• Species: Cat
• Age: 10
• Sex/Neuter status: Male Neutered
• Breed: Domestic Shorthair
• Body weight: 10 lbs
• History: Diagnosed with Small Cell Lymphoma of GI two years ago. On Prednisolone and Chlorambucil. Multiple ultrasounds (including recent) and blood test shows no reoccurance of cancer in body. Recently brought to vet for unrelated symptoms. Lethargy, unable to really meow, excessive drooling, eye dischange, possible mouth pain, squinting
• Clinical signs: Extreme Lethargy, usually chatty cat doesnt really meow anymore, squinting eyes and a ton of discharge, nose running and recently been droollng alot. keeps making mouth smacking noises. been on and off going on a few weeks now. Seems to have hit a high point of fatigue today after his ER visit yesterday. One thing that caused me to bring him to ER was I was giving him his usual medicine and he kind of cried when I tried to open his mouth.
• Duration: 3 weeks
• Your general location: Northeast USA
• Links to any test results, X-rays, vet reports etc. that you have: Results attached. Blood tests came back OK. Platelet count confirmed OK. Ultrasound came back fine. Cat had fever of 104 going into vet and leaving it 6 hours later. Given sub fluids.

Here is a summary of the last couple visits:
4/29/24 AFAST: negative peritoneal effusion, no obvious abnormalities TFAST: La:Ao ~1:1, intermittent B-lines, negative pericardial/pleural effusion CBC: HCT 33%, WBC 11.96K, Neut 10K, Lymph 1.15K, Plt 220K Chem17/lytes: Glu 205, BUN 9, Creat 1.3, Phos 3.1, Ca 9.4, Na 156, K 3.5, Cl 118, TP 8.1, Alb 3.5, Glob 4.6, ALT 13, ALP 41, GGT 0, Tbili 0.1 PCV/TS: 32%/7.6, serum clear CXAXR: 1. The appearance of the stomach, small intestine and colon can be compatible with a nonspecific generalized functional ileus (e.g. gastroenterocolitis or infiltrative bowel disease such as IBD or the clinically reported gastrointestinal lymphoma). There is no evidence of small intestinal foreign material or mechanical obstruction. Consider initiation of therapy for generalized functional ileus and if clinically indicated, abdominal ultrasound might be pursued for further investigation. 2. Mild constipation. 3. Normal thorax. 4. Incidental small defect in the cranial endplate of L5 of uncertain etiology, likely a schmorl's node.
5/12/24 PCV/TS: 30/7.8 CBC: RBC 6.02 (L), HCT 29 (L), PLT 31 (L), bands suspected, rest unremarkable Blood smear: Majority of neutrophils appear toxic. Platelet clumping noted, suspect that platelet number is adequate. Chem17/lytes: Glu 177, rest unremarkable BP (doppler): 100mmHg FUO standard panel submitted to idexx Respiratory PCR panel submitted to idexx AUS with Radiologist: Conclusions/recommendations: 1) Mild gastritis. This is suspected to represent a secondary rather than primary condition however a flare up of small cell LSA cannot be completely excluded. Cursory evaluation of the cervical soft tissues did not reveal any abnormalities as well. Recommendations: Pending results of other testing, consider a GI panel if not recently performed, empirical treatment for gastritis and complete the work up for FUO
Treatments/Plan:
LRS 100ml SQ Ondansetron 0.5mg/kg SQ Convenia 8mg/kg SQ Rx mirtazapine TGH Rx famciclovir x 14d to pick up at pharmacy Rec to follow-up with pDVM in 1-2 days if CS not improving/worsening

I just want to rant and to read other guys opinions on this whole situation and your experience. It's something that's surely bothering me and affecting my mental health for months now. I wish it wasn't, but you know, feelings are not something we can easily have control of and with this whole thing I can truly realize how fragile my mind is. I'm almost 5 months trying to deal with it, I got depressed, anxious, started taking meds, lost a lot of weight, almost 22lbs - mainly of muscle, lost drive, lost motivation to go to the gym, to study, to concentrate on college and so on. It fucked me up. There are periods there it goes up and down, but it's there almost all the time, like a basal negativity.
So, I don't know if this count as some sort of RJ, but I think it does. A quick resume:
I met my now gf last year, 02/2023. We are both 24, she never had a boyfriend before and she's also my first gf.
We had 3 dates together, had sex twice, but I had to go back to the city where I study as I'm finishing med school. I thought that it would not go anywhere because of our distance, but we kept talking to each other, she kept reaching me every few days, she would sometimes text me first, sometimes I would - basically talking about routine, hobbies, daily life. At some point, I started to develop some feelings. Still, I was afraid it would not go anywhere and that there was a chance she was seeing someone else, so I wanted to avoid getting attached and asked a girl from college out one night. She accepted, we kissed, but it didn't lead to sex and that was it. I figure it was best for me to just focus on college and later get to know the other girl in my city better to see where things would go.
She's one of the prettiest girls I've been with and her kind of personality matched mine well so I decided to give it a try when I returned to my city during vacations. 4 months later, I'm back, we spent almost a whole month together hanging out and then I ask her to be my girlfriend, she accepts. I returned to the city where I study, we decided to make the LDR thing work, as she is almost graduating from college as well. every 1~2 months we were taking flights to see each other on holidays, weekends and so on.
Everything is going great, we were happy, more emotionally conected and intimate. We went to a trip together during vacations at the end of 2023, I started the topic of previous romantic relationships, we talked about it for some time, then she asks me how many girls I hooked up with during that 4 months we were talking long distance. I tell her the truth and made the mistake to ask her back. During all that time, I knew I would not want to get into that specific and that the answer would probably affect me. She told me she just made out with one guy at a night when she went to the club with her girlfriends, but didn't like the talking and decided to not exchange contact with him. I'm certain it was all true. I bringed that on the same night, I got very upset and we talked about it one more time, about 2 months later. The projected image of this scene keeps haunting, turned into an obsession, her decision to do it: flirt and kiss another man while we were talking, the fact that during these 4 months a lot of other guys approached her, she compared me to all of them and rejected most but this one she still decided to go for a kiss, the feeling of being betrayed even when what I did was similar and even knowing we hadn't discussed exclusivity at that point. I wanted her so much, projected a future together, got so motivated for us to finally be close for good but now I'm going through this whole mental suffering about being uncertain if I will ever be able to deal with it at some point. If I break up, maybe it will happen again, maybe it won't, but what I've learn now is that for me, this is something that I gotta adress early with the women whenever I might start having feelings towards.

TL;DR: After 3 miscarriages and a diagnosis of DOR, I had two healthy pregnancies without IVF or other ART.
We started TTC when I was 35.5, my partner 37. We got pregnant quickly, and quickly had 3 miscarriages, all around 8 or 9 weeks. We never had them tested, but my OB suspected genetic abnormalities.
My partner's test results were normal for a man his age. After the 2nd miscarriage, I had bloodwork and an SHG, a procedure where my OB filled my uterus with saline and looked at it on an ultrasound to see whether I had any visible issues that could explain what was wrong. This procedure was timed to a specific day in my menstrual cycle, so that while we were at it, she could look at my ovaries on the ultrasound as well, to make a prediction about how many eggs she could expect to retrieve if we decided to try IVF.
The SHG turned out normal. My uterus was perfectly fine. My ovaries, however, looked like those of a woman nearing menopause. My antral follicle count (AFC) was only 4. If we did IVF now, the doctor said, that’s how many eggs she expected to harvest -- just 4. Not nearly enough for a promising cycle. The results from the blood test also corresponded to the levels of a menopausal woman. Here are the numbers, for those of you who already know what these mean:
Day 3 AMH: 0.311
Estradiol: 23.8
FSH: 13.8
I might have looked 30 on the outside, but I’d just turned 36, and on the inside I was closer to 50. Our doctor did not recommend that we move forward with IVF. We asked her what we could do instead. She suggested I try supplementing with DHEA, and gave us the recommended dosage (25 mg 3 times/day, for a total of 75 mg daily). She also recommended CoQ10, though she didn’t have a suggested dosage for that, and noted that my vitamin D levels were low. I started supplementing with each of those three things.
I noticed the effects of the DHEA very quickly. It’s an androgen, and can cause women to start sprouting extra body hair. My libido sprang up to teenager levels, and I got acne again.
I decided to take only 200 mg/day of the CoQ10 because it was expensive. That and the vitamin D seemed to give me more energy, maybe, but I couldn’t say for sure.
It took us longer to get pregnant the 3rd time. The miscarriage was the same.
Our OB explained again why she didn't recommend IVF for women with DOR, and told us about a patient of hers who’d had 9 miscarriages before having a successful pregnancy. We were lucky we were able to get pregnant so easily, she said. We were lucky that we didn’t have any other issues compounding the DOR.
If we wanted to explore other options, she told us, our best chance was to use an egg donor. Other than that, all we could do was keep trying. During my fertile window, and given our age, she recommended intercourse every 48 hours.
I doubled down on my research. I read everything I could find online, and read a lot of posts on message boards like the one I’m writing now. Here’s what I decided to do:

1. Lots of exercise, or at least “lots” by my desk-worker standards (brisk walks every day, gentle training with 10-to-20-pound weights a few times a week, and frequent bike rides)
2. Lots of time being happy and relaxed and out in the sun
3. Supplements:
   1. DHEA, 75 mg/day divided in 3 doses
   2. CoQ10, 800 mg/day (ubiquinone, the cheaper kind)
   3. Vitamin D3, 2,000 IU/day
   4. Acetyl L-carnitine, or Alcar, 250 mg/day (the typical dose is 500 mg, but I found this amount gave me nightmares; at 250 mg I felt more energetic, like I could do twice as much exercising as I normally did)
   5. Alpha lipoic acid, 300 mg/day (this makes your urine stink, but it’s inexpensive and safe, and in addition to helping with fertility, I also found studies about its benefit to diabetics and its effect on the pancreas)
   6. Black cohosh on cycle days 1 through 12 (it’s an herb, so I have no idea how much I was actually getting)
   7. Vitex (ditto)
   8. Prenatal vitamins
   9. Fish oil (why not)
   10. More soy foods and freshly ground flax seeds in my diet, for extra estrogen

A note about CoQ10: There are two kinds on the market, a cheaper one (ubiquinone) and an expensive one (ubiquinol), which is supposed to be better absorbed. Both are similar in structure to vitamin E, but are not classified as vitamins because your body can make them on its own. I went with a low-ish dosage of the expensive one the first time around, but after the third miscarriage, I switched to a higher dose of the cheaper one, 800 mg. I definitely noticed an increase in energy while I was taking it.
Here is a study on CoQ10 in follicular fluid and its association with better outcomes: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00404-011-2169-2
Here’s another (“Conclusion: Our observation leads to the hypothesis that the oral supplementation of CoQ10 may improve follicular fluid oxidative metabolism and oocyte quality, specially in over 35-year-old women”): https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3921/7/10/141
The positive news about CoQ10 keeps coming. I’ll stop with these: https://rbej.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12958-018-0343-0, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.12368
From what I learned while researching this stuff, both CoQ10 and acetyl l-carnitine are antioxidants that are thought to be active in the mitochondria. The mitochondria is sometimes called the “battery” of the cell, supplying its energy as it does its job. After an egg leaves the nourishing environment of the ovary for its journey down the fallopian tube, its only source of energy is its own mitochondria. That’s what keeps it fresh and alive. So an antioxidant that might help the mitochondria have more energy might be crucial for keeping egg cells, and the DNA inside them, better organized for longer -- long enough to conceive. This theory would apply to sperm cells as well, and is thought to be why taking these supplements gives people more energy. Young people have a lot of CoQ10 in their bodies, but after age 25 or so, our natural production goes down.
Here’s a study about egg quality and acetyl l-carnitine (ALCAR): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378432012002436
There isn’t as much research, especially in humans, on ACLAR as there is on CoQ10, but what’s been done so far looks promising. Here’s a study in mice: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378432012002436
As for alpha lipoic acid (ALA), my understanding is that this is thought to be beneficial for diabetics because of its effects on the pancreas. The pancreas and the ovaries are similar in the way they age (again, according to things I read while I was researching like crazy). While I’m not overweight, I’ve always had high blood sugar, and have type 2 diabetes on both sides of my family. So I added this to my regimen too.
Research: ALA supplementation is thought to be safe during pregnancy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09513590.2018.1462320
A small study has shown ALA to be helpful in patients with PCOS undergoing IVF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Luisa_Caponecchia/publication/303088959_Effect_of_myo-inositol_and_alpha-lipoic_acid_on_oocyte_quality_in_polycystic_ovary_syndrome_non-obese_women_undergoing_in_vitro_fertilization_a_pilot_study/links/584fb41c08ae4bc8993b3211/Effect-of-myo-inositol-and-alpha-lipoic-acid-on-oocyte-quality-in-polycystic-ovary-syndrome-non-obese-women-undergoing-in-vitro-fertilization-a-pilot-study.pdf
Anyway, if you're still reading, pregnancy number 4 was a success. I quit every supplement except for prenatal vitamins. My doctor at the IVF clinic put me on progesterone until I got through week 10, in case a progesterone deficiency was the cause of my previous miscarriages. She’d never tested for this, so the progesterone was just a precaution. I’d always been plenty nauseated with each of my pregnancies, and the supplemental progesterone only made it worse. All I could eat were dry crackers. After reading a few things about the potential effects of progesterone on an embryo, I don’t think I’d do it again, not unless my doctor had a test result suggesting that it was what I really needed.
My doctor also recommended I start taking baby aspirin, 81 mgs/day, to be continued throughout the pregnancy, in case I had an issue with blood clotting that was causing the miscarriages. She’d never tested me for it, and given my AFC and AMH and FSH levels, it seemed like we already knew what my problem was, but she said it couldn’t hurt, so I went on it and stayed on it until 36 weeks.
Two years later, while I was supplementing with just prenatal vitamins and CoQ10, and without really trying, we got pregnant again. Baby #1 is now five years old, and #2 is three.

Recently, I gave some advice about playing the Lannisters, and someone asked for further advice because they struggle to play Lannisters. It’s hard to do something like that in a concise package, but luckily, I like to write. I do it recreationally, and will write about subjects I'm interested in, delete the works afterward because the writing helps me put my thoughts on paper. I happen to have some such essays analyzing the Lannister army!
Mileage varies, and how you feel about some units or strategies in this game is going to depend a lot on how you feel towards reckless gambling. This is most true of the Lannisters, who revolve so much around unreliable mechanics that I earnestly think at this point that it’s part of their doctrine. It seems to me, that the idea behind the Lannisters, is that they’re broken. They’re full of abilities that don’t work, or that only work when you get lucky, or that only work if your opponent does something stupid. It’s up to you, as the person building the list, to figure out how to take those mechanics and make them function in spite of themselves. The way I see it, you can play the Lannisters as Cersei, by throwing dice at ridiculous odds that only rarely turn up in your favor, or you can play as Tywin, by making safe, calculated choices that will achieve the specific results you want.

• The Cards

Potential Fixes: Always run Tyrion, Giant of Lannister
The first problem we run into with all Lannisters is that their main card deck is bad. People will jump in and tell you that some other deck is worse. I’m not saying the Lannisters are necessarily the worst deck, but I am telling you that you could play five unique Lannister cards in a single round, and not see any results. They can all fail via random dice rolls. In my opinion, in a tactics game where a single turn makes a huge difference, in a card game where a single card changes the flow of the game, that is pretty bad. That’s not a situation you want to find yourself in if you like winning games, or even if you just like having fun.
So five cards. That’s half of your deck. That means that at the start of the game, the odds are pretty good you’re going to draw one or two cards that might not provide any benefit at all. The only thing you can do about this is get rid of them. Don’t wait for the perfect timing to play Hear Me Roar. If you keep it in your hand until you opponent is down by two ranks and you can sink in a unit with Vicious so as to maximize your odds, that card might be blocking up your hand for three to six rounds, and then your opponent might still roll boxcars. Play it, discard it, just get rid of it. You do not want those cards wasting space in your hand.
Four cards always need to go right away: A Lannister Pays His Debts, Hear Me Roar, Bribery, and Subjugation of Power. These cards all have the chance of either doing nothing, or are so weak they may as well be nothing. If they stay in your hand, they’re inflicting an opportunity cost – that is, there’s another card waiting behind Hear Me Roar to be drawn. If you keep these cards in your hand, you are preventing yourself from getting the better card, so always get rid of these cards, either by playing them, or by discarding at the end of the round. You may find some nice spots to play them – and that’s great! Bribery, in particular, can be noted as a lifesaver if Wealth has already been covered and you need to slow down a hard-hitter. However, that’s part of the trap: these cards can be good in the right circumstances, but it’s difficult to create the circumstances in which they are useful, so if those circumstances don’t exist now, you should get rid of the cards and look for better ones.
You may notice I said there were five cards that can do nothing. The fifth one is Counterplot, and its design is… elective, to seek a kindly neutral word. It’s a counter-card, which means it is useful, but they designed it so that it has a chance to fail on a dice roll of 1 or 2. You can mitigate that by holding Wealth and Crown, but that’s a tactical askance, and your opponent could play a powerful card on the first turn, so in reality you don’t have very much control over the success of this card. To be blunt, that makes Counterplot a very weak card.
People get up in arms if you say it, but it is. It’s a weak card. First, it’s reactionary, which means it only works if your opponent does something to trigger it – playing a card – which means your opponent has more control of it than you do. Second, the card can only be as valuable as the card it blocks, which means if you use it to block something lame, then Counterplot was also lame. That means you might feel compelled to hold the card until you see a very powerful card, such as Assault Orders, but if you do that, Counterplot creates an opportunity cost that isn’t caused by Assault Orders. Assault Orders is a very powerful card which so good, most players will use it in the round that they draw it, whereas you’d be holding Counterplot, blocking your own hand, for as many rounds as it takes for your opponent to draw Assault Orders. Finally, because it has a failure chance, you might wait for Assault Orders, fail your Counterplot roll, and then be hit by the enemy card anyway, which meant Counterplot weakened you by wasting space in your hand, and then didn’t do anything. That is a bad card.
So you need to play Counterplot earlier than later. You may want to use it on Assault Orders, but you have no control over that, and you can’t know when your opponent is going to draw it. You don’t want your hand to be blocked by Counterplot for multiple rounds, waiting for the ideal opportunity, and you definitely don’t want to do that and then roll a 1. Just play Counterplot on any card that would reasonably benefit your opponent. If they play Assault Orders right afterward, then c’est la vi; you cannot know what cards they’ll have, nor when they’ll play them, nor if Counterplot will even work. Just don’t hold on to Counterplot long enough that the card begins to hurt you.
The fix for this? Always play Tyrion, Giant of Lannister. It’s an attachment that lets you discard two cards and then search your deck for any specific card you’d like. In a deck like the Lannisters, where half your cards have a chance to do nothing at all (and those odds of achieving nothing are close to 50% on the Panic-related cards), you will frequently find yourself with two cards in your hand that might not do anything. Tyrion lets you discard those, and then draw a useful card that does do something. For the Lannisters, that is huge. Without Tyrion, you find yourself suffering through multiple rounds with dead hands, where none of the cards do anything, and your opponent will be pounding you with their own deck. With him, it’s not up to luck, you know your hand will contain at least one good card each round, for as long as Tyrion is still on the field.

• The Units

Having mentioned Tyrion, Giant of Lannister, it’s worth noting he only costs one point. During a casual conversation between players, one of them asked, “Why is Tyrion only one point? Counterstrategy is really good, and Battle Plan changes how they play their deck.” The response from the Lannister players was, in a nutshell, “My infantry sucks, bro.”
A lot of Lannister infantry sucks. They’re very frequently broken to start with because they’re given unreliable abilities, and to get them working, you have to attach something specific to them. Tyrion, Giant of Lannister would be amazing in a unit of Silenced Men, but he does nothing to fix the boondoggle that is the Honor Guard, so it’s hard to get Tyrion to the front lines and have the unit be functional at the same time. As a result, as good as Counterstrategy may be, you often find it stuck in something holding objectives at the back of the field.
That is the core essence of building Lannister army lists. Once you understand that your objective is to fix a broken and screwed up army, everything comes together better. You have to expect you won’t get what’s printed on the unit’s card, unless you take an attachment or specific commander who makes the unit work, and that’s what we’ll focus on in this section.
Gregor, the Mountain that Rides
Potential Fixes: NA
Starting with the cheapest units, Gregor is often taken because he’s only four points, and he can pack a surprising wallop if you’re lucky with the dice. With only three attacks, sometimes he flubs them all, sometimes he punches above average. He dies easily, he will die, but he will give your opponent plenty of reasons to want to kill him. Unfortunately, he’s not viable against Free Folk nor Night’s Watch, because siege units can instantly kill him on round one from across the board, so if you play competitively, make sure he’s not in both of your lists.
Poor Fellows
Potential Fixes: No
Poor fellows are just cheap bodies. They stand on an objective and try to stay out of the fight, and that’s it. They can’t really fight, their armor is paper thin, but because they can heal themselves, they will bounce back from minor harassment and won’t be chipped to death. The best way to run them is naked, or not at all.
Stone Crows
Potential Fixes: No
These guys are an alternative to Poor Fellows that might weather direct attacks a little better, but that will die more quickly to Panic. You can put Tyrion, Giant of Lannister in them for “free”, but it’s like a JC Penny discount where the sale never ends, because it’s not really a sale and the cost of Tyrion is obviously built into this unit. Putting anything besides Tyrion in them would be a pointless disaster.
Lannister Guardsmen
Potential Fixes: Mandon Moore
When new players look at Guardsmen, usually the first thing they note is “Lannister Supremacy” and think about how much damage that might do. Don’t focus on that – it’s an unreliably ability. Instead, look at their 4” movement and their six attacks with a 4+ to hit. This unit is excruciatingly passive. They can’t proactively threaten anything, they can’t easily get to a good position (which means it’d be hard to get them on a center objective), and finally, their ability only kicks off if the opponent was foolish enough to attack them with something that couldn’t wipe the Guardsmen out.
There’s not really anything practical you can do to fix this unit, because they’re really not reaching a five-point value in the first place, and they’re too slow. I’ve seen less experienced players recommend putting Assault Veterans in them to make the Panic Test from Lannister Supremacy more effective, but that doesn’t solve the issue of the Guardsmen being passive - of them being more under your opponent’s control than your own.
However, for kind of a fun fix, you can put Mandon Moore in them, and at that point they have Sundering, they’re hitting on a 3+, have 3+ armor, and archers won’t want to pick on them. It’s not competitive because Mandon compels you to run Joffrey, and Joffrey is a point too expensive, and the unit will still be slow, and they don’t have a great attack profile, but it is kind of fun to have some bargain bin Honor Guard on the field.
Lannister Halberdiers
Potential Fixes: None needed
This is one of the few Lannister units that comes pre-assembled with working abilities and everything. You don’t have to fix them! For that reason, if you’re not shy on points, this is one of the units many players will put Tyrion in.
I think one of the most notable facets of the Halberdiers is that they illustrate how much a good offense creates a good defense. Other players don’t ever seem to respect Guardsmen because the Guardsmen aren’t going to initiate anything on their own, but most players try to avoid running their light cavalry directly into a unit of Halberdiers. They’d take wounds on the way in, and if the Halberdiers haven’t activated, they’ll be wounded again when the Halberdiers attack. If you put Kevan or Bronn in these guys, then that’s even more opportunities to punish any would-be charge.
Basically, if you want a defensive unit, Halberdiers are your best friends. Lannisters have many “defensive” options to choose from, but this is one of the only choices that is actually good at defense rather than being simply passive.
Gold Cloaks
Potential Fixes: No
Kind of like Guardsmen but easier to kill, this is another passive unit with reactive abilities that mostly only benefit itself, if it benefits anything. The main draw for them is their “Laws of the Realm” Order, which reduces the number of ranks the enemy can use to attack. If this ability were long range, they’d be reasonable – of course, it’s not.
Gold Cloaks are pretty fragile, and their abilities are short range; “Oppressive Peacekeeping” incidentally requires controlling Crown, which makes it a tactical dud. Regardless, having a bunch of short range abilities necessitates that this unit be as close to the front lines as possible, where it absolutely cannot survive. A 4+ save, with only 7+ morale, makes these guys a pretty good target for a free victory point. Unfortunately, there’s not really anything too practical that can be done about this, because adding to the cost of this unit is generally only going to make it worse.
On the note of free victory points, I sometimes see players saying things like, “If the enemy attacks my useless units, then I win, because they have wasted their turn.”
This is pretty poor tactical thinking. You should assume that if your opponent kills your Gold Cloaks, it’ll be for a good reason. You can also assume they’ll be very easy to kill, because they are.
Mountain’s Men
Potential Fixes: Roose commander, Assault Veterans, Addam commander, Redcloak assistance, Daario commander, Bronn
Mountain’s Men might be one of the more famously non-working units the Lannisters can field, but unlike Guardsmen or Gold Cloaks, they’re at least not passive dead weight. The main problem with them is that their good abilities – Critical Blow and hitting on 3+ - are conditional.
They also have Vicious and Prey on Fear, and I can see how somebody thought this was a strong combination in theory. In practice, Vicious is the weakest keyword in the game, affecting the outcome of an attack only about 20% of the time. Even with Vicious, the odds of an opponent failing their Panic Test is roughly 50% or less, and I’ve had plenty of games with these guys where their attacks never gained them any wounds back. To make matters worse, once they lose one rank, they only have five attack dice. On turns when they have less ranks than the enemy and the enemy passes their Panic Test, Mountain’s Men are closer to being worth four points than they are to six. All those words on the card don’t count for much when they don’t do anything!
Luckily, there are some things you can do that make Mountain’s Men fun to play with, though not competitive. First, you can lean into the Panic stuff, which is only pragmatic here because Vicious and Prey on Fear are the abilities you know the unit will always have. An Assault Vet can help with this, but isn’t ideal because it increases the price of the Mountain’s Men when they’re already struggling to be worth their value. Instead, you can run Roose as a commander and place him in them. Unfortunately, the Panic approach still relies a lot on luck, and even with the extra -1 on all Panic Tests, you can’t guarantee you’ll get healing when you need it, as the -3 penalty will only impact about a third of any Panic Test.
If you run Red Cloaks alongside the Mountain’s Men, you can increase the odds of getting a benefit from Prey on Fear. Doing this with Roose attached means inflicting an extra wound of damage and increasing the odds of success, but you’ll need to lead very aggressively with the Mountain’s Men to make sure they’re the ones primarily engaged, rather than the Red Cloaks. Red Cloaks are also suboptimal in a lot of ways – but we’ll get to them in a second.
Your alternative here is to try to increase the general fighting effectiveness and survivability of the unit. Since Bronn increases the defense and morale of a unit while you hold Wealth, he can increase the Mountain’s Men to a 3+ save with 5+ morale. Though that is nice, it is also the case that most 7-point units already have 5+ morale by default, along with a better overall profile than the Mountain’s Men have, so once again, adding cost to the unit is only making it worse at the same rate it makes them better. For that reason, you can try adding Daario to the unit, and can use Daario’s “Sellsword Negotiations” card to keep them up to ranks. Additionally, Daario lets them attack with all seven attacks when you hold Wealth. Finally, you can try putting Addam Marbrand in the unit, which will make the Mountain’s Men a little tougher to kill off while also letting them use cards like Valiant Example to get them immediately back up to higher ranks.
None of these fixes are good. The problem with most of them is that they add cost to the unit, require a suboptimal commander, or suffer from adding more conditional complexity to the unit. However, some of these fixes are at least fun and patch some of the problems the unit has… a little.
Crossbowmen
Potential Fixes: Sparrow commander, Bronn
Lannister Crossbows are a perfectly fine ranged unit. They do exactly what you’d expect: shoot enemies. Their only real flaw is that they have 7+ morale, which seems quite fair given they have 4+ armor – which is a lot for a ranged unit. Many players like to run Bronn in these guys, which raises them to a 3+ save with 6+ morale when you claim Wealth. In fact, this combo and the ease of finding targets for your Crossbows make them the most optimal place to put Bronn.
Sparrow also provides a +1 to morale, which means that Crossbows are a fine place for him to sit if you prefer not to place him somewhere else. Sparrow’s “Incite” ability is basically nothing, so it’s not missing out on much to ignore it, and his cards can be applied to any unit on the field.
Red Cloaks
Potential Fixes: Mandon Moore, Gregor commander
Red Cloaks are like a multi-role unit that forgot it was supposed to have more than one role. They can inflict a Panic Test on anything in long range by taking an action, and this occurs every time they take an action, which is a neat mechanic, but it’s also the only thing they do by default. It sounds powerful, but it’s important to remember that attacking a unit will inflict a Panic Test, so if you shoot a unit with a crossbow, they’ll first take damage from the crossbow, and then take a Panic Test. When you factor in the revelation that Red Cloak Panic Tests only succeed a little over half the time, and that only when the Red Cloak unit is at full ranks, you realize they’re just not that good.
People occasionally think to put Preston Greenfield in these guys, but the answer to the problem isn’t to use more activations to spam more Panic Tests. What you need, is to give the unit a second role – that is, melee combat ability, and you can do that by putting Gregor or Mandon Moore in them. Once the unit can actually fight, you can throw it into combat, force a Panic Test before their attack, do a decent amount of damage, then force a Panic Test after the attack.
Although this does patch one major issue with Red Cloaks, they still have a few things going on preventing them from holding up. For one, their attack profile isn’t great: when they lose a rank, they fall to five attacks and their Panic ability weakens. They also only have a 4+ to hit by default, which makes Mandon the more appealing fix since he’ll get them to a 3+, though that does make them cost more. Additionally, the entire unit winds up being wrapped up in needing Crown to function at all, which forces you to play Joffrey ahead of anything they do, and that’s a massive liability.
The Crown liability is one problem you just can’t get around. Needing to play an NCU ahead of the unit to make it worth more than four points in value makes them clunky in a way that a lot of other units don’t have to deal with.
City Watch
Potential Fixes: No
What we’re looking at with the City Watch is a unit that has pretty much the same profile as the Lannister Halberdiers, but they can only get Sundering for one turn and they don’t have Set for Charge. If you want what the City Watch is doing at this price, then you’re better off taking Halberdiers and adding an attachment to them. These guys are easily no more than a five-point value, and even then they’d be outclassed by a lot of other five-point units. For example, a cheaper replacement for these guys is to take some Stormcrow Mercenaries and choose an attachment that grants Sundering.
House Clegane Brigands
Potential Fixes: None needed
Light cavalry. It works! They are a bit fragile, but given their solid maneuverability, this is best dealt with by player skill rather than by slapping any attachments on them. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with throwing attachments on them, as all the options work perfectly well on these guys. There are only three, after all, but they’re all solid attachments. Their Panic-related ability is going to be as flaky as those things always are, so when you decide to charge a unit, do it based on the performance you expect from their basic attack, not on what you hope might happen if the enemy fails the Panic Test.
Pyromancers
Potential Fixes: Bronn, Sandor, Addam commander, Kevan commander
Here’s a unit I would have no idea how to balance! Every attack ignores armor, and they have both melee and short ranged options to do this, with seven attacks at a 3+ to hit and a profile of 7, 7, 4. Positively every unit in the game has something to fear here, and yet, with only a 6+ save, the Pyromancers have something to fear from every other unit on the field. Dangerous to any one unit, and in danger from four or more units at a time. That means the odds are usually against them, since the opponent has quite a lot of incentive to kill these guys off, and anything on the board generally has the wherewithal to do that.
Using Bronn increases the unit’s armor while giving them a valuable extra attack, with the extra attack being the most notable thing you can do since a “DPS race” is pretty much one of the only options this unit has. Kevan is also valuable for the same reason, and his Wealth of the Rock card can be thrown out for a little extra defense. If you can combine Bronn and Kevan’s card, then for at least two attacks, the Pyromancers can have 4+ defense! That is, of course, a highly situational play that you can’t depend on. Placing Kevan in them and using Crown for a free charge is liable to produce better mileage, as it leaves open a bit more room to safely maneuver.
Addam also does alright in the Pyromancers thanks to a smidge of added tankiness, some healing from his cards, and the potential to play Lash Out when the unit takes a really bad hit (which is all the more wounds the enemy can’t stop). Normally, Addam’s biggest problem is that the enemy will try to ignore whatever he’s in to avoid triggering his nonsense, but they can’t ignore Pyromancers.
Sandor has some potential in these guys, but doesn’t do enough. He might heal two or three wounds after the Pyromancers attack, but as soon as the opponent shoots everything they’ve got at the unit, it’ll be dead before Sandor can heal them again. Plus, Sandor doesn’t work when they make a ranged attack, and his “vulnerable” effect is a bit wasted when the unit he assaults doesn’t get armor saves anyway. Ramsay Snow breaks on the exact same failure point of too much damage, not enough healing, only he costs more, so I don’t rate Ramsay even as a casual fix. The Panic stuff is not reliable and isn’t worth considering.
Still, no matter what you do, this unit is going to draw a ton of attention, and short of straight up killing whatever’s turned on it, it’s not going to survive what comes to destroy it. “Horrific Visage” is a wet paper bag that’s going to miss about half the time or more, and a 50% shot at a Panic Test is a minor risk to getting the Pyromancers off the field.
While not common, it is worth noting that the Pyromancer attacks “do not permit armor saves”, but they are not instant wounds. That means abilities such as Hardened or Resilient can still block or reduce damage dealt by Pyromancers.
Warrior’s Sons
Potential Fixes: Sparrow commander, Daario commander, Addam commander, Champion of the Faith, Sandor, Gate Warden, Mandon Moore, Bronn, Gregor commander
This is one of the units that I like for certain competitive lists, and that I think make the Lannisters stand out in terms of their faction picks. The trick with them is, they are unreliable, like a lot of Lannister infantry, but it’s on the basis of whether or not they have enough of their “Faith” resource. There are commanders and attachments that help them get more Faith, and as long as you’re using the correct stuff, Warrior’s Sons are pretty good.
The obvious commander here is Sparrow, because every single one of his cards is a morale test, and when you pass them, you can add one more Faith Token to the Warrior’s Sons that took the test. This is great! Because it allows you to use the Warrior’s Sons defense while relying on attachments to give them more kick and survivability. Wrath of the Warrior lets them attack with Sundering and +1 to hit while racking up a Faith Token for later use. Mercy of the Mother brings them back and keeps them going. Protection of the Father buffs their defense by re-rolling armor. If you use Tyrion, you can mill-draw these cards each round and make sure your Warrior’s Sons do what you need them to do.
As long as you have those tokens, you can run Sandor or a Gate Warden to maintain their survivability, or you can run Bronn to occasionally increase their armor and take a free attack. So far so good, but what if you don’t want to run Sparrow? Well, things get a little trickier now.
Addam is a common pick because he makes the unit even harder to kill, but he doesn’t have any good morale-at-will cards. He does have Charismatic Leadership, but it’s reactionary and your opponent would have to make the mistake of targeting the Warrior’s Sons with something to trip it off. Frankly, Addam in the Warrior’s Sons means they’re liable to be ignored. If they don’t generate Faith Tokens, their attacks are a bit mediocre for their cost, so you have a problem there.
Daario has a surprising amount of potential. You can mill-draw Sellsword Bravado to produce Faith Tokens while making the enemy weaker at the same time. Afterward, you can use Faith to get some good attacks, or, if you can claim Wealth, Daario gives the unit’s attacks Sundering. Therefore, any time you hold Wealth, this a pretty strong fighting unit. But wait, there’s more! Sellsword Negotiations can restore the health of the Warrior’s Sons while also having you count as holding Wealth, which is a lovely combo for a front-line unit like this, and I think it makes Daario, Stormcrow Captain the leading candidate to be in a unit of Warrior’s Sons. It is also worth considering that when you play Reckless Strikes, Faith will let you re-roll your attacks, so there’s some potential there, but I don’t recommend it, because the card can also auto-wound the Warrior’s Sons, which undermines their function as a scary, offensive wall.
If you still want to use these guys but don’t want to use Sparrow or Daario as your commander, you can put Mandon Moore in them, and at the drawback of needing to field Joffrey as well, they become a powerful fighter and defender both. They’ll run into trouble on the occasions that they fail their Panic Tests and lose their Faith Tokens, so to mitigate that, it’s usually good to avoid spending Faith while they’re at full ranks. You can wait until they’re on the second or last rank, at which point the Faith tokens have higher value, and spend them then.
Champions of the Faith do generate more Faith Tokens while handing out Vulnerable Tokens, or, if you like gambling, Panicked Tokens. Naturally, there’s also always Gregor, who doesn’t highlight the best parts of the Warrior’s Sons that well, but it does do all the bonkers, this-and-the-kitchen-sink cheese that commanders like Gregor do.
This unit is still okay without any attachments, but mainly just for standing on an objective, which is not the best use of seven points. If you’re going to invest that much, it should be to violently and noisily take something from somebody. The other reason I personally prefer Daario for this is because it won’t cost anything extra to place him in the unit.
Casterly Rock Honor Guard
Potential Fixes: Gregor commander, Daario commander, Meryn Trant, Mandon Moore
It’s so depressing to see so much text on a card, knowing you won’t use any of it. Honor Guard trade Condition Tokens for one-off effects that aren’t better than the Condition Tokens. They expend weakness to get Sundering, which is something most units of their cost might already have. They expend Vulnerable to recover wounds, conditionally based on whether or not the enemy lost a rank. They expend Panicked to remove a unit’s abilities for the turn, and though this one is useful if you’d for some reason put a Panicked Token on the board (probably explicitly for this unit’s ability), it’s not an ability that’s universally valuable because not everything has a defensive ability, and it’s hard to guess if your opponent has a card you want to block.
When you use the ability, the token goes away, so you not only have an issue with needing to set up the effect, but it’s ephemeral. Using NCUs to get the tokens is a problem because that necessitates playing the NCU first, likely broadcasting your intent, and giving your opponent an opportunity to respond. There are attachments that generate tokens, but they only do it once per round, and it’s an opportunity cost to generate a token just to quickly take it away.
In my opinion, the only good attachment that makes this unit work is Gregor as a commander. The unit has decent armor, a decent attack profile, and good morale, so once you give them two automatic wounds, immunity to Weakness, Sundering, and all of Gregor’s cards, they are an imminent threat to everyone. That’s not to say they’re actually good. It’s just that Gregor’s so jacked up that he rescues it.
Meryn Trant can be used as a fix for the Honor Guard because he consistently generates Weakness and Panicked tokens before each attack. You could skip the token thing entirely and go for Mandon Moore, though I think Meryn is better since it gets the ability nullification along with attack re-rolls. However, neither of these choices are great because they increase the cost of the unit, force-include Joffrey, and introduce the Crown confound, where you have to play an NCU before you can play the Honor Guard.
Daario can also pick this unit up with Sellsword Bravado, which will generate Weakness and Panicked before an attack, and while you control Wealth, the unit will have Sundering. However, I think Daario works a bit better in the Warrior’s Sons, because the Warrior’s Sons tend to be tougher on defense and sustain for longer when you’re using Sellsword Negotiations to keep them alive. Warrior’s Sons also have more flexibility with how you expend their Faith tokens, and when they use Sellsword Bravado, they can benefit from their Faith abilities without consuming the Weakness and Panicked tokens. Honor Guard destroy your tokens from the card, Warrior’s Sons construct on the morale test and leave the tokens intact.
Knights of Casterly Rock
Potential Fixes: None Needed
Essentially the premiere unit of the Lannisters, the Knights of Casterly Rock are fast, well-armored, and brutal. There’s not much more to say about them! “Lannister Supremacy” makes them a bit risky to shoot at with archers, and when they attack a unit that isn’t as good at fighting, it can give some nasty shocks, but really it’s the basics that make the Knights as good as they are. Generally it’s not a great idea to run attachments on them because they’re already an eight point unit, and the best thing a player can do for them is provide support.
Notable Neutrals
Though I won’t go into detail on all the Neutral options, there are a few things that deserve to be pointed out.
Bolton Cutthroats are doing basically what the Mountain’s Men are but without the stupid caveats, so if you put Sandor in them to give them Fueled By Slaughter, they cost the same, get 3+ to hit default, have a better attack profile, and heal when they attack instead of when an enemy fails a Panic Test. Not a great unit, but it’s more stable and achieves a similar goal without needing you to also run Red Cloaks, Joffrey, and whatever else.
Stormcrow Mercenaries do well with a few different attachments from the Lannisters. Tyrion most notably, who should really be in these guys if you need a nice, affordable place to put him. The Stone Crows have no advantages over the Stormcrows. It’s not even close, the Stormcrows are better.
Lysense Sellswords can bounce back from a lot of damage if you put Sandor in them. Once they’ve got two pillage tokens on them, every attack is going to restore between three to six wounds. Not bad for six points!
Stormcrow Dervishes with Sandor can also be very resilient. Because they can attack on Wealth, they can make up to three attacks per round (or more if you have Assault Orders), and each attack will heal the unit. Since they can retreat, if you still have your activation, you can take an attack from the Tactics Board, retreat, then charge as your activation, which inflicts Vulnerable from Sandor. That’s just one option – this unit is also no slouch when led by Kevan, who can charge when claiming Crown, retreat, then charge again as his activation. In my opinion, this is the best seven point unit the Lannisters can get if your commander isn’t supporting Warrior’s Sons because the Dervishes have the same armor as most of your options, but unlike your units, these guys are reliable and have consistent abilities.
In Summary of Units
To make this really simple, if you want a competitive list, you should probably be using Halberds, Knights, and Crossbows. You can use Warrior’s Sons if you’re set up for it. Brigands are also alright as light cavalry, but you should be very careful with them since they’re so fragile. Beyond those options, Neutrals are probably a better bet, because Neutrals have abilities that are more stable and will require less set-up.
You might have also noticed a few comments like, “When you play this card, this unit really benefits from it.”
Stuff like that is why Tyrion, Giant of Lannister should be in almost every list you make. Some units are going to be bad no matter what commanders or attachments you put in them, but they do get better and are more fun to play if you combo them with specific cards. That doesn’t work if those cards are at the bottom of your deck and you’re stuck drawing dysfunctional duds like Hear Me Roar.

I reached my goal weight about two month back. Ever since, I think about food all the time.
Male 5’10. Starting weight: 200 pounds Goal and current weight: 160 pounds.
Progress picture: https://imgur.com/a/jzOmoVr
My thinking about food, leads me to eating food. And I think about food all the time, so I eat a lot. Many times I overeat on high value food. But the total calorie intake for sure gets too high anyways. On the weekends I tend to eat junk food as well, the cravings are real! And I eat big quantities so easy. Of all the persons at the table, I am the one always eating the most as the foodie I am 🐷
So I have to compensate by restricting a lot other days. And thats how I maintain. So far I managed to maintain, but long term it does feel like my maintenance easily could fail.
I don’t count calories, because it only makes me think about food even more.
How do I stop thinking about food?
Will I stop thinking about food with time as my body gets used to the new weight?
How was it for you that did a similar weight loss?

Assault Rifles

• Pretty much all AR’s need reworking but AH have acknowledged this or at least the CEO has. Make them all med pen weapons bar liberator (keep this gun as the reminder of how you started, should be the weakest primary but still good for up to diff 5), make them slower firing but really hurt armoured units to distinguish them from smg’s. Speaking of…

Submachine Guns

- Pummeler: this is in a good spot imo, baseline weapon powerful, fun but obvious limitations. - Knight: the one gun I have no idea what to do with TBH - Defender: seems fine too, maybe make it hit even a bit harder than the pummeler as it doesn’t stagger. That’s the trade off. Buffing damage obviously takes into account if AR's are buffed to above where SMG's are right now.

Shotguns

- Punisher: baseline, feels fun to use with obvious limitations, hits hard and has good range, staggers like it should. - Slugger: given the slug nature compared to the other shotguns it should be the most powerful single target shotgun, needs stagger back defo. Fun with a mouse and key but hard to use effectively with controller even before the nerf. - Breaker: restore the mag size to launch number, that’d make it baseline again - Breaker incendiary: baseline, great gun right now super fun - Breaker Spray and Pray: I’ve honestly had no need to use this weapon over incendiary.

Marksman rifles

• Not really my playstyle, good for weakpoints maybe but my aim isn't the best so maybe better damage to non weakpoints too. That or lean into the weak point strength with unique sights that highlight weak points specially, maybe even see through fog and blizzard/sand storms.

Explosive

- Eruptor: This gun felt really fun and I reckon baseline at launch bar too many mags which may be an actually good nerf balance wise, I never knew about any exploits myself until after nerf but using this with a stalwart had me smiling. Defo keep its bug nest, fabricator clearing ability. Restore its glory! - Crossbow: this puzzled me and was the breaking point for me personally regarding AH’s approach to balance because I thought it needed a buff to compete with the eruptor yet it was nerfed. Should do big damage, basically one shot single med pen targets or spewers on direct hits. Treat more like a specialised grenade launcher with support stalwart as primary, less splash than grenades but great for chargers asses and stripping legs. Increase power and lower velocity I think, make it a skill based weapon. Have it close holes and fabricators and open crates. - Jar 5 dominator: baseline honestly, needs more patience than other shotguns when using to shine due to handling but it does. Let it open crates atleast.
- Punisher Plasma: I need to try it out more but I hear good things post buff, could be baseline. Should atleast open crates but maybe not close holes and fabricators idk - Blitzer: so close to baseline, maybe the arc inconsistencies and the upgrade to chained target applying to it also could get it there. - Scythe: all I can say is with a controller, it’s no fun, hear mixed opinions with mouse and key - Sickle: honestly on cold planets, baseline choice and the ammo debuff doesn’t hurt it there. Outside cold planets it gets tricky but I think that should be it’s unique selling point. - Scorcher: right now, pretty much there baseline wise. - Purifier: Dead on arrival, could be as much fun as launch eruptor if reworked in an interesting way.

Secondary Weapons

- Peacemaker: with a laser sight compared to redeemer I think it’s fair to stay, mainly for ballistic shield builds it has use but also like the liberator reminds you where you started. - Redeemer: single shot, this gun still beats the new verdict IMO for DPS. Baseline on that alone. Fun to spray in a pinch but mag count balances it. Lacks laser sight for First Person Ballistic Shield tho which is a shame. - Senator: Good baseline now it has a speed loader, not a fan of the sights or reticle though but thats me. Also hard to use in First Person with ballistic shield. -Dagger: Like the scythe maybe with mouse and key, better aim, its great for weakpoints on bots but i don't have any fun with it myself. - Verdict: More mags and the laser sight could make it a good Ballistic Shield gun if using in First Person but I also feel just adding med pen armour would just tip it to a baseline choice.

Grenades

• My only beef here is now the Thermite grenade, it doesn't stick most of the time and like others have said, if it lowered armour pen needed for that area after its explosion it'd be a very cool strategy for big targets, soften them up then unload an MG into the area.

Armour Passives

Rather than individual armours I wanna talk about the passives and what new ones could replace the abundance of identical ones.
- Democracy Protects: 50% less chance of getting killed by lethal damage and prevents bleeding from chest haemorrhages. First part is interesting but second part never really noticed myself, fine but perhaps could just be 50% less chance of getting killed by lethal damage and 25% chance for limbs to not break*.* Making this a 'Luck' Style armour.
- Engineering Kit: Reduces recoil while crouching or laying down by 30% and increases grenade capacity by 2. At the moment apparently this effects all recoil regardless of crouching or laying down, which honestly should remain. make it Reduces recoil by 30% and increases grenade capacity by 2. Baseline!
- Extra Padding: Increases Armor Rating. A baseline for new players.
- Fortified: Reduces recoil while crouching or laying down by 30% while granting 50% resistance to explosions. I would change to perhaps Reduce Flinching effect by 30% when crouching or prone while granting 50% resistance to explosions.
- Med Kit: Increases Stim capacity by 2 and increases their duration by two seconds. Baseline, very good passive buffs.
- Servo-Assisted: Increases grenade throwing range by 30% and adds 50% bonus to limb health. Instead of Limb Health, I think the whole passive should be Increases grenade throwing range by 30% and support weapons reloads by 15%
- Scout: Markers placed on maps scan the area every two seconds, reduces enemy detection by 30% Honestly our go to armour right now, baseline, whether because it's working as intended or not.
- Electrical Conduit: 95 percent resistance to arc damage. Almost there honestly but I think adding a secondary would make it more fun, like 95% resistance to arc damage and increase Fire rate of arc based weaponry by 10%

Suggestions for other passives for existing/ future armours

- Feel the Burn: Take 80% less Fire Damage from all sources, movement speed increased while on fire by 20% I could see some intentional self immolation to quickly speed grab samples, finish artillery loading in fire tornados or make an escape from a large group, also a good counter to the Hulk Scorcher. Risk vs Reward.
- Artic Explorer: Reduce movement penalty in deep snow and during blizzard hazards by 50%. More Traction on Ice. I considered maybe giving a reduce detection buff instead but I'd rather just have a scout armour with polar colours.
- Geologist: Samples appear marked on the main map when in 50 metre proximity and sample outlines can be seen through terrain at 25 metres. Shows outlines of dropped sample containers too within 25 metres. When ya hunting specifically for samples this would be a handy set for one diver to bring. Like with scout the marking on map doesn't apply squad wide and would show as blinking dots representing their rarity, green/orange/purple. Could also have a hidden buff that audibly warns being in a meteor shower impact zone.
- Flexible Shoulder Pads: Increase solo reload speed for backpack weapons by 30% and increase melee damage by 50% The main draw here is obviously the first buff, it wouldn't affect non backpack support weapons like the railgun or AMR (The Servo-Assisted reload buff I suggested covers those but less of a buff) but Spear, Airburst, Autocannon, Recoilless etc.
- Analyst: Highlights mission critical objects of interest in 50m proximity through terrain. Enemies and patrols temporarily show as red outlines through terrain when pinged. This is similar to the Geologist perks but instead of samples showing through terrain, terminals/ssd's/launch codes, artillery warheads, valve icons show from further away. Enemies also pulse three times (per 1.5 seconds) allowing you or perhaps even your whole team to get a better view. Extra hidden buff, see outlines of team mates when dropping in.
What do you guys think? It’s pretty clear now that trying to do this monthly content is just not working out, more issues than wins overall not to mention the longer this goes on the more intimidating it is for new players coming in having to spend thousands of super credits to just access the bonds and if they shortcut with real money are gonna feel let down with the lacklustre feeling of weapons and uninteresting new armour as they are now.
The latest war bond seems to be ignoring the last balance update numbers before it, which gives the impression things are too rushed as they are now. so the tenderiser (which doesn't even match the trailer colour wise) and purifier are pretty much dead on arrival. The Verdict feels underpowered with light pen now the senator has a speed loader etc
If this goes on we’re just gonna get more new weapons and armour that seem superfluous and often worse than existing launch weapons with more on the way before existing ones are properly fixed. Bear in mind a lot of players aren’t grinding for these bonds but again paying for them.
I think instead (if possible with Sony terms) the next 3 month gap between bonds should really work over issues with some existing armours and weapons, with interesting effects and unique elements that let them stand out. I think it would be easier holding back new content and releasing it in a massive dump too because the heavy users will unlock them immediately and bring to attention any issues needing a quick fix before the rest of the player base get their first impression spoiled.
The arc resistance to armour was the only real interesting post launch armour passive and it didn't even cover all Weights. Each war bond if remaining as monthly at the very least should introduce a new fun passive effect. Like others have said the Polar Bond giving an armour passive specific to snow planets with a secondary buff to run on ice without slipping would have been a lot more interesting.
The focus of balance now should be no nerfs, only buffs. The best weapons right now are the only fun ones to use ATM, none feel overpowered so make them the baseline.

I am a 24 year old AFAB person, who identifies as male (FtM transgender).
I presented to my Dr in November with multiple symptoms. The main ones being pain everywhere after working (traffic control job). I had experienced pins and needles in both my hands and feet, pain down my back, neck, legs and arms. Muscle pain and joint pain.
I am obese. 113kg, 178cm and Drs had been telling me it's all because of my weight, but I had lost 20kg and was the most physically fit I had ever been. It started off with checking all my vitamins, in which my vitamin D and iron was low, started vitamins and they became normal.
She then checked my thyroid, my results for antibodies are: Anti-Thyroid Peroxidase : > 1300 IU/mL (< 60), and Anti-Thyroglobulin : 15.0 IU/mL (< 4.5). Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) : 5.38 mIU/L (0.50-4.00) and Free Thyroxine (Free T4) : 17.1 pmol/L (10.0-23.0). My cortisol is: 709 nmol/L (145-619).
So obviously there's issues with my thyroid. I had all the symptoms of hypothyroidism when I had those tests but my Dr said that it's not that bad and to not worry about it. I then started getting issues with swallowing, breathing, needing to clear my throat, and a dry cough, which has all gotten much worse. A month after those original blood test for my thyroid (and other autoimmune diseases, which were negative), I was put on 25mg of levothyroxine, she said for 5 days only. Day 3 of taking it, my throat got so much worse, waking up during the night coughing and choking. Stopped the medication and it stopped/got better (not 100% but not waking up 10 times throughout the night). Dr said to try again, I did, and after 1 day it happened again. I stopped for a week because I left them at a friend's house. I am day 2 back on them again today and it's getting worse already.
I had my results from my thyroid ultrasound results today, "CLINICAL NOTES Elevated TSH with autoimmune markers FINDINGS: An isolated finding of elevated TSH does not define the nature of thyroid dysfunction. The thyroid is normal in size. Right lobe 7 cc, left lobe 6 cc, isthmus 4 mm. The thyroid parenchyma is heterogenous and hypervascular in keeping with thyroiditis. There is no focal thyroid lesion. There is no indication for biopsy. There is no cervical lymphadenopathy. CONCLUSION: Heterogenous hypervascular thyroid." - my Dr said that my thyroid was swollen, despite what the results say? I also have a lump, see here.
I also had a lot of chest pain, and had to go to hospital after urgent care did and ECG, they didn't tell me why I needed to, and the hospital sent me home with "abnormal" ECG and "talk to your Dr". I then had an echocardiogram which showed nothing other than "your main artery to your heart is a little swollen but it's not concerning and we will check it again in 2 years".
I've had an xray of my spine and neck, an ultrasound of my thyroid, and a CT of my spine. I have 2 bulging discs in my lower back but apparently aren't pressing on any nerves or causing issues.
However, despite no answers, everything is getting worse. Much worse. It's getting to the point I'm gasping from air when I'm trying to sleep, when I'm awake, after coughing it takes me a while to really catch my breath.
My Dr has ordered I got get an MRI of my brain since I also have little black floaties, and flashing lights in my vision every now and again. Alongside the pins and needles, and numbing in my arms and legs. I also have a referral to get a lateral x-ray of my neck, alongside a script for Nizatidine.
So my current medications are: Testogel (testosterone) 12.5mg nightly, Levothyroxine 25mcg and Nizatidine (haven't started).
She didn't tell me why I need an MRI. She said there is nothing I can do for my thyroid and to just let it be. I'm stressed out because I'm not getting any answers, nothing is progressing and I'm just getting more and more tests that come back "fine" but my Dr said my thyroid was swollen when it's not. But I still have a weird lump that wraps around my neck, super uncomfortable throat symptoms that are affecting every waking second of my life, pain all over all the time.
I'm getting really sick of it, and I'm tired. I need to work, I'm broke and I just need answers. If there is anything I need to clarify, please let me know. I've got 16 pages of medical tests we did, lmfao.

Male, 28 years old. Weight 180 but lost 15 lbs in the past 6 months. African American/ Native American/ Caucasian. Former smoker, use to drink daily and alot for years. Ive been having small amounts of bright red blood show up occasionally in my stool the past few months. 5 days ago I ate plenty of oatmeal and black beans for a couple of day. Im now showing signs of constipation. Mucous on stool is about the size of a half dollar or quarter. small amount of bright red blood on stool. The blood is usually no bigger than a penny but a couple times have been bigger. These symptoms about to be listed come and go. Abdominal discomfort/ pain(Rating 0-3) not being able to pass gas and bloating. Also been more dizzy than usual standing up. The pain and discomfort range from the side of my torso to all over my stomach from groin to rib cage. My stomach does feel empty at times too. I’ve taken Miramax two days in a row and made sure to eat healthy plus a bit of fiber. Poop has changed color and consistency during bowel movement. Only poop the night after taking miralax which was twice since this happened 4-5 days ago. I’m not sure if I should go to urgent care or if it’s a typical constipation. Also wondering if this is a sign of IBS. Yes I’ve made an appointment but it’s not for months.

Male, 28 years old. Weight 180 but lost 15 lbs in the past 6 months. African American/ Native American/ Caucasian. Former smoker, use to drink daily and alot for years. Ive been having small amounts of bright red blood show up occasionally in my stool the past few months. 5 days ago I ate plenty of oatmeal and black beans for a couple of day. Im now showing signs of constipation. Mucous in stool, small amount of bright red blood on stool. These symptoms about to be listed come and go. Abdominal discomfort/ pain(Rating 0-3) not being able to pass gas and bloating. Also been more dizzy than usual standing up. The pain and discomfort range from the side of my torso to all over my stomach from groin to rib cage. My stomach does feel empty at times too. I’ve taken Miramax two days in a row and made sure to eat healthy plus a bit of fiber. Poop has changed color and consistency during bowel movement. Only poop the night after taking miralax which was twice since this happened 4-5 days ago. I’m not sure if I should go to urgent care or if it’s a typical constipation. Also wondering if this is a sign of IBS. Yes I’ve made an appointment but it’s not for months.

I've spent several hours throughout the past week researching Gachas and nowhere did I find a single post or comment anywhere that accurately explains everything in the same place, so I'm going to do my best to explain things as best as I can so nobody else will have to research it much either. However, I don't think I know absolutely EVERYTHING about Gachas and might be incorrect on a few points but I'll edit this if anyone can point out where I'm wrong.
Taming: Gachas are tamed passively by dropping items down in front of them, I've heard that you can feed it anything but I haven't tested that myself. When you drop the items, the Gacha will walk towards it (unless it's sitting and it's close enough for it to pick it up) and pick it up, then eat it slowly. According to Dododex it tames better with structures/tools than normal materials. I may have done something wrong but i tried using greenhouse windows in stacks of 10 each (as recommended) to tame them with full effectiveness, but to no avail it always lost effectiveness and still took an incredibly long time to tame. Meanwhile, my brother tamed 4 or 5 just using stone in stacks of 20 with the same effectiveness (like 4%). So in other words, don't use this as a taming guide.
The level of the Gacha doesn't matter as much as it does for most creatures, the most important stat on them is crafting skill, which boosts the production of their crystals (drop rate and the quality of the crystals (normal, primitive, ramshackle, apprentice)). The only reason you might want a high level Gacha is to get a head start on crafting skill or high weight, so you can focus all it's levels into crafting skill and it's still able to hold a significant amount of items at once. From what I've heard, a good base stat of crafting skill on a newly tamed high level Gacha is around 130-135%, but anything beyond that is considered rare.
Crafting Skill: As I already said, it increases the frequency at which crystals drop from the Gacha, I don't know if this means that crystals grow more from eating, or if it means it'll eat the same amount, just more often than normal. All of my Gachas get 1.5% crafting skill per level up, so I'd assume that all tamed Gachas get that amount per level up.
I have seen many people recommend 160% crafting skill for Gachas that you want only the standard crystals that drop materials, and 260% for the leveled crystals (primitive, ramshackle, apprentice). I haven't seen anyone explain why so I can only speculate that beyond 160%, the chances of getting a higher level crystal than the standard ones is just too high to make an efficient material farm, as you would get leveled crystals too often. I have several at 160% and they work very well for materials.
Possible Drops: It would probably be easier to check the wiki for this, but I'll list them anyway. All Gachas get 6 different possible materials they can produce, and of those 6 are 3 common materials, 2 uncommon materials, and 1 rare/very rare materials. When wild they will drop a random one of those 6 resources, but when tamed you can choose whichever one of the 6 resources you want by choosing "Production" in the creature's radial menu (you can also set the production to random, newly tamed Gacha's are set to random by default).
Common Materials:

• Fiber
• Flint
• Fragmented Green Gem (equivalent of Green Gem)
• Corrupted Wood (equivalent of Fungal Wood, essentially equivalent to normal Wood with a few extra uses)
• Raw Salt
• Sand
• Stone
• Thatch

Uncommon Materials:

• Blue Crystalized Sap (equivalent of Blue Gem)
• Clay
• Congealed Gas Ball
• Crystal
• Oil
• Silica Pearls
• Silk

Rare Materials:

• Black Pearls
• Metal
• Obsidian
• Organic Polymer
• Red Crystalized Sap (equivalent of Red Gem)
• Sap
• Sulfur

Very Rare Materials:

• Element Dust

If you're looking to tame a Gacha and want to find one with the materials you want, I'd recommend getting very close to the crystal before you pick it up, and check it's level. If there are several Gachas in an area then it can be hard to find one with the right materials you want just by mindlessly picking up every crystal you find. If you check the level and then open the crystal one at a time, and then see the Gacha of that level nearby, it should be easier to find the one you're looking for. It's also important to pay attention to what materials a single Gacha can drop. The first time I tried to tame a Gacha, I thought I found one that dropped both Organic Polymer and Black Pearls. However, if you look at this list above, you can see that both of those are "Rare Materials" and a single Gacha can only have 1 Rare Material as a possible drop. Depending on the material, Gachas drop a different amount, but I'll get into that in another section.
Gachas can drop leveled crystals that can give a variety of different tools/armor as well as some structures. Leveled crystals only have 3 different rarities; Primitive, Ramshackle, Apprentice. So if you came here wondering how to get Ascendant Gacha Crystals, I'm sorry to inform you that as they may have existed years ago, they don't now. Leveled crystals are easily identified by white/green/blue particles floating upward from them. I am not typing out every item that can be dropped by leveled crystals so here is a link where you can check it yourself on the wiki: https://ark.fandom.com/wiki/Gacha_Crystal_(Extinction)?so=searchThe?so=searchThe)
Gacha crystals can drop almost all stone/metal/fabricated tools and weapons, including torches and canteens but not including harpoon launchers. They also drop chitin/flak/riot armor as well as heavy miner's helmets, and for structures they only drop a few different thing such as dinosaur gates/gateways of wood/stone/metal as well as wooden tree platforms (I do not believe behemoth gates are possible).As far as I have observed, Primitive crystals drop Primitive/Ramshackle equipment. Ramshackle crystals drop Ramshackle/Apprentice/Journeyman equipment. Apprentice crystals drop Journeyman/Mastercraft equipment, and I don't believe Ascendant is possible but maybe it is. There is a good chance that I'm somewhat incorrect about the information above, I tested it several times myself but accidentally deleted the note so I'm mostly relying on memory now.
Snow Owl Pellets: Gachas pick up items near them when wild and tamed, including feces and snow owl pellets. They eat feces as more of a last resort option but they eat snow owl pellets almost immediately after obtaining them, granting them a buff. The buff can be identified by yellow, green, blue and red particles swirling over the Gacha's back. Based on my own observation, the buff lasts until the Gacha produces a crystal, even if the Gacha has nothing to eat in it's inventory, meaning the buff will be "on hold" until it can eat. It's important to note that eating snow owl pellets does produce a crystal at all, like it would it if it ate a material like stone. This means if a Snow Owl is directly in front of a Gacha with the buff and nothing in it's inventory, every time the Snow Owl regurgitates a pellet, the Gacha will pick it up and hold it in it's inventory without eating it, allowing you to farm snow owl pellets while afk for later use. Now I will finally get into what the buff actually does.
The buff from the snow owl pellet forces the Gacha to eat until it produces a crystal (again, as long as it has something consumable in it's inventory), the crystal is also forced to produce the maximum amount of the material it can make, assuming the Gacha is in a good mood (I'll explain mood in the next section). I believe the snow owl pellet buff also makes the Gacha more likely to drop leveled crystals, but it didn't seem to impact my pursuit of materials so I wouldn't worry about it if you just want to farm something like metal for example.
Mood: Gachas have good and bad mood which affect their crystal production. The mood is mainly affected by the gender of other Gachas in the vicinity, but mood can also be lowered by taking damage. The mood is dependent on if there is another Gacha of the same gender withing a certain distance.
For example: If you have a male Gacha and female Gacha next to each other, they'll both be in a good mood. If you have 2 male Gachas next to each other, they'll both be in a bad mood. If you have 8 Gachas in a small area, 7 are female and 1 is male, the females will be in a bad mood and the male will be in a good mood. The mood is dependent on if there is another Gacha of the same gender withing a certain distance.
About the distance, I've seen people give several different numbers but it seems that the actual distance that same-gendered Gachas need to be apart is 14 foundations. Now I'll get into what mood actually does.
Bad mood is caused by being too close to another Gacha of the same gender, or taking damage. It causes the Gacha to not only produce crystals slower, but the yield of each crystal will be significantly less. I'm not sure how it affects leveled crystals but as bad mood as basically the counterpart of a snow owl pellet buff, I'd assume it lowers the drop rate of leveled crystals. They also refuse to pick up items, rending the snow owl pellet farming method I mentioned irrelevant. I don't believe they eat snow owl pellets while in a bad mood, and I'm also pretty sure that the bad mood cancels the buff until they're back in a good mood. I'm not sure how long bad mood lasts from taking damage, but after a Gacha is separated (at least 14 foundations) from all other Gachas of the same gender, it remains in a bad mood for a time unless an opposite-gendered Gacha is close to it. Bad mood is easily identified by purple/black particles on its back, similar to the snow owl pellet buff. It will also refuse to look at you if "Ally Looking" is enabled.
Good mood enables the Gacha to produce crystals normally without issues (as long as it has enough to eat) and utilize the snow owl pellet buff. It also will pick up any item near them. It is identified by no lights on its back, and if "Ally Looking" is enabled, it'll look at you.
Gacha Crystal Material Quantity: A Gacha Crystal will drop a different quantity of materials based on its mood and the snow owl pellet buff. This seems to pertain to the rarity of the material (common, uncommon, rare, very rare). I play on single player settings as I'm always playing alone or with my brother, so I don't know if the quantity is different than default for me.
I recently was out of Red Gems and Crystal, and although Crystal was easy enough to find, I couldn't find Red Gems anywhere except one location. So instead of searching around everywhere I decided to check what materials all my Gachas can produce and found that I have one for both Red Crystalized Sap and Crystal, as well as some other materials I was lacking such as Organic Polymer and Metal. So i threw down a male that produced Red Crystalized Sap and a female that produced Crystal and loaded them up with stuff to eat and all my saved snow owl pellets. I kept getting 30 Red Crystalized Sap with the buff and 60 Crystal, also with the buff. But once the buff ran out i was getting around 14-27 Red Crystalized Sap and double that of Crystal. If you refer to the list in the "Possible Drops" section, you can see that Red Crystalized Sap is Rare, whereas Crystal is Uncommon. I also farmed Organic Polymer and Metal with the Gachas and got 30 from each crystal with the snow owl pellet buff.
Upon further testing I have determined the maximum quantity of materials from a Gacha Crystal based on their rarity: (Keep in mind this is with single player settings, I don't know if Gacha Crystal yield is affected by this or other settings. Also keep in mind I don't actually have a Gacha that drops element dust, which is the only Very Rare Material.)
Common: x120 Uncommon: x60 Rare: x30 Very Rare (Element Dust): x15
I can't confirm this but it appears that a Gacha in a good mood without the snow owl pellet buff would produce between 35-100% of its maximum yield per crystal, and a Gacha in a bad mood would produce below 35%.
Breeding: Gachas do not drop eggs after mating and instead have a gestation timer like mammals do. Once the baby has been born, it will pick up items on the ground, allowing you to give it more food than it can hold which can prevent starvation much easier than you can for most creatures, however a Maewing would render this technique useless. I haven't tested this myself, nor was I able to find any information on it but I don't think they can eat everything an adult can, for food at least. They can eat meat and berries (this I can confirm), and I've seen people use rare mushrooms as they provide more food for the baby than meat or berries, but make sure rare mushrooms are the only item in their inventory, or else they might eat other items first.
You can check what a Gacha can produce ("Production" in the radial menu) even in the baby stage, allowing you to easily determine if raising it to an adult is even worthwhile. If not then you can just.... you know. The possible materials are unaffected by the parents and are entirely random. However, one small disadvantage to breeding Gachas is that Element Dust can only be a possible drop for wild-born Gachas. So if you're trying to get one that drops Element Dust, don't waste your time breeding Gachas and just go tame wild ones. You can use the technique I suggested to find one with Element Dust (Check the level the Gacha that dropped the crystal before you pick it up, open the crystal and if you get Element Dust, tame the Gacha of the same level as the one that dropped the crystal).
When imprinting the Gacha, it will not gain more Crafting Skill. The only way to increase this is through level ups or breeding Gachas with high Crafting Skill, I am unaware if Crafting Skill can be increased through mutations but I personally don't think it would be worth the effort even if it is possible.
What to Feed Gachas: This is undoubtedly my favorite thing about Gachas, as I'm the type of player who does not throw out ANYTHING no matter what game I'm playing, so having a good way to transmute junk that I'm unhealthily attached to into resources I need is amazing.
I have thrown everything from Rockwell Recipes to Slingshots in Gachas and they have not turned down a single thing. Sick of dropping stone tools and cloth armor every time you kill something? A Gacha will eat it. Tired of throwing out all your spoiled meat from feeding troughs? A Gacha will eat it. Have a full fault of hide and now you throw out every bit of it you get? A Gacha will eat it. Maybe you have too many Rex Bone Helmet Skins? Sadly a Gacha won't eat it... just kidding yes they will! These things will eat all your garbage you get after you take a newly raised creature out to kill Rexes for XP. All those skins you get every time you respawn, they'll eat those too. With a Gacha, everything has a purpose now, even those Smithy Blueprints you get from every Blue Supply Drop.
Below I'll list the things Gachas will eat in order (1 being most preferred and 10 being least preferred):

1. Stone (stacks of 20 until gone)
2. Structures, Ammo (stacks of 20 until gone), Armor, Weapons, Tools, Blueprints
3. Food items such as raw meat (not Raw Prime Meat/Raw Prime Fish Meat), Spoiled Meat, berries, seeds, cooked meat, crops, mushrooms, etc. (These will be eaten in stacks of 20 until there is no stack of 20 in the Gacha, even if there are 2 stacks of 17, they will be left untouched until later.)
4. Other materials such as Chitin, Hide, Thatch, Wood, Fiber, Oil (Oil produced by sea creatures is included), etc. (These will be eaten in stacks of 20 until there is no stack of 20 in the Gacha, even if there are 2 stacks of 17, they will be left untouched until later.)
5. The least wanted things such as incomplete stacks from tier 3 and 4, Rockwell Recipes, Skins, Feces, possibly more. At this point it will also eat Raw Prime Meat, as it considers it an incomplete stack since it can't eat it in groups of 20.

Keep in mind I have not tested every item, it would take a long time and probably be more trouble than it's worth. I would assume other minerals such as Crystal and Obsidian as well as Metal would be in tier 1 with Stone, but I haven't tested them nor do I want to, besides Stone would be undoubtedly easier. I have found that the easiest way to get stuff to feed Gachas is just to keep all the random junk you'd normally throw out, I already listed them but I'll list them again:

• Spoiled Meat
• Stim Berries
• Excess items of which you have a full vault
• Trophies if you don't care for them
• Tools/Weapons/Armor not worth grinding (such as stone tools, stone arrows, cloth armor, slingshots, etc.)
• Rockwell Recipes
• Inferior Blueprints (Blueprints that are worse than your best ones and you either throw out or leave in a row of bookshelves that are labeled "Trash") as well as blueprints for structures and normal items
• Skins (mostly Rex Bone Helmet Skins you get from alphas as well as Fireworks Flare Gun Skins from killing deep sea creatures)
• All that extra meat you get from every hunt, as well the berries you'll never use

What I Do: I just have a single Gacha set to produce Metal sitting off my deck but right next to it, with 2 Snow Owls leaning over the Gacha but standing on the deck. Everyday when I log off, I take everything out of the Gacha and put it into a Snow Owl so it won't eat it while I can't collect the crystals. So when I log on, I take it out of the Snow Owl and put it back in the Gacha, since the Snow Owls are leaning over the Gacha, they puke the snow owl pellets right in front of it so it just picks it up (it's in a good mood due to being the only Gacha around).
Then I go on my daily routine (gather kibble eggs and get a few cave drops nearby) and come back and there's a couple crystals on the ground giving me free Metal to put straight in the forge. I also filter the meat in the main feeding trough and the Hyaenodon next to it and give the Gacha about 1900 Spoiled Meat. Every time I go out on my Rock Drake or other tame, I dump all the stone tools and arrows and other garbage (my Chitin and Hide vaults are full constantly and now Stone, Thatch, Wood keep hitting the max every other day) into the Gacha as well, there's always stuff left at the end of the day because I get so much absolutely useless junk that the Gacha seems to believe is food. Occasionally on a slow day it might run out, so I just go to an oil drill or gas collector and grab everything and take it straight back to the Gacha. Every day I get at least 900 Metal in the forge (raw, not ingots).
Other Notes:

1. I've seen a lot of people say that mate boosted Gachas produce crystals more, this is not the case. The only good thing about keeping a male and female Gacha next to each other is it allows you to fit twice as many Gachas in an area without them having bad mood.
2. When a Gacha is set to produce Organic Polymer the best option is to not open the crystal, and instead put it inside a storage container and only open it once you need Polymer, due to the eventual spoilage of Organic Polymer.
3. Gachas will pick up Feces if a creature defecates close enough to them, but Feces is only eaten as a last resort option compared to most available items.
4. If you always have a folder in your inventory with your less used items like a Canteen and Sickle and probably same ammo, then it's best to be aware when you transfer all items straight into the Gacha. Sometimes the "Transfer All" button will take things out of your folder as well, resulting in you accidentally feeding the Gacha your own tools (I have lost over 5 Ascendant Sickles and well over 10 stacks of Shotgun Ammo to this). However this seems to usually only happen when you log on for the first time after opening the game. I should know better at this point but I literally just sacrificed 20 Shotgun Ammo today so I'm gonna start dumping everything out of my folder and into my private vault at the end of every day.
5. I don't think the item that Gachas eat impacts the crystal growth, except tools/weapons/armors/structures seem to equal a group of 20 items (i.e. one mouthful).
6. Since snow owl pellets spoil after 14 days (default settings), if you don't have anything in your Gacha for it to eat and you're just using it to collect pellets for later use, I'd recommend taking all of them and dumping them into a Dung Beetle at the end of every day. Dung Beetles increase the spoil time of all feces, including snow owl pellets. If you don't have a Dung Beetle, crop plots work as well, although it will be tedious to place down enough crop plots for a large amount of snow owl pellets as each one has an inventory of only 10 slots.
7. Again, I'd just like to point out that you cannot get Element Dust as a Production option on a bred Gacha.
8. If you go out for a long time while your Gacha is making crystals, just keep in mind that they only last 15 minutes (default rates).

Anyway that's all I can think of right now, yet I have the feeling I forgot to mention 47097894703 things. If there's anything anyone can confirm or point out, or anything that I should add then please let me know. I'd like for this Gacha essay to help a few people figure out what to do so they don't have to scour the internet for a week. If people actually care about this post then I'll make a detailed post about an optimal Gacha Crystal farm.

recently, i've been reading into if I should base my calorie count on a 24-hr period or based on when I sleep. Although people said it really doesnt matter, they mentioned a lot of it has to do with body hormones.
Well, I started to worry because I can't have a consistent sleep schedule this would affect important hormones for weight loss. On Saturdays and Sundays I work 7p-7a and then during the week I try to be awake by 10a and go to sleep around 12a-2a depending on the night. Ik that this has really messed up my circadian rhythm, but the money's good.
So, should i decide to eat between certain times of every day? does it matter?

Some say it slows your metabolism and stops your body from burning fat, others say it doesn’t matter as long as it’s within maintenance/deficit. One seems to gain a lot of weight from alcohol, while another seems to remain skinny.
I’m not a big drinker, but I do wonder. Does CICO still count when it comes to alcohol? Because alcohol is some form of poison, and our bodies respond to poison, right?
Sure, alcohol makes you hungry and more likely to make bad choices when it comes to food. It’s easier to overeat. But let’s say you stick to a healthy diet, exercise, and drink 2 consumptions within caloric needs, would that affect your weight?

Perhaps infinitely more pleasurable.
I am more sensitive and have multiple dry orgasms and last as long as I want, I feel charged and invigorated from sex, more attracted to my GF and like a more attentive passionate lover. Women flock to me now and have even asked my GF if she would open the relationship… it’s almost like in retaining and cultivating male sexual energy power women feel a magnetic pull to you, when the mind isn’t fixated on sex (or retaining for that matter!) and trying to get something, a wonderful and powerful presence and energy occurs. While the attention is nice, with my partner there is an infinite exploration of intimacy that I have never known possible.
I don’t break eye contact, everyone else does. I feel no anxiousness, my depression subsided. Skin looks like it glows, quit alcohol, porn, weed, nicotine, have more energy at the gym, confidence, chi energy.. this is coming from an overly anxious and depressed low confidence past, also had PE and PIED.
Once we don’t associate orgasm with ejaculation and undo this conditioning it is very possible to have unlimited dry orgasms, and a heightened sensation of ecstasy but also control. The truth is when we ejaculate we also orgasm and so most people associate male orgasm with ejaculation which aren't actually the same thing. Male orgasm is an energetic build up and muscle contraction and ejaculation separate, but through society we are led to believe they are one in the same. They are paired together to encourage us to spread our seed, but I have learned and experienced that they are actually separate and this has been known for thousands of years.
I used to experience premature ejaculation so you can retrain your mind and body.
I don’t count streaks. In my mind if I am fixating on avoiding or abstaining from something it still controls me in some way. Because I retain and have a sex life with my girlfriend I have ejaculated here and there but I have changed my association and expectations of sex from ejaculating being the goal but also try not to cum until I want to, to sex being about presence and pleasure in the moment not waiting for a orgasm to feel good and satisfied. It has changed the entire dynamic of intimacy and I retain as much as I can and occasionally I uncontrollably ejaculate, but it is rare (maybe twice in the past year, and becomes less common with practice). I notice a huge drop in chi energy and stamina, confidence. Not fixating on ejaculating makes sex about the feeling, energy, sensation, presence. The energy builds instead of edging, and I can transmute it into my body and into her energetically.
It feels like a retraining of everything I’ve known, of the mind, body, and spirit. A rediscovering and exploration of intimacy and connection. Finding power again in the masculine and therefore feminine polarity, we both charge.
This took time, practice, communication, and experimentation. It is a process. Initially from retaining I couldn't last long at all and we had to go very slow. Now can go for hours, indefinitely.
Recommend reading:

• The multi orgasmic man / couple
• The masculine in the relationship
• Dopamine Nation
• Urban Tantra
• Taoist secrets of cultivating male sexual energy

Alcohol, nicotine, porn, ejaculation, any addictions will lower your vibration.
Regaining the masculine yang fire which has been tarnished and suffocated by society, deemed to be ‘toxic’ and that men should be feminine only. This is different from toxic masculinity, it is real and healthy masculinity. The reality is polarity is always inevitable. In a relationship a natural yin yang polarity will always establish itself but often times the male becomes submissive and the female assertive nowadays. This is a process of taking back the masculine chi power, the healthy male power in grace. Lifting weights, nourishing your body, following your excitement and passion will all contribute to chi energy.
Healthy yang energy is grounded and secure, stable, safe, calm, driven, inspired, kind, loving, passionate, decisive, unwavering.. in a relationship with a woman I have noticed she has softened the more I cultivate my male yang energy, she naturally unconsciously cultivates her feminine yin energy and has become more feminine. Healthy feminine is compassionate, connection, nurturing, understanding, vulnerable, warmth, sexually excited, soft, gentle, happy. Both genders can be out of alignment or in alignment.
An out of balance masculine is:
Aggressive, Confrontational, Controlling, Desperation, Critical, Unstable, Unsupportive
An out of balance feminine is:
Controlling, Critical, Demanding, Cold, Manipulative, Over giving, No interest in sex, People pleasing
—- when the masculine yang energy balances the feminine yin will inevitably balance too in the polarity.
Real intimacy is a beautiful thing. This is very healing. We have so much power within ourselves.
Fuck porn.

The Context:

A 43 year-old award-winning 3D artist with no construction experience makes a post to /construction bemoaning how hard it is to break into the trades. The thread has been deleted, but still can be read in full here.
His post begins:

I can't get into the trades for no reason that I can discern. 24 years work experience, successful, in an unrelated field. I speak well, no record. I'm eager, have spent time consulting in relevant fields.
It's not random, there's interviews, people make connections, sons get on the job, etc.
I'm white and male and those two qualities have made it impossible for me to get a job at 43 making $18 an hour as a helper to spend most of my time getting coffee?
What am I supposed to do? Banditry? Walk into any shop and it's "why am I going to sponsor you?" and it's not because they don't think I'll do the job well, it's "What is in it for me?"
Unions are meant to protect generational labor while putting window dressing up begging alternate ethnicity and genders or whatever else is on their list. It has nothing to do with who will be the best electrician or carpenter in 6 years.
Good luck guys, glad you have a place in society.

He is heavily criticized for this, with many pointing out that there are likely other reasons he has failed to find gainful employment in his field of choice. OOP then proceeds to get into multiple fights, mentions that he’s won several awards at Cannes, and pushes back on almost all advice given to him.
For readability’s sake, I have linked directly to Unddit for all of OOP’s (now-deleted) comments.

The Drama:

Is OOP too late?

No experience? You're 43? I wouldn't hire you either. It's a young man's game. You're a couple of decades too late.

Putting age into it is literally illegal. You're making my point for me. These public avenues are supposed to make you equal in the law, not add layers of insulation for age discrimination. Hopefully you're not an employer.

Ok we will take age out of it. You sound more aggravating than ten Mexicans of any vintage.
This field is not for you. Go back to tech or whatever.

I sound aggravating when I'm angry at your profession which in some form directly represents you? Go figure.

No, you sound aggravating because you took to Reddit to whine about Mexicans because you think you DESERVE a job that you’re wholly unqualified for. A person of any race, creed, color, or gender with any practical experience is a better hire than you are.

[Continued:]

I took to Reddit because I work in PR and I know how to get the mob opinion which is exactly what I got. I wasn't farming for likes, I knew exactly what this would do and I got exactly what I wanted out of it. I'm applying to "no skills needed" adult programs and am clearly among the top qualified for the job and I'm at the tail end of a long effort of trying to obtain such positions. The answer from shops is "what are you going to do for me" and they don't mean it in the are you going to do the job-type questions. These are "golden tickets" they use as collateral. The public avenues are exactly what I'm saying. You don't get to 90% non-white recruitment as something you parade on a website without excluding a certain segment of people. White people's avenue are through these shops and I'm excluded because people like you think like you thought in your original post. Good day, hope it wasn't too aggravating of an experience. Enjoy the slice you staked for yourself and acted self-righteous about.

You've repeatedly said your skills have nothing to do with construction & have no direct experience, yet still insist that you're "the most qualified". So yes, the 19 y.o. brown kid with 6 months is more qualified. Hell, I wouldn't hire you either. If you're leaving a job of $200k for peanuts because you're "not happy", there's no way I would believe that you will stay in a new field where the New Guy gets shat on constantly. Especially not with the attitude you clearly have.
If you're serious about getting into the trades, go to a trade school. It's a "back door" to getting in with a shop while also getting the knowledge you'll need.

I'm a 3D artist who has had construction clients, I've also had peripheral experience related to trades. Not in trades which is different. Can an engineer build a house? No? Does he know things about that house? Yes? This isn't hard and my attitude on my thread isn't me no matter how much you wish it were. You can walk away with your self-righteous opinions but I'm exactly who I say I am and I can see this bullshit clearly with my own eyes. You're not going to change any of that and you're clearly not going to learn from my experience. Fuck this shit. Yeah, I do have attitude now, look at the responses. It's clear. Age. Private places won't hire me for that reason alone and the public avenues widdle me out by race and gender on the final rounds. I've come to learn that the white kid spots in those places are things of value too. Everyone has a relative.
Buddy. You don't know the difference between a P-1 and a P-2 and you're too arrogant to listen to instructions, get educated or take criticism.
Why the fuck would anyone hire you?

Nice how you can describe me as arrogant without even knowing me.

Well when that's how you present yourself, how else am I supposed to view you?

Others object to OOP’s protestations that his being a white male was a handicap:

i stopped reading when you said being a white male is why no ones hiring you lmao

Innit 😆. I can't get work in a sector I've no experience it must be everyone else's fault

If I were a 23 year old woman who dropped out of HS with a GED I'd have gotten a sponsored union position the second I showed up. You can't tell me that's not true, you also can't look at me in real life and say I'm anything but what I'm saying. That's the reality of the situation, public avenues are excluded me very specifically for no reason having to do with actually being me.

It’s not true

It's not? You mean there's not quotas for these things that are used as actual hiring criteria in the places that feed the union shops in NYC? State and city funding isn't directly tied to their ability to hire these specific groups of people? Because, that's the literal system. You can say it's not true, but they'll tell you to your face and it's broadcast right on their website. If that's the actual system, despite you saying it's not true, that would suck. The age thing is repeated countless times on this thread. People have 2 consistent things, my age and my "attitude" for complaining for this being what it is. That's what people think, they're being honest. The race and gender thing, I dunno, I guess the state legislature? I don't even know.

Clearly you haven't been paying attention. If the guy who owns the shop is white and his kids are white and his nephews are white and his nephews screw up friend is white and they're all in the club and the union is getting quotas from the city they need to fill in order to receive funding that makes all public avenues inaccessible to white males, those positions are filled. That's how we do things these days. Check out places like "Construction Skills" where they brag about 90% non-white recruitment, etc. Well is the city 90% non-white? No? Are white people applying? Yes? You can pretend there's not a correlation here, but it's darn clear. Talk to anyone trying to get into the trades and on the men universally agree the best leg up you can gave is to be a woman. You might not want to live in this world, but it's the world we live in.
this entire post makes it clear that you just have a shitty attitude. i can count with my fingers the amount of women construction workers ive encountered in almost 8 years of being in the trades. this is very much a YOU problem, bud.

Another asserts that OOP’s mentality is to blame:

It’s the insufferable victim mentality. I’ve worked with guys like you and they never last.

See, you just don't encounter very many people who have worked 90 hours a week looking to make a career switch and rose to management in that time. We have the confidence of knowing who we are ahead of time. You can assign whatever you want to it, this is my experience. If half the guys don't have a license and the actual job requirement is "who will work the hardest, get the coffee order right, show up 30 minutes early and don't have to worry about smelling like weed" I'm #1, yet, I seem to be last. Perhaps this is someone who has specifically been on high functioning, complicated teams for his entire care
You’ve never worked 90 hours in a week in your life.

I have Cannes Lions awards, do you even know what that is? Try and tell me I never worked 90 hours, it's my defining feature as a worker. The biggest complaint about me is I care too much and that creates turmoil, over my career I've had to moderate caring about the end product and the client. Address what I'm saying, don't make shit up. Making shit up does nothing.

Let’s rephrase that. You’ve never WORKED in your life. I’ve done 90 hours a week pipelining. That’s work. And it was 15 years ago for me. I’d be fucking crippled if I tried that today. I got a back surgery as a reward for my efforts. Whatever annoying ass shit you’re up to is for soft handed tittybabies who don’t actually create anything of value. You’re one of the non-essentials.

OOP’s tone is critiqued:

You sound like an entitled know-it-all. I would assume that comes through clearly in interviews, along with a dose of racism. Nobody wants to hire the guy who's been to 40 superbowls and knows everyone and everything. They can't be taught and are a drain.

I think I sound like someone who is sick of this shit and you identify with the parties I'm railing against. But, you know, we all have different adjectives for things.

There it finally comes out. Politics!!! It only took 2 hours of this guy complaining and boom POLITICS. It’s always about the “party” you choose. What a joke

Buddy, I just wanted to paint walls or frame a wall.

But you turned it into something else. I get that you're frustrated but you're being "that guy". The chip on your shoulder is turning people off.

Yah man, don't listen to all the people telling you how insufferable you sound, it's not you it's them. That's why you'll never get into the trades..

Another gets down to it:

How much experience do you have in the trades?

How much experience am I supposed to have for no experience required helper positions specifically for adults?

It's uncommon to get hired into the trades anywhere without any real world experience

So only people with real world experience get hired. How does one get that real world experience, genius? These are helper positions, no experience required, adult programs. You're telling me I need the thing they're specifically trying to come in there and provide an opportunity for not having. This is madness.

If you invite someone whose nearly 50 with zero experience onto a worksite he's gonna hurt himself. You can learn to build by just flipping houses or build a deck. As for my trade it's unusual for someone to be hired after 35 even with trades experience.

[Continued:]

I'm a backpacker with a BMI of 19 in the best shape of my life. Age discrimination is also literally illegal. You're literally spouting the bullshit we had to go in and make laws over because middle aged men were getting disenfranchised.

Names are called:

You sound like a whiner. Just an absolute whiny little shit at 43. It emanates from you, and no one likes whiners on jobsites, so it makes sense you can't get hired as a no-experience whiner.

I'm the person who keeps his mouth shut knowing you're a dick with an authority problem who speaks up needing to prove size. I get my job done, don't say a word, laugh at your jokes, then go home. When I whine it's to my boss, about others not pulling their weight. I got bosses willing to attest to that, in spades. We all know things, sometimes we don't know the thing we think we know. I think I got this situation pegged though. Pretty stupid for you to engage, I know me and I get to base my opinion on the evidence you provided. You don't know me and are opining on a thread of me complaining saying I'm a complainer. Huh, wow, genius, you got me, I complained! I know what I offer, what my weaknesses and strengths are. I obsessively work at them on a daily basis. All of this is true, and everything I've written here is my story. Apologies if a single complain to you reads perpetual whiner. I'm glad you've found mechanisms in life to let you believe you're in control and able to exert authority in comfortable places. It emanates from you, who you are. I come on advertising no skill, I come on with a complaint, those are your accusations. I came in with them, so, bravo, figured me out and really added to the conversation.

Keep wondering why no one wants to hire you bro- Don't worry, it's literally everyone elsewho's wrong!

I'm being told it's because it's my age, race and gender, to my face. Whether that's right or wrong, up to you to decide for yourself.

The Flairs:

• “So what's your skill set? Lying and spinning bullshit?”
  
• “I have Cannes Lions awards, do you even know what that is?”
  
• “Whatever annoying ass shit you’re up to is for soft handed tittybabies”
  

TW also for self harm and I guess existential thoughts, depression.
So this culminated to a point for me last year during my birthday in the fall(won't specify, not sure if she uses reddit). I'll give a simple current event summary and then relay past events leading up(me is me, CS(31f): crap sister, LS(26) little sister, ES(36): eldest sister(only here sometimes, as she moved out shortly after her 18th, and then back and forth after tha), Mom(58): mom. SO(same age): ex-partner from junior year HS till age 24. I am trans male, but due to happening after most of these events, that doesn't really have any merit to this story, other than small details, like clothing)
I(28m) decided after not hearing anything on my birthday, and nothing before that since helping her get money for moving state after a divorce(an investing app offered her 1000 if so many people used her link to invest a free 5 dollar gift), to stop all contact and remove my sister from my social media accounts.
When we were kids, CS was the worst. Ever since I could remember, she showed a huge dislike for me. I don't haveamy good memories of her, and the ones I do, are followed, or closely accompanied by a bad memory. I don't have a lot of examples, since the good wasn't really that significant anyway(think, gifting me a stuffed animal when I was in the he hospital for abdominal pains at 8 or 9 years of age, then, after finding that it was a relatively minor issue that happened to cause a huge discomfort. I was told to drink plenty of water, and for my mom to give me a kids Tylenol if needed. She then snatched it back the next day and while I don't remember the exact words, made it clear that I only deserved it if I was really injured, and had wasted time). This was kind of a small(but very impactful) issue that still sticks with me today. I have to convince myself to go to he doctor to have certain issues checked. I recently only went because the numbness in my hands was getting worse, and I was told I had clear symptoms of carpal tunnel(I work in a kitchen, heavy lifting and fine hand movements are often). I also have a ganglean cyst, that has spawned a secondary cyst, in my left wrist, but that's another story.
She always put me down any time I did anything. Even looking at her the wrong way was infuriating to her(I didn't know what she was talking about until just a few years back, but I am diagnosed ADHD and suspected on the autism spectrum. I live on my own and have had a relatively independent life since I could physically and legally do so, just small aspects need extra attention). I'd ask her what she meant, and she'd yell at me. I wasn't rude either. CS:stop looking like that! Me trying to make my face more..plain?: like what? I'm sorry CS: stop it!, you know what you're doing! And you're doing it on purpose. Me: I'm sorry! I really don't know how I'm looking at you, I don't know what you want(I'm crying at this point) CS, getting up to hit me, like always: you KNOW what You're doing, Now stop it!
At that point, my mom had come in and yelled at my sister to calm down(I don't remember what all was said, I was maybe 6 or 7 and don't have the best time remembering the days with her) and that if she didn't like that way I looked, she could go.
Note about my mom, she had left my abusive father and moved several states when I was less than 4, my baby sister not even a year. He tried getting the legal system to bring her back, as the state they had lived in had always done. They told him that it didn't work that way, and they were legally separated. He was told to pay child support(guess how that went) and go to monitored visitation with us. That only happened a few times, and I only remember 2 of them. One visit, there was a person, I don't even recall the face, across the table, coloring and just doing art stuff. The second memory I have is us(me, CS, and LS. ES had a different dad who was not in the picture, and did not want to be. She stayed home). We played with toys in the waiting room for what seemed like forever, the sky was dark when we left. We never went to those meetings again(my dad apparently had told the caseworkers that if my mom wasn't required to meet with him as well, he wasn't interested in the he meetings). Since then, she has been a single mother, working as much as she could while still trying to balance raising us. I don't blame her for not being there, but I am a little disappointed that she never really admonished them, but merely, to this day, says that they may have been horrible then in the circumstances, but they still loved me.
Cue to elementary school, CS used to terrorize me, steal things I owned, destroyed things of mine. She was pretty stuck up and snobby to all of us, but it seemed to be targeted at me(her and ES did fight, instigation from both sides, and eventually made up some years later, but ES could and did fight back. When she could and was home. She worked too, and had a life later in high school, so that was understandable on her part, kind of) I, being younger, and, I guess, a little blind to some social and reactive cues at the time(I discovered I stare blankly while I listen to people. Facial reactions were too hard to focus on without losing attention to what was being said, if that makes sense). Any friends I had soon heard about the way she treated me, and the things she would accuse me of(not bathing, stealing, or just over embellishing embarrassing things about me to make people dislike me. Calling me fat, stupid, weird, etc). One of the only friends I had was a homeschooled girl. But I only got to see her on the weekends. Because my mom worked and ES had extracurriculars and later work(she is about 7.5 years older than me) we were watched by CS, and she didn't want to do the slightest bit of work doing so, which, flipped if it worked in or out of my favor often. Sometimes she'd be non-caring, allowing us to go to a neighborhood friend, so she wouldn't have to watch us. After having to come get us a few times, that stopped. One of the more traumatic times was when she decided to rig our doorknob(so that instead of a lock you flipped, it was a push knob, you push the knob into the door, turn the knob, and release. It's a non key locking system. I'm not sure if they are normally sold that way or if something happened, but it was installed backwards, so that you could lock someone inside of the room. Can you guess what happened? I was locked inside of my own bedroom, no food, no water, not even a bathroom break, during almost the entire 9 hours(mom worked 8 and commute) on a Saturday. I can't remember if LS was in there with me, but it's possible she was young enough to not even know what was going on, if she was in there. She's about 2 years younger than me, and this was when I was around 6/7. I was absolutely terrified. I cried, I screamed, I banged on the door. I begged to be let out for at least the restroom, which she refused, likely because I'd try to run and hide(the smart thing, duh). So there I was, freaking out that I had been locked in a room and cut off from all necessities. I don't stop crying until my mom came home, who, upon hearing the screaming, tore into CS about how wrong it was and what if we needed the bathroom or water, or even food. I don't remember her response(I probably don't want to) but my mom just glared angrily at CS as she left downstairs to her room. Mom made sure I got water, food, and restroom. I didn't mess up my room, that itself also created issues that I'll lay out later.
There are so many(too many) horrific memories from that time. It was hard all the time. I was insulted, isolated from my other siblings, and eve. Physically hurt. I'm not sure if the physical pain was worse though. I tended to forgive people very easily, and constantly, even into my early adulthood, tried my best to make her think better of me. She would steal clothes from me(cut them up to "fit her better". I was chunky, more medical than anything else, so with alterations, yes, they'd fit her. Like they'd fit an escort. Yes it's mean, but she's literally cut the pant legs off of jeans so that it was literally a jean thong. I only realized how terrible that was later on my teen years when fashion set in more within your social groups. And when they eventually didn't fit her(hah) she'd just throw them out and say they were a waste and wouldn't look good on me anyway. My mom told CS at the thrift store that she had to find outfits for me before finding herself some, and she would often try to just grab the first thing(usually ugly and wrong size) she could and the try to shop for herself(she was greedy with money. If CS found out a gift or piece of clothing one of us got cost more, she'd throw a fit and destroy our things. My mom once bought herself a vintage star Trek the original series collection, and because she didn't spend her tax return on CDs for CS, CS scratched up a bunch of the discs. My mom never even got to watch them before that. Some still played, but it felt like a loss). Mom didn't like that and said she had to help me find suitable clothes I liked. CS didn't like it, but obliged.
One of the larger things she did, when a 12/13 year old(I was 10) is she broke into an abandoned foreclosed house with a grown man, and stayed there for several days, or maybe a week or 2 . She ran from home often, blaming our mom for her issues was the norm for her. Everything was moms fault. Might've been her fault, though, was what happened next. My mom didn't want to call the cops on my sister, but knew confronting her alone and with an unknown man would be dangerous. So, probably against her better judgement, she handed me the phone(she worked at a cellular call center, in the early stages(2000's) of cell phones. She got them from the company for free, periodically). I called 911, per our mom's wishes. Explained my sister had broken into a house with a man and had been staying there. Once they heard that she was a minor, they didn't take long to get there. We sat up the road, in the car, watching it happen. Mom cried the entire time, but would not move from that spot until she saw that the cops had successfully taken her into custody. I just stared while it happened.
I know I shouldn't have had to make that call, but, due to being left alone all the time to my own devices, I had become quiet and usually kept my words and feelings to myself, and therefore seemed the most "emotionally stable" to handle it. Being put into that kind of spot was already happening with other issues, but they aren't relevant.
Over the years, more things happened that made me just want to be alone. LS even stopped being a target and was the precious baby sister (no issue with that in itself, but CS further alienated me from LS and I would once again be left alone. Being told I wasnt worth the time and that no one likes me, and if they did, it was because they pitied me, was an often occurance. My mom tried to stop it where she could but she had been met by the wrath of my sister(and before that, my father) for so long, she didn't want my sister to cause an issue that got us taken away from her. (We had been taken for some months due to some CPS workers believing my fathers lies about her being unstable and immoral. Given back due to no evidence, but with a struggle.) She didn't want to risk that again, so instead tried to keep the peace where she could. She had no family help, and was raising us all by herself. CS got physical, with even my mom, and it scared her. Out house was broken into numerous times by her ex boyfriends, ex friends, and people from..."groups" she used to hang out with. ES was also to the point of just not talking to CS or coming around that much anymore(after she moved out at 17. She also couldn't stand to be around CS)
An emergency later on with ES got her and CS bonding and acting like siblings that had a spat, and around that time is when LS was starting to get CS's attention. (I don't blame LS at all. It's not really her fault we never got to bond like siblings and even now don't know how to talk to one another freely). I still received the brunt of CS's wrath. She'd be nice, like offering some soda she bought, or some snacks, and then be a total b itch, sometimes going off and accusing me of stealing something.
CS: my chapstick is missing! Where is it? Me(roughly 8/9): why would I know? CS: don't talk back to me, I KNOW you stole it. now, where is it. Me, mumbling because I know what's going to happen:I don't know... CS: WHAT Me, wanting her to leave me alone: I DONT KNOW. CS: shut up, yes you do, I know you took it, now where is it??
At this point, I am crying and she has already hit me in he head and face a few times. After my refusing to answer, she just screamed and left me there, confused and wondering if I did take it.
She found it later. Never said a word or offered apology. This was a regular accurance all the way up until she moved out for the first time at 14. I learned to not use the phrase " I don't know" as often as I could because to her, it meant I wanted to hide something, because I obviously should know, and was choosing not to tell her and lie. It still happened, and yes, I got beat for it. We even moved school districts when I was 11(not related to the incidents) and I didn't want to make friends because I hated that they would eventually know her. It was rough to say the least.
A few years later, after CS moving in and out of home with boyfriend after boyfriend after boyfriend, starting at 14, I only had to deal with her while she was home, either between moving stints, or whenever she wanted to drop by and take things, like food or stuff she left with us. Sometimes she just took things. Mom was happy to see her come at all, so we dealt with it. While I heavily disliked the way she had treated me until then, I still wanted her to like me. So when she was home, I tried. When she lived with us for a few months at the age of 16/17, ES, now in her early 20s, living on her own, bought me and LS a laptop. It wasn't the best, but it was a laptop. Well, as you can guess, CS wanted to be able to use it too. Mom said we should because it was the nice thing to do and it would calm things down. So I made her a profile of her own. Not good enough. She wanted access to the main account, the one me and LS used. Now I wasnt into anything nefarious at the time, like p**n or anything, but I just don't want to give in to her being crazy and hovering. She looked for anything to yell at me for. She never once asked or yelled at LS for the password, even though LS knew it. It was my fault.
Next time I got the laptop back, the charger cord had some extra pieces stuck to it that I later found to be part of the internal charger port. She had literally ruined not only the charger, but the charging port in the laptop itself. Rendering it absolutely useless. Replacing that small part required the whole charger port to be replaced, and connections to be restored inside the laptop itself. So, it was a loss. No one seemed to ever be as mad as I was that this kept happening. Call me petty, but I held those memories as the deepest grudge, I still do. I kept pushing it down whenever she wanted to be nice to me, which in hindsight ended up being her needing something from me, sometimes even my company, because she couldn't keep authentic friends around. She got me stoned for the first time when I was 8 or 9 at one of her boyfriend's houses, and then gave me my first drink around the same age. Both with my mom not present. I was a child so when she told me not to tell in exchange for snacks and such, I obliged. I just wanted her to like me.
2 moments really stick out in the high school days before she left for several years to play wife to yet another guy. 1.The first was when we were actually hanging out in the kitchen of the family apartment, CS and ES were drinking and just catching up, while I was just by the kitchen drinking water. CS got pretty tipsy and, while walking into the kitchen, slipped and fell. She wasn't hurt or anything, it was just a small thing, and she ended up gigging and everyone laughed, like it was one of those fun family moments, y'know. Like in the shows. Well she looks and sees me laughing too, like literally everyone else. This is particular makes her mad and she gets right up and strides towards me. My mom yelled her name but before anything could happen, CS punched me right in the jaw. Only this time, I didn't fall, much less move more than an inch or 2. I already knew it was coming the moment she locked eyes with me. I stood my ground and just stared at her. I couldn't believe it. Even though I prepared for it, I still couldn't believe it. Everyone else has started laughing first. She had been gone for years. She herself thought it was funny. But seeing me, have fun at her expense, no matter how minuscule? No. Not happening. My mom asked her why she did it. She only looked at me, my face not even sad, just flat, like I felt nothing and hadn't been hit. But I didn't feel "nothing". I felt rage. Rage that, even at 14 and 15, even if others had joined, I was her target. She scoffed when family questioned her and stormed off. Nothing changed.

1. After that, I had issues with friends, yet again, because she was home. I, 16 at the time, tried to stay the night at a friend's house, but instead of getting input from my mom, I got CS. She demanded that I clean my "pig-sty" of a room. I shared a room with LS, and a lot of the things complained of, weren't mine. And even if I cleaned, the ADHD made it messy as I easily lost things and would flip my room in a panic. Regardless, I asked if I could talk to mom. Mom hesitated, but as well said no, likely because CS was there and my mom is, admittedly a pushover and a bit naive when it comes to them. CS was screaming at me on the phone, and my friend's mom heard it, and took the phone and asked for them(my mother, NOT my sister) to talk. After this, I told them my sister had issues and was a bad person(info with extra details omitted, but it's legal issues), and to not pay attention to the insults. Well friend's mom thought she should talk it over with my mom and I told her it's fine just discuss staying over, I'm not keen on going home.

My mom came after some minutes(we lived down the street), with, ugh, CS with her. I asked why she was there and her response was to make sure I "wasn't spreading sh it about her to gain sympathy". My mom went inside to talk to friend's mom and the big hit came. -Some background. I was depressed. Of course, with a sibling destroying any chance of normal social interaction and losing material items and even money, I wondered, from an early age, why. I didn't try to take my life up to that point, and anything I did was cuts, scratching, and punching. I did anything to control what I was feeling. I felt so many emotions, and some that I didnt know how to explain, some of which had followed me since childhood, that I couldn't get a hold of. So I turned to pain, something I could thoroughly control. It had been going on since I was around 12 in middle school, found out by my mom at 14/15, and I was actively in therapy(after arguing with ES and my mom that I needed therapy, and being told i was selfish). I was still 15 at the time. -Back to it. While my mother and my friend's mom were chatting, CS and I were arguing. I just wanted her to leave me alone, and told her so. The apartment walls werent the best, so CS overheard the things I had said about CS. None were lies, I just wanted someone to know. Deep down I still wanted her affection, but I wanted SOMEONE to hold her accountable at least. But it didn't end there. In the hallway, after hearing the main convo between the mothers, and hearing mine tell friend's mom that I fluffed up the issue because we dont get along, sibling rivalry(the usual excuse):
CS:I don't know why you have to blab so much, no one needs to know. Me: it's the truth. CS it doesn't matter. You don't even want to be here. If you're going to cut yourself, at least do it the right way.
I stopped talking and looked down after that. She smiled and continued waiting for our mom, while on her phone, probably the 4th one that year(she broke them often). It hurt. But hearing it didn't hurt as realizing that I felt it all the time. A grief from early childhood, that I didn't know the origin of, came back. I grieved myself. I still didn't know it then, I was just sad and numb. I thought death was the easy way out. Surely I didn't deserve the easy way. I continues the injuries, hiding them better and refusing to tell my therapist after a separate incident with my mom. Mom even stopped coming to the group therapy, and they told me it was specifically to help parents support their troubled kids, and if my mom wasn't showing up, I could no longer attend the group sessions. We would still have 1 on 1. But it made me feel even worse. Everyone in that group probably knew why I wanted there after 2 times with my mom absent. But I digress. After hearing my sister say that, I guess I became more serious about leaving everything and hoping for a better shot next time, if there was one.
Some months later, still 15 and in school I decided to try what I had heard: alcohol with a high number of any kind of pain pill. I took about 14-16(I don't quite remember, I just kept taking 2 at a time and quit counting at 12, just kept taking) of extra strength Tylenol. Took a shot or 2(or 4, I just did what I thought might be enough while not giving myself away) from ES bottle(she had moved home due to her living situation falling through), and went to school, hoping for the best(worst) I did get a little scared when I suddenly felt a spike in my heart rate, sweat, and a cold sweep through my body. This lasted several minutes, and I happened to be sitting at my desk in class, already having finished the assignment, so laying down on the desk looked normal. I waited and waited. The feeling got worse and worse, and painful, in my stomach and my chest. After a few grueling minutes of hoping it would happen, it didn't. While some residual pain remained in my abdomen, the other symptoms had calmed down. To say i was disappointed was a huge understatement. I went through the classes, saying nothing about having almost released myself from the harsh grip of empty reality. There wouldn't have been a point. I'd have been yelled at by my family for being selfish and wanting attention, just like when they had discovered my injuries and when I had asked for therapy. I was already threatened with being put into a mental ward for teens. Saying something and failing warranted worse consequences than not telling and succeding. So I kept silent and suffered. I decided that putting myself out wouldn't happen, and I would just deal.
I moved in with someone I was dating and their family just a few months after my 18th birthday(9 mo together). I hadn't even graduated yet, just finished credits early. CS had already moved out before that, but I just didn't want to be there any longer. I felt unsupported and pushed aside. Not to get into details, because it's not my story, but when LS was going through something(after I moved out), they dropped it all to help her and take her to therapy. Again, I don't blame LS. I may not like the way she handled her situation afterwards, but it happened nonetheless, and she was pampered by that demon and cared for by everyone else as the baby, so I've never had huge issues with her, but my family's reaction to her vs me was starkly different. Especially after being told several times by CS, ES and hinted at by my mom that I was always a little difficult, but not in a purposeful kind of way. Yet while I was "difficult" I was still thought to be relatively low maintenance due to the fact that I shyed away and prefered to do my own thing, alone. I mean, wouldn't you if you felt, no, if you knew, that certain family members just hated you, and others regarded you as difficult? When you just wanted love? I know that I wasn't normal like other kids, in that I didn't show clear emotion, or didn't know how to convey my feelings or needs. But I never tried to be an issue. But that's what I had always been told. That I was doing it at my own will, to make CS angry. I'm not even sure what about me always put CS off, but it weighed down for a while.
As an adult(18-20), it was better. Communication, but with less physical meetings, proved to at least be better for us. CS eventually started talking to me and my at-the-time SO, inviting us out. I think she needed company, because the man she chose to marry had all but cut out all male people from her life(don't feel bad, she did the same with his female friends)and her female friends were not always good friends, and maybe she knew that, deep down, I still wanted her approval. And boy was she right. We(me and SO, Same age) were always accepting her invitation. My SO had the train of thought that CS was at least trying, and that counted for something. At the time I agreed.
Around age 20, we were heading to Christmas with my family after SO's family celebration(we lived with them at the time, in hindsight a bad idea, totally separate issue). It was snowing and the car I was driving had belonged to SO's parents, so, respectfully, I requested to my SO that we pick up CS and take her to moms apartment(she hadn't moved since we left home, expenses and all). Well, SO was a momma's kid, and while we were getting ready to leave, SO told the parents about the extra trip and asked if that was ok. (At the time I don't think anything, but later on I realized that the mother was a huge control freak with attachment issues and the SO would always back her up in the end, even if there was a good chance we'd win an argument). Looking back, they definitely had an issue with my relationship with my family(mother mainly. Narcissist), but this was CS, and I already had reservations about her anyway. SO's parents said no, sorry. Unfortunately, SO was really dense(yes, I know, shut up) so I couldn't ask them to lie to their mother. I let CS know and was explaining that it wasn't my car and wasn't my idea to "get permission" from the owner(although, as mean on their part as it was, that had to be the case. I had only been given permission to use it for work of whenever me and SO went somewhere together. Yes, very controlling, but not the point). CS wouldn't listen. Instead, went on a tirade of how I was ungrateful and useless and all other insults that just echoed all of the childhood issues.
Story short, she ballooned the story to say that I told her I didn't want to take her and was being rude about it. ES texted me and told me not to come by at all(ES was paying a part of the bills and was an adult on the lease). No one would listen that this was just SO being dumb and, although yes I could've tried harder, it was not my fault. Myother called me that night and I cried, asking why my sister hated me. Why CS hated me. She could only say that sometimes people are angry and it's not our fault. While I appreciated her words, it didn't help. The gift I had for CS went unsent,(robe with her favorite design, Mary Jane) sat in my closet.
I mourned for a while but went on with my life, and that very next summer, I moved me and SO into an apartment. Made a deal with paying the car insurance and the basic gas/oil and regular maintenance costs, in exchange for just being able to drive the vehicle freely, and also I had my license for a year at that point(couldn't get it till 19, with my own cash and borrowing a car at the time), so they felt safer letting me use their car. Fair enough. moving on.
Some time goes by, and CS and ES end up falling out of touch again due to a made up issue(literally a dream where we made fun of her life and loss during her pregnancy. A dream. Mind you, she was also on substances this entire time, literally from the time she was like 11 or 12.) ES started talking to me again, claiming that she knew CS blew it out of proportion and just went along with it. Things go ok.1-2 years later Mom and ES move state. More things happen(kind of irrelevant since CS still isn't involved). Now LS and ES aren't speaking with me and CS comes in saying how she understands. I figured, it's was family, and I needed it. Right? And I was so confused on who to defend and back, my bio family or my SO, that seeing her, even with her sketchy SO, be able to have someone support her when she was put out, even if she was in the wrong and did the putting out, hit the family spot. Against everything, I started hanging out with CS. Up to this point , she hadn't apologized for anything really, but had given gifts, sent invites for holidays, and eve invited me, and sometimes SO over just to hang out(420 is legal in all the states I've lived in, so we had that in common at least). Start to not see CS in such a bright light since she has by that time(I'm 22 at the time) admitted to me that she cheats on her husband, they do hardcore drugs, and he avoids taxes, more stuff but I mainly ignore it cuz, hey, not my life, not my problem. Things go ok.
I leave my ex in 2019 and move out of my state in 2020 and in with family. Yay job closures. Now, this move was probably one of the worst, betraying, infuriating, heartbreaking things that I did as it showed some things about family that I really ignored since I hadn't created an irreversible issue until I lived back with them, as well as bring other heart wrenching events, but that's not important here.
CS now hasn't really sent anything unless it's to ask for help with something, which I do and she pays back, as always. That's not really the bad part. First was about 2 years after I had moved states to be with family. I had been paying ES money for rent, from unemployment(COVID), And had a surgery scheduled for just 3 weeks after the unemployment cut off(I had been looking for jobs but very little luck aside from some MLMs) and ES went ballistic, saying how i was putting them in financial strain(our mom had recently gotten a large tax return from COVID credits, as did she. I did not since I worked during 2019 and 2020. I also got no extra unemployment since it started after the main event. ES ranted to CS that I was a bum and was mooching and spent over a year not paying anything,( even though I had offered ES proof since ES had yelled at me before CS called me). She even posted personal information to insult me online to people I don't know, which is when ES told CS that, while she was mad at the situation, that was crossing a major line. I refused to call CS first, so after a few days, she called me. I laid into her what had been really happening by that point, that I had been paying and I have been doing door dash and donating plasma to continue to pay rent, which I Had talked about to ES. CS was silent during this, and I finally asked why any of the things in childhood happened.
Me: I just want to know why you always bullied me, and beat me up? The things you said?
CS: Well, I want to apologize, but I don't remember a lot of the stuff I did. I was usually high on something. Me: ...Not even telling me to off myself? CS:......-username-, I was a terrible person, and I was on a lot of stuff. I'm sorry that I don't remember.
I don't go farther cuz it's just me explaining everything and that I can't stand that Im always attacked. We hang up with CS telling me that she hopes the best.
Well, things kind of blow up, rent gets unpaid, money is wasted, and I decide to no longer pay and move to my own place. I don't talk to ES. CS chats sometimes, but not too much. After a while of not much texting, around middle of 2022, CS texts. Not exact, but I'll summarize it.
CS: hey, I'm divorcing my husband(I knew, mom told me earlier, didn't say anything) and I'm gonna move to Texas with this guy I've been talking to while married. I'm short on money to move into a place, so could you and mom maybe do this investing app and help out? Me: does it require anything like my credit?(Issues happened prior to this with another person) CS: no you just need to invest their free 5 dollars and keep the account open(I think for either 2 weeks or a month). Me: ok I'll get it started. CS: thank you so much! So how's the new Italian place? Me: it's good, it's called "blah blah blah" CS: ok cool, I'll look it up. Me: Okie dokie. So how's the move coming along
She never responded after that. I ignored it and put it on that she needed to move and focus on packing. I then went to our mom(I took her and her cat with me cuz I'm not monster) and told her the situation. She wanted to ask CS about what to do cuz I had to work in the morning and it was late. Convo:
Me: when you ask CS, ask "hey, -username- said you needed something, I have the app up, what do I do next?" Because this would explain that I told Mom and make CS answer what she wants.
Nope. She just sent "oh did you need any thing for moving, like money or anything?"
CS: hmm? Oh no, we're going to stay with his parents, but thank you for the offer! We'll be ok!
I got upset cuz I feel like I knew something was up. Asking me to help with money for moving to an apartment(she has a car large enough to pack her belongings and she didn't plan to bring furniture). I let it go and deleted the investment account, which continues to try charging me so I had to change banks. Very nice.
Now to this last fall(2023). I moved after that and there was very little interaction. I had been thinking about the relationships in my life and realized that being around CS in particular, or even being mindful of her, was causing mass amounts of resentment and anger in me, making my mental health dive. The lack of remorse and just consistent blaming of substances instead of the choice to do those substances. Claiming she's was a terrible person, but not saying anything about the issues it caused.
I decided that if CS did not even contact me on my birthday(she had skipped it before which isn't too bad, but one year even sent a message 2 months late and when I called her out, she blew it off and just said "oops, I was drunk, my bad".
So this last fall I wait. And nothing, till the end of the day. Honestly I didn't want to wait for excuses or anything. I just felt all of the anger of trying to get her attention and her love, and the desperation that I felt trying to understand why I never deserved it. So I removed her. Not blocked. If there are any emergencies where she would need to contact me(not likely), then it's there. I have a new number, so social media messaging was sufficient. I had done the same with ES.
The very next morning, I had a huge message about how she noticed that I had removed her(this site doesn't notify if someone leaves your friend circle) and about how she felt bad about what happened as kids but that she felt horrible for blocking people out for so long. Then another message telling me that she didn't want to be without her siblings again. Telling me that now, she was going to have a kid in several months, and how it's amazing and she's excited to finally be a mom and I'll be an uncle again(LS has 2 young kids of her own). I opened it and ignored it. She then said she tried reaching out and I left her on read and she hopes I have a good life.
Mentally, I may not be where I want myself to be, and sometimes I feel like I haven't moved forward from being that kid, that just wants to know why. But one step at a time, especially with therapy.
I wanna say I don't feel like the AH, or if I am, that is justified. But I guess there's always going to be a small part of me that wants to have the bonds that I never knew, even if it's too late by now.
So, am I the AH for just stopping contact and connection to someone I feel I just don't have a connection with?
P.s., sorry there's a lot, I honestly didn't mean for it to be this long. Please don't hate my late night grammar

I’m so beyond done with how PTJ portrays women in this WEBTOON. They never hold any significance as characters and it seems like their entire character is designed around how they would affect a man. Take the recent arc for example PTJ never fleshed out Mary or Sujin’s character and all they are is to just further emphasize Vin’s suffering. For the issue with SA and Sujin especially he treats SA as a plot developer and as an event that happens to the female character that the MEN suffer from. Never any affects on how it affects the women it’s just written and forgotten about after he “spices up” a backstory. It seems like whenever he can’t figure out what to do with a women’s backstory he adds SA to it. Sujin was supposed to be 7 and 13/14 in this arc and he constantly drew her in such a weird light. For a CHILD he drew her like he draws all female characters overly developed. Why does a 13yr old girl need to be drawn so sexually with the clothes slipping off of her and lots of inappropriate skin and cleavage showing? Not to mention he draws the underage male characters so grown up and emphasizes them being “sexy”. And ironically enough the only time he brought back an og female character from the earlier episodes was Zoe when talking about plastic surgery and Mary this arc when most of her story focused on her crush that came out of nowhere and her weight. Nothing about her Judo skills at all. Point of this ramble is as a woman I hate how PTJ writes female characters and am consistently disappointed in him.
Edit:
Most of y’all in the comments are taking about how I’m saying that there’s no fighting or strong female characters, idc about that I’m talking about how he sexually draws minors both men and women. Yeah I understand that it is a fighting story and most just want to see that but it’s not hard at all to just remove it if you can’t write about it properly. My main issue is the problem of SA in the story. Jiho, Mira, Darius, Eli, Zoe, Sujin, Vivi, Sinu, Sally, Like what and So Funny and the dangler dude are all characters that incorporate SA in their story as a plot driver or a joke like the dangler dude and it is literally never addressed again. I love lookism and I will continue to read it and am in no way demanding that PTJ needs to add fighting women as I realize that it is a lost cause at this point and not every story is gonna have that. But what is entirely possible is talking about the aspects he lacks in and bringing awareness to possible issues so that people can discourse about it. Women and men are both more than their bodies and it is entirely possible to have female (and male) characters without the focus on them being about their bodies or them experiencing unnecessary violence.

This chapter took a long time to get out. Life has me super busy. Two jobs, married, two kids, still sober. I like how this turned out, however, someone new stole the show this time. As always, leave feedback, I appreciate it so very much.
[FIRST] [DELETED SCENES] [PREVIOUS]
~ ~ ~
As I reentered my true body without recieving a mending, the vicious wounds I endured manifested into being as I reactualized into my true Self. Through the pain, I couldn't help but think on Raver's words to me.
"The doors have to be closed."
~ ~ ~
Without recieving a mending in Raver's Dreamtime bubble, reactualization was a fucking bitch. I Perceived my Self as having quite the damaged form, my Soul was fucked over by bombardment from dreadlight and my physical body simply disagreed with it all, stating that I was mostly whole and intact, only being damaged by wounds I had already endured. The three parts had an argument of a sort amongst themselves and with the power of the Dreamtime, reached a tortuous compromise.
I'm certain I seizured and blacked out through the process.
I awoke with my body shaking and covered in a cold sweat, Tsula and Luna above me, chanting in the secret language of their esoteric Traditions. The two of them each held diffetent tools required for their cultural and subtle manipulation of reality. Soft hands, awash with mana and glowing tattoos, were placed on my chest, right where my heart was. Cold, icy fingers cradled my soul protectively, keeping it connected to my body in the here and now as harsh, physical laws rent my form.
I was paying the price for Raver's hubris, and I had almost overdrafted. Thoughts of mortal over reach faded from my mind as I slipped into cool and soothing darkness.
Cold and bloodied fingers were pressed against my chest and did little to assuage the burning ache that was my soul. I couldn't focus on anything else as I gazed at the hollowed out body of my beloved. She had been beautiful, gorgeous even, and due to give birth to our daughter in two weeks. Now, the... dead thing in front of me could barely be defined as a corpse. Her skin had been peeled away like a banana and her insides removed, leaving a bloodied, hollow space. The flesh and bones had been scooped away like ice cream, leaving little in the way of remains. Our unborn child had been pulled out and repurposed with the stolen parts of her mother by dreadlight and a mage's fell Will to form the body of a Thing.
With silent tears streaming down my face, I placed the ring I had proposed to her with and put it onto my finger, next to my plain tungsten one. The simple act of removing it almost caused what remained of her hand to simply fall apart in my fingers. I'm not sure how long I stayed like that. I couldn't even hold her body against mine for fear of it crumbling away into a vile mess. I ignored what was going on around me as I kneeled in the spent summoning circle.
The world around me split and rent itself into distorted imagery, as though I were looking at everything from under a pool with gentle waves. Some parts were compressed together and others were stretched out, not quite like a mirror maze as the world was still simply one cohesive image. Additionally, things seemed closer or further in ways that defied conventional Euclidean geometries. The only area not affected by this blatant disregard of spatial dimensions, had been myself and a scant few feet around me.
What...?
A heavy thud broke me out of my thoughts and I saw my Father landing next to me. Since both of us had been prepared, he was wearing, much like myself, full motorcycle safety gear. It had been enchanted and bolstered by hidden runes and severed Will, turning everything into protective objects that even defended against potent and offensive mysticism. The equipment in question had been chosen for its sheer mundanity and ease of access, letting the powerful enchancements skirt around the Lie and Consensus leaving the magic fully intact and potent.
"Alistair," I heard my Father say to me with grim calm as he twisted the space in front of us into a right angle, redirecting rapid gunfire, "I can't do this alone."
I remained silent.
"Damnit, Son," he growled out then literally kicked my ass with his heavy boot, almost knocking me over onto my side, "get a hold of yourself, Its here now. You handle the mages."
That got me going. I finally got up, my grief was as a lead weight and prevented me from doing what was needed. With a last look at C'Leena's hollowed out corpse, I grit my teeth, steeled my nerves and called forth my magic from the Aether.
Was I dreaming? No, worse, I was in a memory...
"Stay out of my way and watch yourself," Father said to me, "I can't pull my punches against that."
"Gotcha," I replied almost absently and turned to face the assembled shadow mages. They had inexplicably stopped theit gunfire to admire the Thing they brought into existence from Somewhere.
I couldn't help but stare, either.
Standing on top of the northernmost anchor stone, an ugly, multi-faceted block of copper with glyphs and sigils harshly hewn into it, was a naked woman. The glyphs themselves were hard to look at, as though their mere presence were an affront to reality itself, which they were. The woman's skin was a darkened olive tone and she was tall as well as athletic, lithe and fit. Her shoulder length black hair was bushy and curly, flowing about her head almost like an afro. As she ran her hands down her body, I could not help but notice that everything was oddly symmetrical and too perfect. It was unnerving me greatly and triggered an uncanny valley response that tore at my heart.
The body this Thing was wearing had belonged to my fiancée.
Father didn't let It have time to get acclimated. Sidestepping forwards, he drew upon the full capabilities of his Path, eyes backlit by stars, an impossible physical sword of abstract spatial geometries held in his left hand, and a reality defying, super-dense distortion held in his right.
The world contorted and screamed under his might.
I awoke with a start and a low groan, glad to be awake and free of that horrid nightmare again. Not for the first time, I wished I had that motorcycle gear still. I had been far too reckless then and immediately thereafter, and everything had been damaged beyond repair. I could never find anyone I trusted enough to make those enchantments anyways. Farnsworth could only enhance the mundane qualities as he didn't know enough about mana warding to permanently imbue the protections I wanted nor needed for my line of active field work.
Looking around, I saw Rue asleep on the other side of the bed and Spades was nestled between us, his massive form making a visible dip in the mattress. The big monster dog was on his back, legs splayed open and snoring loudly with his tongue hanging out of his muzzle. I was reminded a lot of my Lola when she had still been around in the flesh, making me smile with old and pleasant memories. I must have been out for some time for Spades to be here.
A quick, almost reflexive, mental orison told me everything I already suspected. My mana reserves were shot, my body had been through the ringer and my soul was frayed and burnt. While I knew I owed my continued existence to Raver and her godsend, I also knew it had taken a great and terrible toll on my Self. Miracles like that usually held some kind of hidden cost, even if they weren't readily apparent.
Getting off the bed slowly, I began to look for my pack. It took far longer than than usual as I had to steady myself quite a bit from the spinning room. I managed to be quiet, however, and didn't wake up Rue nor Spades. Finally in the shower, after some time and using the wall to support myself, I let the almost scalding water roll over my aching body. The pendant on my neck protecting me from recieving any burns or aggravating the injuries I had, both old and new.
With the hot water soothing aching muscles, I began to think and take stock of my situation. I had never been on the back foot like this, low on any kind of resource, having few allies, and being pressed for time. It was like something out of a bad novel or shitty indie Steam(R) game. Though, real life was often stranger than fiction and had no real need for a logical cause and effect dynamic. If this was going to become the norm, then I had to find another method of approaching my wendigo problem.
I was simply running out of time.
After some long moments of thinking, I began to wash my hair, using the guest products on the corner caddy. They were so much nicer than anything I would have willingly bought and made me seriously consider changing up my usual shampoo. The only idea I could come up with regarding those wendigos, besides an overwhelming frontal assault, was to appeal to their bottomless gluttony and barter for passage.
I resigned myself to actually try to negotiate with their clan leader, leveraging their horrid taboos against them to get what I needed.
Wendigos, unlike most strange cryptids, vampires and were-folk aside, had a lot of things known about them, especially how they powered their supernatural capabilities. It was a simple and rather straightforward process, the more heinous the act, the more mana they drew from it. Cannibalism, sacrilege, incest, murder, torture, hedonistic gluttony, or any number of other terrible and minor sins. As well as general lawbreaking and felonies, oftentimes combined to have as many as possible occur in the same sitting.
I audibly gasped with a sudden epiphany.
My fate had already been decided, by myself no less. In a bar I couldn't remember the name of, when I had been gazing into my bronze coin, I saw what I needed to do. I had to gift what measly scrap of knowledge I understood from Beyond the Infinite to those creatures. To let those wendigos defile and mutilate such sacred and pure knowledge to whatever whims their baleful minds could come up with.
"Fuck," was the only thing I could whisper at the thought of it all as I turned off the water, getting out of the shower. I cooled the bathroom down with but a thought and wiped away the condensation on the mirror with a towel that wasn't my own, finally getting a good look at myself without vertigo, as that had finally passed.
I looked like shit, and that was a compliment. Huge, fist shaped bruises of black, green and yellow littered my torso, though most were located on my left side and blurred together into an ugly shapeless mass. The ones on my right, however, were well defined and I could easily count the number of strikes. My face held a swollen black eye, I never noticed my diminished field of vision as I had gotten used to having them over the years. Turning gingerly and opening the mirror a bit so I could see my back, I grimaced. It was another spiderweb of a bruise, earned from when I had been smashed against the edge of Raver's Dreamtime bubble.
At least none of my fingers were broken, only very stiff and swollen, just like the rest of me. I probably couldn't drive for another day or so, either, not with my hands the way they were. As I looked, surprised I hadn't noticed earlier, the inside of my right hand was, branded. The skin, while fully healed, held the symbolic glyph that heralded the Path of Stars. A circle with nine curved lines inside it. Each line only intersected two others, but with the irregular placement of them, I could trace an intersection to any other one. In each of the open spaces, slightly off center, as a simple dot.
"Miracles leave their marks," I muttered to myself, almost disbelieving the literalness of the phrase.
I didn't bother drying off and struggled a bit getting into the clothes I brought with me, maroon athletic shorts and a black tank top. Exiting the guest bathroom, I thought about where I wanted to go. Settling on a destination, I went into the backyard, found a patch of grass in the shaded, morning sunlight and lay down. The grass was thick and rather soft, and the smell of the lemon tree and the garden was more pleasant and fragrant than they should have been.
Warding myself against dreaming, I pulled on the principles of the Aether, specifically, those of sun and storms. Since the Aether was a realm of energy and mana in all of its varying forms, I employed an advanced technique, a mysterion. It was something only able to be done by those that actually hailed from the Aether rather than having mastery over it. Pulling some of the sunlight and ambient warmth into my form, I converted measly scraps of energy directly into mana. The process was slow, and almost hardly worth the effort. It was like filling a bathtub with water, a single milliliter at a time.
Mana was now such a rare commodity, every miniscule drop of it mattered.
I settled in and entered a trance-like state, most of my attention devoted to my mysterion, though some of it was allowed to drift off elsewhere. While not exactly a dream, and while maintaining my mana draw, my mind conjured up nonsensical imagery and conversations between myself and others. I didn't pay them any attention as my thoughts wandered and drifted idly.
"I thought I'd find you out here," Rue said as I heard her sit down next to me. I didn't hear her walking, however, she continued to speak, "you've been asleep for a few days. What happened?"
"Got fucked," I replied easily, a little sarcastically as well. "Truthfully," I amended, "I got summoned by Raver. She pulled a shenanigan with Fate to let her have a waking dream."
"So she was hallucinating?" Rue stated, though it was more of a question.
"Damned straight," I confirmed, "she had Sasquatch and Farnsworth make something for her. It had to have been lethal, something like that. Anyways, we were talking and then one of Them showed up. Inside the Dreamtime bubble of hers. Found Raver's luminescence despite Mirzam hiding it."
"Shit. So It was physically there? That means It had a stolen body..." Rue said, trailing off.
"Yeah, it had a body alright," I almost growled out, "broke Raver's ritual with little effort. I spent everything I had to make a patch job just to keep it active, burned through all my mana, too. I did not want to be dispersed."
"I see," Rue said to me with understanding, "I wouldn't want to have to find my physical body without a tether either." There was a small pause before she spoke again, "So what happened next?"
"I made it mad with insults to buy time for the repaired shenanigan to stabilize Raver."
"What do you mean?" Rue asked as I heard her stretch out a bit, my eyes still closed.
"Her shenanigan was woven in such a way that whatever drug Sasquatch and Farnsworth made for her didn't just kill her," I answered with a pause then continued, "it let her do things beyond normality, anyways, my fucked up patch job let me tell Sasquatch that Raver had to stay dreaming."
"So he wouldn't just purge the elixir out of her," Rue stated, then added perhaps a tad bit defensively, "I know some things from other paths, not much, but some."
"That's good," I answered back, "knowledge is power."
"With us, it's quite literal."
I murmured in assent.
"So why did you make It mad?" Rue asked, "wouldn't It just draw strength from human emotions, especially in the Dreamtime?"
"It did," I answered back, "but It couldn't act properly on them, like human emotions were new and novel. The whole encounter was sloppy after a certain point, but I did almost die. Raver saved me, gave me a miracle."
"I saw," Rue said simply, "the mark on your hand was a giveaway."
I could only murmur in agreement again then asked, "Did you find a card in my hands, too?"
"I did," Rue replied after a few moments of silence, "it was debit card, with a note attached to it."
"From Procyon, right?"
It took a few moments for her to answer. "Yes, it was from Procyon," she took a breath and continued with wavering effort, "that damned bastard had it all planned out. Wrote a fucked up letter to me on a Google(TM) doc telling me not to worry and that this had always been his exit plan."
"Sounds like he knew what was going to happen," was all I could say.
"Yes, but, I miss him!" Rue all but snarled at me, then, in a small and quiet voice, whispered, "He was my best friend, and maybe we could've been more, y'know? Now... there's... There's just nothing, only memories of him left to mourn."
"I didn't know," I answered simply.
Rue spoke with a wavering breath before continuing, her thoughts more than a little disjointed, "a lot of what he wrote was personal, so I won't get into that, but he was certain that something catastrophic was going to happen to him and myself. So he made sure that I was at my secondary home, recovering from a job. I had just completed a mission from Raver and Mirzam, and was going to perform a ritual to patch up Spades after I got some sleep. Procyon also stated that someone has been altering things for a very long time."
"So that's why you were caught with yout pants down," I said, "you didn't even have time to recover." I paused, adjusting my mysterion as I had to refocus due to our conversation, "what did they have you do?"
"Some hedge wizards actually got a hold of an actual necromancy grimoire and charged mana tools in a graveyard," Rue said with a bit of a tired sigh, "they knew exactly what they were doing, and would have been rather powerful shadow mages if they had been capable of using starlight."
"Fuck," was all I could say, then formed an actual response after a few moments, "that shouldn't have been an issue for you. Hedges don't have our capability, though numbers may have evened out their odds."
"You're right, but they brought a spirit back before I could stop them," Rue answered with more than a little spite, "a real nasty piece of shit, too. Turned on the hedges, absorbed them, and put up a real mean fight against Spades and I. It was touch and go for a long time and I was actually fearful for my life, too."
"You won, though."
"Yeah, managed to send it kicking and screaming back to the Pit, exhausted most of my mana to do so. Fucking bastard."
There was a small silence between us as Rue became lost in her own thoughts. It was a while before I asked her, "Can you elaborate on what Procyon said about Fate being altered?"
"I can, actually, though it's a bit difficult since I'm not even a novice with the Path of Stars," Rue answered as I heard her shift a bit on the grass next to me. She paused as she seemingly collected her thoughts, "it's just that certain events were made to happen sooner or later. The big one, for our Node at least, was that you were always supposed to make your ancestral home translocate. It happened sooner than it should have."
"Fuck," I said, "So I wasn't supposed to send it away a few days ago?"
"No, that was supposed to happen after our wendigo thing, if the letter is to be believed."
"Fuck," was all I could say, "I do suppose that was a snap decision, I really didn't want Them to get a hold of anything inside. If I had been able to wait, or even had help, I'm sure I wouldn't have lost it to time and space."
"Exactly," Rue said with bitter excitement, "and we'd have access to everything in it. Losing your home was a big blow to our Node."
"Yeah, but at least They don't have it," I answered more spitefully than intended.
"Silver linings and all that, right?"
"Yeah, gotta look at the bright side, no matter how bleak," I answered back with a bit of sarcastic mirth, then said as I stretched a bit, readjusting my focus on my mysterion as well, "speaking of wendigos, I know what we need to do to solve that."
"Oh? Do tell, I couldn't come up with anything myself, kept running into dead ends," she said, then added, "lack of resources and help."
"Well, I don't think you're going to like it, I'm not sure I like it either."
"Don't keep me waiting," Rue said to me with a bit of sarcastic exasperation. I could sense her looking at me even though my eyes were still closed.
"I'm going to leverage their taboos against them, appeal to their insatiable greed and offer them what little I can understand of That Which Lies Beyond the Infinite." I sighed and added, "after all, how could they resist the allure of new magic?"
"You're right," she answered, "I definitely don't like it. I'm pretty sure it's not even wise to do so."
"Wise or not, it's the only way forward, I even saw it in a vision when I was manipulating fate magic."
"Have you talked to Mirzam or Raver about this vision of yours?"
"No, not yet, and I'm pretty sure I don't need to."
There was a bit of silence between us as she digested my words. I felt compelled to elaborate as I adjusted my mysterion again, losing a bit of my focus due to the depth of the conversation we were having.
"Acrux," I said, getting her attention fully by using the name of her star, "there's something you need to understand." I sat up, abandoning my mysterion in favor of giving her my full attention. Blinking a bit at the rise of light and warmth, I continued my thought process, "in the Dreamtime, the Thing I was fighting against, It was surprised and enraged that I was able to call upon knowledge that Lay Beyond the Infinite. Whatever those glyphs and powers are, They never wanted humans to know of them, let alone have them."
"Yet you want to give such power to wendigos of all things."
"At least the knowledge, corrupted or not, will still be on Earth," I said then added, "I'm not sure what you remember, but I know you've seen something from Beyond the Infinite. Your self revival and Spade's new form are proof of that. I was there, guided by Oracle. I Perceived something unknowable, something terrible, something no mortal has any right to gaze upon. Something I can hardly even begin to try to put into words. Raver Perceived it, too. It's how she managed to give me a godsend. So, what did you Perceive, really?"
Rue brought her knees up to her chest, thinking deeply. I could tell she was using her Perception to look inwards upon her Self. I waited patiently while she struggled to look at her soul's reflection against her mind and struggled even more to put the image there into words.
At long last, she spoke, her eyes still closed as she did so, "I'm not sure what I saw, there was too much, and I felt so small. Insignificant. Less than even a dismissed, intrusive thought. There is one thing I do remember. A doorway made of the might from two universes worth of truths and laws. A Thing was trying ro break through, but couldn't, not fully, yet the doors were opened, letting smaller ones through."
"The Doors have to be closed," I said, quoting Raver, before continuing, "that's what Raver said to me, before she sent me back to my body."
"Why didn't they mend you then?"
"They were being attacked in the waking world, too. It was a good plan on Their part, They just didn't expect us to put up so much of a fight."
"They never do, though I think that's changing."
"So that's our endgame, not sure how we're going to do it," I said, bringing the conversation back to topic, "at the moment, however, I'm going to eat a few of those mana-stuffed protein bars and fix your leg. I can't keep spending mana to be able to drive your truck. You'll have to use your own mysterion to get mana, too."
"I hate my Path's mysterions," the venom in her voice was palpable.
Before I could say anything, the backdoor opened, revealing Luna. She was wearing a bird-patterned sundress and her hair had been tied back into a loose ponytail. She put her hand over her eyes to shade them from the sun as she squinted against the brightness relative to that from inside.
"Hey, you two," she called out, "Grandmother says she needs to talk yo you."
"Alright," I called out, shakily getting up to my feet with a bit of a grunt. Everything still hurt. Rue had a bit of trouble as well, her leg was not recieving the rest and healing it deserved and needed.
"We're a mess, aren't we?" Rue asked aloud as we began to walk towards the bak door.
"Yeah, but you should see the other guys," I replied with a light chuckle, only to wince and hold my sides, "I forgot how much laughing hurts with fractured ribs."
"I really don't envy you right now," Rue said with a bit of a smirk as we entered Tsula's home, Rue entering first. "I wonder what Tsula wants to talk to us about?" Rue asked aloud, not really talking to anyone in particular.
I could only wonder as we followed Luna to the living room, the house pleasantly cool due to central air conditioning.
~ ~ ~
The moon was not in the sky, and I greatly enjoyed not having to endure the accursed, purifying light of day reflected by its surface, even if greatly diminished. The loathsome wound in my side had been a mortal blow, burning through my toughened flesh and form with unnerving ease and stunning, blinding pain. Once more, I looked at the oily, thin, and black ichor that dripped from my fingers, more human-like than I was comfortable with.
The mote of dreadlight I had recieved for my services had been the only thing that had kept me from vanishing entirely. Mortal alchemy -- science -- had advanced to such a degree so as to emulate the harsh light of day far too remarkably well. That hadn't been the worst part, that damned thaumaturgist had ensorcelled a curse upon the weapon as well. With effort, as the bulk of my power was directed at repairing the oozing wound, I altered my form and shape, struggling to maintain the illusion as I walked out onto the sidewalk from a side alley.
My contract was not yet completed.
The first two nights I had hidden myself away in the dark depths, raging against the oblivion that threatened to overtake me and ending my existence. The preparedness of the thaumaturgist had been unexpected, as well as the skill and the knowledge he had wielded so effortlessly. Without my guidance, nor presence, to instill fear into the gifted abetters, the wraiths I had gathered with me fell and fled into the night, abandoning their duties and contracts.
I would have never made this mistake against the herald of the bear.
Had I known the name of the mortal's star I had been tasked against, I would have demanded more than a simple mote of dreadlight and a paltry handful of coerced allies. Realistically, I should be grateful that I still had a kind of semi-existence. Quelling my anger and hatred, and swallowing my utter revulsion, my form rippled and took the guise of a tall, middle-aged human male in a common and unremarkable suit carrying an old and worn briefcase.
The artificial illumination around me flickered, emitting a grating hum in my presence and the thin television flickered oddly as it tried to display my image, failing to accurately do so. While tracking Arcturus's quintessence had been a bit of a task, as far too much time had passed, my familiarity with it granted me an advantage that overcame that difficulty. Traveling in my wounded state, however, had been much more arduous. Looking the woman at the reception desk over, I took on my role with hiden revulsion, aided by the illusion I was conjuring and the mimicry of my physical form.
"I'm detective Aiden Roth, and I'm looking for someone. I believe that he was here a few nights ago, definitely this past week," I said. My false, human voice had been made to sound smooth, suave and strong, interlaced with a suggestion, using what little forte I could spare. I put the worn and well-used briefcase I had conjured with me onto the counter with a heavy thud, using more of my forte to emulate such a simple thing. Opening it up, I fished out an image and showed the slightly grainy, black and white picture to the receptionist.
As the woman perused the conjured image, I could not help but hiss, my hand going to my side as I expended more of my forte than I had anticipated. The cursed wound fighting back fiercely against the dreadlight tethering my existence and life. I held my disguise with willpower of monumental proportions. A strength of will I rarely had been pressed to draw from.
Seeing the concerned look the woman gave me, I simply stated, shrugging off the pain with yet more expenditure of will, "An old injury, it flares up from time to time. No matter, have you seen this individual?"
"I'm going to need to see some kind of badge or warrant," the woman said with a genuine smile, "sorry."
The fear of losing her menial job overpowered my subtle suggestion. Unfortunate.
"Sure," I replied with a fake and well ptacticed, fetching smile, adjusting my forte to include another suggestion. I showed an actual badge with my assumed name and likeness. The mortal I was impersonating had been slain many years ago by my own hands, and the subtle illusion taking hardly any of my forte adjusted the dates and design of the badge to whatever was current.
Only a thaumaturgist, or a very particularly skilled sorcerer, could pierce the illusion. Against this mortal, there was no chance of resistance and she accepted the stolen badge without question.
She looked it over, as if trying to divine the legitimacy of it. "Okay," she finally admitted, "he was here a while ago, maybe a four or five days? I remember, 'cause I tried to flirt with him..."
I ignored her prattling and asked when she finished speaking, "Can you show me the room he used?"
"Sure, but it's been cleaned a few times since then."
With a nod, I let her lead the way to the room in question, staying silent. The lights around me flickered and hummed loudly in my presence. Had the woman been more observant, she could have seen my true shadow as I had not the forte to expend to hide it entirely from the ever changing lights. She opened the room in question, using what I could only assume was a master key card.
I immediately recognized the faded auras of quintessence.
"This will do," I stated, closing the door behind me and dropping my revolting disguise, using my forte to lock it.
I revealed my true form. My legs and arms lengthened and thinned, the black suit and red tie I was wearing became my skin, armor and form. My face and eyes became blank, gaunt and sunken, skin stretching out over it. The wound in my side made itself visible, it was an ugly red, peeling and oozing burn from my shoulder to my waist and took up most of my torso. The dreadlight I was using to prevent my oblivion illuminated the wound with a kind of sickly, crimson colored backlight. Black ichor oozed out from it and dripped onto the floor as I used the bulk of my forte to ablate the caustic, foreign quintessence from my form.
The woman looked at me as even her pitifully dull, mundane human senses told her that there was incredible danger in the room with her. She screeched and irrationally ran towards the bathroom as my presence became impossibly tall in the very finite space in the motel room. Using the smallest iota of my forte, I remotely smashed her fleeing form against a wall, pinning her there with unseen force as she begged, and sobbed for her pitiful life.
I ignored her for the moment.
Drawing upon more of my forte, freed up as I no longer needed a disguise, I sensed out where quintessence had been used, discovering two places, the bed and a wall. Imbuing the wall with my own forte, I witnessed a spectral, moving image of Arcturus throwing five darts at a map placed on the wall, one at a time, then draw intersecting lines to a single point on the map.
"Wendigos..." I hissed out in loathing, the skin on my face stretching and contorting with the movement as i spoke aloud with a nonexistent mouth. Even I knew their territory.
Turning to the second source of quintessence, I did the same thing. I saw Arcturus ward himself against dreaming and then hold a brilliant shield in the air, as well as a ball of fire. My knowledge of actual thaumaturgy told me that I would have great difficulties against those Knowings. I put the mystery of his Dreamtime excursion out of my mind for now, there was nothing I could do regarding that.
My expenditure of forte caused my horrid wound to pulse against my form painfully. With a hiss, I turned to the woman meekly begging me to spare her life as she was still pinned against the wall. I could use a thrall, especially as I could no longer gain allies, not without offering something in return to my current contract holders.
That was not a barter I wanted to engage in.
"Please... don't kill me... please... I'll do anything... please..."
The absolute terror in her eyes was delectable. Her fear invigorated me with energy and reminded me I needed to feed. However, the morsels offered by her would be more than sufficient for my needs. I dragged my left hand across my oozing wound, covering it in my own essence then flexed my forte. The clothes she was wearing split in half down the middle, revealing her naked form, making her shriek. I could see the ideas her panicked mind vomited forth as she renewed her struggles with vigor.
What I had in mind was so much worse than the mundane taking of her physical body she expected.
Using the full might of my forte, I lengthened and sharpened my index finger, the tip dripping with the gathered ichor of my essence. In an instant, less than the blink of an eye, I appeared in front of her from where I had been by the bed and plunged the very tip of my sharpened, needle-like nail into the center of her heart, cutting through the most sensitive parts of her breast to do so due to the angle I had chosen for just this purpose. As I let my ichor suffuse her body with each beat of her racing heart, her vascular system visibly turning black under her skin as she screamed and writhed in agony, an odd thing happened.
What could only be considered my blood had been tainted by thaumaturgy qnr bolstered by dreadlight as well as my own forte. As it mixed with the blank canvas of the mortal in front of me, I could sense the candle of her soul. Reaching out with dreadlight, letting the wound burn my side with a hiss of inhaled breath, I ignited it with three kinds of mysticism.
A horrified realization overcame her as she knew I had fundamentally altered her to suit my whims. Having a thaumaturgist thrall would be a great boon.
"You'll do quite nicely," I said with an actual grin, the skin stretched over my mouth revealing impossibly large, gleaming flat teeth, as I watched the physical and mystical changes taking place.
My new thrall would never be human again.
I feasted on her terror, anguish and torment.
It was delicious.
~ ~ ~
Arcturus and Acrux will be back. C'Leena Thomas, Prosthetist is going to be my next update.
[[NEXT]]

I'm 19, male, 12-14% body fat, 176cm (I think), 69-70kg. I have a list of fitness goals such as muscle up (done one before, doesn't count), +100% pullup (dunno weight, but can rep with backpack on), planche to handstand pushup, back/front lever (can't hold front lever cleanly horizontal, but close), human flag (can half-ass for less than a second), 1 arm pullup, 150km cycling, sub-20 5K, marathon, ironman, +50% squat, 100% bench, +100% deadlift.
Do any of these goals realistically conflict, in terms of if training for X will negatively affect performance for Y?
Do the lifts seem out of place or irrelevant among the rest of the goals?
How do I progress toward these goals, and in what order? Maybe in clusters?
I went to the gym consistently for about 2 weeks and saw visible changes with good protein intake and progressive overload, but I very quickly went back to climbing (aka I disliked the gym despite seeing progress because I didn't set clear goals).
How should I view my weight? Should I be aiming for a goal/ideal weight?
Good diet, with the only hitch being consistent protein intake because of restrictions on what I can cook in a shared kitchen with strictly vegetarian friends. I don't know if I need to lose weight (mostly fat, but inevitably also some muscle), recomp, lean bulk, or what to aim for. I do know that I want to lose some fat to be stronger in climbing and calisthenics. I don't know if I need to be aiming for an ideal weight, or if good diet and training will be everything I need for my body to adapt (aka Idk how weight affects performance in different categories of physical activity).
Through inconsistent, but fun bursts of hobbies, I cycled ~90km a few months ago (long break in the middle), got my first two V5s a few weeks ago, and played a lot of volleyball and tennis in the past week. I find that I love physical activity, but I do it sporadically, and want to consistently work toward goals that I find fun (such as getting my 5K time down to ~21min. a year back, and other things such as deadhang time, one arm hang, and getting my handstand from ~1s to ~20s in the past week). I've been doing the RR for a week now. Something I've had trouble with is not liking running as much now that I cycle, and seeing my running performance go downhill ever since, but I like being good at it and just need to get back in the groove of it.
Any tips?
All advice is appreciated!