital for now.
It is now June, and I am shocked that I am still here and confused about what to do now. Despite the diet, I still feel pain and discomfort at some point in the day, every single day. I think about wanting this all to end all of the time. I have not attempted again, though I did pick up another nitrogen tank, and I’ve also stockpiled a 90 day supply of my antidepressant, so at least I have the option. I am drinking two bottles of wine or half a bottle of vodka nearly every night. Alcohol is the only thing that seems to quiet my thoughts enough to get through each evening. I am sitting here in a cycle where I think about doing it, but I still feel obligated to go to work, to see my friends, and to feed my cat. My life has continued, but I don’t feel like I’m living anymore; I merely exist. I feel extremely unattractive because although I look the same as I did on the outside, I’m overcome with never ending emotional pain and turmoil on the inside. I am now unable to take care of myself and be on top of my life the way I used to be. After the second hospitalization, I dropped out of school and have no plans to continue, as I won’t need a bachelor’s degree when I’m dead. I have stopped exercising altogether, as it feels like there’s no point in trying to improve or take care of a body that has been permanently broken. Through all of this, I’ve lost much of my confidence and I feel I have completely lost my identity. I miss that old me so much. I miss my boyfriend so much. Plans with my friends are sometimes the only thing that keeps me going, and I am extremely grateful for them, but despite their continued presence, I feel extremely isolated and lonely. It’s hard to explain what I’ve been through to people without the context of all that has happened. I don’t have the energy to share it with them. And I feel if I speak about what I’m going through, I will feel like a burden, killing the vibe, and I don’t want that.
I have never felt this alienated from my body and from everything in life. I cannot cope with the fact that things will never be how they were before. I feel so incredibly distraught that I threw away what was shaping up to be the best days of my life. There’s nothing I or anyone else can do to change what has happened to me. It took me such a long time to get to the place I was in before the surgery. It was a brief and beautiful couple of months, but it’s over, and there’s no way for me to return. Even if there was, I don’t have that much of a fight left in me. I feel like such a fucking idiot for allowing the doctors to do this to me. I look around at all the happy people around me and know that I am dragging them down with my depression. I am tired of feeling helpless and like a burden on everyone I love. I am a shell of the person I once was. Ending it all is the singular thing that’s in my control. It is the only way to end all of this pain and suffering and stop the concern and confusion of my loved ones. I know that my exit will be painful to them, but they will all get over it in time. But me? I don’t think I will ever get over this. I will never be able to accept this horrible choice that I made. I am so tired of living this way. I am supposed to turn 27 soon, but I really don’t want to live to see my birthday. I have nothing to celebrate. My life is completely, irreversibly fucked. I don’t know when I will go, but it will be sooner rather than later. I am so sorry to everyone. I know this will hurt. I just can’t go on living this way. To all the people I care about, know that I love you, and I am so thankful you were part of my life. I know you will all go on to do great things without me. This entire saga has been unbearable; my life has spun out of control, and suicide is the only way to end my suffering. I’m sorry. I’m signing off.
TL;DR: Doctors performed a surgery I now think was unnecessary and the complications make me want to kill myself.

About the Job

The Marketing Strategist supports the ECS (Enterprise Creative Solutions) Account and Creative teams by helping to identify and clarify messaging opportunities at the onset of advertising projects, and by ensuring alignment throughout the development process. Leads or contributes to the campaign briefing (ONE Brief) process by leveraging competitive analysis and industry trend insights. Identifies competitor and product positioning in the market, current messaging and opportunities, best practice standards, and other research to propose actionable insights that should strengthen creative performance and account growth.

Job Responsibilities

• Working in conjunction with Account, identify and develop messaging opportunities that products from the competition, leverage our competitive advantages, advance LOB strategy, and achieve performance gains. Communicate these opportunities to Account and Creative via the campaign briefing (ONE Brief) process to assist in creative direction.
• Partner with internal research and competitive intelligence groups and external research vendors to develop subject matter expertise for assigned segments, products, and bank’s lines of business, then collect, interpret, generate, and disseminate actionable insights to ECS.
• Collaborate with internal testing and measurement teams to determine effectiveness of product positioning and messaging in creative pieces and provide feedback.
• Develop test plans based on client goals in partnership with Account, where a client need exists.
• Collect, interpret and integrate data on channel and segment demographics, personas, statistics and performance.
• Monitor client strategy implementation, provide feedback and create ECS point of view documents.
• Work with Senior Market Research Strategists, Senior Management and Account teams to determine research needs for clients, increasing ECS value.
• Stay current on industry trends, competitive information and requested market research projects to strengthen our strategic expertise.
• Contribute to agency library of marketing samples and information on current market positioning and messaging opportunities for existing and emerging/potential products, markets, channels and segments.
• Participate in ongoing education to build business acumen and assist in educating ECS on evolving business, competitor and best practice trends.

Requirements

• Solid understanding of the financial services industry and advertising/media channels, for example digital and printed ads/collateral, direct mail, email, social media and/or experiential events.
• Exceptional written, oral, and presentation communication skills, particularly the ability to concisely convey strategic direction.
• Proven ability to interpret data and express implications of analysis.
• Detail oriented with the ability to see how the details fit into the overall, bigger picture.
• Demonstrated ability to effectively collaborate with a variety of agency functions and individual personalities.
• Familiarity with industry tools preferred, i.e. Competiscan, Mintel, eMarketer, Persado, desk research, etc.
• High level of proficiency in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• Bachelors degree or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years conducting statistical research and quantitative analysis for clients in support of the development of effective marketing programs.
• About the Job

Me (28F) and my husband (31M) got this crazy idea that maybe it would be possible for us to buy an apartment in Munich.
At the current prices and taking into account we are immigrants from less wealthy countries with no inherited wealth, buying a big enough apartment to raise a family (we ideally would like to have 2-3 kids) seems out of reach. Therefore we basically accepted our destiny of renting the place we live in.
But what we are thinking is to buy a smaller apartment, 2 room somewhere centrally located, near all facilities, public transport and parks, so that we can have a backup and a place to move to in our retirement. In the meantime we would rent it out, ideally for the lowest possible rent. I do not want to put additional pressure on the renting prices, or get rich by ripping half an income of some less lucky person. So having a long term tenant with low rent would be our goal.
We have approx 200k we can cash out from our savings, and a combined income of 7-8k per month. And we would like to limit the credit duration to as short as possible.
What do you all think of that? Where to start? I read it would be a good idea to first check with a mortgage broker and get an idea of the possible budget. Do you have any thoughts, tips, feedback on my plan? Things to look into, points to consider, advice where to search for good deals? How much money should be set aside for renovations?
I am completely new to the real estate topic so I feel quite overwhelmed by the whole process. Will take any piece of advice and perspective to help us decide how to proceed!

Hi- I’m trying to pinpoint which line of code it function takes long to execute In a piece of code that never finishes.ive used flame graphs.. but even that shows code which has finished uptill now… cprofiler is the same useful only if it finishes. Same for time- while I do want to know how long it takes, I want to pinpoint where it is taking that long. I have couple recursive functions… and some calculations I do- which might explode with more input data - so we’re trying to gauge with different sizes what the results are. How do I pinpoint the function or area which is causing the code to not finish- or it gets stuck there? Unless I’m interpreting the flame graphs incorrectly.. it shows functions which were sampled before I finally exit the code using a keyboard interrupt. I.e force and exit .

hello! so I’m really grateful for all the tutorials out there but one thing I can’t grasp is: why? why and how do these sewists know all the measurements even without a pattern? I would love to find a channel that does no-pattern sewing tutorials that explains the measurements (usually these videos only have music playing).
for example, I just watched a tutorial on no-pattern shorts and I don’t understand why after cutting the front pattern (cut on fold), she proceeded draw a 3cm mark at one end of waistline and then tapered it to the other end of the waistline, and then cut a little piece off one side of the crotch (the same side where she made the 3cm mark)
I think finding educational videos like these would really help me grasp the measurements and why certain measurements are made 🙏🏻 thank you!

So picture this:

It's Saturday. I was watching UFC 302 but I missed Lima vs. Raposo live.

I'm coming back home after procuring an alcoholic beverage. I lay my phone down as I'm carrying the beverage, and the phone dings.

One of you ratfucks sends me a message. No context, no photo, I have no idea what's going on.

The message read: "Bah gawd that's Dave Tirelli's music."

See, when I wrote that article about Dave Tirelli four years ago, I didn't really proofread it. I didn't really try to polish it up and make it easy to read. I didn't really put a ton of effort into it.

I used to write and make video and written pieces for the subreddit off and on, but that one I just threw together. I just thought it was so totally comical that somebody could be this incompetent or outwardly corrupt, or both.

I didn't put it in the article, but internally from what I remember, I just sort of hoped "maybe this was the only guy they could get to judge during Covid in May 2020" and sent it out into the Redditverse.

If you haven't read it or missed Part 1 when TheBaltimoron reposted it on Saturday, you can find it here.

I sort of just figured after all that, he'd not get any more major assignments after how terrible his cards were and we'd all forget about it. After all, the UFC was the only sport really going at that time. Surely all the athletic commissions noticed.

No.

The son-of-a-bitch is STILL getting major cards.

And they're just as bizarre as they've ever been.

There's going to be a bunch of tables below. You can skip this section now, and come back up to refer to it if you're not sure what part of a table means:

Media Scores For = Number of Media Members Who Scored the Fight for X Fighter Per MMADecisions.com
Fan Win Percentage = Percentage of Fans Who Scored the Fight for X Fighter per MMADecisions.com. If the numbers do not add up to 100%, some voters ruled a 10-10 draw unless otherwise noted.
Tirelli Score = Tirelli's Final Scorecard
Rounds Tirelli Scored For = Dave, if you're reading this and having trouble figuring out what this means, this box has the rounds you gave that fighter, separated by a comma.
Fans With Same Result = This box represents the amount of fans who had the same result as Dave. Note, they may have scored rounds differently but arrived at the same final score. This metric should not be viewed as the amount of fans who had the same scorecard as that number would almost certainly be something even less.

Caveats:

Some fights won't have striking stats and some won't have great fan data. Some fights may have misleading stats or big moments that changed rounds/fights that aren't reflected in the data. That said, the point is to show a repeated history of being detached from reality, not a myopic view of one specific fight.

While there are many fights where I remember him scoring a round weirdly, I am only going to include fights with decent evidence to support the overall theme.

In short, this is not an exhaustive list of all of his insane scorecards.

But it is a pretty good one.

Let us pick up where we left off from part 1.

1. Bellator 252 - Yaroslav Amosov def. Logan Storley
November 12th, 2020

Tirelli scores it 29-28 for Storley.

Fighter	Media Scores For	Fan Win Percentage	Tirelli Score	Rounds Tirelli Scored For	Fans With Same Result
Amosov	6	74.7	28	1
Storley	1	21.3	29	2, 3	20.0%

Source

Now, Tirelli turns in a 29-28 for Sorley, which is not his most bizarre card he's ever turned in, but that's not saying a whole lot. The point of deviation from fans and media, was the 2nd round.

Fighter	Round Two Fan Percentage For	Tirelli Scored For
Amosov	85.3%
Storley	12.0%	😎

This means, that no more than 12% of fans could have possibly had Tirelli's exact card. He's less accurate than a UFC troll. We're off to a rippin' start.

2. Bellator 260 - Bobby King def. Nick Newell
June 11th, 2021

Tirelli scores it 29-28 for Newell.

There were only five fan scorecards submitted on MMADecisions.com, and only one media scorecard. I don't have stats from the fight either. There's just not enough data.

So lets look at the one media scorecard and the other two judges vs Tirelli:

Judge	King	Newell
Judge Dave Hagen	30	27
Judge Michael Murtha	30	27
SevereMMA's Sean Sheehan	30	27
Judge Dave Tirelli	28	29 😎

Source

BUT BC THATS LIKE SUPER SMOL DATA AND NOT FAIR.

Boys, we are just getting started. Buckle up.

3. UFC 268 - Dustin Jacoby def. John Allan
November 6th, 2021

Tirelli scores the 3rd round for Allan.

Fighter	Media Scores For	Fan Win Percentage	Tirelli Score	Rounds Tirelli Scored For	Fans With Same Result
Jacoby	14	97.1	29	1,2	8.8%
Allan	1	2.9	28	3

Source

Tirelli scored the fight correctly for Jacoby but with the wrong card because he had a stroke in the 3rd round:

Fighter	Round Three Fan Percentage For	Significant Strikes	Takedowns/Ground Strikes	Tirelli Scored For
Jacoby	97.1	48	0
Allan	2.9	27	0	😎

Source
Source 2

Yeah. No idea.

4. UFC on ESPN 42: Clay Guida def. Scott Holtzman
December 03, 2022

Tirelli scores it 29-28 Holtzman.

Fighter	Media Scores For	Fan Win Percentage	Tirelli Score	Rounds Tirelli Scored For	Fans With Same Result
Guida	17	80	28	3
Holtzman	0	20	29	1, 2	13.8%

Source

You just never know when he's gonna strike. This time, it was in the 2nd round:

	Round Two Fan Percentage For	Significant Strikes (Total)	Takedowns	Control Time	Tirelli Scored For
Guida	84.6	17 (29)	2 of 8	2:55
Holtzman	15.4	22 (32)	0	0:01	😎

Source
Source 2

This inspired comments from da bois:

How can anyone give that to Holtzman?

-lopez_motors

Split??? pretty clear 2-1 Guida

-Sleepyness86

Surprised that one of the judges gave Holtzman the 3rd round for a split decision but glad Guida won that after the continued sequence-altering fence grabs.

-kmp92
5. UFC on ESPN+ 89: Marc Diakiese def. Kaue Fernandes
November 4th, 2023

Tirelli scores it 29-28 Fernandes.

Fighter	Media Scores For	Fan Win Percentage	Tirelli Score	Rounds Tirelli Scored For	Fans With Same Result
Fernandes	1	17.4%	29	1, 2
Diakiese	12	82.6%	28	3	17.4%

Source

Round one was a swing round. Tirelli deviates on the 2nd round:

Fighter	Round Two Fan Percentage For	Significant Strikes (Total)	Takedowns	Control Time	Tirelli Scored For
Fernandes	21.7%	10 (20)	0	0	😎
Diakiese	78.3%	4 (16)	1 of 4	2:50

Source
Source 2

One thing to remember is that ground strikes not rated as often as significant strikes compared to strikes landed at distance. As a result they are more often counted as "total" but not "significant".

As a result, the stats are a little misleading here - Diakiese dominated this round and the fan voting and other judges show it. But I did want to provide the statistics for full transparency, even if they are misleading.

Here's what the ratfucks thought:

The judge making this a split decision just hooked me for the rest of the night.

-Nuclearfrog

Yeah I was half paying attention thinking diakese had this easy. Where the fuck did split come from

-thatinsuranceguy

man that was boring also how the fuck was that a split decision????

-southpawsouthpaw
6. UFC 302: Andre Lima def. Mitch Raposo
June 01, 2024

Tirelli scores it 29-28 Raposo.

Fighter	Media Scores For	Fan Win Percentage	Tirelli Score	Rounds Tirelli Scored For	Fans With Same Result
Raposo	0	2.7%	29	1, 2
Lima	14	97.3%	28	3	1.3%

Source

One of his worst stinkers so far. Not only did he give Round 1 to Raposo:

	Round One Fan Percentage For	Significant Strikes (Total)	Takedowns	Control Time	Tirelli Scored For
Raposo	2.6%	7 (7)	0	0	😎
Lima	97.3%	17 (17)	0	0

Source 1
Source 2

He also gave him Round 2:

Fighter	Round Two Fan Percentage For	Significant Strikes (Total)	Takedowns	Control Time	Tirelli Scored For
Raposo	17.3%	8 (8)	0	0:09	😎
Lima	82.7%	13 (13)	0	0

Source 1
Source 2

But if one absolutely dogshit card isn't enough, Dave's your man. The man can go all night.

The man can go TWICE in one night.

7. UFC 302: Sean Strickland def. Paulo Costa

June 01, 2024

Tirelli scores it 49-46 Costa.

Fighter	Media Scores For	Fan Win Percentage	Tirelli Score	Rounds Tirelli Scored For	Fans With Same Result
Costa	0	4.7%	49	1, 2, 3, 4	Unknown
Strickland	24	94.9%	46	5

Source

That's right - this scorecard is so bizarre, we can't actually tell if any fans at all ended with 49-46 Costa, because it's not listed in the top five as a possibility in the data on MMADecisions.

I'm tired of making these fucking charts. You guys get it. It was insane and we all saw it.

You guys had many, many thoughts:

What in the fuck was that 4-1 Costa scorecard!?

-PhenoManan

Worst scorecards ever tonight, the judge who scored it 49-46 Costa needs to be fired.

-dealerofbananas

Legit one of the worst scorecards I’ve ever seen

-GoldenLlamaDog

He needs to be investigated and prosecuted for bet rigging, cancelled for incompetence is the bare minimum.

-Heroe-D

No incompetence can explain this. I suspect malice.

-Real-Human-Bean-

49-46 Costa might be the single most heinous card I've ever seen

-DesertRL

He thought Costa was Strickland 😂

-ivo09

Enough of this shit.

How is it, that a rando on Reddit spotted this four years ago, and you guys can't figure it out?

Athletic commissions, your job is to protect fighters. Do your fucking job. It's already bad enough that fighters have "win bonuses" anyway. Your lack of doing your job could cost these guys their livelihoods.

I've reviewed this in depth if you can't tell. I have a question for the athletic commissions.

Don't you guys at the respective commissions all find it strange that he can go months to a year with totally normal cards, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it's like he's never seen the sport before? And be completely normal in the next fight, making really good decisions on razor thin rounds?

In the 6 fights where Tirelli went split decision in this article and I have media data, he was 2 for 76 against the media. Meaning, out of 76 media votes, they may have had a different card, but agreed with his winner twice out of seventy-six attempts.

Is it that Dave Tirelli is the only person on planet Earth sporatically capable of understanding who won a fight, OR is it just that if you graded him vs. the media over these 6 fights, he would be DEAD LAST in accuracy?

Whats Occam's razor have to say about this?

Since the commissions don't appear to watch to actually watch MMA, maybe they watch baseball. So, lets present the numbers in a different way.

Expressed as a batting average, arguably the hardest thing to do in pro sports, Tirelli is hitting .026 in his controversial decisions listed just here in part 2.

That makes him over SIX TIMES WORSE than the worst hitting performance over one season in Major League Baseball history. He's six times worse than the worst guy of all time, at the hardest feat in sports. Please, tell me more about how "hard" this job is.

So here you go. Here's your evidence, over two articles now, that shows, unequivocally, that he is either grossly incompetent or completely corrupt.

And Dana White was wrong.

He doesn't need to judge lower shows. He does not need a license. Not now, not ever. I've already done the hard work for you. Fighters don't deserve this. Fans don't deserve this. Promotions don't deserve this. Bettors don't deserve this. Coaches don't deserve this. Advertisers don't deserve it. The networks investing in the product of MMA don't deserve this.

None of them deserve Tirelli's incompetence.

But you know whose incompetence they really don't deserve? Yours - athletic commissions. Because you're asleep at the wheel with absolutely no signs of consciousness.

Pull his damn license.

Or do I need to do that for you too?

Good morning, Night City!
I'm looking for a partner who'd like to join me in writing a story in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. I don't do fandom RPs very often, but this particular setting appeals to me more than enough to make an exception – although I still want to focus on our own original characters, keeping interactions with any pre-existing characters to a minimum. Naturally, for this to work you will need to be familiar with the game, but I don't expect you to have every last detail of the lore memorised – I certainly don't, and I'm fine with improvising to fill the gaps. I don't have a specific plot in mind yet, but the possibilities are endless. We could set the story in Night City or anywhere else in that world; we can use the existing gangs and factions or figure everything out from scratch. I think it's safe to say we can expect a lot of fun action scenes, a fair bit of dystopian hardships to put our characters through, and all kinds of juicy, complex dynamics and relationships for them to develop.
About me – I’m male, 26, I live in Central Europe (CEST time zone), and I have upwards of ten years of experience in roleplaying. I don’t limit myself to playing male characters, and I don’t have a preference as to the gender of yours. Perhaps more importantly, I’m not looking to write a story centred around romance – that is, I don’t want to make it a prerequisite that our characters absolutely have to be lovers at some point. If they have the right chemistry, sure, but it’s not something I’d like to have as a requirement. That being said, I'm all for interesting dynamics! The action and sci-fi elements are fun, but engaging relationships that feel real definitely elevate a story.
As far as requirements go, first of all, please be 18 or older. That aside, I’m looking for experienced, highly literate partners. Post length doesn’t matter that much to me – so long as you’re able to put out a few solid paragraphs per post – but quality does, so please send me a short sample of your writing so I can see if we’d be compatible. Of course I can send you one too if you want. I write in 3rd person, past tense, and my preferred platform is Discord. And the most important thing – please be active! I’m not a GM, and I neither want nor have the ability to drive the plot forward all by myself. I need you to contribute to the story, both in out-of-character discussions and in-character. It’s all fine and good to write a long and stylistically beautiful post, but if it’s self-contained and doesn’t offer the other writer anything to go off of, that makes it tough to come up with a response. I’m not going to start the discussion every time or always be the one coming up with what we need to develop next, so if you can’t or don’t want to be proactive in this collaboration, I’m not the right partner for you.
I think that about does it! If you’re interested, hit me with a chat message or a DM and we can get right to it. Hoping to hear from you soon!

I tapered off of suboxone before after 3 months use/3 months methadone before that/ and 6 months fentanyl before that, I had been tapering anyways and literally got pregnant like right when I fully dropped. I experienced insomnia/exhaustion/stomach pain for about two months but those are also first trimester pregnancy symptoms so I’m not sure if it was from suboxone…
Anyways I had two years off of everything had two babies in the meantime, three months ago I fell into a deep depression being home alone with a baby and 1 year old… and started taking small pieces of suboxone, turned into a 2 month habit and I’ve been tapering the past few weeks. I’m just curious how long of PAWS I should expect from such a short habit? And if I should out of pre caution get on an antidepressant?

I have some 1”x12”x6’ “Select Kiln-Dried Square Edge Whitewood Pine Boards” from Home-Depot.
Problem: The boards smell bad, like chemical treated cardboard and MDF. They are also slightly sticky/tacky. I’m not sure what to do to fix this.
No Go for Returning: I can’t just return it, I’m not going to get anything with better quality back in exchange. This is the best it is going to get. My local store isn’t great, and it was hard to find non-warped pieces. Mine have no twisting, minor central bowing. Would be nice to fix the bowing, but not the main issue here.
Critical Complication: Regrettably I live in and apartment in the center of a major city. My go to would have been to sand the boards, even though the finish is really smooth… and oddly shiny. So, I’ve got no where to sand, and only limited power tool access. I’m in a pickle.
Gonna Mess This Up: My next best idea, short of a block plane haha, is to wash the wood. Not sure how I’d do this. I first bought the wood months ago and gave it a quick iso wipe to get the Home Depot critter droppings cleaned off. I hoped the smell would go away, but there has been no change at all.
Stuck: The sticky/tacky surface is weird and kinda nasty. Maybe it is just sap, but I’d expect a better smell if that was the case. Plus this really shouldn’t be leaking sap if it was kiln dried. Or it would be leaking substantially more after these months. The bad odor is a more substantial problem due to the small size of my apartment. No escaping it. So I can get busy using the material until I resolve this. I don’t want to be locked into building something stinky.
What’s the problem(s)? I could really use a hand with this. Any ideas?

I know this might sound crazy, but I actually watched the infamous Saki Sanobashi anime on a dark web website called TheCursedAnime. The onion link I used to access the site doesn't work anymore, as these links change frequently, but I found it through the Torch search engine on Tor.

What I Saw:

• No Music: There was no background music at all. No eerie themes or horror sounds, just the raw and disturbing actions of the characters.
• The Plot: The anime featured a group of girls trapped in a large, college-like bathroom. They were killing themselves day by day. One particularly gruesome scene involved four girls crushing another girl's body parts into a western-style toilet and trying to flush them.
• Locked Room: The room was locked, and the bathroom was large, similar to what you'd find in a typical college.
• Naked After 12-15 Minutes: Initially, the girls were wearing 80s-style school uniforms. However, after about 12-15 minutes, they were completely naked. I donot know why.
• Disturbing Help: One of the most shocking moments was when a girl asked another for help to die. She said, "Hey, can you please help me?" and the other girl obliged by smashing her head through a washbasin. The girl died in the blood, screaming as her skin seemed to rot and bleed in real-time.

Why No Screenshots:

I couldn't take any screenshots because my brother removed the evidence before I had a chance. Plus, the link to TheCursedAnime Onion site stopped working shortly after my visit, which seems to be a common issue with dark web links.

Similar Content:

similar content found but disturbing, not much then berserk.
I've found other websites with images resembling the anime, but nothing as complete or as disturbing as what I saw on TheCursedAnime. If anyone else has seen this or knows of similar sites, please share your experience. It's chilling to think that such content could be real, but my experience confirms it.

Note:

• TheCursedAnime URL: (http://thecursedanime5k3j7d3k6l2m8p9q.onion) The website might still be accessible later on, as it is known to host a lot of disturbing anime content, possibly based on real ones.
• Production Studio: I think the website mentioned the production studio was something like "Orange," but I can't remember exactly.

I know this sounds unbelievable, but I swear on everything that Saki Sanobashi is out there. Keep an eye on the dark web and use search engines like Torch if you're curious, but be careful. This anime is not for the faint of heart.
Looking forward to hearing from anyone who's seen similar content or has more information. Let's find out more about this disturbing piece of media together. FEEEEEL free to ask for details.
NOTE ANYTHING WAS NOT FAKE STILL THERE ARE MORE LOST MEDIA ANIMES WERE FOUND BY ME WHICH ARE THE ++ VERSIONS OF SAKI I DONT BELIEVE IN FOOLING OTHERS OF WASTING THE VALUABLE TIME OF OTHERS BY JUST POSTING MFS
I RESPECT IT.
CUZ OF MY MF BROTHER WITH WHOM I WAS WATCHING, I APOLOGIES FOR THAT.
I THINK EVERYTIME WE EXPLORE ABOUT THIS, MAYBE ILLUMINATI TRIES TO REMAIN THIS PRIVATE? IS'NT IT?

So.. This challenge is about making a technique centred around drawing, art, and things of the sort. My entry:
World is Mine
This technique lets the user take materials and objects then turn them into paint, or reshape them into art, for the effects.
Example:
They grab the air, they grab fire, they mix them together on the canvas, boom! They can now use a move where they shoot jet-engine-like flames out of their hands.
They reshape asphalt into a snake, they take some of themselves, paint the asphalt snake with their element, bam! Medusa Shikigami.
The drawbacks are that they suffer while using the technique. You wanna grab fire for paint or reshape it? You feel as if you’ve been thrown into the sun. It basically breaks the mind of anyone too feeble to use it. If they grab forest.. they get a really bad allergy attack :P If they grab air, they’d have shortness of breath and LITERALLY become heavier.
Excited to see what you all make!
Here’s some rules, though;
Don’t just ripoff Sai from naruto
Don’t just ripoff other people
Don’t just copy Heaven’s Door from JJBA
Don’t just copy Kurozumi Kanjuro from one piece
Be creative, AKA, don’t just do "He draws an explosion on someone and instant wins"
If you can somehow make a shikigami technique out of this prompt without ripping off Sai or the Ten Shadows, you’d probs win the challenge
The challenge is art, you can do other elements like maybe a CE trait, but they all have to lead back into drawing, paintings, and art.
That’s all!