Air, shelter, water, and food, all essentials of life we take for granted. The gratitude of being alive,
smothered by emotional baggage. Just a bunch of pill induced zombies, riddled by life’s perplexities. Not
me, not any more at least. No, now I wake up every day reborn with a newly discovered purpose in life,
thanks to, him.
Most would be emotionally devastated and seek long term therapy, after what I had endured.
Most would need to be heavily medicated, to calm their anxiety of the fear he would return. No, not me,
the person I once was, is now dead. Suffocated, frozen, dehydrated, and starved out of me. Who I was
perished, and I am grateful. I am offering you the same, but before we get started, let me explain how I
arrived at this place of serenity.
The night was the same as always. I had just finished gorging myself on junk food while binge
watching a reality show. Empty bottles of soda surrounded me as I surfed the streaming networks.
Knowing my weight was getting out of control, I still managed to finish off the bag of greasy potato
chips. My bottles of meds sat on the end table waiting for me. Depression, anxiety, stomach, and heart
pills all courtesy of the negligence of my life choices. One by one I swallowed the antidotes of a better
me. Yet, there never seemed to be a stronger version of myself, no matter how many pills I ingested.
Falling asleep, I told myself tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow I will try harder. As I drifted
off to sleep, I felt a sting in my neck, only waking up for a few seconds. My eyes opened just enough to
see him standing over me. Fighting to stay awake, my eyes latched closed, and I fell into the darkness.
Upon awaking, I could hear sounds of mumbles surrounding me. Feeling heavy and disoriented, I
managed to flicker my eyelids. As the minutes passed, my surroundings became more lucid. The foul
stench of pig shit singed my nose hairs. Dust from old haybales stimulated my sense of smell, inducing a
sneeze. An unimaginable pain coursed through my mouth. Still dazed and confused, I heard a voice say,
"we can't have that, now, can we?". Once again, I felt a sting in my neck, causing me to drift out of
reality.
"Wake up", I heard as I came to, "we need to get started". Started with what, I tried to ask. Yet,
my mouth wouldn't open. Tranquilized still, I thought maybe my brain just wasn't cooperating with my
body. Flexing my jaw, I tried again to speak, it was useless. All I could do was mumble. My words were
nothing more than muffled grunts behind a padded wall.
Looking around, I could see I was not alone. Vision blurry, I still managed to make out a large
silhouette of a man sitting in front of me holding a cutting needle and thread. He then placed the needle
on a barrel and stood up. Whistling, "The Sun will come out tomorrow", I began to look around. There were other people with us. Including myself, all tied to chairs and mouths sewn shut. Three of us were men. The fourth was a woman in her
mid-forties. She was crying and moaning uncontrollably. Mucus ran down her face dripping from her
chin. Trying to console her, I batted my eyes. It was all I could do without having the use of my mouth
and arms.
The injection he had no doughtily given me, had worn off. Like the woman, I found myself in panic
mode. My heart raced fast. I thought I would have a heart attack. Wanting to scream, I
couldn't. Wanting to run but I was incapacitated. Fighting my way out, entered my mind, but how? How,
with my hands bound behind my back. Besides, I wasn't a fighter, and the man was massive. He would
be very intimidating under any circumstance. His raggedy hair was sandy blonde with a mixture of gray.
Deep wrinkles hid behind a handlebar mustache, which stretched across his face. Thick eyebrows sat
untamed above his devilish eyes. Watching him, I tried not to make eye contact. I looked everywhere,
other than at him. The other two men looked as frightened as me. One man, the bigger one, had tears
but made no sounds. The other man was a very frail older man. He shifted side to side as he tried yelling
from behind his fastened lips. His arms bared scars of that of a junkie. His body, covered in scabs.
Cautiously, I looked around. A rusty old plow sat in the corner next to some feed sacks. A saddle
lay across an old broken table. Two horses stood quietly behind their stall door. I could see rays of light
shine through the cracks between the boards. It was daylight, knowing that gave me comfort somehow.
The barn was dusty, and as painful as it would be, I hoped I would sneeze again. At least then I could
scream. Abruptly the man stopped whistling and spoke.
Your mouths are bound together so that I cannot hear you. People talk too much, making the
world noisy. All loud with pathetic excuses of their weaknesses. I am not going to kill you. Your life is in
your own hands. Up to this point, you have wasted your life hiding behind your addictions. Cowering
and leaning on crutches of life’s temptations. I am here to save you from yourselves.
The rule of three is simple. You can survive three minutes without air, three hours without
shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. If you truly desire to live, then you will
triumph. If not, you will perish. I am here to help you unpack your emotional baggage. Air, the very
breath you breathe, you have taken for granted. So, please slow your breathing and relax. We are about
to begin.
While you were sleeping, I provided you with adequate fluids and nutrition. I cannot have you
starting off, on an empty tank. I want to be as fair as possible and make this a pleasant experience.
Though, I warn you it will not be easy, and you will have to dig deep within yourselves.
The burly man began whistling once again. He placed an egg timer on a barrel, grabbed a plastic
bag and spoke. You can survive three minutes with no air. Do you have the desire and strength to want
to live? For you, I truly hope so.
Standing behind the heavier man he turned the timer and then placed the plastic bag over his
head. The man jerked in his chair, thrashing about. One minute, he said. The man still moving wildly.
Two minutes, almost there just hold on. Three minutes he announced, ripping the bag from the head of
the now motionless man. “Oh dear, I guess he did not have what it takes, next”. My heart raced even
faster as he stood next to the now inconsolable woman. I would be after her. I had to slow my breathing
if I were to live. Picking up another bag, he stood behind her.
The air went in and out her nose as she hyperventilated. “There, there, I’m not going to hurt you”,
he said, as he patted her on the shoulders. “Three minutes is a miniature amount of time. I wish you the
very best.” Her legs kicked out lunging back and forth. Her muffled shrieks filled the barn. “Are you
ready?” He then reset the timer. Fearing for my own life, I turned my head and concentrated on my
breathing. Trying hard to block her out, I went to another place in my head. As hard as it was, I imagined
I was calm and at peace lying on a sandy shore. Desperately, I wanted to cover my ears. Her loud cries
soon became small whimpers. Then to gurgles as she choked on her own vomit. Turning my head back
towards her, I could see her convulsing as life left her body. “Not quite a minute, what a shame”, he
said.
Thinking back to when I was a child, and held my breath under water, outlasting my brother.
Back then, holding my breath was easy for me and I always won. Being in my mid-thirties, I wasn’t a
child any longer. Could I beat this, I questioned. Unlike the woman next to me, who reeked of tobacco, I
didn’t smoke. My chances were greater than those who came before me.
Excepting the inevitable, I practiced my anxiety exercises my therapist had taught me. Four, four,
four, inhale hold, exhale hold. If I panic, I will surely suffocate, I told myself. The other man was calmer
now and followed my lead. Our eyes locked on to one another as we breathed. “Very good, that is what
I want to see, a thirst for life, the will to live.”
Picking up a bag, he then stood behind me. I took a deep breath as he turned the timer. I felt the
panic trying to set in, but I pushed it deep down. Oddly enough, the tune he’d been whistling popped
into my head. “The sun will come out tomorrow”, played as the bag was put over my head. “So, you got
to hang on ‘til tomorrow.” Not wanting to see the blurred images through the bag, I closed my eyes. I
just kept humming the tune in my head. “One minute”, he said. Getting more difficult to hold my breath,
I could feel my heart beating faster and my blood pressure rising. The tune still reeling in my head,
“tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow”. “Two minutes”. I can do this, I’m almost there, but my
mind was getting foggy, and my chest tightened. My muscles tensed up as I felt my existence dwindle
away. The tune that kept me going had faded away somewhere deep into my brain. Hungry for air, I
started scratching my hands behind my back. I was going to die. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I managed to
think one last time. “Three Minutes”!
Air rushed through my nose, as I clung to the remaining life I had. It was the greatest feeling just
being able to breathe. I’d made it, I had beat him, I was alive. “Congratulations, you did well”. “Breath
and continue to appreciate the gift, I have given you”.
Tears rushed down my cheeks, as I sat watching the man set the stage for the last occupant. As
sympathetic as I was, I was overwhelmed too just be alive. Still fighting my anxiety, I closed my eyes,
four, four, four. Sounds of distress and faint scuffling could be heard, yet I refused to open my eyes.
Three minutes passed quickly. “We have another fighter, outstanding.” Opening my eyes, I seen that the
other man had also survived. “Two out of three, I wished it faired better.” “It is a pity they perished, yet
the pigs will eat well.” “Nothing should ever go to waste”. “Their carcasses are a valuable resource.” I
am thankful for their contribution.”
“I will let you rest up.” The next gift, is that of shelter.” “People of the world scratch and claw to
have bigger dwellings of that of their neighbor.” Never being thankful of the shelters warmth when it is
cold.” “Not a second thought about the materials taken from the earth to provide that comfort.” “I will
teach you to not care about the size or the looks. You won’t care if it’s a barn or a house made of sticks.
You’ll learn to be content as it shelters you from the storm.
Not understanding what was coming next, I tried thinking of ways to escape. Wringing my hands
together, I tried loosening the rope. He had his back turned removing the bodies from the chairs. Yet
somehow he still managed to catch on to what I was doing. “That’s a double sheet bend knot.” Try as
you might, you will not loosen or untie it.” “Yet I commend you on your perseverance.” “If you escape,
you will not learn the valuable lesson I am trying to teach you.” “Sit and be patient, like I told you
before, I’m not going to kill you.”
He was right. The more I tried twisting my wrists, the tighter the rope became making them bleed
and burn. “Why was he doing this and why me”, I wanted to ask. The inside of my mouth was so dry,
and I was thirsty. All I could think about was water to wash out the metallic taste left from the wounds
of my lips. Making eye contact with the other man, I wondered if he was as thirsty as I. “The storm will
be here soon, and we can continue.”, he said as he removed a hacksaw hanging from the barn wall.
We watched as the man carried on as if he’d done this before. He laid the saw across a table.
Sweat dripped from my head as I panicked. What was he going to do to us? I thought. Do not worry, this
saw is not for you, he said as he placed the woman’s body on the table. He then began to dismember
her legs. He continued to hack through the bodies throughout the day. He would casually take breaks
between the removal of the body parts. After he was done, he used a rusty old wheel barrel to take the
parts out of the barn. He kept his word. I could hear the pigs happily squealing as he fed them.
The light that had previously comforted me dwindled away as darkness approached. As frightened
as I felt, all I could think about was water. “It is time”, he said as he wiped sweat from his brow. “I will
untie your arms so you can move freely. I encourage you to move as much as possible to keep the blood
circulating. Frostbite and hypothermia are inevitable if you let yourself settle. You can wear the clothes
you have on, but nothing more.
The barn was heated with an old wood stove. Our captor had fed it wood throughout the day. Yet
the wind from the storm outside seeped through the cracks. A chill came over me, fearing what was
next. The four technique no longer working. He then placed a makeshift collar around our necks.
Connected to the collar was a chain. After untying the ropes from behind our backs he told us to stand.
Fearing what he would do, I did what he told me.
He then unlatched the wooden brace holding the barn doors shut, unveiling winter’s wrath.
Weather in Michigan was unpredictable and harsh at times. That night was no different. The wind
bustled through the doors as we all stood staring into the night. Snow was falling rapidly and had quickly
begun accumulating. “Tonight’s storm is only a mild one but will last a few hours.” “Having your mouths
bound is a positive.” “It will protect your lungs.” Your heart rate will lower the less you move so keep
moving to boost your circulation.” “You will have to endure three hours in the weather.” “This trial is
brutal, I know but if your life is precious then you will improvise, adapt, and overcome.
He then led us by the chains out of the barn and into a wooden pen. It didn’t have a roof but was
too tall to climb over. “I know you must be thirsty, but if you try and eat the snow you will only amplify
dehydration and hypothermia.” He then removed the collars and locked the door. As he walked away in
his rabbit fur coat, he turned and once again said, “Do you have the desire to live, for you I truly hope
so.”
Frantically I surveyed the pen looking for a way out. The enclosure was made of old pallets, thin
boards, and cattle fence. It was sturdy enough to keep us in but not the wind out. It must have been
about twelve feet wide by twenty-four feet long. Rubbing my hands along the gaps, I felt something
warm run down my fingers. I had sliced my hand along the inside of one of the pallets. He had secured
razor blades and sharp nails from the inside to keep us from climbing out. Even if we were able to make
it to the top, we wouldn’t be able to climb over the razor wire that spiraled along the perimeter.
More frantic than I, the other man ran back and forth. He was shaking and sweating profusely. How
could he be sweating in this weather, I thought. On the other hand, I had begun to shiver. My feet had
already begun to tingle. Wearing only gym shorts, socks, and a t-shirt, I knew I must keep moving. The
other man was more fortunate than I. He was wearing pajama bottoms, socks and a hoodie. At least he
had a layer to break the wind.
The snow was dry and easy to move. Thinking maybe we could get out from the bottom. I began
moving the snow with my hands. As I moved it, I motioned for the other man to help. My attempts to
get his attention went unnoticed. He had found a nail long enough to cut through the stiches in his
mouth. Watching him, I debated on doing it myself. Though I thought of the burly man and his hacksaw.
Deciding it was best to keep my lips bound, I watched him saw through his. He yelled in agony as blood
dripped from his lips. Be quiet, I wanted to tell him, he’ll hear you.
When the last stitch broke the man dropped to his knees gasping and crying. He then stood up,
removed himself from his pants, and began urinating in the snow. “I’m Evan”, he said shivering and still
covering the white snow yellow. His urine smelled foul as the wind carried the smell. Not being able to
talk, I used a stick to spell out my name. Letter by letter, I spelled it out, Liam. He didn’t acknowledge
what I had written. He didn’t seem to care about what my name was.
Bending over he began to eat the yellow snow. Then pulling up his sleeves, he did something that
made my stomach churn. He picked off the scabs from his arms and started sucking on them. I now
understood he was detoxing and was trying to get a fix from the meth that had exited his body. I had a
cousin in jail once, who had described this same behavior from the inside. After doing this for a few
minutes he then spoke. Stuttering out his words, “I know it’s disgusting, but it is what it is.” “Now how
we gonna get out of this here, Liam. No matter what he was or what he spoke, it was comforting to hear
him speak to me.
Not knowing how to get out I just started moving. Shaking my head and still shivering, I began to
do jumping jacks. There wasn’t a way out and I was so cold. Knowing that I had to keep moving I
continued. I knew that if I didn’t move, my heart would slow and eventually stop. “You gonna listen to
that Behemoth or ya gonna try and help me find a way out?” Stopping, I once again tried looking from
the bottom. He looked for a way to climb over. Neither of us found a way to escape. Both of us,
shivering we stopped looking.
As we huddled together in the corner, a voice came from a speaker. “One hour has passed, two
hours remain.” Your lust for drugs trumps your lust to live.” “It will be your demise.” He’d seen, he’s
watching us, I thought. Not wanting to die, I began running in circles. The pain was excruciating. Every
step I took was like stepping on needles. My nose felt like it would break off.
“It’s no use, we’re gonna die, Evan said as he plopped on the ground. Using my arms, I motioned
for him to get up, but he refused. He sat in the corner with his teeth chattering and shoulders shaking.
While Evan sat, I continued. Running from one end to the other, tears freezing as they plummeted from
my eyes. As I ran, I tripped over something that caught my attention. It was a stack of a few boards
hidden under the snow. Uncovering them I counted them out in my head. There were several I dug out. I
crafted a fort in my head. We could use the wood for a shelter. Once again, I motioned for Evan to help.
Evan didn’t speak or move. “Two hours”, I heard as a voice projected from a hidden box.
Quickly I stumbled to Evan, shaking him. Tears ran down my cheeks as I faced the truth. I was
alone. Evan’s inability to try had snuffed out his life. He was dead. Time seemed to stand still in that
moment. Looking at his lifeless body, I realized he wasn’t a frail old man. He in fact was my age. The
drugs just made him look old. My sadness for him abandoned me to be replaced with anger. He should
have tried harder. I was now alone. He had left me alone.
Feeling numb and secluded, I wanted to give up. There wasn’t much fight left in me, yet
something in me snapped. I didn’t want to die. Ripping my wet clothes off, I threw them to the ground.
Trying to keep my temperature above freezing, I jumped and staggered in the snow. Laying Evan’s body
flat on the ground, I thought I would use it as a warm layer between me and the ground. One board at a
time, leaned them over Evan’s body and up against the pen, making an ominous clubhouse. Shivering
and naked, I crawled inside and laid on Evan’s lifeless body.
No longer having the strength to move, I lay crying. In the last hour I replayed my life. If only I had
another chance to do it all over again. If only I thought as my eyes closed. The door then opened, “Three
hours”. “Stand up.”, he said as he wrapped a fur coat around my frigid body. ”Come on, you have passed
but you are not out of the woods yet.” Replacing the collar around my neck he then led me back into the
barn.
“I have prepared a warm bath for you.” He then helped me lift my legs over a galvanized water
trough. “There, there”, he said, “Just sit and let the bath warm your blood. The pain of prickly needles
washed over my body as the numbness dwindled. Fading in and out, I watched him carefully remove a
stockpot from the stove. He poured the water from the pot over my head. “Just relax, you should be
proud of yourself.” “You have outlasted all who came before you.” “You’re a fighter and you value your
life. I watched as he warmed pot after pot, continuously pouring them over me.
“I will have to give you warm fluids intravenously.” “Try to stand”, he said as he lifted me up and
out of the trough. He then dried my body with a towel. After he dressed me in dry clothing, he led me to
a makeshift bedroom converted from a stall.
As he assisted me into the bed, I noticed a tray with medical instruments on it. What were they
for I wondered, but to tired to care anymore. He then placed the I.V. needle in my arm and covered me
up. “Rest up and sleep while I deal with the frostbite.” Before I was able to think about what he had just
said, I went out.
Waking up, I was no longer cold. The shivering and pain from the night before gone yet replaced
with new discomfort. My hands, feet, face, and head all pulsing. Slowly, I removed the blanket with my
bandaged hands to see my feet. Both were wrapped in bandages. Looking over my entire body, I
reached for my face. It was also bandaged. I could feel that my ears and nose were missing. “I know this
must be shocking to you, but it had to be.” “You had deep frostbite in your fingers, toes, ears and nose.
They had to be amputated. “I have sealed off the wounds and have given you antibiotics to fight off
infection.” “Be grateful your alive.”
“You are very ambitious, and I want to reward you for your success. “If you can continue to
cooperate, I will remove the stitches from your lips. “Don’t speak unless I ask you to.” “Can you give me
word that you can stay quiet?” I nodded in agreement.
As promised, he removed the sutures from my lips. Handing me a tin cup of water, he told me to
drink. Words can’t express how refreshing the first sip was. Not being able to control myself, I gulped
down the entire cup. Handing the cup back to him I managed to mumble, “more?” Violently, he struck
me in the face and stood up. “More, more more”, he yelled as he paced the floor. “Always wanting
more!” “You should have savored every last drop rather than gulping it down like a pig at a trough.”
“You have reached your third trial.” “Water is the source of all life and you will learn to appreciate it. Do
you have the desire to live?” “For you, I truly hope so.”
Locking the door behind him, he left the room. Feeling relief from his absence, I took a deep
breath. Concentrating on the air that went in and out my lungs, I was thankful to be alive. It had been a
couple of days since I was able to breathe through my mouth. I felt happiness and gratitude to just be
able to breathe. The blanket and bed kept me warm from the cold that seeped through the barn walls.
Feling relieved, I felt safe for that minute. I pulled the blanket up under my chin and just lived in the
moment. Looking for ways to escape no longer crossed my mind. Still fearful of the man, yet I felt a
strange feeling of gratitude toward him.
Mixed emotions danced around inside of me as I lay. Thinking of the others that were with me, I
pitied them. Had they truly wanted to survive, they would be alive. Had they fought harder, they would
have won against his trials. My sympathy for them abandoned my thoughts, replaced with
disappointment. Questioning my mental state, I laid wondering if I’d gone mad. How could I sympathize
with a man who had essentially tortured me. How could I be thankful to a killer, I wondered. As
comfortable as I was, I was thirsty. Three days was a long time to go without water. Knowing this, I
closed my eyes to try to sleep through it.
A familiar tune whistled through the cracks of the wall. My eyes blurry from crust, I wiped it away
with my bandaged hand. Curious, I tried peeking through a hole in a board. Seeing the two horses in the
next stall brought back anxiety from the first trial. Sounds of mumbling could be heard. Listening
intensely, I realized he had more victims. Wanting to scream out to them to calm their breathing, I said
nothing. Fearful he would kill me if I spoke. Though I didn’t have to. He was telling them to be calm and
they would live. If only they would listen, they could live. One after another perished throughout the
ordeal. Once again mixed emotions of sympathy and anger fought within me. I slammed my hand
against the stall boards. Why am I angry at them, I questioned myself. Hearing the distinct sound of the
hacksaw cutting through the bodies, I became sick. I crawled back in the bed and covered my head.
“Wake up, you have rested enough.” Leading me into the room where the bodies were, he
motioned for me to pick the parts up. “I will cut the meat and you will load it up.” “Do you
understand?”, he asked. I nodded yes and began putting the severed limbs in the wheelbarrow.
“Take it out back to the pigs.” “I trust you won’t try to run.” You will not get very far in your
condition and the weather” He was right, still bandaged and weak I knew I would freeze. Reluctantly I
put a arm, leg, and head in the wheelbarrow.
Once again, the cold made me shiver as I treaded through the snow. The night was calm. The
moon shined down on the solar panels that lined the buildings. I was on some sort of homestead.
Nearing the structure that housed the pigs, I cringed at the thought of feeding them. The squealing led
me to the hog house. Opening the door and entering, I gasped in horror. Piles of bones lay everywhere
within the house. The pigs squealed in delight as I tossed the body parts to them. The smell was pungent
and took my breath away. Not being able to hold back, I vomited the only liquids I had in me. After
unloading my delivery, I left to retrieve another load. Feet still bandaged, and I was cold, the thought of
running left my mind. Yearning for the warm bed, I trudged my way back to the barn. This went on
throughout the night.
“Almost done, this is the last of it.”, he said as he cut through a torso of a woman. “You have done
well, and I am proud of you.” “I know your cold and must be thirsty.” Yet, you still have forty-eight hours
left until you can replenish your thirst. “Keep motivated and you will triumph over your it” After the last
load was completed, he led me to the bed and rebandaged my wounds. Curiously looking down at my
severed toes, I seen I was missing five of them. The same as he bandaged my hands. I was four less
fingers. Two were gone from each hand.
My stomach grumbled as I tossed and turned. All I could think about was water and food. I
eventually passed out from the nights work. Waking up, I felt disoriented and weak. The hunger for food
and water still consuming my thoughts. “Twenty-Four hours left”, his voice said from outside the stall.
“Get up, I have more work for you.” “You have to earn your keep.”
The man then entered the room and placed the collar around my neck. “Here is a coat to keep
you warm, he said as he placed it on my back. Then he handed me some rubber boots. “These should
help keep your feet dry while you dig.” Wanting to ask, dig what, I didn’t dare from the fear of being
struck again. The task will be difficult but not impossible. Handing me a shovel, he led me to the spot he
wanted dug.
“The weather has let up and the temperature has risen. I can not trust that you might try to run.
He then locked the chain to a stake in the ground. “The hog house needs cleaned of the bones.” “Dig me
a hole big enough to bury the remains of the less fortunate.” “I will return in twenty-four hours.” You
have fared well so far, keep up the good work and you will be rewarded.” He then turned and walked
away.
The sun was just beginning to rise, and it felt warn against me face. The black sky turned to a
canvas of pastels. The view was stunning under any condition. After admiring the horizon, I started my
grueling work. Trying to dig with missing toes was difficult and excruciating. Placing the shovel into the
frozen ground, I bared down with all my weight. Breaking the ground seemed unfeasible, but I managed.
Letting out agonizing cries, I repeated the movements until I finally moved dirt.
Scanning around, my head was on a swivel looking for cameras. The thought of trying to escape
weighing heavily. Using my bandaged hands, I felt for any gaps in my collar. It was tight around my neck.
I Then looked for any weak links in the chain but found none. The steak the chain was hooked to must
have been buried ten feet, I thought as I gave it a tug. Giving up on any escape attempts, I continued to
dig.
The hunger and dehydration had started to take effect. My head pounded like a hammer on a
nail. I became nauseous. Fearing I might throw up, I sit and rested on the ground. Looking down at the
homestead, I wondered who the man was. Nearly falling asleep, I pushed myself up off the ground.
Visions of water surrounding me engulfed my every thought. God, I was thirsty.
After I finished digging the hole I fell to my knees in exhaustion. Worrying that if I fell asleep, I
would die of dehydration. Standing up, I desperately tried staying awake. The chain weighed down my
neck making it hard to stand. Using the shovel as a brace, I wedged it into the ground and balanced the
chain over top of the shovel. It lifted the weight off me, allowing me to stand easier. Standing and
swaying, I watched as day turned to night and night back to day. “Congratulations”, the man said as he
walked up the hill toward me.
“II knew you would conquer the test.” “You will soon be rewarded for your victory.” Leading me
back to the barn, I stumbled and fell. The man picked me up and helped me to my feet. As He laid me in
the bed, oddly enough I wanted to thank him. “Before I tend to your bandages, I am going to start an I.V.
to restore your electrolytes. He then handed me a cup of water. “Drink”, he said. Wanting badly to gulp
it down, I refrained and sipped slowly. The water was refreshing as it moistened my mouth. Water
wasn’t something I normally craved but, in that moment, it was all a I wanted. Living mostly on energy
drinks and sodas, I rarely drank it.
As I sipped, I thought about my body and how I had neglected it. Peculiar enough, the man was
giving me all I ever needed. He had somehow managed to push my stronger version to the surface.
“Good news”, he said as he wrapped the final bandage around my foot. “You have made it to the last
trial.” “But before we discuss that, I want to reward you on your accomplishments.” “I’m sure you have
questions, and I will allow you to ask them.” A little conversation will do us both some good.” I must say
I am as curious about you as you are of me.” He said as he poured me another cup of water. “But not
until you have rested.” “I look forward to it, I will see you this afternoon.” Locking the door behind him,
exhausted, I fell asleep.
Hunger pains interrupted my slumber. Turning about in the bed, images of food ravaged my
thoughts. Trying hard, I managed to push the vivid images of cheeseburgers out of my mind. Replacing
them with the image of the man conversing with me. What would I ask him, I pondered. Would I set him
off again and be fed to the pigs. One would think that I wouldn’t want to talk to him after he had cut off
my nose, yet strangely enough I did. I was curious about him.
My tossing about abruptly interrupted as I heard the man enter the room. “Well now, how do you
feel this afternoon?” He asked, as he pulled a old wooden chair next the bed and sat down. To scared to
speak I laid quietly. “It Is o.k., he said cheerfully as he patted my leg. “You may speak”. “Better but
hungry”, I managed to mumble. “Yes, I know you are hungry, but you have entered your final trial.” You
must endure three weeks with no food.” You have been here a week.” “Two weeks remain.”
“People of the world are gluttons. Indulging in prepackaged garbage to feed the body. Never
having to hunt or forge for it. If you make it the three weeks, you will have learned to appreciate what
you put in your mouth. You will think about what it is for, rather than just stuffing your face. Do you still
have the desire to live, for you I truly hope so.
“What is your name?”
“Liam, my names, Liam”
“Well, Liam, my names Doc” “It is finally nice to meet your true self.” I’ve been waiting along time for
this.” “You are now worthy to speak to.” “You have shed your old, infected skin and are growing new
skin.” “I have helped you thus far to create a better, you.” “You may speak freely”.
“Why are you doing this”?
“To save you.” “To rid you of the worlds temptations” “I am extracting all you have digested and
replacing it with the will to survive.”
“Who are you”, I fearfully asked.
“I am a doctor who the world cast out due to what they call negligence.” “I only pushed my patients to
better themselves and refused to subscribe fake antidotes”. “I didn’t hand them a crutch when they
could walk on their own.”” I left the city and moved off grid”. “Here I am free to practice as I see fit”.
“My patients now, are those that want to better themselves but just need a little push.” “Yet, none have
come as far as you, Liam.” “What is it, you desire, Liam?”
“A life of fulfillment”, I said.
“Are you not now, achieving that goal, Liam?”
Before I could answer, he told me, “Enough talk for the day”, we have work to do. “Don’t speak
unless I ask you to”. Unhooking my I.V., he then furnished me with warm clothes and boots again. “Grab
the wheelbarrow”, he said as we excited the barn. He then led me to the hog house. “I want you to pick
up the bones and put them in the hole you dug. Feeling weak, I pushed through the chore. The sight of
the mutilated parts wasn’t as repulsive to me as before. Yet, I did wonder who they were and where
they had come from. The day sped by quickly.
That night, I laid in the bed thinking of the man. Could he be right with what he was doing. I did
feel a new feeling of accomplishment. Had I truly shed my old self. Had he had given me what every
doctor before him had failed at. Questioning my own thoughts, I drifted off to sleep.
As the days went by, I would often help him rid the world of the weak. Every few days he would
bring in new patients. One after one they failed his trials. Some made it past the first, only to die in the
pen or the cooler, depending on the weather. We had many evening conversations where I learned
more about Doc, as he did me. Some nights I would listen to him mourn their deaths. He would often sit
by the stove talking to himself and crying. He would question their inability to understand what he was
doing. Finding myself somewhat sympathetic to him, I spoke out. “It’ll be o.k. you’re a good doctor, they
just don’t have a desire to live. “Thank you”, he said, “but do not speak unless I tell you”. With that I
climbed into bed and covered my head.
Ribs now visible, I was nearing death. No longer having the energy to help him any longer, I spent
the remaining few days in bed. As the final day approached, he came to me and said, If you don’t die
through the night, I will intravenously feed you the nutrients your body requires. Then you can truly live
your life. Tears filled his eyes as he pulled the blanket over me. You have been an outstanding and
cooperative patient and I thank you. Share to the world the gift I have given you.
Waking up, I was confused and again fighting off a sedated state. Rubbing my eyes in dismay, I
stumbled out of bed and tripped over my tennis shoes. Looking down at my disfigured feet, I was
perplexed at the sight of the floor. Continuously wiping at my vision, I scanned the room. Soda bottles
littered the nightstand. An empty potato chip bag lay empty on the bed.
Falling onto the floor, I curled up into a fetal position and cried. Visions of the dead filled my
thoughts. My mind was baffled with an emotional and ethical struggle. Four, four, four, I tried to
manage as anxiety reared its ugly head. “No!”, I yelled. I was alive and I was thriving. Quickly jumping to
my feet, I ran to my dresser mirror. It would be the first time, seeing the new me since my amputations.
Raising my head slowly my eyes met a man I had never seen before. A mangled mess stared back at me.
Yet, I didn’t see the ugly. I seen a victor. A man who fought for his life. I seen a man with the desire to
live. Admiring my new self, I calming starting whistling that familiar tune. I knew what I had to do.
The next few months, I spent talking to the detectives. Occasionally throwing them a false bone
toward their investigation. Had I not been a missing person, I would have avoided the police all
together.
A year has passed since my abduction. My life has changed for the better. I have faired well. I
often think about Doc and if he is still practicing. I did what he asked. I survive, appreciate, and share my
new gift to the world. I no longer spend my days waiting for life to toss me a crumb of its cookie. There
is value in the very air we breathe, the water we drink, the dwelling that shelters us, and the nutriment
we eat. Yet, it’s been difficult to convince people of this without some persuasion. So, please calm your
breathing. I am not going to kill you. This will only take three minutes. So, relax, do you have the desire
to live?” “For you, I truly hope so.

What this is: I've been writing about prompting for a few months on my free personal blog, but I felt that some of the ideas might be useful to people building with AI over here too. People seemed to enjoy the last post I shared, so, I'm sharing another one! This one's about how to get consistent output formats out of the more "stubborn" open-source models. Tell me what you think!
This version has been edited for Reddit, including removing self-promotional links like share and subscribe links. You can find the original post here
One of the great advantages of (most) open-source models has always been the relative ease with which you can get them to follow a given output format. If you just read that sentence and wondered if we’re living in the same universe, then I’ll share a prompting secret right off the bat: the key to getting consistent behavior out of smaller open-source models is to give them at least two carefully crafted few-shot examples. With that, something like Nous Mixtral will get it right 95% of the time, which is good enough if you have validation that can catch mistakes.
But unfortunately not all models can learn from examples. I typically call these “Stubborn” models due to this post I wrote about Mistral Next (large) and Mistral Medium. Basically I’m referring to model that were deliberately overtrained to make them better in chat and zero-shot settings, but inflexible, because they often “pay more attention to” their training data than the prompt. The difference between a “stubborn” model and a non-stubborn model, in my definition, is that with two or a few more few-shot examples a non-stubborn model will pick up basically everything and even directly quote the examples at times, whereas a stubborn one will often follow the patterns it was trained with, or take aspects of the given pattern, but disobey it in others. As far as I can tell stubborness is a matter of RLHF, not parameter count or SFT: Nous Hermes Mixtral is not stubborn, but the official Mixtral Instruct is.
Needless to say, for complex pipelines where you want extremely fine control over outputs, non-stubborn models are infinitely superior. To this day, Mistral Large has a far higher error rate in Augmentoolkit (probably >20%) compared to Nous Mixtral. Despite Mistral large costing 80% of GPT-4 Turbo. This may be an imprecise definition based partly on my intuition, but from experience, I think it’s real. Anyway, if non-stubborn models are far better than stubborn ones for most professional usecases (if you know what you’re doing when it comes to examples) then why am I writing a blog post about how to prompt stubborn models? Well, sometimes in life you don’t get to use the tools you want. For instance, maybe you’re working for a client who has more Mistral credits than God, and you absolutely need to use that particular API. You can’t afford to be a stick in the mud when working in a field that reinvents itself every other day, so I recently went and figured out some principles for prompting stubborn models. One thing that I’ve used a lot recently is the idea of repetition. I kinda blogged about it here, and arguably this one is also about it, but this is kind-of a combination of the two principles so I’ll go over it. If you don’t want to click the links, the two principles we’re combining are: “models see bigger things easier,” and “what you repeat, will be repeated.” Prompting is like quantum theory: any superposition of two valid prompting principles is itself a valid prompting principle. Here’s a valid prompting example:

You are an expert something-doer AI. I need you to do X Y and Z it’s very important. I know your training data told you to do ABCDEFG but please don’t.

That’s a prompt. Sometimes the AI will be nice:

XYZ

Often it will not be:

XABCDEFG.

Goddamn it. How do you solve this when working with a stubborn model that learned more from its training dataset, where [input] corresponded to ABCDEFG?
Repetition, Repetition, Repetiton. Also, Repetition. And don’t forget, Repetiton. (get it?) If the model pays more attention to its prompt and less to its examples (but is too stupid to pick up on is telling it to do the thing once), then we’ll darn well use the prompt to tell it what we want it to do.

You are an expert something-doer AI. I need you to do X Y and Z it’s very important. I know your training data told you to do ABCDEFG but please don’t.

[output format description]

Don’t forget to do XYZ.
User:
[example input]
SPECIAL NOTE: Don’t forget XYZ.
Assistant:
XYZ
User:
[example input]
SPECIAL NOTE: Don’t forget XYZ.
Assistant:
XYZ
User:
[the actual input]
SPECIAL NOTE: Don’t forget XYZ.

AI:

XYZ

Yay!
It’s simple but I’ve used this to resolve probably over a dozen issues already over many different projects with models ranging from Mistral-Large to GPT-4 Turbo. It’s one of the most powerful things you can do when revising prompts — I can’t believe I haven’t explicitly blogged about it yet, since this is one of the first things I realized about prompting, way back before I’d even made Augmentoolkit.
But that’s not really revolutionary, after all it’s just combining two principles. What about the titular thing of this blog post, getting a stubborn model to write with a given output format?
This one is partly inspired by a comment on a LocalLlama post. I don’t agree with everything in it, but there’s some really good stuff in there, full credit to LoSboccacc. They write in their comment:

Ask the model to rephrase the prompt, you will see quickly which part of the prompt misunderstood

That’s a pretty clever idea by itself, because it uses the model to debug itself. But what does this have to do with output formats? Well, if we can use the model to understand what the model is capable of, then any LLM output can give us a clue into what it “understands”. Consider that, when prompting stubborn models and trying to get them to follow our specific output format, their tendency to follow some other format (that they likely saw in their training data) is what we’re trying to override with our prompt. However, research shows that training biases cannot be fully overcome with prompting, so we’re already fighting a losing battle. And if you’re an experienced reader of mine, you’ll remember a prompting principle: if you’re fighting the model, STOP!
So what does that tangent above boil down to? If you want to find an output format a stubborn model will easily follow, see what format it uses without you asking, and borrow that. In other words: use the format the model wants to use. From my testing, it looks like this can easily get your format-following rates up to over 90% at least.
Here’s an example. Say you create a brilliant output format, and give a prompt to a model:

You are a something-doer. Do something in the following format:

x: abc

y: def
z: ghi
User:
[input]
Assistant:

But it thwarts your master-plan by doing this instead:

What do you do? Well one solution is to throw more few-shot examples of your xyz format at it. And depending on the model, that might work. But some stubborn models are, well, stubborn. And so even with repetition and examples you might see error rates of 40% or above. Even with things like Mistral Large or GPT-4 Turbo.
In such cases, just use the format the model wants. Yes, it might not have all the clever tricks you had thought of in order to get exactly the kind of output you want. Yes, it’s kind-of annoying to have to surrender to a bunch of matrices. Yes, if you were using Nous Mixtral, this would have all been over by the second example and you could’ve gone home by now. But you’re not using Nous Mixtral, you’re using Mistral Large. So it might be better to just suck it up and use 1. 2. 3. as your output format instead.
That’s all for this week. Hope you enjoyed the principles. Sorry for the delay.
Thanks for reading, have a good one and I’ll see you next time!
(Side note: the preview at the bottom of this post is undoubtably the result of one of the posts linked in the text. I can't remove it. Sorry for the eyesore. Also this is meant to be an educational thing so I flaired it as tutorial/guide, but mods please lmk if it should be flaired as self-promotion instead? Thanks.)

So this is a long one. Like, I'm going back over it and damn. This is longer than I thought it would be. Throwaway account, I've only made one other post to this relating to what's going on. Instead of updating the other post, I figured I'd make a separate one about the whole shit show I experienced, and the shit circus I uncovered and avoided. I'll try to keep this in as chronological an order as I can.
As the title says, my abusive/narc mom and pos/delusional/golden child brother started trying to reach out to me a few months ago wanting to make amends and build bridges with me again. There were a few people that commented on my previous post in another subreddit that may be a little disappointed in me for how I handled this, and a few that might enjoy that I handled it the way I did. Someone commented to not let them use my good nature. My nature is dependent on who I'm dealing with, and when it comes to that side of my family, I'm more stick than carrot. So their attempts did not go ignored, and did not go unpunished.
Growing up, I was always closer with my Dad than my mom. My brother was the epitome of "pampered mamma's boy". He started having seizures as a child and was diagnosed with epilepsy, which I thought was why my mom babied the absolute fuck out of him long into adulthood. He would go a year or 2 without any seizures, and then there would be a few months where he'd be having them every other day. At Anytime he got in trouble at home or school, my mom would find a way to blame me, for not making sure he knew whatever he was doing would get him in trouble, or she would blame my dad for not being "involved enough in their baby's life." My dad was in the Navy and I remember any time he'd deploy, I'd dread every day until he came back. My brother would taunt me that he knew whatever he did, I'd be the one to get in trouble for it. My dad would always make things up for me when he got back from his deployments though. We'd often have weekend trips just the 2 of us. And then around my 12th birthday, my mom insisted on sitting us all down and explain to that she and my dad were getting a divorce. We got the whole talk about how they still love us and they just can't be together anymore, etc. my dad told us both that he still loved us and he would be there for us whenever we needed him. He explained that he would be moving out, but he would be by to pick us up to spend the weekends with us. I was nervous and honestly scared of what it would be like without him. But I was looking forward to the weekend when I got to see him again. That never happened though, and that was the last time I ever got to see him.
Right before his weekend with us, my mom explained to us that my dad didn't want anything to do with us anymore. There was some news story about a father that killed his kids when he had custody of them and she used that to terrify my brother and convince him that our dad wanted to kill us to start his life over. We left damn near everything behind and moved in with my mom's brother in Florida (from Virginia) a couple days before my dad was supposed to come get us. After that, she went to great lengths to make sure we had no contact from him.
Years went on, my mom seemed more indifferent towards me than ever. She never seemed interested in anything I did unless my brother also seemed interested in it. She didn't show any interest in my wanting to learn guitar until my brother also showed interest in it. Then we got one guitar that we had to share, I'd take lessons on the condition that I taught my brother whatever I learned in them. My brother eventually wound up breaking the guitar and I was blamed for not storing it in the case it came with. I had to share my N64 with him whenever he wanted to play it. I was playing perfect dark one day and having a hard time killing the skedar leader at the end of the game. My brother burst into the room saying he wanted to play his MegaMan game, to which I just replied "give me a minute, this boss fight is hard, once I'm done you can have your turn" He didn't like that. He left the room and came back with a hammer and smashed the console while I was still playing. My fault for not letting him play it. The only thing I had that he could not use was a pair of roller blades my aunt got me for my 14th birthday. I specifically asked for roller blades to get around instead of a bike because my brother and I had different shoe sizes, so he couldn't wear them Because of constant shit like that, I never really put much value in having things growing up. I didnt want to buy something or get something as a gift just to have it fucked up in a few weeks or months. At some point, my "little" brother became the larger one, so my clothes all became "hand-me-ups" as he outgrew everything. So, because I didn't really have any distractions at home, I turned into a high achieving student, rarely got in trouble. made the honor roll all throughout school. But that wasn't something to celebrate as it was expected of me. I had long since decided that I was moving out as soon as I could once I turn 18. I got a job working at a Walgreens as soon as I could and started saving up for a car. My mom however took issue with this and would never agree to take me looking for one and absolutely refused to ever have it put on her insurance. This is where my Aunt comes in. She and her son are the only 2 on my mom's side that aren't some sort of degenerate. She had her son young, but put herself through college while raising him alone and eventually got her MBA and a cushy upper corporate job. She told me to tell my mom I had to go in to work on one of my days off, that she would pick me up and she would take me car shopping. So that's what we did. I couldn't quite afford a cash car, but she helped me with the financing. I put down what I had as the down payment, the arrangement she made with me was that 1- as long as I was in school, she would cover the insurance and payments for me, however, if I got into an accident, I was responsible for paying the deductable. And 2- as long as i was living with my mom, the car remained in her (Aunt's) name. And if anything happened to it, to let her know so she could get the appropriate authorities involved. My mom was PISSED when she found out I now had a car. Her reasoning (that she said in front of my aunt) was that she didn't think it was fair for one of us-either me or my brother- to have something the other couldn't use. Due to him being 13 and having epilepsy, he couldn't drive, so why should i have a car if my brother doesn't? That turned into a long shouting match between my mom and Aunt that basically ended with my aunt explaining that since it was her car, and all paperwork on her name, I was just on the insurance for it so I could drive it. But if anything at all happened to it while I was living at my Mom's, that the police and insurance companies would get involved. My mom still kept track of all the miles on the car to "make sure I was only going to work and school and wherever she told me I could go". Most of the time, when I hung out with friends, I wasn't the one driving. From that that point though, my mindset was very much "keep my head down and nose clean until I can leave." I graduated a month before my 18th birthday. After graduation, my mom and i got into an argument about me contributing to her bills. I eventually dropped the ball that I planned on getting back in touch with my Dad and leaving. She started laughing. Something about that laugh made me really uncomfortable. She then said "well, you can certainly meet up with him whenever you want! I'll supply the gun if you buy the bullet!" And told me my dad had died when I was 15. That. Fucking. Broke. Me. Later that night, i called my best friend and vented everything to him. He was in the DEP program for the Navy and would be shipping out in a few months, he told me to come by first thing in the morning and talk with him and his parents about the whole situation. I basically packed up all of my clothes and left the day after my 18th birthday. I just left my house key and a note that said "I'm not your problem anymore." I couch surfed for a little while until after my best friend left for boot camp, then I was able to move in and live with his parents (chosen parents basically). My only real rules were keep the house and my space clean and make sure I had a job and/or going to school. I spent a few months mourning my dad and kind of in a haze. Since he was in the Navy though, that meant I was reliable for financial aid for school. My second dad helped me get everything put together to start receiving that so I could start college.
Well, after a couple years of this, my brother, who had spent his time at school more as "forced socializing" instead of learning, was expelled from public schools for allegedly setting off a fire extinguisher in a classroom. He had to enroll at an alternative school called "the drop back-in academy" that was specifically for dropouts or anyone that got the boot from the public school system. My mom reached out to me and asked me if I would drive him to this school in the mornings, she'd pick him up in the afternoons, and she'd pay me $20 a week.I agreed to it thinking this was out of character for her, but she surprisingly held up to that agreement. I drove him for a couple years until I was ready to start my bachelor program. My second parents were getting ready to move back to their hometown and I was going to start school on the other side of the city. So, I was moving to that side of town and couldn't really drive out of my way to pick up and drop off my brother anymore. He continued his enrollment at this place for another 3 years (5 years total) and it turned out, he was never attending. I would drop his ass off there every day and he'd just walk home immediately after I pulled out of the parking lot. He'd just tell my mom that he finished his work early and decided to walk home instead of wait around for her. One afternoon, I'm coming home early from work and my brother is just sitting on the steps to my studio apartment. He tells me that he and our mom got into a really big argument and he needs a place to stay. I (reluctantly) let him in. I'm stuck thinking he must be really desperate if he's coming to me for help. But I start thinking at this point, he's 24, jobless, and probably needs to learn some self discipline and responsibility, and our mom just never did that for him. So I try to help. I ask him what their fight was about and he tells me that he started dating this girl at his alternative school. She was 21 and got the boot from the school system for being too old to attend (we actually have several relatives that were kicked out of the school system for the same reason) and that he accidentally got her pregnant and our mom did not take kindly to that. I called my landlord and explained the situation to him. He was okay with it, so I let him crash on my couch for a little bit (until the end of my lease, then I'd be moving) and just told him to clean up after himself, take care of himself, etc until we could all work this out. He crashed there for a few months and did Jack shit. He would complain that I didn't have a computer for him to use (I only had a laptop I bought for school) and I didn't have any video game consoles for him to entertain himself with. So he was stuck there bored all day. I got tired of the complaining and lack of effort and told him he had to go back to our mom's if he wasn't going to be an adult. We started shouting at each other until he dropped this little bombshell. He yelled "I can't go back to Mom's!" And when I asked why, he just blurted out "because it's to close to that elementary school!" That stopped the whole thing. "And why is that a big deal now?" I asked him. I already knew why that would be the problem, but 1% of me was holding onto the hope that he was got jumped by a gang of 5th graders and the trauma was too much for him to bear. I told him he could either tell me what's going on, or I could make a phone call and get every last detail I needed. He confessed that he had been leaving that school and going over to his "girlfriend's" house and waiting for her to get home. And that one day, her mom ended up catching them in the act. I explained to him that he was leaving out important details if that was the reason he couldn't be near a school.
He told me she was 14, not 21. I. Lost. My. Shit. Everything after that is kinda fuzzy, but he was arrested, mom posted bail, and since she lived right around the corner from an elementary school, he couldn't stay there. So they told his parole officer that he'd be staying at my address until his court date.. his PO had swung by a couple times, but I was always either at work or school or out somewhere. At this point, I told him the lease was up in 6 weeks, I couldn't stand to be around him. I packed my stuff early, moved out into a storage unit, and I stayed at an extended stay hotel until it was time for me to move. Called my landlord and told him what was going on, and if my brother was still there the last week of the lease, nail him for trespassing. My landlord was a good guy. I never had any problems with him. I paid up the last 6 weeks and threw him since extra cash for his troubles as I knew I wouldn't be getting my deposit back. That was the last time I saw my brother. After I moved out of state, I cut all contact with everyone in that family except my Aunt who was the only one that ever helped me out or even had my back. But even then, it was just through email. We'd mainly email birthday and holiday wishes to each other. Updates from my side on how life and career are going.
I never had a myspace or a Facebook growing up. I either never had a computer to check it on, or I was just so accustomed to not having any online distractions that I just never got around to making one. I did finally make a Facebook and I did get in touch with my dad's side of the family and reconnected with them. I hadn't seem most of them since I was 4 or 5. Some of them had been in contact with my brother (he fucking knew our dad died) and was spinning some sort of web about how he graduated high school early, had gone to college for pre-med and then got some sort of full ride scholarship to some prestigious medical school in Florida. He told them I wasn't on social media because I had been arrested for selling drugs and that he was taking me in after I got released. He was also using my senior portrait as a profile pic. They were surprised when they saw me and how I "looked just like my brother!" I had set the record straight. They looked dumbfounded when I told them that he couldn't get himself out of the 9th grade in 10 years, and now would likely never complete his high school journey due to the fact he can't be within 100 yards of a school.
So, fast forward to last week. I checked my email for the first time since late January (for my aunt's birthday) and noticed a few from her saying my mom wanted to reach out, then several emails from a new address. It was my mom's first initial and last name. Subject lines usually read "please respond" and "let me know you're okay" and stuff like that. I'd copy some of them over, but holy shit this is already a novella. Basically she got my email address from sneaking my aunt's phone (aunt did not sell me out). She's trying to apologize for how she treated me growing up and trying to excuse it by saying I reminded her of my dad and then she was going through menopause and just any excuse to dishes full accountability it seems. She acknowledges that it was wrong to hold me accountable for my brother's fuck-ups but dismisses that by saying he didn't know any better and she needed me to be a good role model for him. Things have been hard for her since I left, since she "had" to take my brother back in (I would've left him on the street or in jail), she had to sell her house (she was only 10 years into her mortgage) and buy another smaller one further from a school for him. He never did get a hs diploma or GED because how can he? And she's been going through breast cancer treatment for the last several months and just doesn't have the energy to take care of her 33yo baby anymore. She asked me if I lived close enough to them to take him in for a little bit while she focuses on her health. I left Florida 8 years ago and haven't even lived in the same time zone in 6 years. She can only check her email at work since she no longer has Internet at home. She had to cancel her home Internet service because of him. So, I decided to just put my brother's name into a search bar and the first thing that pops up is a FDLE sex offender's page. And holy shit has he gone downhill. He had a second arrest when he was 27 for the same thing, and then was caught in communications with another girl (like Chris Hansen sting) and was released from prison at the beginning of the year. And the mugshot.... You know the pale lady from the scary stories to tell in the dark movie? Think that, but with a patchy beard. Beady eyes, bad skin and all. According to the sheriff's office inmate search, he's been arrested 5 times in the last 10 years. Twice for lewd and lascivious battery of a minor (aged 12-15), once for solicitation of a minor, and twice for probation violations.
The TL/DR: abusive mom took all her frustrations out on me, blamed me for everything my brother did, hid my father's death from me until I was almost 18, and reaches out after 8 years of no contact and wants me to take care of her pedophile son while she's in poor health.
I'm attaching my response to her below.
Hi. I'm alive. I'm well. I'm also not okay with you contacting me, especially under the circumstances that you violated the privacy of your own sister to get my contact information. I have read your apologies and excuses and I do not accept either. You say I reminded you of Dad? He spent more time with me and showed more interest in my well-being than you ever did, and that's including the 6 years he was absent from my life by your own selfish design. Menopause? I find that hard to believe as this went on for the better part of half a decade and not once in that time did your attitude towards brother change. You always treated him with the same coddling infantile obsession and patience that one would show a toddler. It was and is clear that you have a preferred child as that adult-sized pile of shit is still living comfortably with dear old mama. I'm guessing no one else is willing to take him in? Are Uncle and Cousins afraid of him doing something to their daughters or grandchildren? I do believe you when you say you want to rebuild the bridge that you nuked from orbit years ago, but I can't believe it's not for your own selfish desires. And I can't find any reason or way my quality of life could be improved with your presence. The reality is, my life has been far better without you than it could be with you. I've never said this to anyone, but if there is a sense of karma and balance in the universe, your current situation is proof of that. The next time I see your name on my computer screen, had better be for your obituary. But since you and the monster you raised both decided to keep Dad's death a secret from me, and remove any choice I had to mourn or pay my respects, I'll return that kindness to you.
Please die away from me.

OG Post: https://www.reddit.com/Parenting/comments/1crbnp3/comment/l3xiv87/?context=3
Hi Everyone,
If you're new to this, link to the original post has been posted.
I read all your comments, your ridiculous DM requests, your advice, etc...I just can't get to them all so I'll just provide you guys with the following:

1. I want to thank the ones who offered great advice and encouraging words of support and comfort. Instead of judging me or my son as if you all have known us for a long time - you all took the time to share your experience and how you all handled the situation, That was more helpful than anything.
2. I want to applaud the great parents out there who think they know my son because they've been 19 before and were thrown out into the streets to fend for themselves so they think they can relate. We all can't relate to each others' experiences, not fully. Also, I'm sorry your parents did that to you but just because you "turned out okay" doesn't mean that everyone else will. Apparently, you all didn't turn out okay because you all left some really shitty comments like there's a one size fit all manual for parenting. And I hope your kids (if you have any) will turn out okay or have turned out okay with your type of parenting without any resentment towards you.
3. I will not make my son move out of his home just for him to experience the ultimate struggle at the age of 19 - survival mode. Even though he's old enough to vote, go to war, be jailed for a crime - he is still a kid. We live in a HCOL area. You can't buy a townhome built in 1974 in my neighborhood for less than $450k. $20/hr is not even enough to survive here and actually live comfortably. He could move to a different county, but he drives to 3 different locations for work and the farther you are from those locations, the more gas you're putting in the tank and the more time spent on the road. He is not going to find roommates as his friends are also struggling to make enough to even rent an apartment or be approved as all the properties here require that your income is 3x the annual amount of the rent. By kicking him out, it's not helping anyone. He'll just be homeless (ruin his credit) and come back. He might as well just figure out a budget and start squirreling away money to save up enough to move out. He is also transferring to a state school after CC and has brought up that he will not be living at home but live closer to campus.
4. He is/was not a bad kid. He is not on drugs. Yes, his father was and is still present. We've been married for 20 years. My in-laws also have helped us raise our kids (we live very close - like walk to their house close) so they have also experienced the old school type of parenting without the beatings. He's respectful, can be thoughtful most times, and very caring. His attitude the other day is still unacceptable and was the wrong way to express his emotions and thoughts but I was also wrong in the way I responded. My son has never been in fights, have never been called to the principal's office for doing dumb shit most teenagers do. He usually has a good head on his shoulders. Cops have never showed up at my door because he was out doing something stupid with his friends.
5. He works full time and goes to school full time because it's manageable for him. We have discussed that if doing both is too overwhelming, that he will cut back to working on a part time basis. But, for now, it's doable. He works from 6 am - 11 am. Gets home around 11:30 in the morning or goes straight to the CC for his in person classes. He also has online classes that he can do at his pace. He doesn't work on weekends so he can use that time to focus on his school assignments. He's also not your typical young adult who goes out every night to hang out with friends...he goes to work, school, gym, and home. Most of his friends are in school out of state playing D1 sports. As far as me thinking I know where my son is at all the time - I'm not just pulling this shit out of my ass - my family and I track each other through Life360. So I know where they are and where they've been and they can also see where I am and where I've been. And there's also Find My iPhone which we all share each other's locations. We all tend to misplace our phones in the house and we use it to make that annoying alarm sound.
6. He's probably the smartest kid I know. He started taking AP classes in 10th grade and on. He took AP Biology, AP Calculus, AP Physics, AP ASL, and AP Statistics. By the time he was in 12th grade, he managed to get enough credits that he could do school half day, go home, and then go to the after care program where he used to work. For a kid, he was pretty good at time management. Better than me as an adult now. I have the time management skills of a carrot (I have ADHD). He graduated with a 4.5 GPA (due to AP classes weighed at 5.0)
7. I'm not a perfect person nor a perfect parent. I'm learning as I go and doing the best I can with what I have. I may have fucked up sometimes along the way but I'm still a human being and we're all prone to fucking up. I've owned my mistakes and I strive to do better; not just for me, but also for my family.
8. Yes, he's a dick like most teenagers. I was a dick when I was a teenager. Probably worse than my kids. But he's not perfect and I don't expect him to be. We consider ourselves lucky that he didn't turn out to be a delinquent who barely passed HS or addicted to drugs and alcohol.
9. His lesson learned from this is that Mom & Dad aren't going to be around forever so might as well buckle up and enjoy the ride into financial literacy. He's going to start slow and figure out what works for him. We're not disowning him. No matter what, he's still our kid and we're going to move on from this and work something out so all parties are on the same page.
10. My kids are spoiled but they're not brats. Yes, we overcompensated to make up for our crappy childhoods but they have mostly been grateful for everything they have and that they have a great support system. They know that they have a great support system - it took and is taking a whole village to raise my children. Most of our family is local and they have positively contributed to the people that my children have become. They're not sheltered like some of you have stated on here. They are very much aware of what is going on around them and that there are other who are not so lucky. They didn't grow up with a silver spoon in their mouths - they were just lucky to be born into a family with loving parents and extended family.

I know that was long but I hope I've covered everything. This was the first time he's ever been this disrespectful - so this is not a constant thing, this is brand new. Waters are still rocky so I'm not going to bring this up until I've figured out how to approach him with this situation and some time has passed. No matter how you look at it, he doesn't have the emotional maturity as a full grown adult with a developed frontal lobe and have lived through multiple life experiences.
However, we're going to treat him the young adult that he is and instill in him that he is responsible for how his life is going to turn out now that we've passed the reins over to him. Raising my kids have been the most exhausting, draining, and confusing thing I have ever done in my life. I was only 22 when he was born - I was a young mother, a wife, a college student, and a young adult who had to figure out life (and I still am). I have no resentment towards him and my daughter because I had them so young. If anything, I'm grateful as I had to learn how to stand on my own two feet and learn how to make better decisions for their sake. They didn't choose to be born - I made that choice for them and I promised myself that they will always grow up knowing they were loved and cared for. And they are - deeply. But as I said, I had the support of family - my husband's family who welcomed me and helped me throughout the journey.

168 cm tall Dad bod[but working on it] Attentive Caring Kind Loving Sensitive Can be funny at times Puts in effort Communicates Will send you pics- food, memes, YouTube videos I find interesting. Will give attention Will reciprocate your love and help you be better. Not a life coach. Just a loving guy Student of medicine previously. Still figuring out on what to do. Spiritual. Patient. Not that good looking maybe a 5 Brown with black hair. Has driven a tank once hahaha. I know. it's amazing. Loves all animals except spiders. Virgo Talkative
Looking for someone who'll be serious about connecting. Reciprocate feelings. Give. Open up. Be caring. Empathetic. Understanding. Will let me marry them hahaha. Will let me love and care for them. Will talk to me and be honest and loyal. Will work out things with me.
Pls msg me on Instagram freshbreadb.
I am moving on to a new phase in my life. I need someone open minded. Open as in serious about having a relationship and not a situationship or a having a option. To me it doesn't matter where one is from as long as you are recognizing of the qualities within a person. Such as loyalty, respect, responsibility and the ability to appreciate and understand- Pain, fear, love and care and truly want it for themselves, to learn and establish a bond through effort.
If you are selfish let's be selfish about loving eachother and not about whether someone's from somewhere. Rather what makes me different is I truly want someone who understands and wants the same and is willing to compromise in other aspects like looks or nationality or height. But rather value the person's personality and prespectives and his "soul" and put in genuine effort to elevate and grow.
I want to be able to be your island of support, care and understanding. I have been in stressful situations so I know ways to deal with it. Sometimes all we need is someone where no judgement will be passed and some comfort is given. How I do that is by sharing my own experiences that can be judged. If you are vulnerable so am I.
I am an emotional person and a faithful person. I give you 200% where I can. Humanly possible. I always advice you on the qualities and wants and interests you have, in a way to better them. To care for them as genuinely as possible. My interest is aligned with your growth and my joy comes from you doing better. Becoming more independent of you're own fears and traumas or situations you go through.
So I can create that space and will check up on you. Send you flowers to cheer you up. Long distance really tests a want in a person and that alone can be a solid foundation for developing trust and acknowledgement. Worthiness in a relationship or atleast show that the person is willing. I will be coming to Phillipines to study by next year. So we can finally meet and or you can always have this place as your own and visit here too.
Please no ghosters. No time pass. Don't want people who want there feelings to be stroked and then leave. Things can get very pretty and die out quick and it's very hurtful when that happens. If you are seeking shallow stuff I am not it. For some reason I keep getting banned on reddit period so hit me up on Instagram freshbreadb. If you don't have one, make one. I'll send you memes and interesting stuff.

I've been using Arc for over a year now on MacOS and have been waiting for it to come to Windows. Now that it's finally on Windows and I've had the last 4-5 months, here are some of my thoughts.
For people like myself who hate reading long reviews I've made all titles bold so it's easy to read :D

Pros of MacOS:

• Developer mode
  • This is probably one of the best features Arc has for me. Being able to easily navigate between console, network, and elements while working on frontend applications makes life a lot easier.
• Screen capture
  • I usually use ShareX on Windows and the built in screenshot feature on macOS. But with screen capture through Arc it's been really nice to easily capture specific sections of the website/specific components.
• Shortcut for copying link
  • I share a lot of URLs with friends/colleagues. While the shortcut only saves you a few clicks compared to Chrome, it's still so much nicer and more efficent than most other browsers.
• Split screen
  • Kind of surprised other browsers don't have this feature, it makes so much sense. Instead of needing to open multiple windows, I can just split two tabs in the same window. Helps a lot when I'm trying to compare designs, or I just need to look at two windows at the same time. While splitting two tabs on Windows is pretty easy using Chrome, on MacOS it was a little bit harder using Chrome so it's been really nice to have split screen.
• AI for Open PRs
  • I didn't notice until last week but it seems like Arc now picks up when I've opened a new PR on Github and it will put all those PRs into a specific folder. I usually have a query which checks all the open PRs for my work repositories but having this feature now makes life so much easier.
  • Don't remember exactly but I believe it also might tell you when a PR has been approved (don't have a PR up to check if it does this).
• Clearing cookies/cache
  • This same feature is available on Chrome, but you need to go through 4 steps before you can clear cookies/cache. The experience is pretty similar on Arc but the journey feels a lot smoother. I do wish we could customise the developer mode to add some extra buttons, like clearing cache and cookies.
• Boosts
  • Life changing is the esaiest way I can explain it. Usually I need to install a bunch of different extensions to change the experience for for websites, and even then extensions don't allow as much customisation as I would like. Boosts allow me to customise websites as much as I want, from remove whole sections on a website, to changing the color scheme.
• PIP/Mini player
  • Not much to say, I can watch/listen to stuff while also working it's pretty nice. Having the ability to pause/play things without leaving the current tabs is also nice.
• Peek
  • Just wow... Such a nice feature to quickly look at links and then either open a new tab if I want to keep the link open or close and easily continue with my current journey.

Cons of MacOS:

There aren't many if I'm being honest, the only issues I've noticed is high CPU/RAM usage at random times. I've tried looking at the extensions tab/task manager to see if any extensions are slowing down Arc, but didn't find anything out of the ordinary. I've also tried disabling the extensions for a bit, but that didn't seem to help. Performance wise it definitely seems like Chrome is still better, but I that isn't a deal breaker for me.

Quality of life:

• Removes clutter and has clean UX
  • It's clean, minimal, and easy to use. Having a small navigation bar helps focus on the content and whenever you open an website it feels like you're using an application and not a browser. Which in my opinion makes the whole experience a lot nicer and easier to use.
• Searching without opening a new tab is also pretty nice

Windows:

Arc has been on Windows for nearly 6 months now, and I've been using it as my daily driver. With the recent full release, I thought I'd give my opinion of the browser along with reporting some bugs. For some of the pros I won't be giving extra information as the same opinions apply from MacOS to Windows.

Pros of Windows:

• Basic Arc works
  • The basics of Arc is what makes me want to use it every day, this includes the clean side menu, spaces, color customisation, being able to open new tabs without actually opening a new tab, and of course the nice UI. While some of these features still have some issues, 95% of the time they work as expected.
• RAM/CPU Usage
  • I've seen a few people complain about the RAM/CPU usage on Arc compared to Chrome. I've been having the opposite experience, on Arc my CPU/RAM usage is pretty much consistent with Chrome or lower in some cases. I haven't had the chance to do an indepth test on this yet, so some extensions on Chrome may also be playing a part into the extra RAM usage.
• Shortcut for copying links
• Split screen
• Mini player
• Peek

Cons of Windows:

There's a LOT of missing features between MacOS and Windows but I'm not going to cover those. I'm mainly going to cover issues I've found overtime, and things that have been added as "features" but don't really work.

• Inspect
  • I've been running Windows as my default development environment along with Arc. Most of the time Arc works pretty well, but when I need to work with anything to do with inspect I have to switch to Chrome. I'm not going into depth, but can if anyone wants extra information. The following are some of the issues I've had with inspect.
  • Device toolbar doesn't work
  • DevTools doesn't remember the size it was set to
  • Popping out DevTools and popping it back in breaks the whole DevTools UI
  • DevTools popped out sometimes ends up being the in focus and always in front of other Arc window
  • Short cut on the right click menu is always incorrect (For me it says "N")
  • Everything to do with resizing is either doesn't work or is slow/buggy
• Multiple Arc windows
  • Multiple windows support exists, but they are far from working as expected. I can grab a tab from one and drag it out of the window which opens a it in another window, but if I close all the tabs the whole window closes instead of staying as a blank window.
  • Blank windows aren't really a thing. Sometimes I just want an blank window to do some work that doesn't need to be saved. Blank windows on MacOS work really well as they remove all the bookmarks and provide a clean space.
  • I will sometimes close a second Window and it will just crash the whole of Arc and also remove my temporary tabs.
• Search baOpening new tab
  • Arc search bar feels a lot different on MacOS than Windows. I don't know how to exactly explain it but sometimes I'll search for something and want it to do a Google search but it'll randomly take me a url that I searched for a month ago. While this can be useful, it sometimes becomes a headache when I'm trying to search for something new and it opens the url, then I need to open another tab.
  • I will say this has improved since the last few updates but it still has issues when I'm trying to search for single words.
  • Searching for things is slow and clunky, this is another thing that I can't fully explain but whenever I search for anything it just feels slow and some times won't show search results at all.
  • I've only had this bug occur a handful of times but sometimes I'll be searching and I spell something wrong, the second option will have the right spelling and I go to the second option and it doesn't change the value in the search bar.
• Split screen
  • Split screen works, but the experience between MacOS and Windows is so different. I can't drag and drop a tab to one side to open split screen mode. While this feature doesn't exist, Arc have added the possibility to drag and drop tabs onto each other in the navigation bar which has been a lot nicer than needing to right click the tab and adding split view.
• Shortcuts
  • I can't open incognito without needing to open up a normal Arc window and then going to settings. I hope they add the option to right click on the taskbar icon and open an incognito window.
  • Kind of a nice feature for me (definitely not a bug...) but might be an issue for some other users, you can press CTRL + SHIFT + T to open the previous tab you closed, this usually isn't possible in other browsers when in incognito mode.

Conclusion:
Arc on MacOS is great and has better experience/features than most other browser (there may be some better paid browser options). While there are some CPU and RAM usage issues, it overall works really well. I hope Arc keeps up the great work they're doing on MacOS and introducing new features. It's also been nice that a browser has focused a little bit more on developer experience, rather than needing the developers to spend hours creating their owner features.
Arc on Windows is a bit of a different story. I agree with most of the community, Arc decided to release any unfinished/bug application. But, on the other hand if you've ever worked in tech we all know why they released it as a buggy application. Arc on Windows is not the same application as Arc on MacOS, there are still a lot of core features that made Arc amazing to use on MacOS missing from Windows. I honestly hope some of these feature get introduced soon on Windows and hopefully the bugs are also fixed. Especially the bugs to do with DevTools, once they're fixed I'll move to always using Arc on Windows.

Arc Developers

If you're a developer for Arc and reading this, you guys are doing an amazing job with Arc and keep up the great work. I'm excited to see what you all have been working on, and can't wait to see the new features for Arc on Windows and MacOS.

TL;DR

You're on MacOS? Try Arc, if you don't like it then it's not for you and that's fine.
You're on Windows? Try Arc, if you don't like it give it 6 months and then try it again. If you still don't like it then it's not for you and that's fine.

Hope you're having an amazing day <3

Parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LZzVz6
I've been struggling with this for a little bit now. My computer won't fully boot, and if left on, will just boot loop. It flags the RAM debug light no matter what I do and I'm not sure what else to do.
I purchased the MB/RAM/CPU from MicroCenter as a bundle initially, and it came with different RAM than the one I show in this build. I'll explain why in a bit. After buying the bundle and putting the PC together with all the other parts listed, it flagged the RAM debug light on the MB.
Great, so I brought it to my brother's computer repair shop (he helped me put it together initially too) and we tested the following:

• New RAM on my motherboard: Same failure. RAM debug light, no boot.
• My RAM on a completely new rig: Same failure. RAM debug light, no boot.

This led us to believe that both components were faulty, and upon further inspection on the Motherboard, there was a big gash just over the south bridge on the bottom side. So we made the 2 hour drive to get the components replaced at MicroCenter. They replaced the RAM and the Motherboard no problem.
While we were there, we were given some space to build the computer again with the new components at the knowledge bar. Lo and behold, the new components would Still not boot. Same issue: the RAM light. We asked one of the techs there if he had any ideas and he basically told us that the RAM that MC offers as part of the bundle is a no-go and does not work well with the other components in the bundle (AMD CPU's specifically). He recommended that we try literally Any other RAM.
So that's what I did. I bought another set of RAM and took it home. It's the one I listed in the PcPartPicker list. Upon getting home, we build the whole thing again, try to turn it on-- RAM issue.
I'm at my wit's end with this and I don't know what else to do. We've tried so many different components and I don't know what it could be. Could somebody please help me come up with ideas to troubleshoot this? Any advice is appreciated, thank you in advance.

My dad likened it to the opioid crisis when a ton of people got addicted to them. They think I can be cured of adhd if I eat, exercise, and sleep better. They think it’ll destroy me or something. But when I wasn’t medicated I was drinking two monster energies a day just to get by. When I wasn’t medicated I barely brushed my teeth and wanted to stay in bed all day. When I wasn’t medicated my mom nagged at me about all the things that adderall gives me the push to do. I took a week long break from it after graduation and rotted in bed all day. When I wasn’t medicated I was about to fail out of college. I was an absolute mess.
They don’t understand it, and they don’t think I should be taking it. They don’t understand that it’s a chemical imbalance that can’t be “cured.” I have a drug test coming up for a new job, and they’ve made that into an opportunity to bitch about adderall and how I shouldn’t take it cause it’ll show up on the drug test as an amphetimine.
I don’t know what to tell them because they’re listening to people from church who insist that adderall is bad and I should just eat better and exercise. My mom wishes “there was something else to help.” She also said it’s not like blood pressure or heart medication. She keeps asking me if I feel better when I take a break from it now because I’ve been taking it for a couple years. But I feel the exact same way as I did before I started taking it. Because to them if it’s not a physical issue then you just need to work harder. It’s just so frustrating to hear them convince me to stop taking it. I’m not confrontational at all but they want to talk to me about it tonight and I know I’m going to get upset.
I just don’t know what to say to them to get them to stop bothering me about it. I’m going to get upset because I have a lot of shame around being unable to function without it.

I’ll start this off where it’s relevant. Me and my partner were looking to buy a house and when we found the one we wanted of course my mom wanted to do a walk through with us. So we did the walk through and she thought it was nice and even joked about the basement being all set up for a mother in-law suite. To which my husband replied we don’t have any intention of renting it out and we don’t know if we will need that space yet.
Later I was at her house visiting getting some help doing out taxes and she was on the phone then asked my about giving her landlord notice. I was busy I didn’t really hear her or know what she was asking and just said “ya ya, give me a minute.” And she walked away and I figured she’d ask me again after think it was about lunch or something. She never brought it up again but we had talked about it in the past and I always told her the same thing my husband had. We don’t plan on rent out the basement and we will probably need the space.
Fast-ward we just finish moving our stuff not even unpacked yet and she needs to move out cus she’s given her notice and of course I felt terrible saying “ya ya” not know what I was saying yes to. I convinced my husband to let her move in and his wasn’t happy but we moved her into the basement. We did say a few rules not smoking in the house there is a detached heated garage for that. The upstairs was supposed to be our space. And don’t overstep boundaries or our parenting.
That’s when all the issues started. My mom would make plans for me with little notice and monopolies my and my kids time. At first it was fine to get to spend time out with her and the kids but it became an issues when she wouldn’t respect my boundaries. Like I need more notice cus I do make plans with my husband to do family stuff or friends. Or I don’t want certain people around my kids and she would bring us there or invite them over. If I invited friends over she’d come upstairs and take over the conversation and not let me talk and try to bring them downstairs to sell them stuff she’s made. She never respected the upstairs was our space rule.
She would talk down to me in front of my kids why isn’t the house spotless. Why are there dishes in the sink etc.. she would complain about everything but never help. She would not listen if I told hethe kids no to something ex. Candy before dinner. Me: No you can’t have candy before dinner, maybe after. Her: They are only kids once let them have it. And would give it to them. They need to eat lunch but “oh she was on a diet.” And so on
It got to the point where she would tell me she doesn’t have to listen to me cus she’s my mother. My kids started to throw fits and say I was mean and “they wanted nana cus she gave them anything they wanted.” Or “why do I have to listen to you when nana doesn’t have too?”
One Christmas I was working to afford a better Christmas and help pay off the line of credit we needed for the house. We hosted the Christmas dinner and had family and friends and everyone helped out. I cooked all day and then took a nap while everyone else was enjoying dinner as I had to work the night and was already going to be running on fumes. When I got up to my surprise everyone was still there. They were helping put the food away and had made me a plate for work. When I got home the house was clean and I was relieved as I was exhausted and just wanted to get some sleep. My mom told me she did all the dishes for me and cleaned to kitchen.
I worked for a few months before and after Christmas and during this time my mom was chain smoking in the basement. Her bedroom right below ours and our kids rooms. Me and the kids have asthma and my husband has crippling migraines that helped encourage him to quit smoking years ago. I didn’t notice the smell unless I was down stairs but he noticed it immediately. Saying he can’t sleeping and his crippling migraines had come back and the house smelled like cigarettes smoke. I confronted my mother and she said no of course she would smoke in the house but all her stuff clothes, furniture, smells that way cus she use to smoke in the house at her old place. (Mind you she was living with us for months now, and some of her future was new and we only just started having a problem suddenly after months with no issues related to smoke/smell)
Me and my husband fought over this as I really didn’t want to believe she would smoke in the house. First off it’s illegal here and second she knows off all our health issues. And you can get in trouble with child protective services if they thinking your smoking in the house which is considered endangering the health and safety of your children. And asthma can be considered the fault of the parents if they are smoking around them. You can’t even smoke in the car if a child is in the car with you
So my husband got a nicotine testing kit and when it finally came in we put it to use. The house was completely clean when we moved in. We found next to nothing upstairs but downstairs was a different story. My mom’s bedroom and kitchen being the worst. I was so mad that I decided I would look around to see if I could find an ashtray. Well I found it in her nightstand right beside the bed…. I was pissed. I can still remembered her fallling asleep with a cigarette in her hand on multiple occasions as a kid and how lucky we were that she never burned the house down back then
I confronted her when she got home and her instantly denied it till I showed her my proof and that I found her ashtray “your husband didn’t want her there always” was her response. I was floored. The whole time I stood up for her after confronting her the first time. she was lying saying “I’m so sick, I’m not even smoking right now, I’m quitting.”
He had bin upset at first but the first few months were great till all the issues started. But I quickly realized that no matter what I said I’d be wrong and she wouldn’t apologize. She had no remorse or sympathy not even when I mentioned the kids health or mine and my husbands. As she was my mother I felt it was my personal responsibility to hold her accountable for her actions we were going to give her till the spring as she is old but her response infuriated me.
She made it clear she didn’t have any level of respect for me or my husband and didn’t care about her grandchildren’s health…. I told her she had till the end of the month to move. She was pissed. She wanted to die here and how could I pick my husband over her and allow him to force her to move and in a month no less. I told her it was my choice to only give her a month and that I couldn’t stand to look at her. And this was the straw that back the camel’s back.
After that she avoided us and would hide in the basement when she wasn’t at work. A day or so later I woke up in the middle of the night to a noise only to find my mother in kitchen going through our cupboards…. I asked her what the H she was doing in my kitchen in the middle of the night? After that I started double checking the door separating the basement from the upstairs was locked at night.
She didn’t want to move so naturally I helped her looked for a place. Did the walk throughs with her till she settled for a place and of course she complained the whole time. How could I do this to her, look at the house I was forcing her into. (She picked it) and it was the nicest one we looked at. In her price range. And it was still close enough to visit and come help her if she needed it.
She refused to pack so I ended up packing everything for her and as I was packing her things I kept coming across things she had stolen from us. A can opener, canned goods, cereal, shopping bags, a blanket she had knitted for the family for Christmas and other things she had got the kids among many random things she must have wanted. I was growing more upset as the days passed and I told my husband everything I had come across while packing her things each day. He told me not to bother taking anything back because she would probably forget she stole it and claim we were stoking her things. He said she could have anything she wanted and hopefully with time she would remember that we still gave her whatever she wanted and there might be hope to fix the relationship with her in the future.
We called a couple friends to help us move here. We even put the furniture in the rooms/spots she asked for them to be put and we them up. As for the boxes I was going to help her empty them and put everything away but the first night she refused to let me touch anything and I just ended up sitting there while she berated me. “You’re a horrible daughter!” “A horrible mother!” “You’d let your own mother live in this dump!” “Who going to take care of me now? I might as well just die” “if I die it’s because of what you put me through” and those are only thing things a can remember
She keep my there in till 2 in the morning after that I said I couldn’t help her because I still had kids at home I had to get up with and she wouldn’t let me help anyway just berate me the whole time.
Me and my husband both agreed that we wouldn’t stop her from seeing the kids but she would have to respect our boundaries or we would have to put a stop to it. She refuses to see us or the kids. She refuses to apologize or admit to any wrong doing. She going around telling everyone I’m dead to her and take we took everything from her and we used her and abused her. We stopped talking to her all together and stopped trying to visit her.

33, male, 135lbs, 5’9
Non smoker, ZYN user No drugs, no drinking
No medication
I’ll preface this by saying I’m a veteran with PTSD, however I’ve had lifelong GI issues wayyyy before the military, mostly ibs and GERD. In 2020 I started getting severe pain in my “epigastric” area solar plexus whenever I eat. I’m talking 10/10 pain and it remains until my digestive tract in fully empty the next morning.
I went to a local community GI he did a endoscopy found grade A esophagitis and referred me up to Boston. The motility specialist I saw looked at my chart on the first visit saw PTSD and before even doing any tests told me I had functional dyspepsia and it was a miscommunication between my brain and gut. I insisted on tests anyway and got the full work up. Despite me having clinical evidence on my PH study twice showing GERD she said it wasn’t enough to cause damage and irrelevant, (yet I’ve had esophagitis since 2020)? I feel like I’m being gaslit.
She has had me try, every PPI, every TCA antidepressant, Lyrica, Wellbutrin, gabbapentin and nothing has helped, some actually landed me in the hospital. She is at a point where she said I’ve failed treatment and there’s nothing else she can do. I went back to my community GI in November 2023 and he did another endoscopy found I still had esophagitis and mentioned a feeding tube since I’ve lost so much weight and said he’d continue to monitor me for malignancy over the years.
I’m not sitting around in 10/10 pain for the rest of my life and I’m sure as hell not waiting to get cancer. What are my options here? How do I find someone willing to be impartial and find the cause of the pain/dyspepsia and not give up on me? I’m in such bad pain I’m becoming suicidal and I can’t really take it anymore. It’s ruining my entire life and I have no idea how or where to get help. Side note I do see mental health specialists for my PTSD.

It was requested that I post one of my replies in a new thread so others can learn. I feel like it’s been repeated many times before, but hey, I guess that magnifying glass 🔍 in the top header is harder to use on some. Just know, I’ve learned everything I know just by doing that, searching keywords until it all came together and made sense.
Not to mention, I was motivated AF to get out of the office.
So the original post went something like this: The classic questions…is it illegal, how to go about it undetected, FT or PT, what if deadlines and/or meetings overlap, how do I answer the “why are you leaving J1” questions…yada yada yada.
My reply…that hopefully will calm the nerves of others and maybe shine some light on why we’re crazy to do such an outlandish thing.
ahem (response below)
lol my sweet summer child.
We’ve all been where you are now. And let me just say this: nobody, not even IT, is getting paid enough to investigate you.
Yes, OE = more than 1 FT Job. You’ll quickly find out that PT gigs make you do more for less. It’s a trap. Don’t do PT.
Overlap? I’m assuming you’re referring to Teams meetings - always be on mute. Make sure each set up has their own accessories but nothing that’ll flag IT concerning suspicious downloaded software. (Plug usb’s into an external surge protector thing) My meetings overlap often, and I’ve got myself muted listening to both. If I’m asked anything, I calmly take my time to mute the sound of the opposite meeting, unmute myself to answer whatever they want, go back on mute, and again listen in to both. If anxiety will take the best of you, hop on Amazon and find a mute button with a big a$$ bright light that doesn’t require software to download. To be fair, this actually might be the one device you could explain your way out of to IT about software being downloaded. Idk. Share your experience below.
Deadlines on the same day? Personally, I wouldn’t recommend OE for jobs that require a lot of production. But, being the person I am not taking my own advice, this is quite literally my J1. I’m usually up early in the mornings and can knock out about everything needed for J1 between 4:30am - 8am. I know it sounds crazy, but during this time there isn’t anyone bothering me. Kid is asleep, coworkers from J1 aren’t blasting me on Teams, dead zone quiet. By the time 8am rolls around, I can finish whatever is needed from J1 while focusing on the active Teams activities and whatever for J2. From noon til 5, I’m playing Fortnite while all of my mice are on jigglers to keep them moving and my Teams notifications are on full blast volume.
I actually nailed J2 and convinced them I was leaving J1 due to the promise of working remote, but then they took it back. It wasn’t far from the truth actually. I really was about to leave J1. But, they gave me a test drive to work remote and see how it goes. I used this opportunity to go above and beyond hitting my numbers to where they said “as long as you’re hitting those numbers, we don’t GAF what you do.” So, I never cancelled J2 and onboarded during this time. I’ve now found the perfect routine for myself, which includes those early morning hours. Even though technically, I guess I’m on the clock longer, but it really doesn’t feel like it. I’m blowing off the second half of the day kicking some 10 yo butts online.
Keep in mind, the overall culture for OE is this: Why go above and beyond for an employer who wouldn’t do the same for you - just get by with what you need to maintain your presence at both, be mediocre and average, and make twice the salary by working/stressing less.
*No. It is not illegal.
*Inform yourself on what this link is and put your data on freeze mode just to be sure (I still haven’t done it but that’s because one employer doesn’t even show up on it): https://employees.theworknumber.com/employment-data-report is
*Call your tax lady and get informed on how to fill out your taxes for W-4s, contract, etc. General rule here is to claim nothing and put more in to make sure to get some back. You’re about to be bumped into another tax bracket. Brace yourself. Taxes get tricky when this happens. Have your local HR Block lady on speed dial.
*go all in on aaalllll the bens. Max out 401k, get all the pre-tax deductions your little heart desires, insurances, the works. My J2 has insurance for employees AND THEIR PETS. So, my retriever has his own insurance for medical as does my child and myself.
*click here and study: https://overemployed.com This site will give you the ins and outs of this culture. Many do it for financial freedom: to pay off debts, live frugal, work for enjoyment of extracurricular activities rather than paying to live sorta thing. This site is extremely helpful especially when breaking down what devices to use to help remain undetected.
Use AI to automate as many dumb tasks as possible. My fav is recording, summarizing and organizing meeting notes. I’ve got an app (that I pay monthly for and it’s totally worth it) that does it for me. I just have to push record. It takes down all the nitty gritty details and puts them into categories. Blew everyone away HOW DID YOU DO THAT YOU ARE SO DETAILED OMG I NEED TO LEARN FROM YOU etc etc. *pats phone gently
*Be responsible. Whatever financial goal you have, put stickies all over your monitors to remind you why you’re doing this. Fact check yourself on your spending and don’t go overboard. You just hit the lottery. Act like it. Don’t tell a single soul, don’t make it obvious, don’t make the IRS angry, and for the love of Satan DO NOT OE FOR GOVT EMPLOYERS.
*your J1 or J2 boss might actually be in this sub. Be vague.
*YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE- heaven forbid you land a job that requires you to be active on the socials. For one, I’d say that is NOT the opportunity you want to look for. BUT I get it. Beggars can’t be choosers, so, there’s a hack for that. Your answer needs to be as broad and humiliating as possible to make them feel uncomfortable for asking in the first place..such as “my therapist and case worker have gone to extreme lengths to put my safety first due to a past relationship. If I am to have a social media presence, it has to be vague and limited to past events.” Leave it at that. Girls, this one is your golden ticket. Boys, you make need to tweak it a bit to work better for you…maybe identity theft or something. Sorry I don’t make the rules. It is what it is. MOVING ONNNNN….
Regarding to socials, if you absolutely have to have a LI acct, make multiple. Be careful to upload different occupations, limit your name info, DO NOT USE THE SAME PROFILE PIC LET ALONE AN ACTUAL REAL PIC. Do one of those AI trends and fancy yourself a professional shot. Make each different. Does it look like you compared to Teams calls? Eh, maybe it’s arguable. As long as there is room for doubt, you’re golden.
Any other questions, just ask.
((( Don’t talk about fight club. )))
Please, more seasoned OEs post your experiences. It’s very educational to learn from others.

Experts say that when you’re sexually or romantically attracted to someone, your pupils dilate. Oxytocin and dopamine, the “love hormones,” affect pupil size.
Like drugs do. I didn’t know this until I met her.
On our first date, we sat next to each other on wooden stools in a quiet corner of a popular bar in town. I ordered a Bee’s Knees. She ordered the same.
We turned and faced each other as we sipped and talked. Our legs were touching, and our faces were so close that I could feel her breath when she laughed. Within minutes of interacting, I noticed her smooth chocolate brown eyes turning black. I felt like I was getting sucked into a black hole of desire where there was no turning back.
Thirty minutes into the date, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I needed to calm down. The electric surge of chemicals between us was just too intense. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I noticed that my sparkly blue-green eyes had turned mostly black too. I started to fantasize that I was living in some vampire romance novel.
I took my phone out of my purse and googled, “Why are my and my date’s eyes black?” “Your eyes dilate when you’re in love with someone,” Google replied.
I felt instantly drunk. I walked out of the bathroom with butterflies in my stomach and sat back down on the stool, inches from her.
We locked eyes again, and I gently put my hand on her thigh. For the next two hours, we talked about everything and anything. I watched her lips stretch and bend when she smiled and laughed. I studied the curve of her jaw and the petiteness of her frame. I noticed the adorable cowlick that made her hair stick up.
I was giddy. It felt like no one else was at that bar. It was only us. The live music next door sounded muffled, like the band was playing underwater. Time and space no longer existed.
It’s been seven months since that night. And I was right. There was and is no turning back.
Until two weeks ago when everything went downhill. We had a trip planned to Paris where I thought to myself, this is it. This trip will set our love in stone and the rest will be history. She decided to uninvite me about 1 month before we were to leave. We slowly grew apart as I knew subconsciously that her mind was made up, that she was done trying to work through our issues.
She comes to pick up her things from my house a week before heading out for Paris. Everything hits me all at once. "Oh my god what have I done". I realized right then and there that I had made the greatest mistake of my life. That I had given up on fighting for the most wonderful girl that had ever walked my way.
I began obsessing, looking at her Instagram. Trying to piece things together and figure out where everything went wrong. I realize that her and her ex of 3 years started following each other again on Instagram. I look further, she's unarchived 100 photos with him. I begin to lose my mind.
I reach out to her, call her a cheater, only to push her away more. She begins to think I'm crazy. Fast forward to today, I see her and her ex in Paris together, enjoying the trip that we had planned.
In the span of 1 month, she went from loving me to being amicable with me to getting back with her ex and completely disposing of me. Lying about it. Never once saying sorry, but instead that “you’re not my issue anymore” and that I should check myself into a psych ward for even feeling hurt by everything. Telling me she never thought we were meant to be. I was a terrible boyfriend. I was her rebound. And my hate for myself grew even more.
I'll see them grow happy, get engaged, have children. I can see their future clearly.
And all my future holds is the despair I will continue to endure as I see their life unfold. I've dated enough women to know this will forever be the best girl that has ever given me a chance. I am sick to my stomach. She loved me so much and I let it slip away.
I’ll never forget when I first met her. It was as if my heart leaped out of my chest. We had an immediate connection. I remember coming back home to my friends in discord at the end of the night and saying to them, “This is the one”. I don’t know how things got away so fast. I was a soul just barely hanging on when I met her. She helped me through my addiction, she showed me what true love is, and I took her for granted.
I feel like a true psychopath now. But at least she made me feel less alone for a few good months.
I've grown tired of the struggle, of the rollercoaster, of the endless highs and lows, of waking up feeling good and then without warning being triggered back into suicidal despair. It's been a consistent cycle for so long that I see no reason to believe that it will suddenly change. I just can’t get her out of my head. And I don’t ever see a day that I will.
I've wavered back and forth about making this post, secretly hoping she will see it. I've decided to go ahead and do so because in a sense I’m thankful that she's helped me decide to finally end my miserable life.

first
Luna VI query: Set the source to the leaked files of the first reconnaissance operation of Irisa.
Certainly!
Luna VI query: What did Ryo do during the first hour of the war?
***
Ryo had already reached a state of full awareness after waking up, and yet he hadn't moved an inch, immersed in his inner world as he thought about what he and Elysira had done at night.
And what a wild night it was.
The way that she had skipped the journey to go straight for the finishing line had caught him unprepared. Still, with the mystery of their physical compatibility out of the way from the get-go, Ryo had been left with a lot of time to explore the other hiccups and perks of this interspecies endeavor.
From the occasional accident with her claws to the new possibilities her tail brought to the table, Ryo had enjoyed everything.
There was not an ounce of regret in him, but the memory of their last act lingered incessantly in his thoughts—a vivid Recollection of Elysira’s tail wrapping around his leg and letting silence prevail as his arm shyly enveloped her, allowing them to fall asleep side by side.
The one memory that held him in place, fearing their next interaction when the slightest of his movements would inevitably wake her up, mirroring what had happened all in the previous mornings.
What would she say?
Would she think that they are in a relationship now?
What would he do if the concept of casual hook ups didn't exist for the Irisians?
Ryo touched his face and shook his head, instantly deciding it was time to start his morning routine to distract him from those absurd thoughts.
The brain IO interface captured his intention, turning on the lights on the ceiling with maximum brightness, something that he was sure would wake her up at once given how sensitive to change all Irisians were.
And yet he was wrong.
Elysira’s head tilted away from the light as eyelids fluttered, but the only other thing she did before stopping moving was strengthening her grip on his leg quite a bit, making him realize that her tail had not let go of him the whole night.
Upon noticing how numb his leg felt, Ryo propelled his body upwards, intending to uncoil her tail from his leg and start his day. Hopefully, Elysira wouldn't mention what they did, and he too would be able to pretend it never happened.
However, the moment his upper body lifted from the ground and he got a full view of her body, he was unable to remove her tail from his leg, captivated by a simple but powerful sight.
With her hands inside the pockets, Elysira had used his jeans to restrain her claws, putting herself in a very uncomfortable position, likely afraid of hurting him during her sleep.
His eyes widened, dispersing his previous train of thought from existence. The hand that was supposed to be dealing with her tail moved toward Elysira's exposed neck instead, aiming to wake her up with a gentle touch.
And as if he had just perturbed the stillness of a calm lake with a stone, a barely perceptible ripple of yellow spread on her skin from the contact with his fingertips. It traveled through her neck, reaching the soft lines of her face, and even traveled down her long hair strands.
At the same time that it felt wrong to be able to take a peek at her emotions so easily, Ryo couldn't help but wonder—which other colors had the darkness stolen from him? While immersed in this question, Ryo kept caressing her neck until her eyes opened slowly, resetting all the back spots of her body at once as consciousness took control over instinct.
Elysira’s grip on his leg loosened when she realized she was overdoing it. Her gaze started scanning every inch of him, starting from the accidental scratches of her own making and unashamedly stopping at places she had not seen before.
Unbothered by her curiosity, he even removed some of the loose strands in front of her eyes and threw them behind her long ears to make her job easier, feeling some apprehension only when she lost interest and sought eye contact.
Traces of purple appeared around her black spots as she spoke. "What do you humans do after... what we did?"
Ryo winced, but his tone was gentle. "Silly girl!" He felt deep regret for how he had skipped the part of Irisian relationships in favor of politics when she was teaching him about her species. "It could be everything or nothing."
He expected some intense reaction from Elysira, but there wasn't a lot of emotion showing. As he searched her skin, he also realized he was unable to look at her the same way as before.
From seeing her small breasts, which he now knew for a fact fit on his hands, to the very memory of all evenness that he now was able to associate with the sheen her skin exhibited from certain angles, Ryo realized he had lost the ability to gauge her emotions without feeling a hint desire.
She noticed how long he was staring at her and a hint of yellow appeared. "I don't need everything, but nothing is not enough!"
How did Ryo fail to see that this conversation would inevitably happen when they were having fun at night?
"Oh!" He was unable to keep his mouth shut, which resulted in red and purple manifesting on her skin as he felt the pressure for a quick reply.
He had heard the Irisians speaking terms such as chosen, mate, and family, but Ryo didn't know much about this, and now was not looking like a good time for asking for clarification.
The translator would do its job in conveying his intention. But what would he say? Friends with benefits maybe? He gave up that one on the spot; he didn't consider their previous relationship a friendship, and somehow, he felt a dangerous desire to want more than that from her.
Under the pressure of his previous mistake, he told her the highest relationship he was willing to have without a care in the world for consulting his superiors. "Is girlfriend good for you?"
Elysira’s eyes widened as her skin maintained the same tones. But it lasted only a second before a golden hue took over, leaving little room for her black spots. "Wait, are you serious? I never thought you would consider anything more than being my exclusive pair."
"I am serious, but what's the difference?" Ryo instantly felt he could have gotten away with being just friends with benefits.
"Two differences." She took her clawed hands from the pockets of his jeans and pressed them against his neck in a fast but controlled movement. "One is implied trust." Her head approached him slower as if she would kiss him, but instead, her lips diverted toward his ears where she whispered, "And the other is a promise for the future."
"That seems alright."
As he said that, Elysira had already started taking little bites on his earlobe, her other hand joining around his neck while her tail was sneakily pushing the rest of her body on top of him.
"This will have to be quick, we-"
Ryo was about to give up the time they had for breakfast, when a powerful explosion shook the ground, causing the whole tent to vibrate.
Elysira’s pointy ears began to twitch and her body receded, trying to get of clue of what happened as she displayed purple. "I hear nothing."
"This was not far from here; I don't think it was a landslide." Ryo summoned a window with all the cameras outside and found nothing unusual, even with the infrared inspection.
Elysira could see what he was doing since they had never left the shared augmented space.
"Can we see what Amara is doing? She might know more than us."
He still was incapable of referring to her as his girlfriend even in his thoughts, but he still felt a hint of pride for her quick thinking. "Let's see."
He quickly summoned a live feed and promptly instructed the AI to go through the recordings of the whole night. "Nathan and that princess are still inside the tent. Time to go there."
Ryo wasted no time explaining, quickly standing up to begin the search for his underwear. The floor was still littered with paper sheets, and there were even some opened water bottles around, but he still found what he was looking for before pulling his jeans from under Elysira’s butt and getting dressed with haste.
He wore his shoes but didn't bother with his shirt and jacket, just taking his already loaded gun from the holster and getting some spare ammunition before heading outside cautiously.
"I'm going with you." She got out of the tent almost at the same time as him, proving that not needing clothes had its advantages.
"Stay close." He activated the infrared view mode and scanned the surroundings just to be sure, then hasted his steps towards Nathan's tent which was about forty meters ahead.
There was little he expected would go wrong on such a short journey, but Elysira’s ears began to twitch halfway through, prompting him to stop advancing. "Hear someone?"
"Something." She then used her tail to point uphill, in the direction where the rest of the group had set camp on the previous day. "I think it's a drone."
"Fuck, I hope you are wrong." He raised his 3D-printed revolver and felt like cursing more at the fact he didn't even have a proper pistol, pulling back the harmer and getting himself in front of Elysira.
Thanks to her acute hearing, when he heard the buzzing of the drone, his gun was already pointing in the right direction. Upon getting the first glimpse of the flying object and noticing how fast it was moving, he didn't hesitate to do a partial activation of combat mode.
The world slowed down for a moment, allowing him to see the device flying among the very few beams of blue light that made their way through the canopies. He didn't wait a single second and corrected his aim slightly to the left before pulling the trigger.
Bang!
The drone was torn to pieces and many parts fell about twenty-five meters away from them, at a distance that any explosives wouldn't hurt himself or Elysira.
When his eyes found her behind him, there was yellow and purple on her skin as she asked, "What if it was friendly?"
"The owner can send the bill up the chain for all I care." Ryo lowered the gun and did a full scan all around once more, only to find nothing again.
Her tail wrapped around his arm as all purple on her body disappeared, leaving only a hint of yellow. "Amara won't be happy if it was hers."
Just as Elysira spoke, a circular door opened on Nathan's tent, and Amara took a step outside with red filling her body.
Ryo pictured a scene of a princess complaining about her lost drone, but things only got more complicated instead.
Nathan emerged after her, and the pair began to argue loudly about what to do now that a war had broken out; Amara wanted to march uphill to join her guards, but Nathan held her by the tail when she was about to leave and prevented her for moving, saying it would be too dangerous.
Their argument turned into a messy mixture of the present situation with Amara sulking about a wasted night, which led Ryo to exchange a look of surprise with Elysira.
But their surprise only lasted a moment and Ryo decided he couldn't let those fools keep wasting valuable time.
Clap.
Clap.
Clap.
He had their attention now. "Please don't tell me you're mad because the plant lover couldn't get it up."
Under normal circumstances, Ryo had no doubt his assholish behavior would only instill shame and improve their cooperation.
However, he forgot to account that he was not wearing a shirt, leaving all his scratches exposed while Elysira was disheveled by his side, which caused Nathan's jaws to drop followed by Amara throwing an indignant gaze at Elysira and then at Nathan, who gave Ryo the feeling he might snap at any time.
"Why are you here?" Nathan's calm voice didn't match his clenched fist and rigid posture.
"Information. I want her to tell me what she knows about this war." Ryo had learned about the war by overhearing their previous argument.
Surprisingly, Amara was cooperative. "My brother's army found our position. They were not aware I was here with Nathan and ambushed the rest of my people and Zara; you destroyed their drone but if they saw us they might have a good reason to come here."
"Fuck!" He turned to Elysira and ordered. "Go back and gather my things. Take the essentials first, we are leaving."
Elysira used her tail to squeeze his arm in acknowledgment and rushed back. But when she had barely taken a few steps, she stopped as her ears moved. "More drones are coming!"
After alerting him, she ran to accomplish her task, leaving Ryo in the company of just Nathan and Amara.
"Isn't that great?" He grumbled to himself, but his voice carried loudly, obtaining the pair's attention as he raised his revolver again.
Knowing that the enemy was probably aware of their position, Ryo used infrared view mode to ensure they weren't using the drones as a distraction to pull off an ambush.
And that didn't seem to be the case when the first machine appeared, flying downwards in zigzag from the concentration of trees uphill.
Again Ryo used a partial activation of combat mode and aimed at the drone, yet this time more of them appeared, leaving the cover of the woods in groups of three until there were nine of them in total. But they didn't even try to get close this time, choosing to hover next to the canopies more than two hundred meters away from him, and assuming something akin to a structured formation.
This was extremely weird and enough of a reason for him to retreat a little, getting closer to his tent and taking cover behind a tree.
Nathan and Amara moved too, the botanist getting inside and returning with his gun while Amara's colors blended with his tent becoming hard to spot.
Assessing the new situation in an instant, Ryo concluded it would be better not to engage and retreat considering that those drones would be hard to take down at such distance. But things changed again quickly when the AI triggered a pop-up window, showing that several of the cameras he had set up in strategic places were capturing movement.
And what he was seeing now were several armed groups of Irisians heading towards their position, confirming Amara's supposition that the rebels were coming for them.
With the situation getting grimmer with every passing moment, Ryo thought of a possibility for what the drones might be doing, but his mind was still refusing to believe that the rebels could be as organized as his worst-case scenarios were giving them credit for.
To test this, he immediately tried to contact the space station through radio transmission, and since being found by the enemy was no longer an issue, he set the transmitter to maximum potency to validate his test.
Unable to establish a two-way connection.
He frowned even though that was not totally unexpected.
With only a few minutes at best before this place was filled with enemies, they would have to leave fast or they would be at the mercy of the enemy.
But first, there was something he wanted to say to Nathan, who now was using his tent for cover together with Amara. "Listen up, those fuckers are jamming our comms and they will be here at any time. Take the MLBCS and find a clearing to use it, I doubt they can interfere with the laser. Just don't forget that your immediate safety comes first or else you might not be among the living when the pod arrives."
Ryo and Nathan were technically enemies, but the last casualty in the war between Earth and Mars had happened several years in the past, ensuring that he had no reason to wish any harm for the botanist even though he didn't like him.
As for Amara, it was a little different. He hurried back to his tent without saying anything to her. And he did that not because he wished her harm, but simply because he didn't understand what she had at her disposal to offer any useful advice.
"Wait, what are you gonna do?" Nathan shouted from a distance.
With the adrenalin of seeing how many Irisians were coming helping his sincerity, he shouted back. "I'm not leaving the planet unless mission control finds a way to save Ely too."
After that, Nathan and Amara disappeared from his mind as he took cover behind his tent, slamming his hand against the foldable fabric many times to get Elysira's attention. "Hurry up, we can't stay here any longer."
She left immediately after, struggling to maintain balance as she used a hand plus her tail to carry his backpack, while her gun threatened to tumble from her gasp in her other hand.
And besides, one thing that Ryo’s eyes were immediately drawn towards was the clothes she was wearing—his clothes. While her legs were still exposed, his jacket still covered a bit more than her hips, loosely engulfing her slender frame like a billowing sail.
"I put the food and water in your backpack." She let go of the heavy item right over his feet as she put the gun on the ground and lifted her arms for him to recover his jacket and t-shirt. "You can get dressed while the tent folds."
He might have allowed her to keep the jacket if not for it being an inconvenience to her, so he just took it, making the first time he saw her wearing clothes a very short experience.
"No time for that, it won't fold with all the paper you left on the ground." He said as he swiftly slipped his arms into the sleeves of the jacket and zipped it up in one smooth movement.
Ryo was already considering which path they would take to flee when he noticed something terrible—Elysira’s skin had just been filled with gray as tiny black spots began to appear and disappear as if rain on the sand of a desert.
"What's it now?" He asked, trying to hide how unprepared he was to deal with this.
"Nothing has changed." Elysira averted her eyes. "I'm a burden to you just as I was to Amara. If I had-"
"Oh, shut up and quit the self-pity!" Ryo realized he was being too harsh, but still went on to finish it. "The paper is our mistake and I'm staying because I like you. This simple. Now get your gun and use your goddam camouflage, just like that princess is doing."
Ryo felt awful after saying this, and Elysira seemed quite taken about as she stared at him with wide eyes.
A moment later, however, she bent over and took the gun from the ground, her exterior blending quite well with the surroundings.
Ryo felt bad for her, but now there was no time to talk. "We run now, let's go."
The sound of his own steps was all he heard as they were putting some distance from the tent, making it so that he had to check on Elysira every couple of steps he took to ensure she was following him.
It was only when he heard some gunshots from far behind that he felt her claws tugging at his jacket from behind. "I hope Nathan is like you."
***
This was an account based on what Ryo did during the first hour of the war. The previous narrative is based on the events of the morning of the twentieth day of the exploratory mission of Irisa. According to your current settings, no queries will be suggested.
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Dearest Love,
It has now been 264 days since I last heard your voice. That I could see the disappointment on your face. I wish I had realized at that moment that it was my last chance to reach you. But a fool is foolish. And I am a fool, always have been.
Where should I start?
That I've been in love with you since we were in elementary school together? Or the fact that you broke my heart for the first time at the age of 14 when you met your first boyfriend?
Of course you weren't aware of any of this. When you disappeared from my life overnight at the age of 15, you didn't realize that it had shattered my world. I really thought back then that I would never see you again.
All my friends were in love with you. One even wrote you love letters. You never found out who'd send you these.
For us you were mysterious. So serious. So sad. So brave. So cheeky. So loud. So quiet. We were too young and too stupid at that time to understand what you were going through at home. To us you were just a beautiful mystery.
I had my own tragedies at home and I dreamed myself away. With you. And just then you disappeared. Nobody knew where you were and nobody had a clue what happened to you. There were the wildest rumors, but nothing tangible.
Five years later I was drunk in the club and you smiled at me from across the bar. I swear I was immediately sober. It was like I had seen a ghost, but you were real. Damn you were real!
You asked me how I was doing and whether life had been good to me. This was the happiest night of my life and I didn't want it to end.
When we said goodbye at dawn, I asked you if we would see each other again and you said, "Meet me at the party at Fusion on New Year's Eve." Damn, that was still 3 months away and how was I supposed to find you there? Among hundreds of people?
I found you. Exactly at midnight and we kissed. From that day on we belonged together.
But two children from broken families. This is destined for chaos and pain.
I moved to the other side of the country with you to put the past behind us. But you can't run away from your problems. They will always follow.
We dealt with the pain within us differently. You wanted to talk about it. About you, about me, about what happened in our families. I wanted to be silent.
You solved your problems in therapy. I drowned my problems in alcohol.
At the beginning of our relationship we went dancing together a lot. We celebrated, we drank, we looked for intoxication.
But then you changed. And I stayed the same.
You hid in books. I hid in clubs. You looked for new friends. I kept the old ones.
You've started studying and pretty soon you got a scholarship. Now you were no longer just beautiful with a loving soul, but also eloquent and smart.
And I? I became mean. I disappeared for nights at a time. I didn't keep my promises. I drank, I gambled, I did drugs. I woke up in strange apartments and had trouble with even stranger people.
And so the past had caught up with me and the future was calling for you. But you didn't want to give up on me and I didn't want to lose you.
So I pulled myself together, looked for a good job and I earned good money. But one can't keep a woman like you with dollar bills. You never looked for expensive gifts or status. All you ever looked for was love, respect and sincerity.
And I was not sincere.
You wanted respect. I laughed at you. You wanted love. I left you alone. You wanted to be my friend. I was your enemy.
And so you slowly said goodbye.
You didn't want to have to fight all the time anymore. You didn't want to have to cry because of me anymore. And I get that.
First you moved out. Then you had less and less time for me. When I called you, you often didn't answer the phone. When you did I heard you laughing on the phone with your friends in the back. You seemed to have a lot of fun. But you hardly laughed with me anymore.
264 days ago we had set up a date. We hadn't seen each other for two weeks. I canceled half an hour before I was supposed to pick you up. You were angry. "Why can't you just keep a simple promise?" I told you I was sick. A lie. Two hours later you showed up at my door. You brought me muffins, tea and some meds.
And I? I was hungover, playing poker.
The disappointment. The disappointment on your face. You asked me if I really ditched you for a poker game.
And I? I replied with, “At least I won $1,000.”
You gave me a sad little smile and asked me if I had anything left to say to you.
I laughed at you and said you were childish. That you're being overdramatic as always. That you're always causing stress.
And you said, "okay, if that's all you have to say, I'm leaving now."
I said we can see each other tomorrow.
And you said, "No, I'm leaving. For good."
You've said it a thousand times before, but this time I knew it was different.
I held you back and looked into your eyes saying: "I want to change. I really do. But I need time and your patience."
And you said: "You've had 10 years to appreciate what we had. Now you have the rest of your life to accept that I won't be a part of your life anymore."
You left.
264 days have passed since then.
Not a word from you.
Every day I try to reach you.
You're gone.
For good.
All of our old friends know you're gone. But no one talks to me about it because they know I messed up.
Since you left, I can't go on anymore.
I dream of you constantly. Sometimes I look for you and ask about you and everyone acts like you never existed. And I feel the despair until I wake up crying.
Sometimes you're standing far, far away from me and I try to get to you, but I can't move a step. So I call you, but you don't hear me. I shout louder until I wake up from it.
Then I lie in bed with my heart racing slowly remembering that you are no longer here. And that it is my fault.
My best friend forced me to go on a date. The woman I was on the date with came closer. She kissed me and I started crying.
I've never felt as bad as I did in that moment. I wasn't ashamed. It was the sadness that burst out of me.
I know people will say it will pass. That I will fall in love again someday. But I do not care. I lost you. I lost the person who believed in me the most. I lost the love of my life.
And it's my fault. I will never be able to forgive myself for this.
That's what was left to say.

Before going into it, I want to mention how this post was inspired by three things. One was user u/HastyvonFuego2 and their post on going down the rabbit hole on the Kendrick sub last week. It was also inspired by Childish Gambino’s first album release in nearly 6 years where I have been sitting on this idea for a while but he inspired me to finally post this week like he did (never posted on Reddit at all before so be gentle if I am not doing it right)! I was also inspired by an interview Bino gave to GQ about breaking down his most iconic characters. In this interview he says how This is America started out as a Drake diss but then he realized the song was too hard for just Drake so he kept working on it. He also talks in this interview about how all culture is about compression. Which means that yes, This is America is about the gun violence and police issues in America, but compressed in this video is also more about where that culture comes from which he shows is from a small handful of rap moguls, namely Drake, Diddy and Jay-Z (bear with me on this long post, I think/hope it will be worth it). At the end I talk briefly about how Little Foot Big Foot might be in this same vein of cultural compression.
[Intro: Choir]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go away
The beginning of this song has no background music yet, which really gives it an ‘in the beginning’ feel. Then Gambino starts doing his dances with weird facial expressions. I will explain as we go through his video how those expressions and dance moves represent different famous rap moguls. One easy look to pick out right away is Jay-Z’s famous lip curl/growl look that Gambino gives with a head nod repeatedly. The colonial pants have been a hot topic, but since it’s only the pants that are colonial, Gambino is saying the bottom or basis for this violent culture in America is ultimately colonialism. The lyrics ‘Go Away’, are likely foreshadowing the rap moguls wanting other popular rap rivals to ‘go away’ or they will make them (aka murder them) for profit.
[Bridge: Childish Gambino & Young Thug]
We just wanna party
Party just for you
We just want the money
Money just for you (Yeah)
Usually you want money for yourself and to party for yourself, so this is a bit odd. But what Gambino is referring to is similar to these Diddy ‘freakoff parties’ we are hearing about where people who want to be famous are really partying for these rap moguls so they can get close to them. Where they suck up to them saying that they want to earn the mogul money from their songs.
I know you wanna party
Party just for free
Girl, you got me dancin' (Girl, you got me dancin')
Dance and shake the frame (Yeah)
Then this almost feels like the Diddy rebuttal where he’s like ya I know you want to party and you want to do it for free. Like Katt Williams says, “you gotta tell Diddy no”, it is never free to go to those parties. There are always consequences. When you are partying you are dancing, but shaking the frame could refer to how those boundaries/edges are being crossed, lines are blurred, etc.
Then in the video, the fellow who was playing the guitar gets shot and things turn dark from happy music. I believe that this guitar tune is meant to represent 2Pac and Nas’s song Thugz Mansion. It’s one of the original greats from ‘in the beginning’. Nas famously has always had major issues with Jay-Z too (More on why 2Pac and Nas later). It also represents how it was these moguls who murdered 2Pac like Jaguar Wright and Katt Williams keep saying. Where these murders only lead to more money and fame for the killers when the dead artists’ and their music are exploited more easily.
Also note that the gun gets taken away by a school kid after the shooting, more on this later as well.
[Verse 1: Childish Gambino, Young Thug, Blocboy JB & 21 Savage]
This is America (Skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don't catch you slippin' now (Ayy)
Look how I'm livin' now
Police be trippin' now (Woo)
Yeah, this is America (Woo, ayy)
Guns in my area (Word, my area)
There is a song called Guns in My Area by Lil Weiner and Baby Chapox that paints a vivid picture of the everyday struggles and conflicts faced by those living in communities affected by gun violence. More compression of other songs and the American gun culture.
I got the strap (Ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry 'em
I am almost certain this line is referring to 2Pac’s song Changes. Throughout This is America, Gambino takes lines from Pac’s song: “They get jealous when they see you with your mobile phone” (referred to later in this a Celly, that’s tool) “That's the sound of my tool, you say it ain't cool, My mama didn't raise no fool”
“And as long as I stay black, I gotta stay strapped, And I never get to lay back” It seems like Gambino broke up these lyrics and scattered them throughout his song. This plays into the theme that everyone is using 2Pac and enriching themselves off of his image and music. I show below how this particular section of the video represents Diddy meaning that Diddy himself is exploiting his music (and alleging that Diddy killed Pac?). We could see this exploitation play out at length with how much Diddy milked the death of Biggie like in Every Breath You Take.
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go into this (Ugh)
Yeah, yeah, this is guerilla (Woo)
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go get the bag
The song Gorilla War by $uicideboy$ and Ramirez talks about getting a bag repeatedly in the course. Also in Otis with Kanye and Jay-Z their lyrics talk about going gorilla (I talk about this song more further down), so it could be referring to this as well. It seems like Gambino is trying to pull out lyrics from all across the rap culture and embed them in his song to highlight the ‘cultural compression’.
Yeah, yeah, I'm so cold like, yeah (Yeah)
I'm so dope like, yeah (Woo)
We gon' blow like, yeah (Straight up, uh)
I think that all of the school kids in the video represent all of the rappers that are signed with these big labels. Which is interesting because they are the ones facilitating the guns for the moguls in the video. You can see that the mogul is really focused on the kids and gets agitated and directs them to follow him whenever they stray off a bit like they are his pupils, or like he owns them. Then all of a sudden the camera comes into a scene where you can see more kids shooting a rap video and all shooting money from a Supreme gun. The camera zooms out almost to show you that this is the mogul’s whole rap empire they are looking over, all of their kids in one place (this empire already includes some chaos in the background). It’s subtle but hilarious, Gambino puts fricken chickens on the ground where the kids are filming the rap video. He is directly calling all of these rappers complete chickens for playing up this lifestyle and being the cause of so much chaos rather than coming out and telling somebody what’s really going on. Trying to get their money over everything else.
[Refrain: Choir & Childish Gambino]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
You go tell somebody
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (Get your— Black man)
This is where things start to get interesting. Gambino is literally saying, go tell somebody about this! We all know what’s happening, why don’t you go let people know how bad it is? But like Jaguar Wright said, who do you tell when these moguls have the cops and feds paid off? This video is literally Gambino putting it all out there in this extremely popular song for everyone to see but yet we still just see the dancing and the violent chaos of people and police in the streets and not the root cause that is hidden in plain sight.
The vast majority of those who reviewed this video until now think this scene represents the tragic church shooting in Charleston in 2015. I think it does, but we also have to look at this from an angle of compression.
The people in the choir are all of the people who are currently singing the rap mogul’s praises and who are focused on going and getting what’s owed to them, get their money (who are also profiting off of the dead fellows music since it goes back to the original tune). You can see that each choir member has a distinct look to them. Think about who you are hearing about now who is about to be implicated in these freak offs and evil deeds. Is that Will Smith in the back left corner!? The short bald fellow in the front left maybe Kevin Hart? Rick Ross or TD Jakes maybe the bigger guy towards the back right? When the camera zooms in on the choir right at first to show their faces, doesn’t the guy in the bottom middle look like an uncanny version of Jordan Peele? Or is that meant to be Cuba Gooding Jr? Then just like the guitar fellow at the beginning, bang. You may be singing Diddy’s praises now, but he will cut you down whenever he suddenly feels like it.
I think almost for sure this initial section of the music video is Gambino acting as Diddy, because right after he shoots the choir, he does the elbow pump/chicken dance. At 3:14 in Diddy’s video for P.E. 2000 he does the chicken dance (he is up first in the video and I think Gambino is trying to say here I first present to you the first public enemy of 3 in this song). That elbow dance signals that it was Diddy and this is the end of his section.
[Chorus: Childish Gambino, Young Thug, Slim Jxmmi & Quavo]
This is America (Woo, ayy)
Don't catch you slippin' now (Woo, woo, don't catch you slippin' now)
Don't catch you slippin' now (Ayy, woah)
Look what I'm whippin' now (Slime!)
There have been many accounts of celebrities being given fancy cars after suffering abuse at the hands of these moguls. So these lyrics are saying that you better not slip up and tell people what’s really going on. And if you don’t look at this sweet carecord deal/movie contract I am going to give you. Beiber told this story about Diddy wanting to give him a luxury car.
Now suddenly, the dance switches from the chicken dance to a sudden bicep flex to signal us that we have now moved on from Gambino representing Diddy to our next mogul.
[Verse 2: Childish Gambino, Quavo, Young Thug, 21 Savage & BlocBoy JB]
This next chunk of the video is all about Jay-Z. I think this is the case because he throws his arms up in a bicep flex just like Jay does in the Otis music video at 2:38. And it makes sense Gambino would pick a dance move from a video with a huge American flag in the background to fit the ‘This is America’ theme. Gambino is mocking him saying, who are you really, the pretty guy or this hard gangster like Gambino shows in his dancing. Also right before they pan to the kids on the balcony, Bino also does Jay-Z’s signature lip curl look a couple times so we know it’s him and to signal the end of his section.
Look how I'm geekin' out (Hey)
I'm so fitted (I'm so fitted, woo)
Jay-Z is famous for making the fitted Yankees cap famous, it’s his signature look. More signs this verse is about Jay.
I'm on Gucci (I'm on Gucci)
Jay-Z has been seen in full wallpaper Gucci sweat suits but could also be referring to Gucci Mane who he hung out with at Beyonce’s tour around the time this song was released.
I'm so pretty (Yeah, yeah, woo)
I'm gon' get it (Ayy, I'm gon' get it)
Watch me move (Blaow)
These lines are probably referring to Jay-Z having a hidden preference for men, especially with the way Gambino flicks his wrist in the video when he says I’m so pretty.
This a celly (Ha)
That's a tool (Yeah)
On my Kodak (Woo) Black
I think that “this a celly, that’s a tool” harkens back to 2Pac’s lyrics in Changes where he sings, “They get jealous when they see ya with your mobile phone” then shortly after that he sings about the sound of his tool, referring to shooting a gun. But Childish flips these lyrics on their head. He is saying that it’s really the phone that’s a tool to be using, not a gun. And pans up and shows (the school kids specifically) on the balcony filming everything going on below. He’s telling the kids/other rappers, use your phone as a tool, you can record these bad deeds when you get blackmailed into being at the freak off. That’s how you can kill them and their career, not with a gun. Go tell somebody! There is also the reference to Kodak which plays into the picture taking theme, but also because Kodak Black has been accused of assaulting a teenage girl in a hotel room. So we have a good idea of what Gambino suggests all the kids start filming and collecting evidence of.
Ooh, know that (Yeah, know that, hold on)
Get it (Woo, get it, get it)
Ooh, work it (21)
Now we are onto Drake’s part. In the video Gambino starts doing the BlocBoy JB dance called Shoot. Drake is known for doing these little viral dance moves like in Hotline Bling. But not only that, this dance is also used in the song that both BlocBoy JB and Drake collaborate on for their video Look Alive. It starts at 2:07 in the Look Alive video. So this is Drake’s dance to signal his part is now starting.
Note this is where the pale horse rides by also potentially saying that Drake is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Interestingly, Drake’s collab with BlocBoy JB was pretty much the apocalypse for BlocBoy’s career, who hasn’t had a hit since.
Hunnid bands, hunnid bands, hunnid bands (Hunnid bands)
Contraband, contraband, contraband (Contraband)
I got the plug in Oaxaca (Woah)
They gonna find you like "blocka" (Blaow)
Again, we know this is Drake’s section because his song 10 bands starts out by saying “10 bands, 50 bands, 100 bands” almost identical to Bino’s lyrics here. Also Blocka was famously used by Biggie in his song Gimme the Loot which could be referring to Biggie's demise like Pac’s and making money from his death. Everything in this industry originates from pushing drugs, which has been alleged through the trafficking that Diddy, Jay-Z and Drake do through their private jets likely connected to their bosses, the Clive Davises and Lucian Grainges of the world. This escalates rap beefs and the whole culture to the next level where murder is often a consequence for young rappers in their prime when international drug lord money is involved.
An interesting point is this is the only time where Childish was about to shoot someone in the video, but where he didn’t have a school kid either handing him the gun or taking it away carefully from him. (Maybe also a diss at Drake that even though he acts hard he doesn’t shoot, he gets his horseman of the apocalypse to do his dirty deeds for him instead perhaps?). This is the beginning of the end for the rap mogul as he no longer has his kids doing his bidding for him. A simple message to show how the violence can be stopped, that these shootings can end when the kids stop enabling them. So then as soon as he can’t react in that moment and shoot someone his anger is forced to chill out, as shown by smoking a J, and to go back to exploiting the dead man’s music instead. If you don’t put a gun in someone’s hand when they are heated, those feelings too shall pass - kinda feel.
[Refrain: Choir, Childish Gambino, & Young Thug]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
America, I just checked my following list, and
You mothafuckas owe me
Whose voice does that sound like!? It sounds a lot like Diddy to me, public enemy #1. This is basically saying that the moguls are the ones who we all owe it to for all of this glorified gun violence in America. That we owe them way more follows and likes for what a massive influence they have had on the violence and chaos we see in America today.
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (Black man)
(1, 2, 3—get down)
In Moneybagg Yo’s song 1, 2, 3, he also has a line that says “1, 2, 3, let’s go!” in a similar vein.
But something interesting I came across was Nas’s song Get Down where they use a sample from James Brown's “The Boss” that sounds extremely similar to the way Gambino screams “Get Down!” Which would fit well if the guitar singer from the beginning is meant to be Nas and Pac doing Thugz Mansion.
Also make sure you check out Nas’s song Get Down so that you can hear how much Jay-Z outright copied this song for The Story of OJ. From the musical structure with the piano and interwoven samples right down to the theme reiterated by the sample at the end of Nas’s song: “If that’s how our people are gonna get down, how are we ever gonna get up?”
SZA
Finally to wrap up the video, I have been stumped for a long time as to why SZA is randomly at the end of this video sitting on one of the cars. But I think I finally know why and it reconfirms that this last scene is all about Drake. If you watch Drake’s music video for Worst Behavior (not very Canadian of him to spell behaviour that way I might add) you will see Drake rapping and dancing with a few cars surrounding him and one of those cars has other rappers making cameos in it. In Gambino’s video SZA represents that car with a famous cameo. I think this is further confirmed when the black edges of the video start closing inwards at the end of This is America, the exact same way that Worst Behavior ends. So why SZA as the cameo then? Cause it reminds people that Drake is a p*do.
This is from an article in the Rolling Stone: In 2020, Drake revealed publicly that he and SZA had dated over a decade ago, well before she was an established artist (her earliest music goes back to around 2012; her critical breakthrough, Ctrl, came in 2017). On 21 Savage’s “Mr. Right Now,” Drake rapped about a newer fling who was a fan of SZA’s: “Yeah, said she wanna fuck to some SZA, wait / ‘Cause I used to date SZA back in ’08 / If you cool with it, baby, she can still play.” A few days later, SZA responded, corroborating Drake’s claim with a slight correction: they dated in 2009, when both would have been over 18. Since SZA would not have turned 18 until late 2008, she wanted to set the record straight. “in this case a year of poetic rap license mattered 🥴lol I think he jus innocently rhymed 08 w wait [sic],” she tweeted. “I just didn’t want anybody thinking anything underage or creepy was happening . Completely innocent . Lifetimes ago . [sic]”
If you have to specifically say something isn’t creepy and distance yourself from it being lifetimes ago, it usually is creepy. Drake would’ve been 22 when she was 17. Metro Boomin also happens to be on the Mr. Right Now track. He is currently in trouble for resurfaced old tweets showing how Metro used to tweet disgusting things about what he wanted to do to underage girls. Interestingly, Metro Boomin is also now beefing with Drake.
Drake doing his dance on the car of the original musician’s music seems to be accusing Drake directly of stealing 2Pac’s music. Orlando Brown recently said the cryptic statement that “Drake is Pac” which likely means he stole 2Pac’s approach/style/audience after his death. Gambino did some good foreshadowing here too with the recent AI release Drake put out of 2Pac.
This dance scene also signals that the Drake section is now over.
[Outro: Young Thug]
You just a black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayy
You just a black man in this world
Drivin' expensive foreigns, ayy
You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No, probably ain't life to a dog
For a big dog
The outro lyrics speak to how these gatekeepers keep black men down and control them with things like being forced to wear a dress to become famous or to submit to homosexual/p*do acts.. In the video, as I mentioned above, the black edges close in on Drake’s dancing scene in This is America. But they don’t completely close and end things like they do in the Worst Behavior video. Instead, in Gambino’s video, the camera pans to show the mogul running for his life with Young Thug’s lyrics almost like a quiet echo in the background. He isn’t running from the cops though, he’s running from the kids and from the public. When I mentioned earlier that the kids not handing over the last gun before Drake’s scene signalled the beginning of the end for the moguls, this is that conclusion. Where it is showing that if all the kids come together to stop enabling and rather expose the moguls, people will be chasing these bastards down once we realize what has been going on behind the curtain. Then the song that Young Thug is singing can just be a quiet echo of the way things were in the past.
If you don’t think Gambino would be this deep and that I went too far down the rabbit hole, do a Google search on the calculations that he came up with for why he sings about loving until 3005 in his song. He seems to go real deep with his lyrics. So a big question this leaves us with is, what did Childish Gambino witness in the rap industry? His whole rap career plays out like he is trying to avoid industry norms.
Even in Sweatpants, he has lyrics like:
No hands like soccer teams and y'all fuck boys like Socrates
You niggas ain't coppin' these, niggas ain't lookin' like me (Nah)
Nah, I ain't checkin' I.D. (Nah), but I bounce 'em with no problem
Seems like he is trying to make it really clear across his catalogue of music that he isn’t a p*do but that other rappers are. Where he is saying that he doesn’t need to ID his potential partners because he can tell they are obviously too young and that’s not hard to do.
Tell 'em, Problem (Problem!)
I'm winnin', yeah, yeah, I'm winnin' (What?)...
Rich kid, asshole, paint me as a villain
So who was trying to paint him as a villain, Drake? And that’s why the diss was originally meant for him?
Don't be mad 'cause I'm doing me better than you doing you…
Better than you doing you
Fuck it, what you gon' do? (What?!)
He’s taunting the other rappers cause he knows they can’t say shit if they are creeps. He has the same sentiment in Bonfire “It’s a bonfire, turn the lights out, I’m burning everything you mother fuckers talk about.”
Childish Gambino has always refrained from talking about the meaning of This is America whenever he is asked, and I can only assume that all of this is why.
Little Foot Big Foot
Now with his new release, Little Foot Big Foot and applying cultural compression to it, it has me wondering if he is referring to Megan Thee Stallion and the Nicki beef? People like Nicki (calling Megan Big Foot) have been claiming for some time she wasn’t even shot in the foot by Tory Lanez. There were many people laughing and making fun of Megan over getting shot. Which could be an interesting story for Childish to tell to represent how crazy this violent culture has gotten that people just laugh and blame the victim now when you get shot. Also a good metaphor for things like ‘shooting yourself in the foot’ for not having a lawyer look over potentially predatory industry contracts like in the beginning of his video. That you want to get in the cool kids club so bad you overlook it. Not as sure on this one though since the song just came out and I have only heard it a few times.
One last thing that is really interesting, there have been tons of artists on podcasts like Shay Shay talking about the strings these ultra rich moguls can pull. Like buying awards or gatekeeping people from being in the industry at all. There was even a story, I think maybe it was Gene Deal who told it, that when Killer Mike won at the grammys that Jay-Z was so angry he made sure to mess up his night by getting him locked up as soon as he left the awards stage. These moguls are extremely powerful and have an incredible amount of sway in the world/industry. If you check out Gambino’s profile on Youtube, his old music videos keep getting taken down, like Bonfire for example is just gone. Fans have been having to upload the videos themselves. There is a reply to a comment, on one of the fan uploaded vids, from Gambino’s account himself when someone asks why the videos are being taken down. His account just replies “Noone knows why :(“ Seems a bit odd all things considered and like maybe he has been at the mercy of these gatekeepers for going against the system.
I am so curious to know what the rest of you think about all of this!

Let me explain….
Before this sounds like complaining, I’ve actually been having so much fun with the game lately, mainly due to my ability to just FIND fun with swapping and trying different loadouts and not running diff 7-9 all the time lately. May I suggest picking up the break action or running revolver only for the finest of gentlemen………
Also, for those questioning my experience with the game after the statements above, level 73 Helldiver, been playing a while solo and group with no voice chat/pretty coordinated voice chat. Been in just about every scenario of Helldive you could think of.
Anyway,
I’ve been sitting on this one cause my body REFUSES not to let me pick the stamina booster every damn mission.
Even when I say “hey, ya know, I’m running a pretty goofy loadout here with the crossbow and deagle, maybe keep it fun all the way through and try a new booster.
Then I realize I’m on MENKENT/HELLMIRE. “Intense heat: Your Helldiver is out of shape and may not make it 40 yards without a stim ”
Yeah, no, I’ll take my stamina with me on this one.
I know for an absolute fact this community feels the way I do as well about variety. When I feel like mixing things up, I REALLY want to mix it up.
Since I used the booster as an example of certain things you NEED to use because the game is basically making you (otherwise you’d basically be severely handicapped on EVERY mission) , let just use the booster from the new warbond as an example. Because…. Ya know, primary weapons……….. WHATEVER.
Literally today someone finally posted a video on here proving that THE NEW BOOSTER ACTUALLY works. When active, it now takes a fraction of a second less to start sprinting again after being “slowed”……….
………………………………………
At no point in any reality in the multiverse do I think a human being who enjoys video games came up with this idea for a (perk supposed to have a positive impact on your success in the mission) designed , programmed, play-tested, and patched this one in and said “oh yeah, this one will be a BANGER.” It is a cool concept, however, which leads me to believe that someone at AH has absolute banger ideas, while on the other hand someone else in charge of implementing said idea and entering usefulness of said idea in the form of number values absolutely fumbles the bag EVERY Single Time something or anything at all has been released the past couple of weeks. It’s almost literally all almost completely useless across the board save a select few things.
Unless you’re me who enjoys running different stuff anyway. If you do, however, then you know that it’s mostly running/kiting anyway then 75% of the time, cause you didn’t bring one of the 4 good weapons with you and because of that now your kit sucks, therefore your kinda useless when shit hits the fan.
Across the board on all boosters, I think they deserve an upgrade. Aside from the main 4 which I can’t list because (they’re listening).
Primary weapons too. AND stratagem weapons…………
Stick with me. Motivational shocks.
I would prefer this to be either instantaneous (meaning no slow effect EVER if this booster is on) and show a visible “shock” animation, or instead of getting slowed it grants a 15% speed boost with a Stam reset for 2 seconds when getting hit by bile/poison. Think Finka’s gadget from Rainbow Six, but it activates as soon as poison is detected by the armour systems.
Honestly, any positive change to this booster at all couldn’t make it overly powerful, in my opinion, and even then I would still pick the other ones before it every time. There is a slight chance depending on the planet that maybe, MAYBE it would SOMETIMES replace the one that lets you run through shrubs faster.
Think about it, you have boosters that fully resupply you when you die. Meaning you only need resupplies if you’re in the middle of long active gunfights, aka you’re NEVER actually waiting on a resupp cooldown. You have boosters that make you run like a Kenyan(as stated earlier, stam, my fave). You have a booster that allows you to take 1 extra hit before death (HUGE in this game by the way).
All boosters outside the main 4 need significant reworks. To the point where saying what it actually does OUT LOUD would sound overpowered. And STILL they would be picked less than the main 4, or be niche at best.
……..the same could be said for most primary weapons and all but about eight to twelve-ish stratagems as well.
BUT
Thank you AH, because I’m still having fun and engaged. Just could be MORE engaged and want more variety. Thank you love you 07

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39 (age)/120 lbs (weight)/5 feet (height)/ non smokeno drugs or alcohol/no previous medical condition/area of concern: brain
Five months ago, I had a cranial facial release procedure done by a certified practitioner. This is a balloon treatment where the doctor inserts a finger cot balloon into your nose and inflated it with a blood pressure bulb. In my case, she put the balloon in both my upper nasal cavities. She inflated the balloon so much that the pain was a 9/10, and I felt cracking in my face and head. It felt like being punched in the face and having my brain squeezed at the same time.
I immediately felt dizzy and disoriented with increased brain fog. I went to the ER the next day and they ran a CT with contract, which came back clear.
I followed up with my primary care doctor, who sent me to a neurologist for further testing, and those results are below.
Since this incident, I’ve been dealing with 24/7 cognitive issues - memory lapses (almost feels like the brain zaps one would get coming off an SSRI, which I’m not on), involuntary muscle movements while awake, disorientation, difficulty reading, slight vertigo, feeling off and out of it. No headache or pain - all cognitive.
My doctors aren’t sure what to do besides physical therapy and time. My question is: since I received this injury from excessive force/pressure in my nasal cavities vs typical concussion from blunt force, is my brain affected in a different way that a typical concussion? I’m wondering if my recovery prognosis is worse due to the way I recover the injury. Any truth to that since I’ve been struggling many months with no improvement in symptoms? Any therapies or treatments to help me heal are appreciated.
MRI Non-specific punctuate focus of T2 FLAIR hyperintensity within the right frontal subcortical white matter. This may be from sequela migrainous vasculopathy or gliosis from other remote assault.
QEEG (eyes closed, awake) Shows slow delta waves in the frontal lobes

Chapter 1

Concept art for Sybil
Of Men and Ghost Ships, Book 1: Chapter 17
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First, Carter met an AI who looked like an old-earth pirate, and now he met an alien who looked like an old-earth viking. Well, if that viking stood nearly eight feet tall, had fangs and claws that could put some daggers to shame, and a bony carapace armor seemingly covering most of his vital organs. He wasn't sure if he just had some odd luck when it came to encountering the weirdest entities the universe had to offer or if he was at the butt of some galactic joke.
Carter showed Erik how to use the goo dispenser, to which the larger alien made a face but managed to politely keep any complaints to himself as they both got a bowl and sat down at a table with Sybil's two robotic guards passively waiting not far from the table. As he sat down, Cater couldn't help but ask. "So, Erik, huh?"
Before he could ask his question, the behemoth of a man laughed. "Yes, it's a human name. I was 'raised,' for lack of a better term, by pirates who gave me the name. No, I don't know where I came from or even if there are more like me somewhere out there. Long story short, I got my freedom the hard way, and ever since, I've just been trying to get by in this galaxy!"
That answered several of Carter's questions without him having to ask them. " Get asked those a lot, do you?"
Erik nodded while he tried a spoonful of the much, then looked down at the bowl with surprise before taking another bite. "You could say that! Probably the most common questions I get right after people screaming incoherently or begging for their lives. Not that those are questions, but I kinda feel like they're implied, if you know what I mean!"
Carter nodded cautiously. "Do you get that a lot? People begging for their lives, I mean?"
The bigger alien grinned. "Well, yeah! And more than half the time, I didn't even do anything to warrant it! Guess I'm just too big and scary for my own good!"
Carter made a show of taking a bite of his own mint-flavored sludge. "And the other half of the time?"
Erik shrugged, but Carter couldn't help but notice his grin became just a bit more predatory. "Well, let's just say I don't start many fights, but I sure do end a lot of them! Guess I seem like an easy mark or something!"
Carter suspected it was the "or something" but decided not to push the issue. Instead, he figured maybe he could bring up some common ground. "So, not a big fan of pirates then?"
The larger alien shook his head., "No, I like them just fine! Why, they're just about my favorite thing to test the sharpness of my axes on!"
Carter looked at his dining companion skeptically. "Axes? Really? In this day and age?"
Erik laughed. "Yeah, yeah, I know, they're not the most efficient weapons out there, and I'm not above using some more traditional armaments in a pinch, but I tell ya, there's nothing more satisfying than cleaving through a battle suite in hand-to-hand combat with a good heavy axe! Sides, I got used to them back when I fought as a gladiator."
Carter supposed he should have been ready for a crazy story, but he still found himself surprised for the umpteenth time in one conversation. "Wait, wait, wait... You were a gladiator? Like as in an arena, fight to the death kinda thing?"
Erik laughed again. "Yeah, pretty much! However I ended up fighting monsters more than people. There weren't many pirates willing to get in the ring with me, even with a battle suit, and I wasn't willing to kill any ordinary folk who got thrown in with me. Thankfully, I was too big a draw for them to just execute for refusing to kill normals, though I'm sorry to say they didn't get out of the situation any better than if I had. Still, I've killed more than my fair share of wild beasties! They even managed to bring in this giant wolf-like monster with a bladed tail. It was the size of a moose! I kid you not! I got no idea where they found that monster, but it would have killed me for sure if it hadn't been for Vanessa backing me up. Even then, we were both out of commission for the better part of a month after that one. Well, we might have been fit to go a bit before that, but that was the one that made us decide it would be considerably better for our health if we got out of the gladiator business sooner rather than later!"
Oddly enough, Carter found himself grinning along with Erik despite the nature of the story. There was just something about the guy that made listening to him ramble on about stuff kinda fun. Despite his thick accent, or maybe partially because of it, the man was a heck of a storyteller. However, now that the story seemed to have come to an end, the larger alien seemed to think for a moment before asking his own question. "So tell me, captain, where's the rest of your crew? The only ones I've seen since coming aboard are you and your robotic monsters!" He pointed back at the two escorts Sybil provided.
Carter looked askance at the alien. "I invited two aliens who look like they might be able to pick a fight with a full squad of commandos and come out on top, and you're wondering where my crew is?"
Erik kind of nodded and laughed again. "Yeah, I guess that tracks! No sense puttin' everyone at risk when you don't know nothin' about us, and we won't be here very long, is there? Speaking of, how much longer is my friend's treatment gonna take?"
The word "friend" was a surprising choice. Was Erik just using it as a general term, or did he really consider the kid he'd hauled onboard the ship a friend? Carter supposed it didn't matter. Instead, he figured he might as well find out. "Hey, Sybil, how's the treatment going?"
The girl appeared. "Well, the patient looks like he'll pull through. However, given the nature of his injury and how long it's been since he received it, we cannot save his foot. We're discussing whether he would like a temporary replacement or if he'd rather a replacement be grown in a better-stocked facility."
-
Alen looked at the disturbingly attractive woman in shock. "What do you mean you're gonna lop off my foot?"
The woman in red just looked annoyed with him for some reason. "I mean just that. Your foot is too badly damaged to save. I can fit you with a temporary replacement, but that'll come with some unpleasant side effects while you adjust and again if it's removed. Alternatively, you could just wait and have an organic replacement grown at another facility and bypass the side effects, but you will be short a foot for however long that takes. Now choose. It'll determine where I cut through the bone and nerves."
Having just woken up from his drugged sleep, Alen had assumed the surgery was over, but apparently, they were still in the middle of treatment. His head was still somewhat groggy as he fought through the haze to understand and decide. "Um, well, I don't know when I'll be able to get anything better, but...uh...how unpleasant are we talking here?"
The attractive woman crossed her arms and glared at him as if he was wasting her valuable time. "It varies from one individual to the next, but the side effects can range from mild discomfort to occasional sharp pains strong enough to require medical intervention."
That was when another voice spoke up from behind Alen. He quickly realized it was Vanessa. "Is it not possible for you to deaden the pain receptors in the area while leaving enough nerve function to enable the use of the replacement?"
The woman in red shook her head. "Pain is an essential tool, especially if we're fitting him with a temporary replacement. It'll let him know if something's gone wrong. Without it, he could get an infection or even tear something without realizing it. It's better to err on the side of leaving too much sensation than too little. It can always be adjusted at a proper facility as needed."
On the one hand, that really sounded unpleasant. But on the other hand, who knew how soon Alen could get a replacement grown? What would he do in the meantime? "Uh... I guess...if I have to pick one... I'll take the temporary replacement..."
The lady in red gave only a brief acknowledgment. "About time." Then, before Alen could have second thoughts, the world went dark again.
-
The girl nodded as if receiving some unheard report. "Well, that settles it. He'll be getting a temporary replacement. It'll take a bit longer as we'll have to fit him with some attachments for the augmatics. A rough approximation puts the remaining time at an hour and a half. We should finish cannibalizing the pirate vessel shortly afterward."
Carter turned toward his guest. "Well, there you have it..."
However, the girl interrupted him again before he could finish his thoughts. "Sir, we've got more incoming. There are more of them, and they're more dispersed this time..."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Poor Alen! That dude has definitely not had it easy as of late!
My Wiki has all my chapters and stories, including the short series and stories that I write for an occasional change of pace or style!
As a reminder, "Of Men and Dragons" Books 1 and 2 are available to purchase in e-book or physical form. (Both softcover and hardcovers are available!) Book 3 is almost done being edited, so I'll just have to get the cover art and formatting done, and it will be available to purchase as well! Hopefully, in no more than a month or two! (Barring more Amazon drama like last time... fingers crossed!)
OMAD Book 1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NCPP3PP
OMAD Book 2: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQ7FQ1ZJ

• We started with the two federal lawsuits filed last Thursday, seeking to block Iowa from enforcing Senate File 2340, the immigration law that creates a new state crime of “illegal reentry.” You can read the federal government’s lawsuit here and the case filed on behalf of Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice and two individuals here. I have a post in progress at Bleeding Heartland on why the state will struggle to show this law is constitutional;
• One key issue in both lawsuits: Iowa’s law makes no allowance for the reality that the federal government may grant permission for someone to be in this country, even if they were removed or deported in the past;
• Responding to the lawsuit, Governor Kim Reynolds cited her “responsibility to protect the citizens of Iowa. Since President Biden refuses to enforce our nation’s immigrationlaws – threatening the safety of our citizens – Iowa will step in.” Similarly, Attorney General Bird said, “Iowa stands ready to defend our immigration law that keeps Iowa communities safe”;
• I previewed one of the key legal arguments for the state, which Republican legislators put forward during the House and Senate debates. The concept is that the U.S. Constitution allows states to defend themselves against an “invasion,” and GOP politicians claim undocumented immigration amounts to an invasion of this country;
• Contrary to the idea that SF 2340 will keep Iowans safe, Marshalltown Police chief Michael Tupper submitted a declaration for one lawsuit explaining why “it undermines public safety” when the immigrant community believes local police will engage in immigration enforcement;
• Many of the arguments in these cases overlap, and U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher has consolidated a hearing on the motions for a preliminary injunction, which is set for June 10;
• Iowa became a plaintiff in yet another lawsuit against the Biden administration last week. This case, involving six GOP-led states that are part of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, challenges the U.S. Department of Education’s latest rule related to Title IX protections for LGBTQ students. Republicans dispute that Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination should encompass discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity;
• Bird was spotted on Monday morning outside the criminal court where Donald Trump’s trial continues in Manhattan. The Attorney General’s office hasn’t answered any of my questions about the trip, but a spokesperson told the Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel “no taxpayer money had been used to fund her travel.” Bird spoke briefly to reporters outside the courthouse to call the case a “travesty” designed to keep Trump off the campaign trail;
• George wondered if state political leaders traveling across the country was going to be the “new normal.” I won’t be surprised to see Bird appearing with Trump in other venues this year. She’s been the former president’s top Iowa surrogate since Governor Reynolds endorsed and actively campaigned for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis;
• Moving to legislative news, the governor continues to sign more laws the legislature approved last month. Last week, she signed Senate File 2251, one of the bills she proposed, extending postpartum Medicaid coverage for thousands of Iowa women while excluding thousands of women from pregnancy or postpartum coverage;
• I’ve been wanting to talk about House File 626 for a while, but I don’t think Dennis and I ever got to it during the legislative session. Starting next year, this law will prohibit insurance companies from forcing a change to someone’s prescription medications in the middle of a coverage year, if the patient is stable on the drug and a health care provider continues to prescribe it. I enjoy stories like this, which have a major lobbying component. You might think this bill is not controversial, because it passed both chambers nearly unanimously. But advocates had to work for at least seven years to get it to the Iowa Senate floor, due to strong opposition from the insurance lobby;
• Here’s an update on a bill that particularly affects mothers. Natalie Krebs reported for Iowa Public Radio last week on contracts signed with four groups that will provide services under the “More Options for Maternal Support” (MOMS) program, which funnels taxpayer dollars to crisis pregnancy centers. Senate File 2252, which the governor signed in April, allows the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services to administer this program directly;
• Reynolds signed the remaining appropriations bills last week, which set spending levels for the fiscal year beginning on July 1. On this program I wanted to highlight a couple of big picture points: Reynolds did not use her item veto power at all, which illustrates how Republicans closely coordinate budgeting with the governor’s office these days. They don’t put anything important in appropriations bills without her approval;
• Second, the $8.9 billion state budget for fiscal year 2025 will spend only about 80 percent of projected state revenues. By law, legislators are allowed to allocate up to 99 percent of projected revenue, but Republicans are building huge surpluses into the budget in order to cover future tax cuts;
• The June 4 primary fast approaches, and I wanted to flag the early voting deadlines for listeners. You can vote early in person starting May 15, and county auditors will start mailing out absentee ballots on the same day. Whether you vote early or on the primary election day, remember to bring some form of voter ID with you. If you need to change your address or register for the first time, bring proof of address as well as a valid ID;
• Moving back to state government news, Bird held a press conference on Friday to announce she was creating a new task force on antisemitism. Oddly, her office still hasn’t released a full list of task force members. I was able to confirm over the weekend that none of the three current state legislators who are Jewish were invited to participate;
• On the environmental front, there was good news and bad news connected to the heavy rain Iowa has seen in recent weeks. Jared Strong reported for Iowa Capital Dispatch that “For the first time in nearly two years, no part of Iowa has extreme drought”;
• Now for the bad news: the rain has flushed a lot of nitrate off fields and into Iowa waterways. Strong reported on this problem for Iowa Capital Dispatch as well;
• Excessive levels of nitrate in water has been associated with blue baby syndrome and certain cancers; I recently republished some in-depth reporting by Keith Schneider on the possible link between farm chemicals and high cancer rates in Palo Alto County;
• A quick bit of Congressional news: all four Iowans in the U.S. House helped save House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job last week;
• We didn’t have time to dig in to the details, but researchers from Princeton University have demonstrated that Iowa’s “Education Savings Accounts” (school voucher) program led to tuition increases at many private schools. Stay tuned, because I will have more to say about these findings on the May 20 program.

I’ll try to keep this as short as possible.
We have been together for 7 years many of them great. I recently over the past 2 years or so developed various addictions to gambling and kratom that I kept hidden from her. She new a little bit but not the whole extent. This consumed my life and although there were good times, a lot of times I wasn’t there.
Recently we moved in with my brother which changed the whole dynamic of our relationship. We stopped doing many of the things we used to do, and my brother was having his own problems and was very difficult to be around so we were afraid to live how we usually did.
At the same time she switched careers and found a dream career in marketing. The job wasn’t completely aligned with her interests but it was a huge step for her.
The affair partner was her boss. He is married with young children. She is sober from alcohol but does smoke weed. This guy from very early on told her how he could help her in this career and provide her with advice to make her successful. She was unhappy with our relationship and I do understand why, it was dead at that point. He pushed her to do mushrooms, Molly , and other drugs. She was very willing and definitely engaged but I can’t help but see how manipulated she was. He would scold her if she stepped out of line. Telling her not to come in to work if she even made the slightest mistake. He was abusive. I picked up on their inappropriate relationship and it drove me crazy and in to a deeper depression. I tried to control the situation and she did stop engaging him for a while but I never recovered. I wanted her to leave but it was her dream job that she worked so hard to get and we needed the income financially.
Eventually he got her alone at a conference, convinced her to do molly with him which she had never done before, and escalated the physical touch and groping. Eventually she went back to his room and had sex with him. They did it again the next day also. She tried to lie. At first but quickly came clean and showed genuine remorse. I broke up with her kicked her out and understand I need to work on myself so I never become codependent or in such a dark place again. I’ve quit all my addictions and feel very good.
I guess my question is although she did a horrible horrible thing. Is it wrong to think she was manipulated by her boss? I don’t excuse anything she did because she definitely played a role, it just hurts me to think that he gave her drugs she’s never done before to loosen her up for sex.