This has been really bothering me as I have played well over a thousand FOB missions at this point and I cannot for the life of me figure out how the game figures out what staff are captured or even whether or not I get any.
Usually I will go through the FOBs that come up in the infiltration list and first scan through looking for bases with lots of S++ staff and then look for the easiest to infiltrate platforms. The game and all sources I can find state that a successful infiltration will capture 10 staff from that base, but this is not always the case. None of it even makes any sense, and I am programmer so I am really struggling to make any sense of it.
Last night I infiltrated a platform that had nothing but S++ staff and when I reached the core it showed that I extracted 10 staff but then they were all S rank and lower. That wasn't even a possibility.
Other times I will have a successful infiltration and completely ghost the base and no staff will be captured even though it has shown that there were tons of staff available.
Then there are the bases with tons of staff, plenty of S++, S+ and on down the line and I will successfully infiltrate it and instead of extracting 10 staff I will get 3 or 4 or 7 or whatever.
None of it really makes any sense. On top of that a base may say that as part of the bonus rewards I should get X volunteers but even that is usually not even close to the amount that I actually get. But then all of the rest of the rewards are what it says that I should get. Resources, GMP, etc., are all spot on, but it might say that I should get, for instance, 29 volunteers and then I end up getting 11 or whatever. Well less than half.
And to make things even more confusing and hard to figure out the other night I infiltrated a base that had 10 S++ medical staff up for grabs and on the mission summary at the end I ended up getting all 10 S++ staff from that base, and it was an extremely easy base to infiltrate.
I cannot find rhyme nor reason to how it might work. I would think that you should get staff roughly in proportion to what is available. Let's say that the ratio of S++ ranks is 1:10 with the rest of the distribution, I would expect to probably get 1 of those, roughly speaking. Or get 1-2 of the best staff with each successful infiltration and then a bunch of scrubs. Maybe a sort of stop-loss programmed in if a person does not have many staff available to cut the number down from the 10 that they advertise, but I have infiltrated FOBs with hundreds of staff up for grabs and captured zero. I have infiltrated other bases with relatively few staff and gotten the advertised 10. The difficulty level of the base also doesn't seem to matter, the number of platforms doesn't seem to matter and it also does not seem to matter if I ghost the FOB or have soft alerts or anything.
As a programmer and someone who works in technology I usually try to make sense of such things and then "Moneyball" the algorithm but in the case of MGSV FOBs I cannot make heads or tails of it. Any ideas?

I play in my school band and school orchestra. Once mid-way through a concert, my reed’s opening closed and it dried out. I had to swap my reeds really quickly but I still missed my cue. What do you pros out there do?

I'm an enormous DG fan, almost borderline finatic and also a musician myself. I found myself back in 2015 up to today, getting ahold of legally posted bootlegs and just listening over how gilmour changes the way he plays and sings each song note by note, phraze by phraze and just generally fanboying out over songs and playstyles as he went night after night. Its intereasting how he retains a certain over-arching phrase/lick/note relation from either a particular song or songs from the album hes touring and how that slips into the other back cataloug song solos - like a musical marker where you can tell what tour the song was played on but thats me just being a nerd and thats what i find interesting for a tour, as The pipes call has a really resh feel to it and id like to see this new layer applied over old songs as he plays them.
Its interesting reading/listening over the new developments with this upcoming tour on what to expect, the reluctance towards 70's floyd is an interesting turn but then again im a huge DG fan so his reign over floyd on AMLOR and DB are just pure bliss to me so its not a low ball IMO. It seems hes very annoyed with roger at the moment, not from exact words but more or less me reading between lines a bit, with how hes handling things and how things are manifesting, sure little 70's floyd is a little support towards that so im curious what the set list will be like. Im aware of his vocal range and perhaps the very few dates we are all seeing for the tour itself is maybe a sign to his age and abilities physically now, which also play a part of what songs meet the setlist. He said back in 2015 that he and polly sat and listened over every album making notes of what songs they wanted to play so its likly hes going to do the same again. This time though we have more supporting evidence to highlight his strenghts and weaknesses when it comes to vocal and playing ability. A lot of these high vocal range floyd/solo songs are probably not going to meet the tour so it makes me wonder, what will ?
The bootlegs from RTL have shown he has struggled to sing some songs, some more than others and a indications of struggles is his RTL set list which he has said is constructed to tell its own story but i can see its designed to provide as much vocal rest as possible. Rattle that lock (song) was such a vocal killer for him which is why i think it was played in order (5am - RTL - FOS) aka Songs 1, 2 and 3 so it was out the way first rather than played later. Risky but cool that what do you want from me made its way in an early setlist slot which would of really pushed his vocals off as well. I think a lot of people are confusing genuine playing mistakes as a sign of age, for example run like hell, he often bodged the guitar on the main riff, but you can tell with the shades on and the frantic lighting hes just struggling all out just to see what hes doing so little things like that do mask some truths. I am aware of his struggles to play fast as well so that is another factor to take onboard, vocally though he has a suprisingly good range for his age but has lost a lot of power and stamina so i dont think really reletless songs will make the cut, however luck and strange is a first for gilmour in the fact that he has included a cover so perhaps we will see a new for gilmour in the tour as well, which could be that he detunes songs simalar to how roger detuned run like hell on his live shows.
Set list Luck and strange - I think its possible hes going to play the album in full, but that depends on the unstrumentation and vocal demand so its 50/50 if he will do it in full like he did with on an island in 06 or just cherry pick like he did with rattle that lock. Assuming hes made the album with live performance in mind, and lets say its going to be played in full
01 - Black Cat
02 - Luck and strange
03 - The Pipers Call
04 - A Single Spark
05 - Vita Brevis
06 - Between Two Points
07 - Dark and Velvet Nights
08 - Sings
09 - Scattered
In relation to rattle, david never plays the opening instrumentals again in tours after so im positive 5am wont feature, RTL will be too vocally demanding and not make the cut. however songs like faces of stone and in any tongue are very open songs for him to play around with, vocally not too demanding at all (assuming his Backing will take the chorus in IAT) and he has the ability to have fun with the solos. DRIFOM requires a orchestra so unless hes performing with one i dont think that or the girl in the yellow dress will feature. the rest I dont think he will take on for various mixture of reasons.
10 - Faces of Stone
11 - In Any Tongue
In relation to island, on an island and the blue are songs hes played on RTL tour, island is an easy vocal song and one he often liked to solo with so im sure that will feature, the blue on the other hand is a song that was very hit and miss on the last tour, the bootlegs made it clear he struggled vocally and guitar wise so its 50/50 but i dont think will be featured. Take a breath, smile and this heaven i think are good picks but I dont think his voice will hold out for them as he struggled with them back in 06. where we start is a very high probability but IMO only to fill out the set list.
12 - On an Island
13 - Where We Start
14 - Take a breathe - (detuned very very unlikly)
in relation to About face, hes never played any since 86 (if i recal correclty) and we know from his interviews about AMLOR that he felt floyd went very 80's with there sound at that point and about face feels exactly the same spectrum sonically so im sure hes got some issues with the sound, but, theres some songs which are good. all of them realistically are pushing his vocal stamina, songs like murder are soft high range to shouty high range which he cant really do, rame for all lovers. realistically Near the End is possible and perhaps out of the blue but i very much doubt that. I get the feeling hed play you know im right but vocally hes going to struggle.
15 - Near the End
I personally dont think we will see any from his first album. unless its an instrumental but id be very VERY suprised. in relation to devision, i think poles appart is quite likly, vocally doable and its a little roger jabb so it might make an apperence. What do you want, a great day, take it back are songs I just dont think hes got the vocal abilities for now. Likly that marooned might appear, coming back to life 50/50, lost for words also 50/50 and high hopes is almost certain.
16 - Marooned
17 - Coming Back to Life
18 - Lost for Words
19 - High Hopes
I dont think we will see anything from a momentry. on top of that I think we will see yes i have ghosts
20 - Yes I have Ghosts
and i think some songs are just set in stone
21 - Wish you were here
22 - Fat old son
23 - Comfortably Numb
I think we are going to see his son and daughter on tour with him this time, and if thats the case its likly we might get some covers as we have seen in the lock down streams as well as maybe an instrumental or two from the endless river.
I know people have high expectations and Ive seen a lot of dream setlists here on this reddit but I really doubt some of these higher vocal and more demanding performance songs will come forward. Given that he usually plays for around 2 hours, its going to be quite mellow I feel with these songs that I think hes going to play. Though I could be totally wrong, Run like Hell back on the rattle tour proved that.
what do you think ?

This is a long one so I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read it and can maybe give me some insight of their own experiences trying to get biologics and if the generic ones are any easier to get insurance to approve/pay for than the name brand.
I've been on Humira for about 5 years now and it's worked wonderfully for me but I'm having an increasingly difficult time getting my meds, to the point that almost one week out of every month I end up having to miss a dose due to issues with insurance or the pharmacy or the financial assistance, it's always something. These constant occurrences of having to miss doses (there's been multiple instances where I was off my meds for months at a time sorting out these types of issues) have caused me to have to increase my dose from every other week to weekly injections because the medicine wasn't working as effectively as it should be.
I'm sure you all know that when you repeatedly go on and off of biologics like this your body starts to build up a resistance and the medication becomes less and less effective at managing the disease.
Anyways, I used to be on the my abbvie assist program and that's how I got my meds for the first 4 years I was on them. I had a lot of issues with that program too, but for the most part, I got my meds on time and they shipped me three months at a time so even if it was late once or twice a year, it wasn't happening every month. Last year at the end of November I submitted a new application for financial assistance (which you have to do every year). It took them an incredibly long time to process the request and they kept telling me I was missing information on the application or that they needed my doctor to fax something over. It took 8 weeks of this back and forth before they finally called and told me that they had changed their program requirements. At this point, I had been off of my meds for two months and had to be put on steroids again to try and control the disease until they approved my application. They told me because my insurance company offers a copay savings card program I was now ineligible to use the my abbvie assist program.
So, I called the copay savings card program and got signed up with them. The first two months were fine (February and March), they shipped me a month's worth of meds each time and I was able to get them on time for $5/month. I thought great, this is working, I'm finally back on my medication. Boy was I wrong. Last month I started having issues again. At first, they told me that I didn't have any refills left, which didn't make sense because I had only refilled twice so I called my doctor and asked her to send in more refills. She called me back and said she had personally talked to the pharmacy and I still had 4 refills left so she wasn't sure why they weren't letting me refill it. So I called the pharmacy back and asked them to refill, saying my doctor confirmed with them and I had refills left. Long story short after about 5 days of calling people and getting sent to dozens of different departments and being given different phone numbers to call (one lady even gave me the phone number of an entirely different company that doesn't even supply my medication, it was absolutely insane how completely mismanaged they were and how much nobody I spoke to knew anything about who I needed to talk to). Eventually, I found out that they had changed the phone number to the specialty pharmacy and the number that I'd been using for the last couple of months to refill my medication now only went to the normal pharmacy, which is why they couldn't find my refills. I finally got my meds but it had been another 2 weeks of being off of them.
This month, I called again to refill my meds last Friday. I was told that my copay savings card was no longer active and if I wanted my meds I had to pay the $1300+ copay out of pocket. Obviously I can't afford that, but the copay savings card line was closed by that point in the evening so I had to wait until Monday this week to call them. I left a message yesterday and finally got someone to talk to me today. They told me that my account had been flagged and I had to call a separate number to complete a "benefits review". Okay, fine. I spent 3 hours on the phone with these people today and this is what I've learned:

• I am apparently using the available funds on the copay card "too quickly" and spending too much at a time on my medication so my account was flagged and insurance is threatening to increase my already very high deductible unless I spend less money on my medication per month (how??? it's not like I get to choose how much they are). They are effectively telling me that I can no longer use the copay card unless I want to deal with serious consequences with my insurance coverage. I've used almost all of the available funds they gave me for the year, and they won't be giving me any more.
  
• There is another savings program that my insurance uses that offers "cost relief" to help cover what the copay card won't so I can still afford my medication. Apparently, even though this is something my insurance covers, my specific plan excludes it as a benefit so I can't use it.
  
• This leaves me with two options. I can either pay $1300 upfront with my own money to get my meds every month and then wait for them to reimburse me, which I can't afford, or I can apply for the abbvie debit card program which works similarly to the copay assistance but is instead a physical card that they send me and I use that to pay the copays so my insurance is happy and then I pay abbvie the $5/month copay directly. I don't fully understand how it works but at this point, I don't care, as long as someone is sending me medication. I said I'd like to use the abbvie debit card, they said great we'll call you in approximately 3 business days to get you the card number. My next dose is in 3 business days. So best case scenario I'm missing another week's dose waiting for the debit card number so I can order the prescription and then waiting for the medication to ship.
  

I am so completely and utterly exhausted by this entire process and I am sick and tired of constantly missing doses of my medication. It's fucking with my body, it's sending me into flare ups, and it's decreasing the effectiveness of this medication that I am fighting so fucking hard to get every single month. I'm losing money having to take time off work to spend hours on the phone with these people. I just can't do this every month for the foreseeable future. It's not sustainable.
I am so close to calling my doctor and asking to switch medications to something that is cheaper or easier to acquire because I simply can't do this every month. But, tbh I don't have much hope that this won't be my experience with any medication I try. I'm also very afraid of possible side effects, Humira has worked wonderfully for me (when I can actually fucking take it) and I haven't had any side effects, switching meds is risky in that I could have a poor reaction to it and it could not work as well at controlling my symptoms. Has anyone out there had an easier time getting generic meds than their name brand counterparts? Is there any hope for getting my meds consistently on time without spending hours and hours of my life every month fighting with these people only for my meds to be late anyways? I'm at the end of my rope here. I desperately want someone to tell me that this isn't the universal experience but I'm also not stupid enough to believe I'll have better luck with any other company. I'm not even really sure what I'm looking for here. Advice? Hope? A place to vent? It just all feels pointless sometimes.
TL;DR - I'm having an incredibly hard time getting my Humira every month and keep getting kicked off of the financial assistance programs. This is causing me to miss a lot of doses and I'm obviously having a bad time as a result of that. Are the generic options any easier to get than the name brands like Humira? Is there any biologic out there that isn't this difficult to get every month?

Sadly I'm stuck living with a crazy narcissist female due to bad luck and finances and so I've had to endure witnessing some detestable bullshit.
The story starts with the girl abusing her boyfriend until he suicided himself. She has a long history of some of the most cruel treatment of her "ex". The very night he was officially declared dead she went partying and one night after already had a new boyfriend.
This guy didn't give a shit about the dead man and didn't care about maintaining any more respect for him outside what the girl superficially expected.
This guy uses people, rips people off, he has zero empathy, a giant over inflated ego, and worse is just being caught around any of that and having to go through the cringe of his BS.
He always tells you and others "his plans and goals" because ofcoarse it puts him on a pedestal to feel like he's a success. But you seldom ever see him pull off anything he says and outright drop 90% when you expect him to do what he's saying. Then he acts like it never happened, rinse and repeat.
He's the type of guy to pep talk the entire work crew into working all weekend "to get 'er done!" And the first to not show up. He does this regularly.
He went on a tirade all day about this new job hes looking at and accused everyone of being lazy, unmotivated and uncommitted. He talked really big and made a lot of promises only to change his mind the day after.
I broke my leg and the guy has yet to "believe" anything is wrong. He thinks I just skipped work to do drugs despite the fact that I don't do drugs and I'm around him enough that he should know that I don't do drugs. I never got the smallest "are you okay" from the guy.
Funny enough, he nearly cried the day after because his boss wouldn't come pick him up to take him to work. He was entrenched in a ridiculous amount of self pity. He was sniffling so I'm assuming he was holding back some tears. He was saying things like "no one ever helps me" yet my other buddy is basically his fare-free taxi driver and other people are helping him through everything. So, the guy with the broken leg gets no sympathy but a grown ass man that refuses to take pu lic transit and miss work because of it should be pitied on account of his boss wouldn't pick him up.
So, these two have been dating for a few months now and they compliment each other so well. He's apathetic and she's cruel and sadistic. She loves his "status" appeal especially because it's all bullshit. He pretty much just sees her as a sex object and she's so delusional she thinks they're in love. Her bogus and superficial good girlfriend acts work on him only because he doesn't care to see things too deeply and because he's so emotionally detached and she's so delusional she can convince herself she's the best girlfriend ever. Neither one of them have any morals, although the girl pretends to be a paragon of righteousness even though she's pure evil.
They work out because they're both so fake that while he doesn't need to genuinely care about anything, she can pretend to genuinely care and neither of them care to scrutinize the truth of the matter. Meanwhile I have to watch her lie, come up with delusion fabrications, and I have to watch him spout his mouth with bullshit anytime he talks. There's also the fact they love hearing each other bullshit everyone because it's like they get second hand ego boosts from each other.

Please red my earlier post for more details.
So I (F31l left him 3 w ago and it's been painful ever since. It wasn't good staying in the relationship but it's even more painful now. I've missed him ever since and regretted it almost immediately. I somehow understand what I've been dealing with through or relationship yet I blame myself so much I still want to "change myself and save the relationship".
After the breakup he went completely cold, it's like he became another person. He said he was done although he didn't wanted to block me when I asked him to. I just can't stay away and I keep hurting myself by writing in desperate attempt to get us back. I almost feel like the abusive one since I'm the one who's love bombing and I don't even understand why. I really love him, but I understand he's not good for me. I want to be with him so badly but also I just want to forget about him.
When he answer (sometimes he don't) he goes hot/cold. When I'm asking "do you want me to stop writing and leave you alone?", he doesn't say no directly more like "I love you but I don't know what to do, I don't trust you anymore". This makes me crazy cause I want to keep proving my love for him - which is what I did during the relationship.
He also went back to drugs so I'm dying inside cause I feel guilty about it. I want to help him but sometimes it feels like the best way to help him is to dissappear. I called him to see how he was feeling cause I was worried and he started to scream "what do u want? U don't wanna help me u only care for yourself" and hang up. And I, like a fool keep thinking no he's just in a bad place. How can I leave him when he's like that?
I texted him after trying to explain my worries and that I still do care for him and he wrote back talking about love, sadness och confusion (hot/cold). He say he still love me but don't know what to do.
I'm so desperate and stuck, yesterday I relapsed hard and wrote a long confession text where I wanted to - and was ready - to do anything to save our relationship asking him what he needed from me as a partner to work. He answered "he to thinks about it a lot, that he miss me, love me, but that he don't know cause he can't TRUST me and dont know what to do". He also said "yeah that sound wonderful but how does that love of yours actually work practically?" (Don't know if the translate was good - sorry for that).
I then asked for straight answers to put it I'm my own face since I wished somewhere he would answer "NO fck of" or something. I wrote "if u don't believe my love is truth for u, do u even want me/my love? Does my fighting even mean anything?". And he stopped answering again.
I'm feeling discussed by myself. I'm ashamed yet I'm proud. I'm feeling sick and psychotic. I'm ashamed cause I feel like he's just validating himself on my emotions, yet I don't believe he's bad, just hurting, then I'm feeling "proud" cause no matter what - I follow my foolish heart. I love and want to fight for my love. But love isn't supposed to be like this. This is pure hell.
The facts in my head about what's right/wrong is a big mess right now. I know what I would say to my best friend if she told me "my story". But I'm lost. I'm lost cause he's hurting, he's damaged and I love him. I want to make everything right but I can't. I want to believe my love will save us. I want to keep changing to prove myself and my true intentions. Why doesn't he believe me? 😭
I'm feeling sick. What am I doing? Why am I chasing him? What do I even believe will happen? - IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE. I validate his behavior towards me just by being myself. Then again goes the thoughts "he's just hurting cause you're the one who left him", "you're psycho look at how desperate you are".
I start to believe I'm the copendent narcissist since I react like this. I'm so done with myself.
All I ever wanted was us to be in peace, at least most of the time and when it wasn't - battle life together. I wanted to give him everything and have a family. I miss him so much it hurts! I sometimes feel like I'll never heal fully from this love. I still haven't even accepted it for what it is - cause what is it? What's the truth? Did I ruin it all? What's going on and what can I do to fix it? If not the relationship then my head/heart.
God help me I just want to dissappear I can't do this 😭😭

Initial Contact: Description, First Impressions
I was outside, grinding corn, grinding it with the mano, over and over. I couldn't hear the screams of Chimalli, my older brother. He was sprinting, so fast, he tripped over the metate and spilled the corn. “Watch it, you fool!” I shouted, worried that I may get beaten. Nantli didn’t like food waste, and she wouldn’t care that it was foolish Chimalli’s fault. He was gasped for air, his hands on his knees. “Acalan… and I…were hunting…” He stopped and took a deep breath. “We were by the water when we saw this fish, a fish of great size. It wasn’t in the water, it was on top of it! It was brown, and atop it was 10 feet monsters with light skin!” I barked a laugh. “You’d better stop lying, Chimalli.” I decided to put the already ground corn back on the metate and take off the grass left in it. “I swear on the gods I'm not lying! I swear on Huitzilopochtli! Quetzalcoatl! All of them, I swear!”
I rolled my eyes, put the mano on the matate, and got up. “Show me what you’re talking about, fool.” Chimalli grabbed my hand tight and started running as fast as he could. I was whispering prayers to Patecatl, scared that what Chimalli was saying was true. We met up with Acalan and hid behind a bush near the lake. We could see the white-skinned people, and they were covered with weird clothing. They spoke loudly, in a peculiar way. They waved their hands around like birds and marched fiercely like jaguars. My heart was beating so loud, I was scared that Acalan and Chimalli would hear it. “They look so weird,” I whispered. The marched along, with their weird looking animals, amd were headed towards our causeway! Chimalli, Acalan and I exchanged a worried glance. Slowly and carefully, we all left our bush and headed back to the calpolli.
I went inside and saw Nantli sitting down, weaving. When she saw me, her face twisted in rage. “You dare spill the corn, leave the metate and mano unattended, and leave with the boys!? What were you even doing?” I shifted on my feet. Nantli was scary, but hse was understanding. Sometimes. “There are monsters on our land! They have big animals, a big brown fish that can swim ontop of water, and pale skin! The don’t speak Nahuatl, too!” i blurted out everything i saw, even if it didnt make sense. Chimalli was beside me, nodding his head so vigorously that it looked like it was about to fall off. Nantli got even more angry and said, “If you don’t stop lying this instant, i will call your Tahtli!” Chimalli and i both said in unison: NO!
“I swear on Huitzilopochtli! Tepeyollotl too! I even swear on Xolotl!” Chimalli cried as we were bothe getting pulled by the ear by Nantli. We were pulled outside, when we saw Tahtli. His face looked like he’d seen death. “Your foolish, lying children came to me talking nonsense about monsters with pale skin!” Nantli said, but Tahtli wasn’t fased. Tahtli was calmer then Nantli, and he was more wise. That was probably because he was a priest. However he was severe in punsiments. Nantli was all bark and no bite. Tahtli was bite, no bark, and when he did bite, it would last forever. He shook his head. “They're telling the truth. They are like us, but they have come from another land. Spain, they call it.” Nantli’s mouth was open so wide, I was trying my hardest not to laugh. She finally let go of me and Chimalli’s ear, her brows furrowing. “Did Moctezuma talk to them? Did you talk to them? How did they come here?” I side-stepped away from her, rubbing my ear. I exchanged a mischievous glance with Chimalli, and like a tiger, we left as fast and quietly as possible. In front of the door, Acalan was waiting for us impatiently and said, “Let’s go see them again. Maybe we’ll try to talk to them.” Chimalli raised his eyebrows. “Are you nuts!?” He exclaimed. I didn’t think it was a bad idea. Maybe we could understand their intentions. We never got to do that though. We never got to do anything.
Amoxtli
​
Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs
They kidnapped our ruler. The scary, stupid, dumb-looking monsters took our ruler. Foolish Chimalli brought it upon himself to save him. Nothing reasonable ever comes out of that stupid brain of his. He got killed doing it. Atleast he was brave. Braver than me, thats for sure. They have loud, long black tubes that shoot out fire. That killed him. Nantli hasn’t been the same, she doesn’t let me go to school anymore. Tahtli has fallen sick. Why is this happening? Is this a sign? Oh why, oh why? Oh gods, why?
I woke up, the rays of sunlight shining directly into my eyes. I got up, and to my right, was Acalan. He had decided to stay with us since all members of his calpolli had died unfateful deaths. His Nantli got sick, and his Tahtli and all of his other relatives died in the battle with the monsters. Whenever I start to pity myself, I remember Acalan. He’s got it worse. “Good morning,” I said. Acalan nodded, not uttering a word. He was looking outside, and his eyes had this aloof look to them. “Where’s Nantli?” I said, looking around the room. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t hear it. I sensed that he obviously wasn’t okay, so i scooched beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “It's okay, just try not to think too much about it. I know how you feel, the gods will help us out.” I said softly. He shrugged my hand off his shoulder, and moved away from me. He was looking hard at the ground and whispered, “How can you be so sure?”
“Huh?”
“I said,” He looked at me square in the eye. “How can you be so sure? That’s what everybody’s been saying, but I'm getting tired of it. Face it, Amoxtli. The gods have done nothing for us. They’re just a bunch of stupid stories to scare us. My calpolli would still be here, alive and well. Those monsters wouldn’t have come here. The gods aren’t real.”
I sat there, stunned. What was he saying? He must be mad, because this isn’t the Acalan I know. The Acalan I know was so devout, more than I was. Maybe the grief got him bad. “And no, you don't know how I feel. You will never know how I feel. You ever think about jabbing a spear into your chest? You ever thought about jumping off the mountains, and drowning yourself underwater? You ever think of that? Huh?” Acalan continued. And before I knew it, he was sobbing. Acalan, the soon-to-be soldier who had never shed a tear, the boy whose heart was made out of stone, was crying. He was saying something in between sobs, but I couldn’t understand it. His face was buried in his hands. The truth is, no, I have never thought about any of those things. I didn’t know that Acalan was this affected by it. Maybe I’m the foolish one.
A few hours later, I told Nantli about what Acalan had been saying, except the blasphemous things. That brought out a side of her that i never knew she had. Her face softened, and she nodded with understanding. She comforted Acalan, giving him words of reassurance. Nantli sent me out to get water, since Chimalli wasn’t here to do it anymore. Every passing day I miss him more and more. As i walked through the village, I heard loud, bone-rattling screams. The monsters were pushing and shoving their way into the houses, and coming out with valuables. I stood there, frozen in place watching it all happen. A tall monster stood in front of me, and all I could do was stand there, looking stupid as we both stared at each other. He scowled and grabbed my bucket, throwing it on the floor. “Hey…!” I said quietly. He kicked my bucket and continued walking. I don’t know why I didn’t do anything. I don't know why I just stood there, acting clueless.
I left the bucket and ran, far far away, near the lake. I sat down and dipped my feet in the water, trying to calm down. I saw Acalan in the distance, sauntering towards me. He finally arrived, and joined me, dipping his feet in the lake. We greeted each other, exchanging awkward small talk and sat in silence. “Maybe this is how the world will end.” He said suddenly. I nodded. If that's the case, then I wish it would've waited sooner. I had so much to do, and so much to see, I wanted to be a doctor, and raise warriors. If the world really is ending, I would just be a foolish, scared girl with no importance. Chimalli never got a chance to be the warrior he’s always dreamed of. “If the world is ending, then it's a shame that you won’t be a warrior.” I sighed. “I don't want to be a warrior.” He said sharply. “Isn't that what you always wanted? To be a warrior?” He shook his head vigorously. I furrowed my brows. “Then what do you want to be?”
“Nothing.” He said. Nothing? How could someone not want to be anything? I decided to let it be, and we sat in silence once again.
-Amoxtli
Outcome of the conquest on Aztec Society:
I'm starting to realize that what Acalan said two years ago was true. The gods did nothing. Tahtli passed, and Nantli is sick, she's in horrible condition. I caught Acalan trying to hurt himself twice. He’s been in bad condition as well, even to the point where he hallucinates about his Nantli and his Tahtli and his Achcāuhtli. It's really bad for him. If the gods really cared, they’d put a stop to this madness. If they really cared, we’d be flourishing, and winning against those damned Spaniards. I'm starting to get sick too. At this point, if you don't die in war, you die of sickness, if you don't die of that, you die of starvation. I’ve learned some Spanish, and I'm thinking of converting to whatever their religion is. A few priests came to the village, rambling on and on about their religion. I understood a few words, but not much though.
“You’re so naive, you know that?” Acalan said when I told him about the new religion. I rolled my eyes. “You could give this a chance. Maybe their god will help us.” He shook his head. “Never. If Huitzilopochtli, all-powerful, god of war, can't even help us,” He said in a mocking tone, “Then how will another help us? It's all the same.” I shrugged. “It's worth a shot.” Just then, I heard Nantli cough a hoarse, horrible cough. I jumped up and quickly went to her. I gave her a cup of water and some piptzahuac. After a long coughing fit, she finally caught her breath and said, “I heard what you and Ancalan were saying. He is a bad influence.” My heart felt like it would leap right out of my mouth. Despite this, I kept my calm and tried not to show any emotion. “What?” I said, trying to act clueless. Looking back, it was a stupid thing to do since Nantli already heard everything.
tbc

By this, I mean not specific reminders ("hands close to keys"), fingerings, dynamics, but just comments on the piece, whether humorous or not.
I do this rarely, but have done it, mostly to amuse myself. Couple examples: "AAARGH!" over a really treacherous passage in the finale of Beethoven's op. 27/1 sonata, which I never did finish cleanly; "Sorry I killed you, Dad" in Brahms' "Edward" Ballade (op. 10/1) at the return of the opening material (referencing the poem that inspired the Ballade) "HERE BE DRAGONS" over the scary passage in Chopin's Ballade 4 with the torrent of double-notes in the right and octaves in the left (and it doesn't get any easier from there on out) "Bad guys walk into the bar" in the minor-key section of Scott Joplin's "Bethena–A Concert Waltz"
Share your own examples!

Round 2, Pick 33 - Keon Coleman, WR, Florida State:
NFL: After trading back twice on Thursday, the Bills stick at 33 and take a big, physical and athletically gifted target. Coleman isn't fast and isn't a deep threat, but he can win in a variety of ways. But who will Josh Allen's deep threat be? Stay tuned.
CBS Sports: C-. “X” receiver for a WR-needy team. Plays faster than his combine speed but doesn’t separate consistently and isn’t as good of a contested-catch wideout as his size and highlight-reel would indicate. Young though.
ESPN: After trading back twice, the Bills addressed the team's most significant position of need with Coleman, a big outside receiver with the ability to make splash plays -- 12 receiving touchdowns on contested catches since the start of 2022, second-most in the FBS, however, only a 31.7% contested catch percentage in 2023 -- to create separation and a release that general manager Brandon Beane described as "about as good as any." Beane acknowledged that while he's "probably not" going to run away from defenders, Buffalo feels his play speed is faster than the speed he showed at the combine -- 4.61 40-yard dash -- also noting that they liked his athletic ability that came from playing basketball. The Bills needed starting-level talent at outside receiver and Coleman, who turns 21 in May, fits into what Buffalo was looking for, while the team was still able to move back and add picks.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Believes that knitting is the original “Netflix and chill”.
Round 2, Pick 60 - Cole Bishop, S, Utah:
NFL: Safety was a big need for the Bills, and they go back to the Utes for help after taking Dalton Kincaid in Round 1 a year ago. Bishop is a very good athlete and field general who can play the post safety spot and cover a lot of ground. He played like the QB of the Utes' defense the past two years and could be a rookie starter for Buffalo.
CBS Sports: A-. Large, intimidating safety with magnificent movement skill. The QB of the defense. Aligns everywhere. Can wear many hats. Excelled as slot defender and vs. TEs in coverage and runs the alley on outside runs as well as any safety in the class. Ball skills and tackling must improve. Short arms. Need filled.
ESPN: Another pick for the Bills in the second round, another big need addressed. Drafting Bishop adds someone who can compete for a starting role this season, in addition to being a potential answer in the secondary after moving on from Jordan Poyer this offseason while Micah Hyde continues to contemplate retirement. Bishop has the ability to move all over the field, along with speed -- 4.45 40-yard dash -- and many of the qualities and instincts the Bills look for at the position.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: He always weebles and wobbles, but he won’t ever fall down.
Round 3, Pick 95 - DeWayne Carter, DT, Duke:
NFL: When I first watched Carter at the Senior Bowl, I wrote in my notes: "rolling ball of knives." Carter's game doesn't have a lot of pretty to it, but he's a scheme disruptor with his low center of gravity, ferocious style and nasty demeanor.
CBS Sports: B+. Active, high-energy interior rusher who’s on the ground a bit more than what’s desired because of his frenetic style. But it also gets him to the football more often than most DTs. Flashes of swim move and spin just needs to utilize them more. Length is a plus and he works hard vs. run. Some power too. Fills niche need on Buffalo’s defensive front. Needs to use his length better on passing downs.
ESPN: Using the pick acquired via the trade with the Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday, the Bills addressed another hole with Carter bringing depth at defensive tackle. The three-technique tackle will have the opportunity to continue to develop -- potentially as Ed Oliver's backup -- adding to a defensive tackle room that has limited young talent. The Bills didn't draft a defensive tackle last year due to the way the board fell, but the team was able to add to the rotation early this year.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Still says ‘weeeeeeeeeee’ when on a playground swing.
Round 4, Pick 128 - Ray Davis, RB, Kentucky:
NFL: Davis has overcome a lot to reach this level, and though he lacks long speed, he can be a Zack Moss-like player for the Bills. Davis' vision and wicked spin move have left a few defenders in a blender.
CBS Sports: C. Compact, older RB with plus stop-start ability, married to his feet well. Can deploy multiple cuts in a run to make defenders miss. Good, not amazing overall elusiveness though. Quicker than fast too. Will work hard to fight through contact. Has the skills to be fine complementary RB in NFL.
ESPN: With Davis, the Bills add a needed bigger back -- 5-foot-8, 211-pounds -- to pair with James Cook, but also someone who has the ability to catch the football (seven touchdown catches in 2023, tied with Najee Harris for the most by any SEC running back in a season in the last 25 years). Buffalo had a variety of veterans complimenting Cook last season, but Davis, 24, will give Buffalo a power runner and another younger presence in the room, albeit with plenty of collegiate experience from two seasons at Temple, two at Vanderbilt and one at Kentucky.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: This divorce is taking forever Erica why are you doing this?
Round 5, Pick 141 - Sedrick Van Pran-Granger, C, Georgia:
NFL: He's a tough, durable competitor with good anchor strength and three years starting experience for an SEC power, although SVP's lack of athleticism and smaller frame might make him a center-only projection.
CBS Sports: A-. Multi-year starter in the SEC with wrestler’s mentality. Battles through the whistle every snap. Mobility stands out. Explosive short-area quicks. Doesn’t have supreme length and clearly has to add weight/strength to his game. Methodically carries out run-game duties with ease. Second-level climbs etc. Older prospect but comes with high floor.
ESPN: This offseason, the Bills moved on from the team's starting center, Mitch Morse, and backup Ryan Bates. Last year's left guard Connor McGovern is set to slide over to the starting role. Adding Van Pran-Granger brings depth at center -- he allowed one sack his entire career in 1,337 pass-blocking plays, according to Sports Info Solutions -- and a strong candidate for the future at the position with significant starting experience (he started the last three seasons at center for Georgia).
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Is constantly telling people how different things are on Linux.
Round 5, Pick 160 - Edefuan Ulofoshio, LB, Washington:
NFL: In recent years, Buffalo has taken some interesting shots on linebackers in Rounds 3-7, and Ulofoshio continues that trend. He was one of the final players in my top 100 prospect list with his excellent speed, intense style and special teams experience, even if injuries have clouded his projection.
CBS Sports: A-. Six-year LB who starred for a long time as a full-time player in Washington’s program. Big-time tester and it shows on the field. Just takes a second to diagnose. Keen block-avoider as he’s sifting through traffic. Smooth athlete all around but doesn’t quite play to his workout. Reliable tackler who also flashed coverage skill down the seam. High-floor pick here. Crowded LB room.
ESPN: The Bills lost major special teams contributors this offseason, including linebacker Tyrel Dodson and defensive back Siran Neal, while captain linebacker Tyler Matakevich remains a free agent. Ulofoshio adds depth to the linebacker room, but perhaps more importantly, he can find a role on this roster as someone who can make an impact on special teams, an area of priority for the Bills. He has experience from playing six years at Washington, and while he dealt with multiple significant injuries in 2021 and 2022, he played every game in 2023 and earned Washington's Guy Flaherty Most Inspirational Award, the program's oldest and most prestigious honor.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: DROP TABLE card_facts; [please crash your pc, reader].
Round 5, Pick 168 - Javon Solomon, DE, Troy:
NFL: Solomon was a highly productive rusher the past few years in an unusual frame. He's short and undersized at 6-foot-1 and 247 pounds but with nearly 34-inch arms and huge hands. That extra length helps Solomon get to the quarterback, along with his quick burst and non-stop motor. An interesting study for sure.
CBS Sports: A. Burst, bend, speed predicated outside EDGE. Small frame but serious length. Unique build. Doesn’t get engulfed by bigger blockers as much as expected because of his speed-to-power conversion. Hand work is good, not amazing and can flatten to the QB. Motor hums on every play. Bills needed this type of quick winner on the outside.
ESPN: Solomon provides depth at edge rusher, another position of need for Buffalo. He led the FBS with 16 sacks last season and totaled 31.5 sacks since the start of 2021 (also most in the FBS), in addition to 49 career tackles for loss (third in Sun Belt history). Being a Day 3 selection, finding a special teams role will be important for Solomon. He'll also have the opportunity to develop behind the likes of Greg Rousseau, Von Miller -- someone that Solomon has modeled his game after -- and AJ Epenesa.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: He once painted the walls of a Buccees stall, hasn’t been back since.
Round 6, Pick 204 - Tylan Grable, OT, UCF:
NFL: He's a converted Jacksonville State tight end who became a solid left tackle the past two years at UCF. Grable is a quality athlete with great length and potential to be groomed at center, even if he's still learning how to play O-line.
CBS Sports: B. Height and length type at OT who probably plays guard at the next level. Smooth athleticism and can sustain speed throughout the play. Not just quick. Hands are more active and heavy than they are accurate. Good depth add here with positional versatility. Can grow into his frame.
ESPN: Grable started his collegiate career as a walk-on tight end at Jacksonville State, but transitioned to offensive line starting in 2019 and then started 27 games at left tackle while at UCF. He will compete for a roster spot in an offensive line room with veteran players, and said he's prepared to make a switch to a different position if needed. General manager Brandon Beane said that Grable is "gonna have to continue to work on his lower body strength, his power to move guys in the run game, but has great feet you know for pass pro."
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Still refers to Google DUO as Google MEET.
Round 6, Pick 219 - Daequan Hardy, CB, Penn State:
NFL: His return skills might be what keeps him in the league, as Hardy lacks the mass and strength to hold up full time on defense, but sub-4.4 speed is always appealing in a DB.
CBS Sports: A-. Case for most sudden, twitch-up athlete at CB in the class. Super speedy too. Plus recovery talent. Explosiveness in every movement. Not always sticky in coverage but does have high-caliber reps. Check Ohio State game. Erratic tackling and hard to get off blockers because of his size. Chippy in trying to make plays on screens.
ESPN: Hardy brings depth at the cornerback position and skills as a returner. In 2023, he tied the Penn State record for most punt return touchdowns in a season (two) and finished seventh in punt return average (14.6) in school history. Beane noted that if not for the new return rules, he's not sure if they would have picked Hardy, but "this guy can play one of the backup corner spots, but also he's a really nice returner." Buffalo lost multiple players at the returner spot in free agency, and with more focus on it going into this season, Hardy will have the opportunity to compete for the role.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Owns the complete N64 collection including a CIB Conkers.
Round 7, Pick 221 - Travis Clayton, OT, England:
NFL: The Brit, who is 6-foot-7 and 301 pounds with 35-inch arms, ran a 4.81-second 40-yard dash at South Florida's pro day and immediately put himself on scouts' radars late in the process. He's a total project but might be a terrific find with some seasoning, thanks to those unusual athletic traits.
CBS Sports: C+. At 6-foot-7 and 300 pounds with 35-inch arms and a sub 5.00 40-yard dash, this is a ridiculous athlete who is new to football from London.
ESPN: Despite the Bills never seeing Clayton play football, he's an intriguing addition to develop. The initial projection is as an offensive tackle for the 6-foot-7, 303-pound boxer and former rugby player from England after offensive line coach Aaron Kromer came away from watching tape of his workouts. Notably, he ran a 4.79 40-yard dash, faster than all offensive linemen who competed at the combine in the last 10 years. He'll have an opportunity to show the Bills exactly how his skills will translate and what he may be capable of in the NFL, especially as he does not count for a roster spot as part of the International Player Pathway program.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Just like a fantasy draft, the true sleepers can be found in round seven.

After playing League for ~3 years I decided to stop and learn a new game and now have been playing Dota for about 8 months. As I've been learning I've been comparing and contrasting them, and I felt like writing up my thoughts.
I'm not a high ranked player; I was emerald in League and I don't really played ranked in dota. It doesn't matter, since this post isn't about tactics/strategy or how to win-- I'm just talking about the differences between the mechanics of the two games and their clients.
Disclaimer, this is all about Soloqueue. Pro play is a different environment and many things are different. I'm just talking about the average player's experience.
In Dota's Favor:

• Much better tools for learning. The tutorial is better. You're able to click other heroes to see their abilities in-game. The guide system to tell you what to buy and how to use it, as well as how to use your abilities. League does have recommended items and recommended order for ability-leveling, but the fact that you can choose between different guides for different roles in dota is huge, and the user-written text telling you when and how to use specific items for a hero is also majorly helpful.
  
• The game is less punishing to learn than league, for a multitude of reasons. Don't get me wrong, it still has an enormous barrier to entry and a steep learning curve, but it's just less painful. If you haven't played both it's hard to relate. League has two 1v1 lanes and very little sustain - there's no couriers to bring you tangos and mangos. You have to walk, but missing even a little XP can be devastating, so leaving lane at all can end your lane for you. If you're new and you're laning against someone who isn't new, it is absolutely brutal and you basically cannot play the game. Everyone who ever learned League without prior moba experience remembers what it was like in those first couple months being alone in lane against people who have been playing for years - especially in top lane or mid lane - and just getting fucking demolished 1v1 and not even being able to play. That can happen in dota too, but it just doesn't happen as much by comparison. And while there are roaming supports in dota, there's no jungler role, a very stressful role which in league which often leads to that player being blamed for everything that goes wrong in a match.
  
• Way, way, way more interesting items. There are so many active items in Dota, and they feel much more impactful. Having a tool like orchid malevolence or eul's is just enormously powerful. By comparison nearly every item in league is just a statstick. The only comparable items in league are Zhonya's Hourglass (kind of like a self-only Eul's) and Guardian Angel (literally Aegis - the resurrection effect isn't as game-changing in league as it is in dota). There's also a couple of items that give shields (damage barriers), but pretty much everything else is just....more damage, more armor, more health, more attack speed, etc. The item selection is just downright boring by comparison.
  
• Way more beautiful map. It's not even close. Dota's map has so much going on. There's so many different places and different entities and landforms, and it's just beautiful. Trees, high ground, outposts, trails through the woods, a radiant side and a dire side, day/night cycle....League's map feels small, empty, and stale by comparison.
  
• Fights are slower and longer in Dota. You last longer. You don't get one-shot as much. It's nice. It can be very frustrating in league being killed in a half second before you can do literally anything, over and over, game after game (if you get a bit unlucky and are playing a squishy champ/role and they have one or more assassins).
  
• More team-oriented. Due to the prevalence of long-lasting debuffs from both items and hero abilities, no one person can really just solo carry to the same extent as in League. In my experience it's much less common to see someone 1v9 in Dota, and usually it's because the enemy team is just making stupid choices. In League it happens close to every other game.
  
• Built-in voice chat. This actually does come in handy a lot. Hate not having it in league.
  
• Turbo mode. This mode is just great. Wish league had it. Great for learning and testing and playing casually when you don't have time or interest in a serious game.
  
• Not having to recall (teleport to base for hp/mana) is nice. More time spent out on the map playing. Having teleport constantly available lets you take part in more plays. Couriers are great. It's awesome having items shipped out to you instead of having to spend time retrieving them.
  
• Better demo tool by far. League's practice tool is notoriously shitty. Being able to open the demo tool while you're waiting in queue in Dota is amazing. Can't do that in league.
  
• The backpack is sick. Love being able to hold 3 additional items. Just gives you nice flexibility with consumables and components.
  
• Neutral items. This just doesn't exist in league and I wish it did because these are really fun and cool.
  
• Agh's shard and scepter, and the talent tree. None of these things exist in League and they add so much and make the game much more fun to progress through.
  
• More late game avenues to spend gold. Buybacks, Agh's shard and blessing, edible moon shard, boots of travel 1 & 2, item sharing, etc etc. I realize it's fairly rare to reach that level of full build in ranked, but in low level games it's more common and especially in turbo and honestly it's just great to have stuff to spend the gold on. In league you hit the 6 item cap and that's it, any gold beyond that is mostly wasted. It feels bad.
  
• On a related note, it's also really nice how the dota items are useful already at their not-yet-fully-built stage, like how Eul's is a crucial item that doesn't really NEED to be upgraded to Wind Waker, but optionally CAN be later when you have the gold and nothing of higher priority to spend it on anymore. In League you don't get effects like the active on Eul's until you've completed it into its final form (i.e. Wind Waker). This means that in League, with rare exception, you don't really have much choice but to fully finish items one by one, whereas in Dota it's the norm to only build the intermediate item and not FULLY complete it until super late game if at all.
  
• The announcer saying "Holy SHIT" when you go on a 10 kill streak. I find this hilarious.
  
• Better ability tooltips. When the talent tree adds +40 damage to a skill, that skill's text is updated to reflect that. I love this. League has a lot of little issues with incomplete tooltips that don't tell you the full story of how an ability works. You have to reference the wiki constantly. I have to reference it SOMETIMES in dota (like I had no idea why Pudge's E could completely block the damage from his W until I read on the wiki that the rot damage is divided into 5x per second, not 1 instance once per second), but in League I have to reference it pretty much...uh....ngl, constantly. Even as someone who has played it for thousands of hours. Feelsbad.
  
• Better cosmetics store. League's just has a splash art image of a skin and a purchase button. You have to go to youtube to see how it actually looks, and you cannot try it out at all without buying it. The fact that Dota allows you to launch into the demo tool with any cosmetic is amazing and something League players would literally trade sexual favors for.
  
• Cosmetics for things other than the heroes/champions themselves. In League you can only buy champion skins. In Dota you can buy cosmetics for the ancient, the towers, the creeps, the map, etc. None of that exists in League. We fucking WISH we could buy that kind of stuff. Riot are you listening?
  

In League's favor:

• Better lore. It's not a contest really. League's champions all have names and stories that are placed front and center, whereas Dota hero names are kind of buried and infrequently referenced. They're more like archetypes than individuals with their own identities. I mean...there's LITERALLY a dude called "Anti-Mage." There's a dude on a bat and his name is Batrider. The videos and media around champion releases in league are just way cooler. Check out the fiddlesticks rework video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNn2F39G-6s
  
• WAYYYYY better champion animations and sound design. This is for me where League blows Dota out of the water. Go ult someone as Axe - he does a little hop and swing animation. Then check this out, the corresponding ultimate in League from Darius, at the 3min mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRu0IznjCSc There's really just nothing in Dota that feels like Jhin, or Ekko, or so many others. With rare exception, almost all the champions in league have aspects that FEEL amazing - great sound design / animations / feedback delays that are incredibly rewarding. Dota's heros are really fun to play and I'm having a great time, but if you put them side by side with a pretty large percent of League's cast, the animations of many of their abilities and movements just feel kinda flat and low-budget by comparison.
  
• Cooler duels. Dueling is a big part of league and it doesn't seem to be such a big part of Dota by comparison. Whenever a fight starts, people teleport in and it becomes a teamfight, or someone disengages and gets away somehow using one of the many items like force staff or eul's. In league, two lanes are 1v1 and the jungler also often 1v1s, so there's a kind of constant dueling and it really lets you find fun ways to express skill and mastery. There's only one item that will get you out of a sticky situation instead of many, and only a portion of champions can reasonably build that item in the first place.
  
• More 1v9 potential. Because there's so much less CC by comparison to dota, and champion counters aren't as hard as in dota, a single player can completely take over a game and win versus multiple opponents at once single-handedly. This can be really, really exciting and it's one of the high points of League that makes the game addictive.
  
• Having to recall (teleport to base for mana/health/buy items) actually can be kinda nice too, by comparison. It lets you take a breather and just look over the state of the game while you walk back to lane.
  
• Being able to see on the tab scoreboard what items and creep score people have is really, really nice. It's really fucking annoying in Dota having to click champion portraits to see what items they have, and if you click ANYTHING else it hides it again so you have to do it while standing still or moving in a straight line. Probably dota loyalists will say this is part of the skill of the game, but honestly imo it's just annoying/bad UI design that people sort of just got used to and became convinced was "part of the game."
  
• Skillshots! In Dota most abilities are just unit targeted or AOE, while disjointing does exist, aiming isn't really as big a mechanic. There ARE abilities you have to aim, which in league we'd call skillshots, but they're far fewer. In league skillshots are kind of the norm, and aiming them and dodging them is a huge part of the game and it's fun to do so and makes you feel cool when you land them or dodge them. Having nearly everything be unit targeted isn't bad, it's just different, but it is something I enjoy a lot in League.
  
• You can buy as many wards as you want. I hate having to share wards with the team in dota, and the store being out of them. I understand it's part of the game and managing that is part of the skill of dota, but I find it tedious and don't really enjoy it as a mechanic. Similarly, in League basic wards don't take up an inventory slot and instead get their own special slot like TP scrolls in Dota, which is really nice. It's pretty frustrating losing an inventory slot to wards.
  
• Manaless champions. There are a couple dozen champions in League that don't use mana, and many people enjoy playing them. Dota doesn't really have that.
  
• Simplicity. League has a smaller and simpler map, fewer mechanics, FAR fewer active item abilities, and more rigidity to its champion roles and how the game is played in soloqueue. Dota is kind of intimidating to learn from the sheer amount of stuff it has going on. Not everyone has the time or interest for it all.
  
• Rotating game modes. ARAMs (all random all mid: a constant 5v5 teamfight on a map that only has one lane in the form of a bridge connecting the two teams' bases and nowhere else to go) are pretty great. Dota's modes seem to be a bit more static and homogenous, but idk, it's possible I just haven't been playing long enough yet?
  
• Better champion skins, frankly. Some of League's skins are just amazing, and they ALL come with complete visual makeovers for all of the champion's abilities. While you can buy individual ability effect cosmetics in Dota, the options are somewhat limited by comparison. Any skin purchase in League will redo all the abilities to varying extents. Sometimes it's a small change, but higher-end skins make very significant changes. Dota does have some cool skins and a ton of cool minor cosmetics, but I would say League wins here.
  

Conclusions:
On the whole I'd say there's more things to like about Dota than about League just in sheer quantity of bullet points, but I love both games and I think they're both really fun. If Dota improved their lore, their animations, and their tab screen and League improved their cosmetics store and their map and added neutral items, the talent tree, and agh's shard & scepter, I wouldn't really have any major complaints about either of them.
I think anyone who loves one game could potentially love the other one too and it's totally worth learning whichever one you don't already know, if you have the time. Obviously these games take a ton of time and most people barely have time for one let alone two. But if you're young especially, they're both really fun.
It's pretty hard for me to see eye-to-eye with the people who love one game and ferociously hate on the other - it seems childish and kind of empty. To not find one as fun as the other, sure, that's normal, but to expend energy hating the other one and constantly shitting on it, that just confuses me. You can have a favorite while still acknowledging the other as a comparably enjoyable game.
One final note - one of the things I found most interesting about comparing them is seeing which mechanics are normal in one game that would be overpowered in the other game.
In League there is a champion named Zilean whose ult is to enchant an ally such that if they die in the next 5 seconds they're resurrected - basically Aegis, but on a one minute cooldown, for anyone on your team who needs it. Zilean would likely have a >90% wr in dota.
But then in Dota Nature's Prophet's teleport has a 90s/60s/30s cooldown and he can access it from level one if he chooses to, and eventually has a talent that removes its cooldown completely. Meanwhile this exists in League as one of the strongest ults in the game and with one of the longest cooldowns of any champion ability. Nature's prophet would have a >90% wr in League.

This post has the title corrected, it is not an attempt at spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Yes, some of you may have seen my previous post asking for advice for a RoomHacks editor. I make this publication because, in truth, I believe that for a single person it is quite difficult to achieve this.do so much (and more for someone who is going to start. The program is very good, although I get confused with quite a few things and need time to learn)
What I'm great at is inventing and writing history, one that is emotional and compassionate, but at the same time has a good happy ending (obviously normal PMDs have those characteristic sad/happy endings, which are great). On the other hand, I can understand that many are distrustful, since perhaps they only work with people they trust. However, to give you an example, I can say that I have written some librettos for opera (one of them commissioned), works in verse, such as poems and some romantic songs.
I apologize if my request sounds very shameless, or even if I don't see the right to ask where I could find a partner. I beg you not to think badly, I would really like to embark on such an experience. If you want to know the synopsis (what I will do in Fanfic), I leave it below:
A long time ago, Arceus, father of all Pokémon and lord of the Universe, released a powerful energy never seen before: the Aurel. In that way, the celestial vault of the world could support the weight of the entire cosmos, granting life, peace and health to the inhabitants of the planet. One fine day, Xerneas and Darkrai (sons of Arceus), faced each other in a fierce battle whose reason remains in the deepest darkness... It is This caused a fatal imbalance in the vault, leaving it severely damaged. Everyone tried to stop them, but in the end there was a ceasefire. However, as time passed, Arceus realized of this, but instead of showing his rage and anger, he decided to carry out a plan to fix it...
The natural disasters were many, but over time they ceasedwithout knowing that they were facing the one chosen by Arceus, but Darkrai's Fury was reborn, ready to defeat the God of Life once and for all.... Thus we reach our days, in which a human turned into Charmander fell into that new world... A Pokémon family adopted him as their own son,without knowing that they were facing the one chosen by Arceus... To save the world and stop both from a devastating new fight, in exchange for something very special: staying in the Pokémon world.
Let's see what you think.

The back story: I have been sick for days and finally took the day off and went to urgent care. I have been up since 4:00 am due to feeling really miserable. The earliest I could be seen is early afternoon. I get prescribed a few meds for my symptoms and conveniently there is a pharmacy next door to urgent care. When I get there the entire pharmacy staff is on lunch break for another 20 min so I decided to putter around the store and grab a few items.
When the pharmacy opens, I join the line with just 2-3 people in front of me. I do notice there is a boomer man sitting in a chair nearby but not standing in the line. To be honest, I thought maybe he was there for a vaccine or consult , or just married and waiting for the boomer woman who ended up ahead of me in line, and she said "you know, that man was here before you got here. In fact he was here before I got here." I just responded with a deadpan, "ok." And then she turned around huffily and he got up and stood right behind me.
I have an upper respiratory infection and laryngitis so I didn't make further conversation like to ask why she didn't invite him to move ahead of her then. But I also just wanted to get home and take meds and rest before my kids get home from school.
I am also super mad at myself that I missed the obvious opportunity to say "ok boomer."
You have to be standing in line if you want to be in line, right? Lol.
(Edit for typo)

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.

I dove into FO76 for the first time a couple weeks ago. I expected a LOT of learning was going to be required to catch up to where the game is at now and I was not wrong haha. When I created my first character I read a lot of "just pick whatever, you can switch later, level 50 is where it starts". So I mostly picked shotgun related cards.
Now I am level 50, and I can't really switch builds as I don't have damage perk cards for other types of weapons? Am I missing something....or do I now still need to gain enough more levels to unlock more perk cards for the other builds in interested in. Would it be better to start a different character?

Good morning, men and women of this subreddit I hope you're having a good day.
I come to you with a situation that happened to me a couple of days ago and that I haven't been able to get out of my head. To begin with, I'm a man (25) and for a couple of years now, I made the decision to put aside everything related to romantic matters or going out on dates with other people, because the last time I opened my heart, things went really wrong, very wrong, and let's say that my love mourning has been long (Much longer than I would like.) Anyway, the situation was like this.
A couple of days ago, around 7:30 pm, it was raining and I left my job to buy a coffee, as I do once a week at a bar & restaurant. When I entered, I ordered my coffee and waited. Then, a well-dressed Asian woman (by well-dressed I mean a high-value businesswoman) approached me and asked if I was a certain Fabian. I quickly told her no, and a look of disappointment crossed her face. Uncomfortably due to the confusion, she apologized to me. I just told her not to apologize and asked her about the issue. She became uncomfortable and after much hesitation, she told me that she had a date but the guy hadn't shown up after 15 minutes.
After receiving my coffee, we talked, and a little while later, she invited me to her table. I had time to spare before taking the bus home. To keep this short, it turns out that her appearance didn't lie, and this woman had a lot of money and was living in my country for business purposes, she had been here for a year and a half. She told me about the many things she had and how, at her age, it was very difficult for her to find a partner, let alone someone to marry (she looked to be in her late 30s). I won't lie, I liked meeting her, however, I felt uncomfortable when I had to tell her about myself.
With some discomfort, I told her about myself, about living with my parents and how I was saving up to buy a house or an apartment, about my job as an IT support and my decision not to have romantic relationships. I'm sure I saw how disappointed she was to hear this. I wasn't comfortable telling her all this, but in my head, "It was only fair." The thing is, there was a silence, not an uncomfortable one, but a sad one. In the end, she asked if I wanted to accompany her home to hang out. I, on the other hand, even more uncomfortable, just told her no, because I had never had relationships before (We never got that far with my previous partner, I know, sad) and also because I shouldn't choose a partner in this way just because she was desperate. She just said she felt very lonely.
The truth is, I understood her, I have also felt more alone lately. Anyway, I saw the time on my phone and told her I had to go or I would miss my bus, we said goodbye, and I wished her luck in her search for love.
Several days have passed since then, and for some reason, I haven't been able to get this woman out of my head, mostly because somehow I thought I had finished with romantic issues in my life, but this situation has made me feel sad and lonely again. Maybe I saw myself reflected in her or something, I really don't know. There are a couple of things I left out to not make this longer than it should be, but anyway, I wanted to tell this because I still have doubts about why these feelings of sadness and loneliness have returned to me.
Anyway, I wish you all a good day and a better week.

I'm going to try to translate those top comment from Hupu for MSI, I might skip some of them as they are Chinese internet memes that I've no idea how to translate, and those comment related to Honor of Kings, a popular league like mobile game made by Tencent.
The rating is user poll generated, you can give a rating between 2 and 10, and average is used. A total of 328k people participated in this series' rating.
Hupu rating is an in APP feature so it doesn't really have a link, but here is the post match thread for the match, and on the top there is an link you can click on that get you to that page. link

MATCH 1: TES vs. G2

Top Esports

	Player Rating	Top Comment
369 K'Sante	5.3	369: You guys are are so good. : We are so good?
Tian Xin Zhao	2.6	That fight with Trist, if you just smited him, Trist would be dead, why play if you don't know the basic combo.
Creme Azir	3.1	Can't lane, but ok in team fights, had some good shuffle, their mid is just playing out of their mind today.
JackeyLove Varus	2，4	Loser Grand Slam is not been awarded by someone else, you need to earn it! (There was some drama with LPL Caster Teddy Guan joking on Sunday that JKL might become the only LPL player to ever lose against LCS, LEC and LCK in a BO5, hence the loser Grand Slam).
Meiko Nautilus	2.5	First time I saw people saying a game is not bot's foul when they got lane killed twice in 4 minutes.
Despa1r	5.3	This game is probably a lose regardless of BP, they are not playing like human.

G2 Esports

	Player Rating	Top Comment
BrokenBlade Camille	9.8	We are Suzhou University of Science and Technology, we have an opening for a guest professor, would you be available for a quick discussion? (There is a Camille one trick in China with ID：Suzhou University of Science and Technology).
Yike Ivern	9.8	Putting bushes in TES base made them think they are playing Vietnam.
Caps Tristana	9.8	TES, you are the challenger. (Sukuna jpg.)
Hans Sama Kalista	9.7	Give Uzi 50 to get a cab himself and go back home. (Ale reference, he was once trying out for RNG and told he is not needed before he played, and given 50 as Uber fee to go home).
Mikyx Leona	9.8	Dear god, how did I do today, would you come and be my AD? (Uzi reference, his nickname in China is YYDS, meaning forever God, not always a complement.)
Dylan Falco	9.8	Kept picking new stuff, I'm becoming a fan.

MATCH 2: TES vs. G2

Top Esports

	Player Rating	Top Comment
369 K'Sante	7.6	Please come back, my Kanavi, Knight, Ruler, Missing.
Tian Jarvan IV	2.8	The first tower dive is really horrible, but watching Jacky fan blaming support, mid and jungle, while he missed axes, its just too funny.
Creme Corki	3.3	The best rated TES mid, if the two prior mid played like this, they will get flamed to retire.
JackeyLove Draven	2.3	Both AD doesn't have passive, it is fair.
Meiko Renata Glasc	2.5	I know what you are think, you want to wait for Kog gets 6 items, and Hostile Takeover their entire team right?
Despa1r	2.7	The Trist one trick, don't pick Trist, who else is going to contest the Draven pick?

G2 Esports

	Player Rating	Top Comment
BrokenBlade Twisted Fate	9.3	If you win regardless of what or how you play, do we really need to blame you?
Yike Rek'Sai	9.9	Holy Crap, that 4 man knock up.
Caps Tristana	9.6	Already preparing for Sask. (Mid for Uzi's team in the Old Guy Cup, I think they are joking about a scrim between them on G2's Weibo).
Hans Sama Kog'Maw	9.9	Both AD without passive???
Mikyx Braum	9.9	Int one in the end, with FPX emote. XD.
Dylan Falco	9.6	You knows how to BP to win. The only way TES wins is from bot lane, so you 5 ban bot, first pick mid Trist.

MATCH 3: TES vs. G2

Top Esports

	Player Rating	Top Comment
369 Udyr	2.3	The reason I don't ever think you are better than Bin is because you never stood up when you team is on the brink.
Tian Rek'Sai	3.5	SSSSVIP ticket, you get to spectate in game.
Creme Corki	2.4	Hanu has gotten their Rocket Launcher, he want to defeat the evil Boss Stone.
JackeyLove Kalista	2.6	JackyLove has become the only player to ever lost to LEC, LCS, LCK in an international BO5, congratulation on your loser Grand Slam.
Meiko Camille	3.0	Dive mid and trade kill isn't really worth
Despa1r	2.5	Why do you still have a job?

G2 Esports

	Player Rating	Top Comment
BrokenBlade K'Sante	9.8	체력 4700 방어력 329 마 저201 인챔피언이 저지불가, 쉴드, 벽 넘 기는 거 있고요. 에어본 있고, 심지어 쿨타임은 데 초밖에 안되고 마나는 15들고 w는 심지어 변신 하면 쿨 초기화에다가 패시브는 고정피해가 들 어가며 그 다음에 방마저 올리면 올릴수록 스킬 가속이 생기고! q에 스킬가속이 생기고 스킬 속도가 빨라지고 그다음에 공격력 계 수가 있어가지고 W가 그 이익-으아아아악!!!
Yike Ivern	9.9	The jungle guerrilla warfare from Ivern king, Fear beyond death for TES.
Caps Tristana	9.8	With the form Caps is in, I'm starting to get worried for Sask.
Hans Sama Draven	9.8	All Hans Sama: Shoutu.
Mikyx Neeko	9.7	FPX emote every game, this G2 is on to something, they look really good.
Dylan Falco	9.7	Ok, after this game we know how you will place in LPL now.

(sorry this is long, I just started and couldn’t stop)
I'm a 57F professional working as a Contracts Specialist for a large Tech Company. I discovered I have total Aphantasia about 2 months ago. I hate saying it that way, I "have" Aphantasia. It sounds like a disease or something. Still working on a way to word that when I share this with people who have never heard of it.
I have spent the months doing as much reading and self-searching as possible. I immediately felt relief when I discovered what Aphantasia is and have never had the feeling that I am missing out by not seeing the images, but I can sure understand why some would feel that way. For me it was the answer to questions I have been asking myself all my life. I just found out "I'm not crazy" AND "I'm not alone". I've never posted anything like this before, but when I joined, reading things like this from others when they first find out they are an Aphant was very helpful.
Some things I have thought about since learning this about myself.
Psychology Profession and Memory Loss - I have known I have a bad memory since I was a kid, I never understood why I couldn't remember things until someone "triggered" the memory. Once triggered, I can remember things fairly well. As many young adults, I had some issues adjusting to college life and chose to seek help with a professional. This was my first experience with being told I must be repressing a traumatic experience from my childhood. We spent many months/years and many tears trying to determine what that could be. Now I should add I was abused as a child and had remembered and dealt with that. My parents ended up shipping me off to my Grandparents to get away from her influence. But answer me this, if I remembered it and dealt with it and no longer had negative consequences from it, why didn’t my memory get better? Over the years I have seen a couple other therapists that wanted to concentrate on repressed memories because of my memory. I went along for a while but finally became convinced that there were no other memories to find. But that profession took a lot of my money, time and emotional wellbeing - yet nothing was ever discovered. I doubted people in my life that I never should have. Now I believe Aphantasia should be a part of all professional training for mental health wellness. I'm old, so maybe it is now??
Fake Memories - After experiencing this kind of high pressure "therapy" I can totally understand how people create fake memories. So many thoughts and details were provided during these sessions, I could have easily started to "make" things up and that leads to believing it happened in that environment. As a woman, I am always looking to please people, I tried to please my therapists. Aphantasia or not, false memories are not as hard to plant as you might think especially when that person is trying to make you happy.
Being Present - This has been a big thing the last few years. People pushing for you to be present in your life. Professionals have also mentioned that my memory issues may be due to the fact that I have never "been present" in my life. It took a few sessions to understand what the hell they meant and then spent much time trying to "be present" and I the only thing I determined is that I have always "been present" as best I can! I stopped going to therapists after this one.
Objects & Memories - I now understand why I have been holding on to things that most people would have let go of by now. For instance I have a large stuffed animal collection and have always told my husband I could not get rid of any of them as each one is a trigger for a good memory. I am afraid if I get rid of it, that memory will be lost forever. If the memory really does go away, then I can get rid of that object. If there is no memory trigger, it's pretty easy to let go. Same with taking photos, I have a better understanding of why I always had my camera out. Without a picture, did it really happen? Not in my memory!
Deep Connections - Aphantasia may be a factor in my perception as to why I cannot make deep connections with people. Because my brain does not pepper me with visions and thoughts of loved ones, I don't think about other people very often. I don't know what people mean when they say "I miss you". I truly am an OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND lifer. When I have expressed to others that I feel that way, I have been told they feel a deep connection and don't know what I would mean by deeper. Now I believe since I don't think about others often, I've just convinced myself over the years that my feelings must not be deep. If it were deep, wouldn’t I be on their minds like I am on theirs? I am starting to understand things a bit differently now, I love and care DEEPLY for the people in my life, I'm just not triggered to remember them.
Learning/Training - I have always had issues with classroom learning. I have trouble concentrating on what is being presented unless there is some kind of hands-on activity associated with the training. I recently moved to a new position at work, I used to be a corporate trainer. To start my new position there was a large learning curve. I found when someone one told me something about the job I needed to see it or even better perform the task myself. That is not always available in training situations. It has taken a while to get up to speed in this position and I was doing a great job of beating myself up about not catching on quickly. I must be getting old, I thought. I was usually frustrated as a trainer when I had to train people my age, they just didn't seem to "get it" when others did. Well here's my payback, now I have to learn and I'm the one not "getting it". I do really wish I had known about Aphantasia/Hypophantasia/Hyperphantasia while I was a trainer. I think about all the improvements I could make on the material if I knew how the student's memory worked. I never really used much visual assistance, other than performing the task in front of them, and now I think that would have been helpful for "normal" memory types. The good thing about my memory is that once I understand WHY something is done, I've got it, it's in the vault. I actually do better than most others once that lightbulb goes off. Sometimes it just takes a while to really have that understanding. I am very detail oriented and technical; I can pick up computer operating systems quickly, they make sense.
Face/People Recognition - I have a hard time identifying characters in a movie, especially if they are wearing similar clothing or haricuts. I even have difficulty remembering my waitperson after talking to them directly. I usually remember if they were Female or Male, but not always. If I need something from them, I am awful at locating my wait person. I usually end up asking some random employee. Once I am familiar with the person, I will recognize them, but there has to be some kind of connection made. This has proven to cause quite a bit of embarrassment when I run into someone I have met and have zero recollection of who they are or where I met them. Unfortunately, this has happened more than a handful of times. It makes the other person feel bad and that's the last thing I want to do.
Another thing I noticed that I believe fits in this section, is how people can imitate others. I now understand how they can do that; they actually have a mental image of that person doing something. They can see them moving, hear them talking and then interpret that to an imitation. That was one of the many lightbulbs that went off in my head while researching Aphantasia. I mean how does someone tell a sketch artist what someone looked like after a crime? Not only face blindness but adrenaline flowing as well. But some people can remember down to the angle of their eyes and shape of the mouth. That has always been such a mystery to me, how can people do that? Now I understand, they actually SEE the face.
Processing Information - One thing I have been wondering is if Aphantasia has anything to do with how fast my brain processes information on the regular. I have been called a fast thinker when I come to a conclusion quickly and process what is in front of me quicker than others. I notice this when playing games, learning and putting things together during a conversation. I have the ability to see the big picture which allows me to put things in place and make decisions quickly. It drives me crazy when it takes my mom 5 mins to make a move in a game. I can understand that a bit better now, so learning this about myself has also helped me understand others. Others have all kinds of images they are needing to process to decide. And after sharing my findings with my family I have determined that my mom is a Hyperphantasic. Her memory is amazing, she remembers everything from her childhood from 4yrs on. I've always been jealous of that kind of memory.
I even understand how Chess works and what they mean by look ahead 5 moves.
Psychedelics - In the Aphantasia community, I have FINALLY found kindred spirits when it comes to experimenting with certain drugs. Aspirin, Antihistamines, pain killers and other prescribed drugs work just fine. But when I have taken any illicit psychedelics, nothing happens. The first time I noticed I was not as affected as others was in college. I just figured everyone else was really exaggerating and I wasn't interested in trying again. But I have since tried experimenting again with my husband who has gotten into Microdosing. We thought it would be interesting to take a recreational dose. He had an awesome time with lots of visuals and motion. For me, nothing. I could make the grass or a picture on the wall get "movement" but nothing like what he was experiencing. Decided to try again, this time with my sister and husband. I took a double dose this time just to make sure I would feel something. Nope, nothing. I have tried up to 10g at a time with nothing (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, DONE BY A PROFESSIONAL). I have never heard of anyone else having this kind of experience until I joined this group. There have been several people indicate they have similar experiences including one who even called out that they don't feel anything more than a minor wavey feeling.
Now I think it is probably for the same reason we don't have a "minds eye". Some synapses somewhere are not sparking normally. I do believe for some Aphants, this does actually lead to some visual or other sensory experiences they have not had before. But for some of us, we don't have the ability to "Trip". This is probably the only thing I have found that I don't like about Aphantasia. I have been able to put a positive spin on most of what I have found, but I do wish I could experience that feeling others have while taking a "Trip".
Where do you see yourself in 10 years? – This is a question that I have had to answer many times in my career, it is one of the favorite questions asked during an interview. I’ve never been good at answering that question. Others would provide great details on where they see themselves going, but I have never had the ability to look that far ahead. I don’t see myself anywhere specifically, I tend to follow the opportunities that come my way.
In conclusion (yes finally almost done) I've gone 57 years telling myself I can improve my memory, "I'll remember that if I really think hard" but I never do. Or I try to make sure I am "Present" so I can remember, nope, doesn’t help either. Now that I have an answer that explains my brain is acting differently than most people, I don't kid myself anymore. I'm just not going to remember and that's OK, that's how my brain works and part of who I am. There is nothing I can do about it, no more wasted time working on my memory!!
I can honestly say I am grateful to learn about this memory process and for the ability to move on from difficult situations. There are many more things I could get into, but that would be an even bigger book. My sister can get stuck on something that is difficult for her to get past, the images of bad things “haunt” her. For me, as soon as the actual event is over, it may take a few days depending on the severity, it is buried and does not "pop in" and bring me back. If only I had known this when I was younger, I can only imagine what I could have accomplished! I imagine my self-doubt/hate could have been less with this information as well as the therapist bills that could have been saved. This is such important knowledge, I am so happy to see research being done!! I only hope the information continues to spread so more people are aware. I don’t know if all the things above are in direct relation to Aphantasia, but my eyes have been open to these differences.

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.

( fyi this is going to be a long post, im sorry in advance >_< )
so im 21f and im learning about spirituality and i have a spiritual therapist ( she's not a scam artist btw, she's really good at her job ) its been few months since im doing spiritual therapy, she's been helping me alot and recently she has been asking me about if my family has twins and obviously at first i was confused because i didnt know anything about twins and the only twins i know in my family are from my fathers side but then she asked me if my mom was pregnant with twins and i said no she wasnt but then she asked me again when my mom was pregnant with me, did i had a twin?? I was confused because if i had a twin my my mom would have told me, so i asked her why is she talking about twins and then she said since the beggining she noticed that there is a twin boy always beside me but at first she didnt realize it until a few sessions later. I thought maybe its from the past or its from my family ( my family always carries secrets ) but she truly believes that its my twin, maybe my mom didnt know about but im still confused because its my first time hearing this and idk if this normal or this can actually happen. She said there is a connection between me and the twin boy because he's always beside me like an guardian angel. And also i forgot to add when she saw him after a few sessions later she noticed that he was twin and the other one its still alive and at first she didnt know who the other twin was but then she noticed that it was me or maybe it could be me but idk. I still havent asked my mom yet but i asked my older brother 25m if he knew about this but he was weirded out like i was and he doesnt believe it but he said probably its someone from my family not my twin but then i asked him if mom did ultrasound and he said the only time she did that was to see if i was boy or girl and it was when she was 4 months pregnant.... so idk i need advice maybe she could be wrong or maybe shes not because the spiritual world anything can happen.
And if someone says like " shes a scam artist " shes not, shes a pro in her job and also idk if this weird she can feel my emotions ( im not open about it and im very closed off ) so everytime im feeling down or really bad, she would always call my mom asking if i was okay or safe because she could sense something was wrong with me ( and no i dont always tell her what im feeling like she can sense it ) and many things she does that honestly y'all would not believe it because its out of this world. And she never sugarcoats anything, shes very honest and very firm aswell
So yeah like im very confused rn if something like this has ever happen to someone or if its normal if you were pregnant but you didnt know you had twins but one of them dies but you still dont know about it. Im still questioning this and my whole life, maybe this is why ive always felt something was missing and why i felt so lonely, idk
And also dont insult me or anything like im very sensitive so please dont be mean, im just trying to figuring out about this whole situation
Edit: this is my first time posting on reddit, maybe i made a few mistakes and im sorry in advance and this is the first place i thought about asking this question, thank you for your time

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.