First Part - I play a game they call "Sleep Points". Every night I hide under my blanket (Part 1) : nosleep (reddit.com)
Previous Part - I play a game I call "Sleep Points". Every night I hide under my blanket (Part 19) : nosleep (reddit.com)
I had no idea how to react to any of this. There was a long awkward pause of about 30 or 40 seconds where I just kept my mouth shut and let Anastasia let it all out. My first instinct, though, was to ask probably the dumbest question I could’ve asked at that moment.
“Who’s Wendy Peterson?” I asked. I immediately regretted the question. This was obviously a person ENORMOUSLY important to Anastasia, and here I was, just asking who the hell she was, like she was some nobody. But Anastasia didn’t seem too upset. I guess my question took her mind off the tragedy with her friend, since she seemed to regain her composure a bit after I asked that.
“I –“ she started, then took a few breaths. “I believe I mentioned her in passing during our meeting in the Stairwell a few days ago. When I was a new player, I needed guidance of my own. Wendy was the one who gave it to me,” she explained. “Excuse me for a moment,” she said, leaving the bedroom. I wasn’t entirely sure what she headed out for, but when she came back with a carton of orange juice and a bottle of vodka, it got pretty clear.
“Honestly, I should’ve been expecting this…” she trailed off, somberly, pouring herself a shot from the bottle and promptly downing it. “Her time was nearly up,” she explained. “One cannot play Sleep Points forever, Morgan. You can extend your time with this game all you like, but The Sandman always collects his due,” she said.
“Would you care for any?” she asked, gesturing towards the vodka bottle. On the one hand, she was probably one of the smartest, most athletic, and most all-around most accomplished students in school. She had all the best grades, all the best awards, all the best everything. And yet still, THIS was apparently the person that all those after-school specials had warned me about when they would try and scare me about “peer pressure”.
I had never been offered anything like alcohol or weed or cigarettes or ANYTHING by anyone before. Well scratch that, now and then Ezra would offer me some skunk-weed for like 90 bucks a gram. He used to make a killing heading down to the seedier parts of town buying the cheapest pot he could he get his hands on, and then re-selling it over at College High for a fucking LAUGHABLE mark-up.
Now, I had never smoked before, but even I of all people could tell that whatever Ezra was selling was absolutely NOT worth what he was charging. But a lotta freshmen at College High were so desperate for ANYTHING to get ‘em high and they’re obviously not always the sharpest tools in the shed, so even with his INSANE scalping techniques, he STILL found plenty of willing buyers.
But either way, it was ONE thing when the school edgelord offered you something. That just kinda comes with the territory, and you pretty much know to expect it. But to be offered alcohol – and very STRONG alcohol at that – by my school’s model student was nothing I could’ve ever expected. Although, this was also the same girl who was telling me to steal my parents’ car keys, sneak out in the middle of the night without either one of our parents knowing, and head on over to her place. So maybe encouraging me to break the law wasn’t THAT far out of Anastasia’s wheelhouse, come to think of it.
“Well, I DID have to drive up here. I’m gonna have to drive back, too, y’know. You DO realize that, right?” I said.
“Oh c’mon, one shot won’t kill you,” she said, trying to egg me on a little. “You’ll be sober by the time you leave at 3. And besides. What other cars will be out at THIS time of night? Don’t let Ezra’s hallucination tricks fool you. He can make you see all KINDS of things, Morgan. If you wanna know if he’s REALLY there, just poke him,” she said, downing a second shot. Which was a bit concerning to me, because I had always heard about how you’re supposed to pace yourself with drinking and this second shot came pretty shortly after the first.
“If he’s not, your finger will go right through him. Why, it’s practically a rite of passage for new players to be thoroughly bamboozled by one of Ezra’s visual gags,” she explained. “Some would call it hazing. And I would not find that to be an unfair assessment. Ezra has a rather twisted sense of humor to say the least. Tricking you into thinking that you were about to crash headlong into his vehicle is perfectly consistent to his character,” she said. Had I told her about that? I figured it didn’t really matter, since she would’ve found out either way.
“I tend to prefer my vodka neat, though I suppose you have yet to become acclimated to the taste. It is most off-putting to the inexperienced. That is why I have brought this carton of orange juice, such that the alcoholic flavor of your beverage shall be masked to a comfortable extent,” she said. “Now don’t worry, I will only pour in ONE shot. You would hardly taste it,” she concluded, as she finished pouring out my drink.
I took a sip. I’ll admit, it tasted a little funky, but not enough to gross me out or anything. So, I had a little more. Anastasia seemed quite pleased with this. She then poured herself a THIRD shot. So, just because I feel like keeping score, we were now only about 20 minutes into our meeting and this girl was on shot number THREE. She had only brought the bottle out about 10 minutes before this. Though in her defense, she didn’t have any more after that. Y’know. For about another 20 minutes. Yeah.
“That should be quite enough,” she said, finishing her third shot. She got up, put the bottle and the orange juice away, and we were back to Wendy.
“Now, Wendy is not someone you would be familiar with, because she is from upstate,” she explained. “VERY upstate. She lives in Barrow,” she said. Technically, that little town in the way far north of Alaska changed its name to something else a few years before all this, but I can’t pronounce or spell it, so I’ll just be calling it by it’s old name “Barrow” since that’s easier.
“Well, ‘lived’, perhaps I should say,” she said correcting herself. “I too lived in Barrow until fairly recently. Though my family had moved to Alaska from St. Petersburg when I was 3, we did not move to Fairbanks. Instead, we had moved to Barrow, where we had lived for approximately 10 years from sometime in the spring of 2007 until December 1^st, 2017, just over a year ago now, by now. I recall the date as it was an extremely difficult move. Not least because I had already been playing Sleep Points for over a year by then,” she said.
“Well, what about playing Sleep Points made the move so difficult?” I asked.
“I must remind you that to hide from The Sandman, you must be asleep in your OWN bed,” she explained. “I would not have been capable of escaping the clock by moving. It would follow me throughout my travels, as it ultimately did. And I knew all of this l in advance. For a few dreadful hours, I had truly thought this impromptu move from Barrow to Fairbanks would be the death of me. Surely this would require several nights out of my bed, I had thought,” she explained.
“And I must stress the point that this move was EXTREMELY spontaneous. I had not been told of it even a day in advance. One day my father told me to pack up everything into our RV, and the next, we were on the road. Well, the metaphorical road in any case. Now you see, a particularly complicated facet of my father’s bizarre plan to move us from Barrow to Fairbanks all at once was the fact that there are no roads connecting to Barrow. Typically, when a person leaves town with a great deal of luggage and cargo as we did, given that we had to take all our possessions with us as we would not be returning, it is during the summer, when the oceans have thawed, allowing for various cargo ships to ferry one’s things to one’s desired destination. Given that it was December at the time, this was simply not an option,” she explained.
“And we of course could not use an airplane to fly to Fairbanks given that everything in our old house would never fit on a commercial airliner. The only feasible option was my father’s Recreational Vehicle. It was extraordinarily cramped, but after a few hours when all was said and done, most of our things managed to, in principle, ‘fit’ to some uncomfortable degree or other”, she said. “Though some things did still need to be left behind. Such as my bedframe, for example. Though I had strongly insisted on bringing my mattress.
I did not know for certain if my bedframe was required to stave off The Sandman, but, given the frankly preposterous circumstances in which I had found myself, I had gambled on the notion that all I would need to stay safe would be to sleep in the same mattress. During my first night in the RV, I was entirely unaware of whether or not I would live to see the following day. As midnight approached, I felt my life slipping away from me, as though it were flashing before my eyes, as the old cliché goes. I am forever grateful that my clever loophole successfully warded off my seemingly inevitable demise,” she said.
And again, as a reminder, she’s 3 shots of hard liquor in at this point and still prattling on like a goddamn encyclopedia, just like how she usually would. I gotta admit, I was damn near genuinely impressed with how lucid and intellectual she could still sound, even after all she had had to drink. She didn’t even seem tipsy. Though one thing I will say, is that while she would usually speak in an American accent, the deeper and deeper into her drinking she would get, there would always seem to be more and more bits and pieces of her original Russian accent creeping through. Though at that point, I could hardly notice it. But anyway, back to the story Anastasia was telling me.
“Though I must say, my father was very opposed to me taking my mattress. And I could not, for the life of me, ascertain why. When I asked him, he claimed it was because we needed to conserve as much space as possible, and that, because there was a pullout couch in the RV for me to sleep on, that I should use that instead. But I knew for a fact, for an absolute FACT, that spending even a single night out of my proper bed would end my life most abruptly. And so, I persisted. The rest of the family was already quite opposed to the move initially, and thus I had high hopes of turning them against him, thereby overruling his decision to force me to leave behind my mattress. And, through enough prodding from my mother, my father relented, and I took it with me,” she finished.
“Well, if the rest of your family was so against the move, then how did you guys end up going through with it?” I asked.
Anastasia seemed like she was hesitating a bit to answer the question. For a moment, it looked like she might not have been comfortable answering, but then explained the difficult situation to me as carefully as she could.
“Now that, Morgan, is a rather… complicated question,” she said, slowly. “My father has what one might consider a somewhat… ‘colorful’ past, shall we say,” she explained. “Now, I am not entirely certain of the specifics as he has never been particularly forthcoming about them, but from what I gather, this colorful past of his likely has something or other to do with organized crime or perhaps something else of a similar nature.
In any case, that phase of his life is behind him, and he would most definitely appreciate it remaining that way. That was why we had initially emigrated from Russia in the first place. And why we had moved to Barrow, Alaska in particular. My father wished to make it as challenging as possible for him to be tracked down and, with Barrow being perhaps one of the most remote communities on the face of the earth, he had considered it a strong candidate. But, in late 2017, he unfortunately was tracked down after all. And he had very little time to do anything about it.
As frustrating as it was to have to pick up everything all at once and to travel hundreds of miles through the dense Alaskan forest by RV, we all understood that whatever agents or mafiosos were after him would not spare a single one of us either, thus it was absolutely crucial that we all go into hiding as fast as possible. And so, we acquiesced to my father’s spontaneous decision that we move to Fairbanks as there was a common understanding in the family that he would not be asking any such things of us unless ghosts of his past were coming back to haunt us all. We knew we had no choice but to vacate the premises post-haste.
As it so happened, there was, and continues to be, a certain man in Fairbanks that, through methods unbeknownst to me, allows for my father to hide in plain sight, and to never be tracked down again. That made Fairbanks our new safest option, and it is why my father moved us all to this town specifically. This means that we will thankfully never have to make any such sudden change in residency ever again, “she concluded.
“Would you like another drink?” she asked, noticing I had already finished my orange juice with the shot of vodka she had given it. “In any case, I will be pouring myself another shot,” she added. “And I do hate to drink alone. I find alcohol consumption far more rewarding when drinking in the company of a friend. I am aware that I set a rather poor example by having so much all at once right in front of you, but in my own defense, you should know that I do not drink in such excess when I am alone. I would DEFINITELY never endorse such behavior from anyone else, and it is why I am quite glad to have you around to care for me, should anything go awry,” she said.
“Well, how the hell am I supposed to do THAT if I’m already two drinks in myself?” I asked, trying to be the voice of reason in order to clamp down on all of this, since to me, it looked like things were starting to get out of hand. I wanted to believe she wouldn’t drink like this while alone, and that she was only doing this because she was having a really tough time getting over the death of her best friend Wendy, and just felt safe with me around. Looking back, I think at the time, that was more or less true. Maybe not entirely true, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can confidently say that at this point, having 4 shots in an hour was a bit much, even for Anastasia. But unfortunately for her, it wasn’t about to stay that way in the coming years.
“Morgan, if you are sober enough to ensure that I do not vomit anywhere other than the toilet, you will have done a fine job of caring for me. And I likely will not throw up at all, as I happen to have a rather strong alcohol tolerance as it is,” she said. For a moment, it seemed like there was a hint of pride in her voice, but that quickly went away when she realized what she had just told me, and what it implied about how much she would normally have, even when alone.
“Well, not because of how much I would TYPICALLY have to drink, I should say. This alcohol tolerance of mine is by no means ACQUIRED,” she backtracked. “Rather, it is a simple result of my genetics. My forebearers had a great deal of alcohol tolerance themselves, which it would appear I have inherited,” she explained, defensively. “Well, I’ll pour you out another, in case you would like one, but don’t feel pressure to drink it if you wouldn’t like to. I’ll have it myself, if you are uninterested,” she offered.
On the one hand, I knew I would be scared to death to drive back home if I was two drinks in, but on the other, I really wanted this fourth shot to be her last one of the night and take away any excuse she could have to drink any further. And then there was the fact that I didn’t wanna look ungrateful for her offer. She had already said she considered me a friend, and it seemed really important to her that I just go along with her and have another. This really seemed like her way of reaching out and trying to connect with me, so I just felt bad turning her down.
Though I’ll admit, it may have also been because I had a bit of a buzz going myself and wasn’t gonna say no to a bit more of one. Though I couldn’t let Anastasia know about any of that. If I did, then she’d have an excuse to get me just as wasted as she was, and I seriously could NOT let something like that happen.
“There you are, my good man. Na zdroviye,” she said, clinking her shot glass against my glass of orange juice mixed with a shot of my own.
“I’m sorry?” I asked, not quite getting the last part of what she had said.
“I said ‘na zdroviye’,” she said, a bit more slowly, enunciating the phrase she had said before. “I can’t blame you for being confused. It’s a common Russian saying when sharing a drink with one’s close confidants. It means ‘for good health’,” she explained. “Well, go on. Say it back. Have manners, now,” she said.
“I… don’t think I can pronounce that. I don’t speak any Russian,” I said.
“Understandable. I suppose it’s a somewhat difficult phrase for English speakers. But I would still appreciate your best attempt at it,” she said.
“Well alright, but I won’t promise not to butcher it,” I said, before saying something more along the lines of like “nsdroveh”.
“Meh, close enough,” said Anastasia, before downing her fourth shot of the night.
“This is gonna have to be my last one, though. It’s 1:40, and I’m gonna need to be on the road by about 3, if this meeting is gonna go according to your schedule,” I said.
“What time do your parents wake up on weekends?” she asked. “If they sleep in, you might not have to leave until 4, maybe even 5. I am entering a new stage tonight, and I would not like to go through my first night alone. That, in tandem with the fact that we still have so much more of Sleep Points to go over, is why I am far more concerned with you leaving too early rather than too late,” she said. “We may well need to fit two nights of discussions into one, tonight. Have you met your sleep quota yet?” she asked.
“Well… not quite. But should be able to get 90 minutes in during the day tomorrow. I mean, I’ve been up for 2 days, and it really feels like the new moon has been helping. I’ve already strung together 26 minutes so far, and since tomorrow is Saturday, I’ve got all day tomorrow to get some sleep in,” I explained.
“You cannot afford to risk that. If you still need 90 minutes of sleep within the next 24 hours or so, then it will be far too dangerous for you to risk missing out on it by coming to visit. You must stay at home tomorrow night. I will not let you in if you decide to come anyway,” she said. “26 minutes after two under a waning moon is, I must again say, a rather poor sign. Most by now would have strung together at least a full hour. At least among those only in Stage Two, in any case.
Now, I have no doubt that, with the melatonin I have given you, you will have nothing to worry about this weekend. The new moon will shortly be upon us, and, so long as you have melatonin at your disposal, you will most likely survive the next week or two with relative ease. It is the full moon that concerns me. The full moon on later stages, to be more specific. Not only do I have my reservations about your capacity to survive the upcoming full moon in roughly three weeks’ time, but even if you do, it will still be very worrying when you are confronted with the next full moon, when you are on Stage Three. And there are many more stages beyond that as well, each more sleep depriving than the last.
Even though you sustained 90 minutes of sleep within 72 hours once, it was a rather close call. And not even during a full moon, at that. How much closer of a call will it be when it finally arrives? I don’t see anything happening to you in the immediate future, but when I look to the long-term, I must say that your chances appear quite bleak. Now, since you have only gotten 26 minutes of continuous sleep since your last 90-minute stretch, I suppose that would mean that you have yet utilize any of the melatonin gummies since then, correct?” she asked.
“Oh no, I haven’t had any since then,” I responded. She seemed pretty relieved by that. “Good. Very good. While this does not improve my outlook on your long-term safety, your response thankfully does not worsen my predictions, as I had feared it would. How many melatonin gummies had you taken Wednesday night?” she asked.
“Well, I had taken 10, but that’s not too much, right? I mean, you had said I might need to take up to 10, didn’t you?” I asked.
“While it is true that I had suggested the possibility of requiring up to 10, I had hoped that that amount would not be the amount required of you. I had hoped that you would only need perhaps 5 or 6. While 10 is not entirely beyond the pale, it is still quite unideal. At this rate, you may have even run out of gummies entirely by the time of the full moon. I will provide you with a new container of gummies if I must, but I fear that that will only be putting a band-aid over your issues. How long will that container last? I do not have an endless supply of sleep points to spend on you.
I, myself, shall run out eventually, as my supply of sleep points will not be able to replenish itself if I am so constantly supplying you with increasingly potent sleeping aids. I have plenty of sleeping supplements which I must supply myself if I wish to continue in this new and most challenging stage that I have reached tonight. They are quite expensive, so I will have very little left over in order to cover YOUR insomnia, as well as my own.
You are quite lucky that you did not snoop through my window during this stage. You would have surely died, being that close to The Sandman if I had already graduated to this one by then. That is why, along with being so inappropriate, what you had done was so dangerous. If I had been even one Stage farther along, you would not have come out of that episode alive.
I must now be asleep every hour on the hour from 12AM to 5AM, just I had to be during the previous stage. I must also have been asleep for 5 minutes by the time a new hour is reached, and I must also remain asleep for another 5 minutes beyond that, where before I had only needed to be asleep on the hour, and nothing more.
It is presently 1:50. This means that I now have only 5 minutes to fall asleep, and so I will have to leave things here for now, though I expect to see you back at 2:05, when I may wake up once more. Sit in your truck until then. Do not stand out in the cold. Furthermore, and I cannot stress this enough, do not look through my window. Even after The Sandman is gone. I hope I have made it clear that you should never do any such thing ever again. Now leave. When 2:00 comes, you will not be safe anywhere in the vicinity of my house. I have already wasted another minute explaining the situation to you, so please leave right this instant. Go,” she finished.
She didn’t have to tell me twice. I was already panicking for her, knowing that she had to go from being wide awake to completely past out in just 4 minutes. Maybe the alcohol would help put her to sleep. Maybe that was another reason she had had so much. She needed it in order to help her be asleep on time. Though, granted, it was probably more complicated than that.
Either way, I knew to keep away as she had asked. She quickly turned out the light of her bedroom, and once I had gotten my heavy winter coat back on, I sped out back to my truck as fast as I could. I even pulled out of the driveway and drive up the street a little ways just for good measure. And when 2:00 came, I was glad that I had. Even from up the street, I could see that her entire house was now completely enveloped in a sinister red glow. And I could hear The Sandman all the way from out there. It sounded just as loud as it did when it was right next to me in own room. With how loud it was from where I was sitting, I could only imagine how absolutely deafening it must’ve been from where Anastasia had been laying.
How the hell was she managing to sleep so soundly through all of this? I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to know. In any case, I was way too busy with making sure I was far enough away to keep myself safe, as it was. Because the glowing red light was starting to grow, and it was starting to look like it might just have been heading toward me. I wasn’t entirely certain of what would happen if I DID get caught up in the red glow, but I had enough sense to know that it couldn’t possibly have been anything good.

Is there a subreddit where people buy and send stuff to others who don't have access to them in their country. Idk if that makes sense.
Edit: a carton of a particular brand of cigarettes is what im looking to acquire

I’ll be travelling end this month and haven’t bought duty free cigarette cartons in a long time.
Does anyone know if they carry Marlboro ice blast or black menthol? If not, any recommendations on anything similar? Thanks!

~THE WAR DOGS: 1.~
~2551. Meridian has been lost to the UNSC.~
The final parts of the Meridian Defence Fleet left in so much of a hurry that they neglected how many men and women they had actually left on the ground. Orbital Drop Shock Troopers looked up from the dry docks to witness the final Paris class frigate exit the atmosphere. Army troopers watched the same frigate from the various checkpoints and defensive positions locked in around the drydock and surrounding area. Marines sat in defensive positions – dug into the carcasses of once proud warships and cargo vessels. Molten ground stretched for miles beyond the ridgeline. Gas clouds loomed overhead as phantoms and seraphs dominated the night skies, sunset masked behind the swirls and grey, green, and orange. Colonel Theodore Haskins, who had been in charge of the drydock’s defensive strategy, called all UNSC forces back in to regroup.
Long lines of pale faces trudged single file across dirt roads and open ground. Sullied expressions and tear-stricken cheeks were now the norm as they gathered in one of the many warehouses. Haskins let out a gentle sigh as he greeted them all at the main gate, helping to hand out fresh MREs, watching them all strip down their body armour, keeping to the cloth uniforms with grit, mud and blood matted into the fabric. A few vomited at the gates. A few collapsed from exhaustion after the long trek. The odd group even fell down into a state of sobbing, eyes puffed up as grime and dirt became grime, dirt, and streaks across grazed and scraped cheeks.
Haskins grimaced as he watched each person walk through. What a fucking mess, honestly. If command was incompetent enough to leave nearly three regiments behind on this molten rock, then God forbid they effectively defend Earth. Hell, he worried if they’d even be able to defend Reach. Theodore rubbed the dirt from his face as he watched the final marine limp through, helping the trooper to take his body armour off and tossing it into the pile of helmets and armour plating. The Colonel then proceeded to help him to the aid station, where medics and other essential personnel had stockpiled what little medical supplies they had left over.
The rest of the drydock garrison sat in the warehouse waiting patiently, a brutal silence dragging throughout the room only to be broken by the occasional screech of a folding chair shuffling forwards or backwards. Nobody there was in any mood to talk – nor was anyone in any real place to. They had just been abandoned by their higher-ups. The UNSC was their home and they had been practically shoved out of the way by the upper echelons of it.
“What a fuckin’ mess”, mumbled a marine in the front row, only for his buddy next to him to smack him across the back of the head. Haskins walked in shortly after, strolling to the front of the large crowd. He pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and slid his final smoke out through a tear in the packet, perching it gently between dry lips and stuffing the flattened carton into his back pocket before removing a lighter from the front zipper on his tactical vest and flicking the top of it open. After a long-drawn-out moment of him igniting the cigarette and placing the lighter back into the front zipper, he inhaled – filling his lungs with smoke, taking the small roll from his mouth, and exhaling the cancerous cloud.
“Well,” he began, tucking the lit instrument into the right most corner of his mouth. “From what I can see, we’re fucked.”
Silence continued to echo amongst the troops, unsurprised faces staring back at the colonel.
“I know, no shit, but we are well and truly fucked.”
~WAR DOGS: 2.~
~Somewhere out in the Open Wastes.~
For the most part, the planet was uninhabitable. The lands were now either molten glass, or the ground had been charred by the heat for such a prolonged period of time that dirt had been replaced with blackened sands and ash. Corporal Donavan “Crash” Krasinski didn’t mind a bit. Crash had been trained for desert combat in the marine corps after all. His unit specialised in traversing environments such as these in their stripped-down warthogs and their refitted Kodiaks that were now redesignated as tank hunters, their 1,152mm guns repurposed for anti-tank efforts. Each Kodiak – more affectionately known as House Cats – was capable of ripping a wraith in half, the powerful gun firing 90mm rounds that not only stood to be explosive, but also jettisoned magnesium upon penetrating armour. When Meridian finally fell, Crash’s battalion had been caught up a few hundred miles East of the New Meridian Corporation Drydocks, mopping up a Covenant armoured column. Although three of the seven House Cats had been lost in the exchange, the enemy column had been burned to cinders, left just as blackened as the sands beneath them. Now, Donovan and his men had to make the trek across to the docks.
Understandably, they were for the most part hesitant about the idea. It would be a hell of a shame to miss out on mopping up the other Covenant armoured units in the area. However, when news of the defence fleet abandoning all UNSC troops in the sector arrived, they had no other choice. Either the Desert Rats ran out of ammunition lollygagging in the strait, or they traversed the hellscape in favour of finding fresh faces.
Crash sat aboard his ‘hog at the front of the convoy, picking at the grub stuck to the corner of his nails. They’d been on the move for days – no drydock in sight. Crash thought it better to bring the House Cats along in case they’d ever need it, but now they were more of a burden. It was like dragging cattle fr hundreds of miles. They were useful, but unbelievably slow. Donovan rolled his eyes and looked across to the marine next to him, noting how filthy the both of them looked in the front two seats of the transport, dust and soot sticking to their skin, hiding skin complexion and the like.

“Hey, Boomer.”
“Yeah?”, the driver responded, turning to look at Crash. Boomer looked like shit, in all honesty. Not only had he not showered in days, but his goggles were now hanging around his neck, leaving an oddly clean perimeter around his eyes, big circles of clean skin wrapping around. Donovan couldn’t help but laugh, licking his finger to smudge the much on Boomer’s upper lip in an attempt to make a Mustache. Boomer, understandably, scoffed, and smacked Crash across the face, leaving a clean handprint on his right cheek.
“Cocky bastard!”, he exclaimed, followed by a second scoff. Crash adjusted his helmet and laughed, tucking the broken straps away behind his ears underneath the helm.
“Yeah, yeah – not MY fault that you look like a fuckin’ cartoon character…”, Crash remarked. “Plus, look around! The hell else am I supposed to do here? Twirl my non-existent facial hair?”
“Maybe if you had just ditched the big guns back there, we’d be there already!”
Shit – he had him there. Crash huffed and crossed his arms, sitting sideways on the seat and looking out to the open desert surrounding them. It was a blackened wasteland covered in dust storms and melted concrete. The convoy now was traversing over where one of the major cities used to stand – fuck knows which city, however.
“Crash, you think they’ll have good grub, or just more cheese paste and stale crackers?”
Donovan paused for a moment, twisting his neck around to look at his driver before shrugging.
“Anything’s gotta be better than those nutrient blocks we’ve been grinding our molars down for..”
The Corporal proceeded to shield his face, a sudden pothole on their path kicking up a cloud of black as the warthog dipped down and shot back up, the suspension covering most of the impact as the vehicle touched back down, thought it sure as hell hurt his ass more than he liked to admit. Twisting around once more, Crash grabbed the radio mic built into the stereo system and clicked the button on the side.
“Potholes, potholes, be advised.”
Each vehicle in the long line suddenly switched on their headlights, twisting around in an attempt to avoid them, some even drifting across the sands. Crash gave a shit-eating grin as he watched a transport hog Tokyo drift around to the front of the column, taking over as lead vehicle.
“Much obliged, 3-1!”
Donovan clipped the mic back down onto the stereo as Boomer mockingly twirled his finger above his lip, getting a firm knock on the head from him.
“Dust storm, dust storm!”, called the transport hog at the front. “Hatches down, ladies!”
Each warthog suddenly pulled across a set a reinforced covers which seemed to bolt themselves down through industrial clamps to the front of the vehicle, the massive glass window flicking its shutters closed. Crews on the House Cats soon returned to sitting inside their vehicles, locking down hatches and doorways as rocks and pebbles peppered the exterior of the vehicles. Crash cursed as one of these pebbles smacked into the cover of his warthog, leaving a massive dent. He picked up the speaker once more.
“Standby, shit’s about to get rough!”
Not much longer. Soon, they’d be at the docks. Soon, they’d get decent grub.
“Nearly home free”, said Crash. “Nearly home free, Boomer.”

I am just wondering why Wawa is restricting how many NJoY pod packs I can purchase. Each store says something different some say limit of 3 some say limit of 2. The cashiers seem to think it’s a government restriction, but when I go to QuickChek, they will sell me as many as I would like. Seems kind of silly when I can buy a carton of cigarettes, does anyone know why wawa is limiting sales. It’s a shame because I would pick wawa over quick check any day of the week but with these new limits I will be using quick check from now on.

The Case of Kate Blackwell: Howling? (REUPLOAD)
11/05/2017
Log book of Det. Ryan Snow
Case #2798: The Appalachian Murders
The meeting with Mr. Raines, though frustrating at times, did give me a slight better insight as to what it was I was dealing with. Unfortunately, it’s the farthest thing I wanted my leads to bring me to. I still can not reasonably rule Ms. Blackwell out for the murders in the Appalachian Mountains. I still need to gather more evidence to prove anything that I just found out and stop looking to Ms. Blackwell as my primary suspect.
I assured Ms. Blackwell would have constant surveillance during my time in Asheville to have my interview with Mr. Raines. Upon showing Sheriff Kirkpatrick the letter from my mysterious caller and what I had learned about Cloud Nine not assuring the security of their properties, he agreed to have a deputy monitor everything that happens at the Blackwell estate everyday until I could prove her innocent. After, if I were to prove she hadn’t killed anyone, Sheriff Kirkpatrick would partition to have her placed in witness protection. If the actual killer was out to get her, we’d have to take precautions to prevent another murder from happening concerning this case.
The cigarette carton I brought for Mr. Raines had to be opened and examined before I was to go into the interrogation room to speak to the convict. My gun and pen being taken away from me before I was allowed in the windowless room with nothing but a table to separate me from the killer.
Once Mr. Raines was lead in by guards, chained, he slumped down in the metal chair across from me. The guards quickly hooked his cuffs to the table before leaving us alone. He was middle aged, his once brown hair graying on the sides and gray beard scraggly. He appeared tired. Almost like any kind of fight that was left in his buff body was completely gone as he glared at me from across the table. Before I could get a word out, the older man asked for his cigarettes, to which I handed him the carton. Not even asking if I was fine with him smoking in the same room as me, he asked for a light as he placed one of the cigarettes in between his lips. I used the one match I was allowed to bring in and threw it out in the can behind me. As smoke began to fill the room, I asked if I could record out conversation. Mr. Raines only replied with grunt, to which I just assumed was a ‘yes.’
[RECORDING OF INTERVIEW WITH LEIGHTON RAINES]
[WHIRRING OF RECORDER]
DET. RYAN SNOW: This is Det. Ryan Snow at the [PRISON NAME REDACTED FOR PRIVACY] in Asheville, North Carolina. I am with Mr. Leighton Raines, conducting an interview to understand what took place in Cabin #2 of the Appalachian Mountains. Mr. Raines, do you know why you were imprisoned?
MR. RAINES [EXHALES SMOKE]: I killed my fiancé.
DET. RYAN SNOW: Can you tell me why?
MR. RAINES: I blacked out. Went mad. Killed her. I’m telling you what I told the court.
DET. RYAN SNOW: Do you believe that’s what happened?
MR. RAINES: What I believe and what really happened are irrelevant. I killed Bonnie. It’s as simple as that.
DET. RYAN SNOW: You wrote in the guest book that Bonnie heard something in the attic and that you ignored her.
[SILENCE]
DET. RYAN SNOW: You stated in it that you told her not to worry, but that the Ouija board hidden up in the attic ended up on the coffee table and you were holding a knife when you-
MR. RAINES: How… How did you know what I wrote in that book…? That the Ouija board was in the attic…?
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines, I-
MR. RAINES: I… I had no idea that piece of shit was up there… I didn’t… How’d you’d find out that’s where it came from?
[SILENCE]
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines, I’m going to have to ask you to hold off on your questions for a moment and recount every detail you remember when you went to that cabin.
MR. RAINES [SHUFFLING IN CHAIR]: Fucking Christ! [INHALES THEN EXHALES SMOKE] Fine… I… It was supposed to be a romantic getaway… Just me and… Her… To celebrate our upcoming marriage… I proposed to her on those God forsaken mountains… We hiked and I…
[SILENCE]
DET. RYAN SNOW: By “her” you mean… Bon-
MR. RAINES [SNIFFS]: Don’t. Don’t say her name. You don’t deserve that… [INHALES SMOKE BEFORE EXHALING] … We wanted to get away and just be together… She was getting nervous about the wedding… So, I booked the cabin to get her away from the stress of getting the whole wedding together… Her parents never really cared for our relationship and my best man had gotten the flu, so I knew she wasn’t having the best time getting everyone she wanted together for the wedding… Up there… In that cabin… It was just us… No upcoming wedding… No disappointed parents… No friends who were getting sick or canceling… It was just us… The world… No one else existed except B-… [INHALES SMOKE THEN EXHALES]
DET. RYAN SNOW: The guest book, you said she heard noises. When did she start hearing them?
MR. RAINES [SIGHS]: Yeah… Yeah, we both heard some noises coming from the attic I think… On our… Third day there? I just thought it was an animal and thought the little dumb ass would find its way out, so I told B-her to just ignore it… I couldn’t open that attic anyway… It was locked. I…
[SILENCE]
MR. RAINES: You… You said that the Ouija board was up there…?
DET. RYAN SNOW: You didn’t know?
MR. RAINES: Of course not! Had I been able to get up in that shitty attic and saw that fucking toy up there, I would have gotten Bon- my… Her… Out of there! I don’t believe in that hocus pocus, but she did and I knew she’d be having a panic attack over it. I brought her there to get away from the stress, not make it… Make it… Worse… The… The attic… It was locked…
DET. RYAN SNOW: I’m sorry?
MR. RAINES: The attic was locked… When the police came… I called them and told them everything I knew… They had gone to the attic to see about the noises I told them about when they asked me to explain what happened… It was still locked… The attic… Said it could only be unlocked and locked again by a key… I hadn’t broken the lock… There was no key… How’d I get that Ouija board…?
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines, someone else found the Ouija board up in the attic during their stay in the cabin, there could have been two, the one you had may have come from somewhere else and the one the next tenant found was-
MR. RAINES: Wait, what?
DET. RYAN SNOW: What?
MR. RAINES: There’s been people staying in that cabin after me?
[SILENCE]
DET. RYAN SNOW: Yes…?
MR. RAINES: No… No, no… No, no, no! [CHAIR SLIDES AS MR. RAINES STANDS] No one should have gone up there after what happened! That place should be burned down! What happened to me shouldn’t happen to anyone else! It left me to rot in this prison! It wants more! It’ll get more if people go up there!
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines, please, calm down! What do you mean? What are you talking about? What is “it?”
MR. RAINES: What am I…? What kind of detective are you? The Ouija board, me waking up to me killing my Bonnie, the noises! None of this shit is clicking with you?
[SILENCE]
MR. RAINES: “It” is a demon! Something from Hell that made me kill my beautiful future wife using that God damned Ouija board!
[SILENCE]
DET. RYAN SNOW: You’re saying… You were… Possessed…?
MR. RAINES [SLUMPS BACK IN CHAIR AND INTAKES ANOTHER PUFF OF SMOKE]: Knew it wouldn’t hold up in court either, so I confessed to just killing her and… And nothing else happened after… No black outs… My cellmate’s a dick, yet I haven’t killed him… Yet… So, I just assumed the demon went back to the cabin to get its next victim. Never told anyone my theory about it, because I knew they’d think I was crazy…
DET. RYAN SNOW: I thought you didn’t believe in that kind of stuff?
MR. RAINES: I don’t… But that’s all I could understand about how I could have… Killed her… The Ouija board… The knife… My not remembering what happened no matter how hard I try to dig deep enough into my memories to find the answers… I… I don’t remember…
DET. RYAN SNOW: The autopsy… Her heart was missing… You don’t remember taking it…?
[SILENCE]
MR. RAINES [INHALES SMOKE THEN EXHALES]: No… The police couldn’t find it either… Some people… The press and… People who didn’t fully know about me… Theorize that I… That I… [SNIFFING] That I ate her heart… There was blood all over me… Even some around my mouth… So… [SNIFFING]
DET. RYAN SNOW: People think you… Ate her heart?
MR. RAINES: Some kind of… Ritualistic killing from what I remember them saying… That I communicated with that demon and made a deal with it… Her heart being what sealed our… “Contract…” Christ, it sounds so stupid saying it out loud… I just… I don’t remember messing with that Ouija board or… Anything…
DET. RYAN SNOW: Do you remember anything about that day? The moments before you… Before blacking out?
MR. RAINES: We went for a hike to get her away from those sounds in that attic… They were scaring her and I thought a walk would calm her down… She said she’d been hearing things at night… Was having nightmares of someone telling her things… Telling her I’d been cheating on her… I should have just taken her away from that place, taken her home… [SNIFFING] I never should have asked her to marry me… [INHALES SMOKE THEN EXHALES] We got back after she seemed to calm down… I opened the door for her and we walked in… That’s… That’s when things went black… That’s all I can remember before blacking out… Before I… Woke up… [SNIFFING] God… The fear in her eyes… [SNIFFING]
DET. RYAN SNOW: Was there any indication before the trip that she believed you had been cheating on her?
MR. RAINES: No! No, of course not! I would never! I would never cheat on her! She was everything and I could never see any other girl behind her back like that! No, she was just stressed about the wedding and everything going on, so I just chalked it all up to her mind playing tricks on her. I worried she was getting cold feet and… And I just was so afraid of her… Leaving me…
DET. RYAN SNOW: I see. Did you worry for a while, even before the trip, that she would leave you?
MR. RAINES: I… I had my concerns… But then she said ‘yes’ when I asked her to marry me… I thought all those feelings… All those worries, all the back lash from her family… I thought it would all go away… Then I booked… That… Fucking cabin… [INHALES SMOKE BEFORE EXHALING]
DET. RYAN SNOW: Did you book the cabin through Cloud Nine Vacation Rentals?
MR. RAINES: Cloud Nine Vacation…? No, I booked it through some bitch named… Ah… Alba Larson? She said she was the landlord. I booked it through her.
DET. RYAN SNOW: How did you come across her contact information?
MR. RAINES: I was looking up places in the mountains to book a place for us… Posted on Facebook for any recommendations and she reached out to me… She vanished off the fucking Earth, so the police couldn’t find her.
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines… Someone did indeed book themselves in that cabin after you. Many did actually, but only one of them booked through Mrs. Larson. Everyone else booked through Cloud Nine Vacation Rentals. That person is under suspicion of murder as well. Now, the thing about Mrs. Larson, is that she’s been dead since 2005 and the property was bought out by Cloud Nine when no one could locate any family of Mrs. Larson.
[SILENCE]
MR. RAINES: Y-You’re… You’re fucking with me…
[SHUFFLING SOUND OF DET. RYAN SNOW TAKING OUT A PHOTO OF MRS. LARSON AND HER DEATH CERTIFICATE, PLACING IT ON THE TABLE]
MR. RAINES: Th-That’s… That’s… That’s her… She’s the one I spoke to about… What the fuck…? What the actual fuck?
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines, are you absolutely, one-hundred percent, sure that you killed your fiancé?
MR. RAINES: I don’t know… I don’t know… I… I can’t remember… Someone else is accused of murder…?
DET. RYAN SNOW: Yes. They booked the cabin through Mrs. Larson and went through something similar as you did. They heard sounds in the attic, heard voices, and found a Ouija board in the attic. There were five of them and one was accused of murdering the other four. However, her story matches yours in a way and I believe there may be someone either impersonating Mrs. Larson or just some sick killer luring people to that cabin to kill them. Why they’re leaving you and this other person is what I’m also trying to figure out. I can’t rule out anything. I can’t say for certain that you’re both innocent. They could have looked up your story, did some digging, and repeated everything that happened to get away with it. I’m still trying figure out if you both did indeed speak to a Mrs. Larson, or if you just made all that up.
MR. RAINES: Well I spoke to someone! That’s for damn sure, but how the hell could they have been dead for five years?
DET. RYAN SNOW: Exactly. You’re saying you were possessed. This person also believes they were framed by something that didn’t show itself until they got the Ouija board. I don’t believe for one second it was something supernatural, but it definitely has something to do with the occult. You said your wife believed in that stuff, yes?
MR. RAINES: Y-Yeah…
DET. RYAN SNOW: I see.
MR. RAINES: So, now what?
DET. RYAN SNOW: If you have nothing else to offer, I’ll need to take my leave and continue my investigation on this current suspect. If I can prove that they’re innocent and see if I can find out who the real killer is, I will have the court petition to release you and clear you of the murder.
MR. RAINES: And if you can’t?
DET. RYAN SNOW: Then you and my current suspect are going to be imprisoned for a very long time and those cabins will remain.
[CHAIR CLATTERING]
MR. RAINES: No! No, you can’t let that place remain open to the public! If what you say is true, then that place needs to be burned down! Whether or not a demon is to blame for my Bonnie dying, there’s seriously something wrong with that place!
DET. RYAN SNOW: Mr. Raines, there’s nothing I can do about the cabins after I prove or disprove you and this person. What happens to them is up to nature at this point as I also plan on taking down Cloud Nine. They failed you and this person, despite the kind of people you could turn out to be. I’m afraid that’s all I can give you and all you can give me… [CHAIR SLIDES AS DET. RYAN SNOW STANDS]
MR. RAINES: Wait! Wait!
DET. RYAN SNOW: Yes?
MR. RAINES: I… I remember… One last thing… I remember… Something after I woke up from my black out…
DET. RYAN SNOW: And that is?
MR. RAINES: Howling…
DET. RYAN SNOW: Howling?
MR. RAINES: Yes, howling.
DET. RYAN SNOW: It’s the mountains.
MR. RAINES: I just- you- mother fuck- [DEEP BREATH] I understand that and I thought the same thing, but there was something… Off about it… It wasn’t until I got off the phone with the police that I heard it… That howling… I thought it was a mountain lion at first or maybe a group of coyote… But… It sounded… Almost human… An animal… I can’t describe it, but… It still haunts me…
[CREAKING NOISE]
DET. RYAN SNOW: Best of luck to you Mr. Raines. I’m sorry for your loss.
MR. RAINES: Dick-
[END OF RECORDING]
As I stated before, my conversation with Mr. Raines did give me more of an insight to what I was dealing with in the Blackwell case, but it was leading me down a hole I did not want to fall into. Demons? Possession? Things I never believed in. Everything had a far more reasonable, rational answer to it. Things that went bump in the night didn’t exist.
Unfortunately, anything else I tried putting together to make this puzzle were not fitting. Both Ms. Blackwell and Mr. Raines stated that they had spoken or at least exchanged communication with Mrs. Larson to book the cabin. They both, or at least Ms. Collins when she visited with Mr. Raines, heard sounds and voices coming from a locked attic. And they both had experiences with the Ouija board. Mr. Raines having no idea how he had gotten it from the attic which was still locked when he woke up from his black out.
There was just one last piece. The howling that Mr. Raines heard after his supposed murder of Ms. Collins. Ms. Blackwell had never mentioned to me about any howling during her time in those mountains. I’m going to conduct one last interview with Ms. Blackwell. If her answers bring me to another dead end, I will have no other choi
[RECORDING OF PHONE CALL BETWEEN DET. RYAN SNOW AND UNKNOWN CALLER]
[PHONE RINGING]
DET. SNOW: Det. Ryan Snow with the Char-
UNKNOWN: Lucky… Dime…
[CLATTERING SOUND]
DET. SNOW: Who is this? Where are you? How do you-
UNKNOWN: Bring her back… Please… I need it… Please….
DET. SNOW: What do you need from her? She’s not going back to those mountains just for you to-
UNKNOWN: Liam says hello…
[SILENCE]
DET. SNOW: How… H-how do…
UNKNOWN: Bring her-
DET. SNOW: Son of a bitch, tell me how you know that name!
UNKNOWN: Regan…
[SILENCE]
DET. SNOW: What… What am I thinking right now?
[SILENCE[
UNKNOWN: Lake… Gaagige…
[BEEPING OF LINE GOING DEAD]
[RECORDING ENDS]
I need to talk to Ms. Blackwell. I need to know what the hell is going on. This can’t be real. It just can’t be what I’m starting to believe it is.
Part 6
Part 4

Whenever I'm on mission I pick up almost all items I've tagged for search.
So imagine I'm walking through some ruins, shooting whoever's in my way and then "ooh look, a microscope, gotta have that. Ooh, toy rocketship, I always need aluminum". It's really statisfying to just feed all the junk to my work station when I'm home.
I also like taking all cigarette cartons and box and then selling them, even for a small profit.

I got some Kentucky burley and Virginia tobacco seeds off ebay, started sprouting them indoors about a month ago. Put some of the larger plants in the ground already protected by hay for frost. Been a very late spring unfortunately. Anyone grow in 3b and have any tips? Also i dont smoke, i am going to give it to my friend who smokes drum. Is Virginia and burley good for cigarettes? Thanks for any help

Yes, I know smoking is bad for you, which is why I don't.
My friend, though, has a family member who is in her late 70s, won't quit, and needs her cigarettes. She just had a nasty fall and will be recovering mostly in bed for the next six months and won't be able to leave the house without assistance.
He doesn't live here and we've got most of her stuff worked out online — groceries, lite beer, cleaning supplies, water, etc. The one we're having trouble with is her cigarettes.
She buys them at two to three cartons at a time. From what I can tell Postmates used to deliver until it was bought out by Uber, which doesn't. Do any of the smaller local smoke shops delivery locally? Is there a mail-order version? How does one in Las Vegas attain the purchase of a delivered carton of tobacco cigarettes these days?

A movie I saw, I think in the 80s but I seem to remember it looking like it was filmed in the 70s, was about a killer loose in a town. The scenes I remember were a husband and wife at home, the wife smoked and the husband didn't, and the wife ran out of cigarettes. The husband asked her not to go out to buy more cigarettes, and she agreed, but then he left the room and came back to see a note on the table from her saying "Non-smokers wouldn't understand!". The wife goes to the store and gets a carton of cigarettes, and then stops at a gas station, where the attendant asks very slowly "You want gas?". The wife nods, getting very nervous, and then the gas station attendant smashes her window with the gas nozzle and pulls her out of the car. It turns out the killer was in the back seat of her car and the attendant saw the killer. The show ends with the husband and wife walking, I think back to the house, and the wife throws the carton of cigarettes in the trash.

Where can I buy a whole carton of Stuyvesant extra mild 20 cigarettes in Lusaka? Looking for a good deal. Thanks in advance.

I noticed RC ships have a “buy 3 cartons of cigarettes get one free” often. Looking at the laws, it appears you can only bring 200 cigarettes into the states (one carton). What’s RCs logic with this? Are they assuming you will smoke 3 cartons on the ship? Do you claim them at customs and then pay some sort of fee or tax? Has anyone ever not claimed them at customs and got caught? Just curious. I don’t smoke, but some coworkers do and smokes are like, 80% cheaper on the ship than back at home (easily $12/pack).

I was sitting around watching TV (currently taking two week paid vacation off work in Spain) and thought of a cool idea.
In Spain we have bars that close at 5AM. At 6 AM there are several other bars that we call “afters” that open until 1PM. (People go hard in Europe)
But between 5AM and 6AM, everything is closed. So people just wait outside the “afters” until they open. There is no way to get anything until they open.
So I decided to buy 4 cartons (40 packs) of cigarettes for about 180 euros. I went to the “after” at 5AM, and started selling packs of cigarettes for 9 euros each. I sold all of them in about 40 minutes and made 360 euros (180 profit). Had I gone with a cooler full of beer, I likely would have sold out of that as well
I probably won’t do it again, and this probably wouldn’t work as effectively in America (smoking is very popular in Spain still), but thought it was a cool idea to share.

Morton White

29 April 1917 – 27 May 2016
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Morton White and the Regularity Theory of Historical Explanation
Monday 29 April 2024 is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Morton White (29 April 1917 – 27 May 2016), who was born in New York City on this date in 1917.
White is known, among other things, for his rejection of speculative philosophies of history. It’s not always clear what philosophers mean when they say they reject speculative philosophies of history, but one suspects that this is a way to indirectly distance themselves from that bête noir, Hegel, or that other bête noir, Marx, whose birthday is just a few days away. He opens his book Foundations of Historical Knowledge with exactly this gambit, naming and shaming Hegel, Marx, Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee in rapid succession.
White says that philosophy of history is, “a discipline with a checkered past, a respectable present and, I hope, a brighter future.” Presumably Hegel and friends represent the checkered past. Why was this past checkered? Because they went about the business of philosophy of history all wrong. Now we are smarter and we know better. Here is how White characterizes the change in philosophy of history that delivered us from the bad old days of all that had gone before:

“Instead of seeking to chart the development of epochs, cultures, and civilizations, the contemporary philosopher of history is more interested in analyzing historical thought and language. Instead of trying to advance or defend some general theory of the historical process itself, the contemporary philosopher of history who is not dominated by the aims of Marxism or by certain forms of theology is now primarily concerned with the logic of history, anxious to elucidate terms that are commonly employed by historians and historically minded thinkers, and eager to advance toward a clearer understanding of the chief intellectual activities of the historian.”

Notice that White here invoked a desire to advance toward a clearer understanding of the chief intellectual activities of the historian. This is the familiar figure of the practicing historian—one might even say the familiar philosophical figure of the practicing historian, sometimes called the working historian—which I previously discussed in my episode on Siefried Kracauer, who was also interested in a philosophical exposition of the practicing historian. In my Siefried Kracauer episode I argued that the idea of the practicing historian serves the philosophy of history much as the idea of the practicing mathematician serves the philosophy of mathematics. The underlying idea here is that philosophers get too focused on peculiarly philosophical problems and lose sight of the actual problems faced by historians doing history, scientists doing science, and mathematicians doing mathematics (as though this were the proper remit of the philosopher).
If specifically philosophical problems are illegitimate, as is sometimes implied, then if anything remains of philosophy, we are left with the Quinean dictum that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. I’m not going to argue this point at present, but I wanted to mention it so as to be on the up-and-up on the motivations that drive a lot of contemporary philosophy. But is the practicing historian, or the practicing whatever who is invoked by philosophers, really the philosophically pristine figure that they are made out to be? Or might it be that the practicing historian is a construction of the philosopher of history who wants to attribute his views to this pristine figure so as to derive the disciplinary authority of some figure not attached to a particular philosophical school? This might sound like an uncharitable way to characterize the work of a philosopher, but I think we can legitimately ask this question in relation to White’s use of the figure of the historian.
White does not himself use the language of the “practicing historian” or “working historian” but instead uses “professional historian,” as in the following from his Foundations of Historical Knowledge:

“…professional historians write their histories about a limited class of things. Not any thing may be a central subject of a historian’s history. Historians write histories of nations, civilizations, scientific societies, philosophical movements, revolutions, economies, religions. They usually do not write histories of planets, animals, stars, rocks, or galaxies. So we know that they are primarily concerned with the social behavior of human beings. However, the problem before us now is not that of defining the class of things or subjects of which historians with a large ‘H’ may write a history. We are asking what features of a given subject should be mentioned in a history of that subject. And if we are seeking a definition of the notion of what features should be recorded by a professional historian, I do not think that any useful one can be supplied.”

Historians today do write histories of planets, animals, stars, rock, and galaxies. We find this in particular in the school of big history, which I discussed in a recent episode on my paper, A Complexity Ladder for Big History. Nevertheless, it remains true that professional historians are primarily concerned with the social behavior of human beings. This loose way of understanding history allows for differences in scope as to what properly constitutes history, but, even given his wiggle room, White concedes the impossibility of a definition of what is to be included in a history, and what is to be excluded. This is the familiar problem of the historian’s selection of his material.
The historian’s selection has been a target for critics of the possibility of objectivity in history. White addressed the objectivity question for history in his book Social Thought in America. I have not yet been able to get a copy of this book, but there is a section reprinted in Hans Meyerhoff’s anthology The Philosophy of History in Our Time. White’s Social Thought in America was first published in 1949, some years before Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History was published in 1965. I mention this because White implicitly discusses the problem of the perfect chronicler, which we find fully explicit in Danto, and White doesn’t make the breakthrough that Danto did, namely, that the logical structure of a narrative sentence is distinct from propositions such as one would find in a chronicle.
A narrative sentence describes an earlier event in terms of a later event—for example, the future 16th president of the United States was born in a log cabin in Kentucky on 12 February 1809—which is a meaning that no chronicle, no matter how exhaustive, can capture. White has his own solution to this problem that is different from Danto’s, but since Danto’s work changed the field, White’s solution is not discussed today. But I wanted to mention this book by White—Social Thought in America—since it further develops the theme of the working historian.
As I said, I don’t have a copy of the book, but the extract from the book included in Meyerhoff is a discussion of American historian Charles Beard. Beard is among the most eminent of American historians, with a multi-volume work on The Rise of American Civilization and his influential book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, among many other works. Beard would seem to be a perfect candidate for a working historian or practicing historian or professional historian. Beard did, however, occasionally express himself on philosophical matters connected to history, so his work isn’t perfectly pristine with respect to philosophy.
What I find interesting is that White does not take Beard as a model of historical practice from which philosophers should learn, but in fact he critiques Beard’s views. This strikes me as both strange and as understandable. It is strange because, if the philosopher is supposed to take his instruction in history from the professional historian, presumably it would be White’s business to follow the lead of Beard and provide a philosophical justification for why Beard’s historical practice is the proper model for philosophy of history. Is it understandable because no philosopher can resist poking holes in the philosophical arguments of others, especially when those others are non-philosophers who are a soft target for philosophical argumentation.
White does a poor job of selflessly serving professional historians, but he does a good job of drawing out the philosophical presuppositions of professional historians like Beard, and in demonstrating their previously unnoticed consequences of these presuppositions. Beard redeems himself in White’s eyes only because he fails to heed his own philosophical views in his historical practice:

“It should be said in Beard’s behalf that he was the only member of the group I have examined who has given a full account of the methods and aims of the social sciences. It is not surprising, therefore, that his ideas should be subject to detailed criticism. He raced around fields where most of the others stepped lightly and infrequently. And very often he says what they really thought, while they merely mumbled it incoherently or kept it to themselves. For all his mistakes and his philosophical confusions, Beard’s later work in the methodology of the social sciences remains stimulating. It goes without saying that his errors in philosophy cast no reflection on his work in social science itself. In this respect he takes his position in a long and worthy line of scientists— physical and social—who have worked with standards in philosophy which they dared not use in science.”

This final claim that scientists have worked with standards in philosophy which they dared not use in science—the crucial condition for Beard’s redemption arc—poses many interesting questions. Should scientists dare to employ their philosophical standards in scientific practice? Is it possible for scientists to hold philosophical views, if only in subtle and difficult to discern ways, that do not influence their scientific practice? I have been assuming that one of the reasons philosophers appeal to the practice of working historians or the practice of working mathematician as the justification for authentic philosophical views reflective of a discipline is because these practices are believed to be purer because there are uncontaminated by philosophy.
Of course, the forbidden views the intrusion of which is particularly unwelcome are usually metaphysical views. One of the presumed ingredients of a speculative philosophy of history such as proscribed by White is too much metaphysics, or the wrong kind of metaphysics. It is entirely possible that someone might formulate a metaphysical philosophy of history that was not a speculative philosophy of history. For example, an analytical philosopher of history might formulate an ontology of historical objects, events, and processes while remaining entirely agnostic on any laws governing these historical objects, events, and processes.
Of course, we can ask why someone would take the trouble to formulate an ontology for history while carefully avoiding noticing any pattern that these objects, events and processes might exhibit, especially as the historical events and processes that connect historical objects to one another might themselves be taken to be laws of history. But let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that it is possible dance around any connection between events and to lay out an ontology of history that has nothing to do with laws of history.
I strongly suspect that the same kind of animus that has been directed against speculative philosophy of history by analytical philosophers would be directed also against a non-speculative metaphysical philosophy of history. White himself acknowledges pragmatists, naturalists, and realists are anti-metaphysical and united in their rejection of speculative philosophy of history, which implies the equivalence of metaphysical and speculative philosophy of history, but, as we have seen, careful observance of the method of isolation can separate the two.
I said earlier that Danto had changed philosophy of history so dramatically that earlier approaches to narrative, such as we find in White, have fallen out of notice since Danto’s work took the field. This is sometimes expressed as Danto inaugurating an era of post-positivist analytical philosophy of history. White belonged to the still-positivism period of analytical philosophy of history. The high water mark of positivism prior to Danto is represented by Carl Hempel. In my episode on Carl Hempel I mentioned his covering law model of historical explanation. This is the tradition within which White was working, though he called Hempel’s covering law model the regularity theory of historical explanation, and he glossed it like this:

“It will be convenient to begin by considering what is sometimes called the covering law, or regularity, theory of historical explanation. On this view an explanation of a war, a revolution, or an economic depression is similar in structure to an explanation of a fire. We may explain a particular fire, it is maintained, by deducing the statement that the fire has taken place from the statement that a spark has fallen into a wastebasket of dry paper surrounded by oxygen and from the law that whenever a spark falls into such a wastebasket under such conditions, a fire will take place. Some philosophers who accept this view contend that not only the truth of a singular explanatory statement in ordinary language, like ‘The lit cigarette caused the fire’ or ‘The bent rail caused the derailment,’ but also that of a singular statement in history books, like ‘The Moslem seizure of the Mediterranean Sea caused the breakdown of the Mediterranean Commonwealth in Europe,’ is dependent on the truth of a law. Ever since Hume, such a theory has exerted a powerful hold on philosophers, even on those who recognize and emphasize the limits of historical speculation. The idea that we can intuitively see causal connections between historical events without appealing to inductively established laws, or that causes have unanalyzable powers to bring about their effects, has seemed indefensible to philosophers of an empirical turn of mind, and they have therefore been led to the view that causal statements are either disguised statements of laws or are in some way dependent upon them for their truth. Even though historians in their explanatory statements refer to particular events like the Civil War and the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests, philosophers under the influence of Hume and Mill have maintained that such explanatory statements turn out upon analysis to imply, involve, presuppose, or depend on general laws.”

The covering law model presents a subtle problem for the analytical philosopher of history. The analytical philosopher of history has renounced the possibility of finding laws of history. But the idea of laws of history is ambiguous. What is and what is not a law of history? The covering law model of historical explanation makes explanations of historical events into law-like statements, but how is an explanation of history distinction from a speculative philosophy of history that gives a lawlike explanation of events? Are we not, with the covering law model, offering laws of history?
White is sensitive to this problem. He was concerned that the laws of the covering law model might be mistaken for the faulty generalizations of speculative philosophers of history, and on this problem wrote:

“Although the ‘laws’ of certain speculative philosophers of history do not always turn out to apply to single examples, there is no doubt that they often apply to very few examples by comparison to the laws of natural science, and this paucity of inductive evidence may lead some critics of the regularity theory of historical explanation to complain that any law of the sort the regularist may employ in an explanatory deductive argument will resemble the allegedly bankrupt laws of the speculative theorist of history. Once again, however, it must be pointed out that there is no a priori reason to suppose that regularism involves an appeal to indefensible laws, and also that where a speculative theorist asserts a law that is not supported by inductive evidence and he cannot compensate for that defect by, for example, deducing it from more fundamental statements, he is justly criticized. The fact that certain speculative philosophers of history assert faulty generalizations is not an argument against the regularity theory of historical explanation.”

Is it only the indefensible laws of history that are bankrupt, leaving defensible laws of history intact? If this is the case, how do we distinguish between defensible and indefensible generalizations in history? If we can offer more fundamental laws from which our laws of history are derived, and the fundamental laws are among the defensible generalizations, does that get us off the hook? Have we successfully avoided a metaphysical philosophy of history if we can support our historical generalizations with inductive evidence or more fundamental laws?
When White argues that historians are really using a covering law model even when they don’t realize that they are appealing to this kind of explanation of historical events, he is making an appearance/reality distinction: the appearance of ordinary historical explanation is not that of covering law model explanations, but in reality this is what the historian is doing. The historian doesn’t know that he is using a covering law model of explanation. That is to say, the professional historian doesn’t know what he is doing as he is doing history. This seems harsh, but it is exactly this lack of self-awareness that White thinks redeems Beard, who, according to White, doesn’t impose his naïve philosophy on his historical practice. So much for historical practice as a guide to philosophy of history.
Moreover, if making an appearance/reality distinction is metaphysics, White is engaged in a metaphysical philosophy of history because he distinguishes between the appearance and reality of covering law models of historical explanation. In all fairness to White, I agree with the essentials of his claim: historians are presupposing a number of covering laws in their historical explanations. The problem is often that the laws are so many, so subtle, so elusive, and so intricately tied together that it would be difficult in the extreme to tease out the exact deduction that is being made. The complexity of history defeats ordinary human deductive powers.
There is a relatively unstudied backwater in the philosophy of history that would consist in reducing this complexity of history to a manageable form—perhaps through an adequate taxonomy of historical objects, events, and processes, which I earlier called a metaphysical philosophy of history.
Here lies an opportunity to demonstrate that a metaphysical philosophy of history is possible within the framework of analytical philosophy of history. There is no reason to believe that this cannot be done, but exhibiting such on ontology would be more convincing that merely arguing for its plausibility.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/5ulU0P3ir9g
https://www.instagram.com/p/C6YEiCLNuwd/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/morton-white-and-the-regularity-theory:c

Podcast Edition

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/64tLDTq7cJb
https://podcasters.amazon.com/podcasts/a31b8276-53cd-4723-b6ad-a39c8faa4572/episodes/bd3101c1-93ad-462c-8a5b-b488ffb41015
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/morton-white-and-the-regularity-theory-172150253/
​

Visiting Vegas this week and would like to get a couple cartons of cigarettes. Where can I get the best price near the strip if possible?

I was in Mauritius about 2 weeks ago and went around looking for a cigarette brand I really liked from Dunhill. Unfortunately I couldn't find them easily and got it from a small corner store for something like R500. Did something change?? I bought a carton of my own for personal use but wanted to try the strawberry flavoured cigarette here and it was so hard to find.
Pretty weird, I couldn't understand.

Hi all, wondering about how feasible is it to get cigarettes shipped into the country from a website like taxfreecigarettes or some other online retailer.
I smoke American Spirits only (100% tobacco no fillers) and as far as I know they're ONLY available in the US. I brought the allowed 400 (2 cartons) in with me but am dwindling my supply. Will Qatar allow this type of shipment? All I can find is regulations about traveling with them but not the mailing of them.
I am not ready to quit and don't want to change a brand because I cannot seem to find any product that is of this quality.
Alternatively, is anyone aware of some magical place in Qatar that happens to carry this brand? I'm assuming no and have asked around, but figured I'd ask here just in case. Otherwise I'm really hoping I can get some shipped. Thanks all!

This is absolutely unacceptable. I am making this post anonymously, but I want this to be widely known. PPD has disabled Anonymous Tip Lines (maybe in leu of the current situation on Kentucky Bars?).
Anyways I attempted to report a stalker who followed me from a bar I was at despite me telling the bartenders I am leaving because he is creeping on me. They said "yeah sorry about that we noticed he was being a weirdo" but didn't provide anything more than that. I didn't expect more than that but I really wish at this point someone had fucking stopped him because he continued to follow me.
As I left the bar and walked down the street I lit a cig, and was cautious because I was nervous this creep would be there. And he was. He followed me while I decided to smoke a cigarette. I was lucky enough that I was fairly certain he would be a creep who would follow me so I watched him after walking about 1 block away and turning round he was there.. I walked another block away, he followed. I walked a block diagonal (across the street and across again). He kept following me each corner and each crosswalk across the way. Even pretending to check his phone or drag an imaginary cigarette when I kept looking back.
I knew that this guy had stalker vibes from encountering him at the bar let alone while he followed me so I immediately decided it was time to quit the cig and just walk away as fast as I could for my safety. I hurried down another block and yet again I saw him following. I got into my car about 2 blocks outside the bar (I was only there for a drink before I had planned to head out, yet my night was cut short by a fucking weirdo like this guy...). He saw me get in and I pray to god he didn't read my plates.
I started to panic like it was an emergency at this point. But I kept calm as I drove up a few blocks past my house because I just wanted to leave without this guy following me. He was clearly intent on following me home. I drove away after but kept making sure he wasn't following.
I got home (after driving a few extra blocks to avoid being followed) and went to report to the anonymous PPD hotline. Guess what? it's a looping receiver with no actual "anonymous" tip lines to leave. I feel like I can not go back to this bar nor can I be truly safe in this town. Fucking great.
Why can't I leave an anonymous tip? Do I need to make a formal police report despite nothing truly occurring that night?