GrapheneOS and stock Android are both OS options for phones. GrapheneOS focuses on keeping your info safe. Stock Android, on the other hand, offers many handy features. Let's dive into how these two differ in privacy, security, and what you can do. This way, you can pick the one that suits your needs best.

Key Takeaways:

• GrapheneOS places a strong emphasis on privacy and security, while stock Android focuses on providing convenience features.
• GrapheneOS stays close to upstream and delivers regular updates before stock OS.
• Google apps work on GrapheneOS, but some apps need special permission to install.
• Some banking apps might not work on GrapheneOS. This is because they lack a certification from Google. You might be able to make some of them work by using special settings in the apps.
• Unfortunately, GrapheneOS misses on Android Auto and easy backup solutions.

GrapheneOS Features

GrapheneOS is known for its strong focus on privacy and security. This makes it perfect for those who want to keep their data safe. Now, let's look at what makes GrapheneOS stand out from the rest.

Sandboxed Google Play Services

One of GrapheneOS's key features is sandboxed Google Play services. This means apps can't freely access your private data. They're limited to a safe area. This helps prevent data leaks and stops apps from seeing more than they should.

Regular Updates for Security Maintenance

GrapheneOS keeps devices safe by offering frequent security updates. These updates fix any new vulnerabilities that might arise. This way, the system is always up-to-date, keeping your device secure.

Attack Surface Reduction Measures

GrapheneOS uses techniques to reduce the chances of different types of attacks. It limits how much apps can interact with the system, blocking some attacks right at the start. It also includes special features that make it harder for attackers to exploit the system.

Enhanced Heap Memory Corruption Defense

Heaps are a common target for hackers, but GrapheneOS strengthens against this. It uses its own memory management system to protect against heap corruption. This includes special memory handling to make attacks harder.

Robust Memory Exploit Detection and Prevention

GrapheneOS is ahead of the game in detecting and stopping memory exploits. It has tools that spot and fix important memory bugs. This helps keep your device safe from complex attacks that target memory use.

Official Production Support for Pixel Devices

GrapheneOS supports many Pixel devices officially. This includes the Pixel 8 Pro and other new Pixel devices. Users of Pixel devices can get the added security and privacy GrapheneOS offers.
After learning about GrapheneOS, it's time to look at Stock Android's setup and features in the next section.

Stock Android Setup and Features

Setting up Stock Android on your device is simple. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy. When you turn on your device, you'll follow some steps to make it yours. This includes picking a language, connecting to Wi-Fi, and signing in to Google.
Stock Android works perfectly with Google's many services. Thanks to Google Play services, you get millions of apps and games from the Play Store. Just sign in with your Google account to start downloading your favorite apps, from work tools to social apps.
Stock Android also brings you Google Maps. It gives you precise directions and updates on traffic in real time. It's great for finding your way in a car or on foot, showing you the best routes and interesting places nearby.
With Google Keyboard, typing is easier and better. It guesses your next words, lets you swipe to type, and supports different languages. This means typing on your phone is faster and more accurate.

Key Features of Stock Android:

• Simple and user-friendly setup process
• Integration with Google services, including the Google Play Store
• Google Maps for navigation and exploring new places
• Google Keyboard for enhanced typing experience

Features	Stock Android
User-friendly setup	✓
Google Play Store access	✓
Google Maps integration	✓
Enhanced typing experience with Google Keyboard	✓

Functionality Comparison

GrapheneOS and stock Android are much alike in basic phone tasks. Yet, they have key differences.

GrapheneOS Functionality

GrapheneOS values substance over flashy marketing. It cares deeply about privacy and security. By not including Google services, it focuses more on protecting users.
Its main goal is making your device safe from attack. It does this by limiting what attackers can do and safeguarding the core part of the operation system.
It also stops attackers from taking full control even if they somehow get in. This is done through a feature called verified boot.
By removing unneeded code, GrapheneOS makes attacks from far away, close by, or online less likely. It adds layers of protection to apps and the system, making them much harder to exploit.

GrapheneOS Functionality Features	Description
Sandboxed Play Services	A sandboxed Play Services feature that provides better app compatibility, functionality, and security compared to MicroG.
Push Notifications without Play Services	GrapheneOS allows push notifications to work fine without Play Services for many apps.
Privacy-Focused Network Toggle	GrapheneOS offers a network toggle without leaks and prefers fine-grained VPNs for enhanced security.

GrapheneOS finds a sweet spot between being private, easy to use, and secure. It designs features to challenge any threats.

Stock Android Functionality

Stock Android, made by Google, aims for everyone. It has many features that cater to diverse needs.
One highlight is Android Auto, making your phone and car work together. This way, you keep your hands off the phone while driving yet enjoy many useful features.
Another cool feature is Now Playing. It shows what song is playing without you needing to open your phone. This is handy for finding new music.

Stock Android Functionality Features	Description
Android Auto	Android Auto provides seamless integration between Android devices and compatible vehicles for hands-free access to navigation, communication, and entertainment features.
Now Playing	Now Playing feature The identifies and displays the currently playing song on the lock screen.

Such features make stock Android attractive for those who want a versatile system. It's packed with tools and tricks to make your life easier.
Remember, GrapheneOS and stock Android are both good for getting things done. Yet, GrapheneOS shines in protecting your privacy. This might mean fewer but more secure features.

Privacy and Security

When you pick a system for your phone, think about privacy and safety. GrapheneOS and stock Android protect your data in unique ways.

GrapheneOS Privacy and Security Features

GrapheneOS focuses heavily on keeping your data safe. It offers many tools to boost your privacy and security. These include limiting data collection and secure updates.

• Limiting Data Collection: GrapheneOS cuts down on what data gets collected, lowering the chance of others getting it.
• Secure Updates: It ensures your system stays safe by giving you regular, secure updates.
• Restricted Google Services Access: GrapheneOS limits how much Google can see of your personal data.
• Permission Controls: You get to decide what info apps can use. GrapheneOS gives you strong controls over this.

Stock Android Privacy and Security Considerations

Stock Android, made by Google, has its security perks. But it's heavily tied to Google's services. This can lead to less privacy.

• Google Services Integration: It comes filled with Google tools. While convenient, it does raise privacy worries.
• Privacy Settings: It does have some privacy settings. You can adjust app permissions a bit and limit some data access.
• Regular Updates: Google works on updating stock Android often to fix security issues.

Both GrapheneOS and stock Android care about security. However, GrapheneOS's special focus on privacy sets it apart. It's great for anyone who really values their data privacy.

Comparison Table: GrapheneOS vs. Stock Android Privacy and Security

Privacy and Security Features	GrapheneOS	Stock Android
Data Collection	Minimizes data collection	May collect user data through Google services
Updates	Regular secure updates	Regular updates to address security vulnerabilities
Google Services Access	Restricted access to Google services	System-level integration with Google services
Permission Controls	Strict permission controls	Permission customization options

Table: A comparison of privacy and security features offered by GrapheneOS and stock Android
In summary, if you're big on privacy, you'll like what GrapheneOS offers. It's a top choice. But if Google's services matter a lot to you, stock Android might be the way to go. It's not as privacy-focused, but it's great for those that love Google's features.

App Compatibility

GrapheneOS and stock Android both excel in app compatibility, but GrapheneOS faces challenges with some banking apps. These apps need special access. Yet, GrapheneOS aims for the highest privacy and security, sometimes making these needs clash.
Many apps are compatible with GrapheneOS, and the project actively works with developers. It encourages them to make their apps work with GrapheneOS. This allows users to enjoy the operating system's enhanced privacy and security safely.
Stock Android, on the other hand, has superior compatibility with all apps, including those from banks. It works across many devices and is chosen by developers. Its wide use makes it easier for developers to ensure app compatibility.
To make the app experience smoother on GrapheneOS, users can choose alternative apps that work well with the system. Also, the project is always updating to boost app compatibility through community efforts.

Recommended Banking Apps for GrapheneOS

Many banking apps face issues on GrapheneOS. Still, several banking apps perform well on this system:

• Banking App 1: This is a secure and reliable app made for GrapheneOS.
• Banking App 2: It provides an easy and smooth banking experience on GrapheneOS.
• Banking App 3: This app focuses on keeping your financial info secure and private.

Remember, although these apps are compatible with GrapheneOS, it's wise to confirm with your bank or financial institute for the latest compatibility updates.
As GrapheneOS grows, its app compatibility, including banking apps, is expected to get better. The project is dedicated to offering an experience that values security and privacy while ensuring apps work well.

User Feedback and Experience

GrapheneOS is great for privacy and security, which users love. They feel their data is safer and that Google tracks them less. Plus, it works well with most Android apps. This means users can still do what they want while keeping their privacy a top priority.
Some say that stock Android is smoother and has more useful features than GrapheneOS. They think that GrapheneOS focuses too much on privacy and misses out on some key features. For example, it doesn't work as closely with Google services and apps.
GrapheneOS users share their thoughts in forums, social media, and by talking to the team. They give detailed advice, like how to make permission prompts even safer. They also want the Auditor feature to be better explained, especially to journalists.
Users often request a better way to know when there are system updates. They want to be able to choose when to update, so it doesn't disrupt their day. They also ask about how to use the app pinning and auto-reboot timer, looking for more info.
Users also need more info about the Android Recovery system in GrapheneOS. They want to know more about its role in updating the system. And they worry about any issues the updates might bring.
Some users find features in GrapheneOS that remind them of Google. They want clearer information about these features. This way, they can understand them better.
App compatibility is an issue for some. A few apps won’t work on GrapheneOS because they fear security risks. Some just crash. This is why some users carry a second phone for specific apps, like banking or gaming.

User Profile Usage on GrapheneOS

GrapheneOS encourages the use of separate profiles for different apps. This keeps your privacy and security levels high. Users should have profiles for general use, social media, work, and private matters.

GrapheneOS Installation Ease

Installing GrapheneOS is known for being easy among custom OSes. The web interface makes the process straightforward. However, installing it on various computers might need extra steps sometimes.

GrapheneOS Benefits and Drawbacks

Why do people like GrapheneOS? It's great with most apps, makes you more secure, and doesn't let Google track you much. Plus, it backs up your apps very safely.
But it's not perfect. Some apps, like Facebook Messenger, have issues. The fingerprint sensor on the Google Pixel 6 isn’t the best. And sometimes you might face problems with internet when using a VPN.

Google Pixel 6 User Experience

The Google Pixel 6 is seen as a good buy by users. It offers good features and performance for its cost. However, the fingerprint sensor and the size of the phone get mixed reviews. The camera's quality also varies among users.

Overall Recommendation

Despite some issues, GrapheneOS is recommended by many for its strong privacy and security. It's a good choice for those who worry about Google spying on them.

User Feedback Overview

Feedback	Request/Suggestion
Implementation of safeguards in on-demand permission prompts	Enhancing permission controls for improved security
Better explanation and marketing of the Auditor feature	Targeting investigative journalists as potential users
Proposal for a notification system for system updates	Allowing manual installation of updates
Inquiry about the functionality of app pinning with auto-reboot timer	Clarification on how the feature works
Request for clarification on Android Recovery system	Understanding its role and potential issues with OTA updates
Identification of features resembling "Googlisms"	Clear explanations and disclosures for informed usage
Challenges with app compatibility on de-googled version	Issues with banking apps, food delivery apps, Uber, and mobile gaming

Future Development and Updates

GrapheneOS gets better thanks to the hard work of gifted developers. They're always updating it to make it safer and easier to use.
Updates bring new security patches, app changes, and more. For instance, new kernel updates might change to versions like 5.15.151 or 6.1.80. Apps like Vanadium might jump to new versions like 124.0.6367.159.0.
They use tags to give updates for certain devices. For example, a tag like 2024040100 might mean a special update for certain phones. These updates are meant to make your experience even better.
Recently, they made sure that VPN apps can't accidentally leak your web requests. They also update apps like PDF Viewer to make sure they run smoother. These updates are all about making your phone more enjoyable to use.
GrapheneOS also pays special attention to certain phones. For example, the Pixel Fold might receive updates specific to its design. This keeps your device running well and safe.
They change settings to make your phone safer and easier to use. For security, a new memory tag setting is available. You might see different settings based on what phone you have, making everything more user-friendly.
Improving apps is just as important to GrapheneOS. Apps like TalkBack, which helps by reading the screen, might get better with version 14.1. These changes aim to make using your favorite apps a smoother experience.
They also make technical updates to stay cutting-edge. A recent kernel update, like 5.15.149, makes your device more secure and faster.
Even the Camera app and GmsCompatConfig (used for Google services) get updated. This ensures your phone is more dependable and full of new features.

Official Device Support

GrapheneOS officially supports many Pixel models including the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 5a. These devices let you make the most of GrapheneOS's features.
Some Pixel phones, like the Pixel 5, won't get any more updates. Yet, the Pixel 4a and 4 XL keep getting support, like better security. This means you can still use these devices safely.
The 8th generation Pixel devices offer top security levels. They're supported for 7 years from their launch with features custom-tailored to protect your device.
Pixel devices get different levels of support based on their generation. The 8th generation has a longer 7-year support compared to 6th and 7th generation models, which gets 5 years. This shows GrapheneOS's focus on lasting security and usability.

Future Focus and Community Support

The team behind GrapheneOS aims to make major improvements in device, system, and software security. Their focus isn't on supporting every device but on ensuring profound security.
GrapheneOS has a strong community that loves its security. This community's dedication to privacy drives the project's advancement and success.

Related Alternatives

CalyxOS, RattlesnakeOS, DivestOS, and Ubuntu Touch offer different privacy and security features. Exploring these options can help you find the right system for your needs.

Benefits and Drawbacks of GrapheneOS

GrapheneOS offers big benefits for privacy and security. It keeps your data safe and lets you control your online world better. But, there are drawback to consider too.

Benefits of GrapheneOS

• Enhanced Privacy: It reduces the chance of your data being stolen. You get to control what apps can and can't do on your phone.
• Innovative Security Features: It's really good at stopping new security threats. This makes it hard for bad guys to find ways to harm your phone.
• Enhanced Security and Privacy Settings: You can do cool stuff like turn off Wi-Fi automatically or only use the internet through certain apps, making your phone safer.
• Dedicated Effort to Prevent Memory Corruption Bugs: It works really hard to keep its system safe from bugs. This means fewer chances of someone breaking into your phone.
• Secure Apps: It comes with special apps that keep your phone safe. This includes a secure web browser and camera app that protect your data.

Drawbacks of GrapheneOS

• Limited Google Integration: It doesn't come with Google's usual apps. You can add them but this might mean giving up a bit of privacy for certain features.
• App Compatibility: You might struggle to use some apps, like banking apps, because GrapheneOS isn't the regular Android. But, more and more apps are being made to work with it.
• Lack of "Smart" Features: You won't find fancy features, like Google's smart phone answering feature or advanced keyboard tools. You might need to choose between these extras and your privacy.
• Troubleshooting Required: Sometimes things might not work perfectly. You might find some emojis missing or have to fix some app issues yourself. So, some tech skills could come in handy.

Deciding on GrapheneOS means balancing privacy with how easy your phone is to use. It's great for keeping your data safe. But, you might not find all the apps and features you're used to.

Conclusion

After using GrapheneOS for a year on a Google Pixel 6A, its focus on privacy and security shines. It updates quickly, in about 5 minutes, keeping your phone safe. Occasionally, small graphical glitches happen but are easy to fix.
Most day-to-day apps work well from the Google Play Store and Neo Store. The battery life is outstanding, lasting days even with lots of use.
It integrates well with Google's main products like the Play Store and Calendar. Yet, using these services means thinking about your privacy trade-offs.
When making privacy choices, think about how you use technology and what you're comfortable with. The author has used Apple phones for privacy extensively, which informs this perspective.
GrapheneOS makes Android more secure by adding extra permission controls, reminiscent of iOS. It lets users manage apps' accesses like location and storage.
A Google Pixel phone is a good choice for GrapheneOS because it supports other operating systems. Though some users find the user interface a bit challenging, they like its simple design.
To get push notifications working, the author installed Sandboxed Play Services. Going without Google Play Services can be hard due to its deep ties to Google.
With Android 12, apps start to adapt to your phone’s colors, which looks great, especially on the Pixel 7 Pro. This new look makes the home screen feel personalized and clean.
GrapheneOS takes security and privacy seriously, stepping beyond regular Android. Its multiple profiles help keep your data isolated, enhancing privacy.
Setting up GrapheneOS is easy, thanks to a user-friendly web interface. Most apps work well, giving users a satisfying experience, even with compatibility.
Battery life and performance are as good as regular Android systems, showing it can be just as efficient, with better privacy controls.
With GrapheneOS, users have less tracking and more privacy, surpassing typical Android’s privacy. Yet, there are issues with some specific apps and services.
GrapheneOS with a VPN sometimes has connectivity problems, possibly due to app compatibility. Generally, using it on a Google Pixel 6 is a good experience, despite minor issues.

GrapheneOS	Stock Android
+ Strong focus on privacy and security	+ Wide range of features and convenience
+ Streamlined updates with quick completion time	+ Regular updates and feature additions
+ Smooth app compatibility for day-to-day apps	+ Better compatibility with all apps
+ Impressive battery life	+ Similar battery life and performance
+ Seamless integration with Google products	- System-level integration with Google services
+ Additional privacy controls and permissions toggles	- Limited privacy control over Google services
+ Multiple user profiles for enhanced privacy	+ Standard user profile and features

Considerations for Choosing an Operating System

When you compare GrapheneOS and stock Android, think about what matters most. If you are very concerned about privacy and security, GrapheneOS is great. It keeps your data safe and your device secure. However, if you like having many features, stock Android might suit you better.
GrapheneOS is especially good for Pixel devices. It promises many years of support. For example, 8th generation Pixels get 7 years, while older models get 5 years. GrapheneOS might not work with Android Auto or some banking apps. But it's very secure and focuses on keeping your privacy safe.
Stock Android works well with Google apps and has lots of features. You can use Google Maps and Google Keyboard easily. But, if you switch to GrapheneOS, you lose things like Google Pay and some unique Google features.
Choosing between GrapheneOS and stock Android is all about what you need and like. Think about your privacy wishes and how much you value convenience. Then, you can make a smart choice that meets your needs.

FAQ

What are the key distinctions between GrapheneOS and Stock Android?

GrapheneOS focuses on keeping your data safe and private. Stock Android, on the other hand, comes with many useful features.

What are some of the features provided by GrapheneOS?

GrapheneOS gives you a more private and secure playground. It does this by keeping Google Play services separate. It also keeps your phone updated regularly.

How is the setup process and what features does Stock Android provide?

Stock Android is easy to get started with. It includes popular Google services like the Play Store, Maps, and Keyboard.

What are some of the functionalities offered by GrapheneOS and Stock Android?

Both operating systems let you do the basic stuff. But GrapheneOS skips Android Auto and Stock Android has a cool Now Playing feature.

What distinguishes GrapheneOS and Stock Android in terms of privacy and security?

GrapheneOS works hard to make sure your information stays private. It does this by not sharing much with Google. Stock Android, however, is closely tied with Google services, which might affect your privacy.

How is the app compatibility for GrapheneOS and Stock Android?

GrapheneOS might not work with every app. Some banking apps might not fully function on it. Stock Android usually works well with all apps.

What is the user feedback and experience for GrapheneOS and Stock Android?

Users really like GrapheneOS for its commitment to privacy and security. Stock Android is preferred by those who want a smooth experience with lots of features.

How are the future development and updates for GrapheneOS and Stock Android?

GrapheneOS depends on donations to improve with new features. Both systems get updated regularly. Stock Android gets these updates from a bigger team.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of using GrapheneOS?

Using GrapheneOS means your data is more protected. But you might miss out on using some popular apps and features.

What should I consider when choosing between GrapheneOS and Stock Android?

Think about what matters most to you. If privacy and security are top concerns, GrapheneOS is a great choice. Stock Android is better if you want a smoother experience with many features.

Hi everyone,
Just hoping to seek some advice whilst working on a 2006 Saab 9-3 convertible Aero.
Ive had luck with the above head unit and getting it to power on using a CTSSA001.2 connects 2 loom.
Problem is - there's no output to the speakers.
Ive also gotten a Amplified Active speaker adaptor lead CT53-SA01 from Connects 2
From what i understand the CT53 allows you to bypass the factory fitted amp.
But i cannot figure out how to use both together to have any chance of keeping steering wheel controls.
Even if i just used the CTSSA001.2 it would be great but having wired everything up im still struggling to see what i can do to get any kind of sound output from the speakers.
If anyone has used this is their 9-3 with a factory amp, i would be very grateful for any advice!

Hello! My name is Nycro and I've been a roleplayer for roughly 13 years now! I'm primarily an original story writer, preferring to build a story from the ground up. I love world building and character building. In my extensive history I've written most genres and continue to find enjoyment in exploring and sometimes trying new ones. I'm looking for someone to build a story with me with original characters and an original story. I'm a huge sucker for romance and prefer to have it involved in my roleplays as well.
I'm a multi-paragraph writer, tending to put in 3-5+ paragraphs for my writing, though I'm open to writing more depending how much I get back, but for a simple matter I refuse to write with anyone unable to give atleast two paragraphs, and would strongly prefer someone who can match or beat me in length to push me to writing more.
It is a requirement that you are capable of paragraph writing and able to produce atleast 2-3 paragraphs per emote. I'm not interested in single sentences.
It is also a requirement that you are 18+ I'm uncomfortable writing with anyone younger then that.
A little more about me! I use they/them pronouns I write in the third person, though I've dabbled in first person. Definitely prefer third.
I'm a caretaker irl, and things can be very hectic and busy with both my health and well-being, so I'm not always available but I'll always try to be open about it.
I'm a dog and cat owner, lover of the small critters, always happy to share pictures of my animals.
I enjoy making playlists, and have recently started making reference boards.
I'm open to writing all pairings, I honestly prefer finding a story that fits more then worrying about the pairing, so I'm open to everything.
I'm also open to furry/anthro! I'm happy to include or work them into the story some way if that's something that would interest you.
For Genres I prefer, though not limited to, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Post- Apocalyptic, Adventure, Slice Of Life, Romance, Drama, Tragedy, Medieval (non-fantasy), Historic, Western.
I'm open to some fandoms, though I'm not interested in playing canon characters
Harry PotteHogwarts Legacy. Recently picked up the game and I've had a strong pull to do something in the wizarding world.
Homestuck. Not ashamed to admit I'm still a fan and interested in coming up with plots for it!
Doctor who. A fun science fiction series, has been a bit of an inspiration and I love creating wild stories to go in the setting. One of my favorites.
My Hero Academia. I haven't done a roleplay in this setting in a while, and I'm a little hesitant to pick it back up, but I'm open to trying depending on the story we come up with!
Titanfall 2. This is a bit out there but it's one of my favorite games in general and I've had such a strong calling to get into it and write a pilot/mech dynamic duo as characters and think it could be a fun setting!
Halo. In general another one of my favorites, I'm not exactly sure what kind of story I'd like to write in it, but I'm open to any and all suggestions!
Monster Hunter. I'm a big fan of the games and am open to writing in any setting though I have a leaning preference toward new world plots. I'm happy to go back into older game settings, or creating our own though!

Hello Everyone,
I am in an interesting position and wanted to get your takes on the matter. I began my career journey rather young and have been working in corporate settings as a data analyst since 14, I was doing VBA work, basic Python, HTML, some JS…. I then began a position at 19 years old at a consulting firm that had me jumping around multiple financial and tech institutions tackling different projects where I would begin flirting with some ML concepts. During this time I’m actively pursuing a BBA in Finance hoping to secure a position as a quantitive analyst.
COVID hits and I frankly can’t cut it in the finance world so I end up taking a job as a Data analyst at a Fortune 500 utility company where I became a senior in a year and ended up devoting close to 3 years at the company. During this time I was miserable, I was using antiquated software/methodologies, the subject material was extremely boring and I had enough so I just resigned on the spot.
During this downtime I pursued a intense Data Science bootcamp in hopes of pursuing the “fun and challenging” data analyst/scientist positions. I gave this whole backstory just to say I have no idea what my trajectory looks like from here and this shitty job market is not making it any easier. All in all my questions are:
-Should I pursue senior positions since technically I have 10 years experience in data analysis?
-Should I start from scratch since I’m still relatively young (25) and look into ML internships?
-Is there a specific way you should apply to these roles?
-Should my resume be 2-pages long?
Any other advice is welcome and appreciated, I am always open to making industry friends so feel free to reach out.
Thank you all for your time.

I had top surgery with Dr. Gast at UW Health in October 2022 and it's been a process of one annoyance after another since I first reached out to the clinic around Feb/March or 2021. I'll say that the results of my surgery seem technically okay, but I didn't get a single thing I asked for, despite her saying all of it would be possible during my consultations.
The first issues were after I got my letter of readiness (September 2021) and they started to run the surgery through my insurance. From then until around February/March, UW Health, myself, and my insurance (Aetna) went back and forth about whether the nipple graft would be covered by insurance. Aetna had a clear policy on which code to use to get it covered, but UW Health continuously refused to use that code and insisted it had to be a different code. In the end, I decided I wanted to just get the surgery done and agreed to pay UW Health's $3500 (cash, due upfront, no payment plan) option for out-of-pocket nipple graft.
I was doing FtNB, so I asked for slightly largefuller pecs and larger nipples/areolas both to look more androgynous and because I wanted to get my nipples re-pierced after the surgery. All of these points were reiterated at EVERY check-point including pre-surgery visits, consultations, and in the surgery prep room. The final result I have is completely flat pecs and nipples so small they barely even protrude from the skin, and UW Health is giving me the complete run around on trying to resolve. So the surgery is technically proficient, but not at all what I asked for in terms of results.
After the surgery when I started healing, I noticed my nipples and areolas seemed really small, but I know they can take time to protrude, so I waited around 9 months to set up a post-op consult to talk about revisions for the small dog ears and the small nipples. I was told this consult could be done as a video call (I don't live in Madison), so I scheduled the appointment, waited a few weeks, and had the call where Dr. Gast told me this could only be handled in person. So I had to make ANOTHER appointment, wait again, and drive out to Madison to get looked at.
During this in person appointment, Dr. Gast told me she could set up a revision surgery for the dog ears and ask a colleague about nipple fillers. She told me that if I was a candidate for the fillers, they would be free at their filler clinic.
After a few weeks, I hadn't heard anything back, so I reached out and she said the other doctor said I was a good candidate for fillers. So I try to schedule an appointment for the fillers, but now the nurses are telling me that:
1) I have to go have ANOTHER in-person consult with this other doctor (why wasn't I told this so I could have both consults back in October when I was there already??? They knew I wanted to talk about nipple filling options... No one can answer this...)
2) The consult will be separate from the procedure, so I'll also have to go back ANOTHER TIME to do that.
3) Instead of FREE as I was told both verbally and in a written message by Dr. Gast, I'm now being told the fillers will be some mystery price between $600 and several thousand dollars (which no one can tell me until after the procedure???). Remember this is ON TOP of the $3500 I paid to get nipples that are nothing like what I asked for...
I also asked before my surgery if revisions would be included and they said yes, but now that I need revisions the cost of everything is vague answers of a lot of money.
At this point I'm feeling like I should just either give up and be stuck with pecs/nipples I hate and constantly want to hide or find some other surgeon closer to home. If I have to pay for all the revisions either way, I might as well save myself all of the driving.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to be dead in the next 24 hours.
Whether that's the Costella family, or whatever this is, I'm not sure.
The police are taking forever, and part of me knows they're either refusing to believe me, or RC got them too.
I'm holed up on our school bus, so I've got nothing better to do.
I want to tell you about my team.
We met in our sophomore year.
Strangers standing outside the club room.
Levi was the freckled brunette who wouldn't stop talking about Game of Thrones.
Sunny, a pretty redhead, told him to shut up.
Tom, a sandy blonde, nodding his head to music corked in his ears.
I just wanted to be part of a club, and get away from my overbearing mother.
I won't say it was a perfect start. Our school was lacking in funding, so anyone could join, which made us more of a Quiz Club. I had some serious anxiety, so I stayed on the sidelines for a while, watching, rather than taking part.
It's not like we actually talked to each other initially. The first few weeks, we played Jeopardy, and attempted to find more members to cement us as an official Academic Decathlon club.
Unfortunately, though, it was just the four of us.
Which made it extremely hard for us to be taken seriously.
According to Google, Academic Decathlon teams were made up of nine members, placed by their GPA.
Our principal laughed at us, but he did let us become official.
Which was out of pity, I assumed.
The club was assembled, and we started meeting up after school.
Sort of.
Sunny barely showed up, and Levi didn't take anything seriously, preferring to spend the time telling us about his weird family turf-war.
Our principal dumped us in a tiny classroom with a resident rat living under the floorboards.
There was barely enough room to move, and the four of us crammed together for three hours was less than appealing.
Still, though, I wanted to be part of a club.
I had grown up with parents who were obsessed with board games, so I was pretty good at general knowledge questions. Our club room was too small for anything else but three desks (Sunny and I shared one) and a whiteboard we had to shove through the door.
But, again, we didn't start as an Academic club.
It was more akin to Story Time Club.
Arriving late on my third day, armed with quiz cards from home, I found Tom and Sunny completely mesmerised by Levi’s storytelling skills, drowned in shadow.
They didn't even turn the lights on.
I strictly remember squeezing next to Sunny, and hearing the words, “But there was so much blood all over the floor, and my Mom told me to go upstairs and hide under the bed…”
Sitting in front of them was Levi, perched on a desk, his legs swinging, a whiteboard marker between his teeth.
Sometimes he'd get up, and illustrate parts of his story.
It sucked that his drawings were all stick people.
I won't go into full details of his life, but Levi grew up as part of a family who had… interesting methods of making a living. I had seen the guy’s father multiple times when we hung out at his place, and, yeah, my friend’s family definitely had Soprano vibes.
Levi’s Draw My Life was nothing to do with the club, but it did bring us closer.
Even if, at that point, I was considering leaving.
But it's not like it was easy to walk away from these guys. It's like finding your soulmates. Levi wasn't the only one with an interesting life. Sunny Lang was an ex kpop trainee, who was kicked out for being too fat, which led her to develop a severe eating disorder, and a hatred for her own body.
Sunny explained her family were originally from Boston, her mother growing up in Korea.
She signed up for an idol agency focusing on creating a new girl group, and had gotten all the way to the final stages, before being kicked for her weight. Sunny told us her story with a smile, though there was a hollowness in her eyes I couldn't ignore. The other girls were judgemental bullies, and the idol diet and brutal regime almost killed her.
Sunny lived in a tiny apartment with 9 girls, who would tear each other apart for a chance to debut. Sunny said all the other girls debuted, and when we (not so patiently) asked for names, she shrugged, admitting she signed an NDA that prevented her spilling the beans.
What she did say, was the K-pop idol is a product, not a person– and are made and moulded into a product.
She had zero interest in throwing her humanity away to become a manufactured doll.
So, one of us was the son of an underground family, and the other was an ex idol.
Tom was an aspiring horror writer with a famous older step-brother.
His story times were usually, That one time I went to the Met Gala.
When it was my turn to reveal my story, I told them the only interesting thing about me.
I could smell when something bad was going to happen.
They laughed, but I was being serious.
When I was a kid, I smelled my mother’s brain tumor.
I remember it smelled like curdled milk.
I asked Mom why her head smelled of mouldy milk, and Mom laughed and said it was her shampoo.
It was actually a grade two tumor growing inside her brain.
Thankfully, the tumour was found quickly and removed.
Growing older, I became sensitive to smell. The little girl choking on the bus smelled of singed wood, and the old man crossing the road stunk of gasoline.
In the fourth grade, my classmate Alex Castor smelled of lemons all morning.
I sat behind him, choking on the stink all the way through class.
Ever since I met him, Alex had always smelled… off.
It was a distinct smell I could never understand, and as the days and months and years went by, that smell morphed into a subtle orangey musk that was so strong I had to cover my mouth and nose. Then, he smelled like lemons.
During Recess, I watched Alex fall off of the jungle gym, straight onto his head.
Alex Castor was dead before the paramedics arrived, my panicked teacher attempting CPR when his brains were leaking out of his ears.
The school claimed it was an accident, but Alex would have been fine if the jungle gym wasn't built on solid concrete.
I told my team members this, and Levi was sceptical.
“You can smell bad things?” He said, his lips curved around his milkshake straw. In the early days, we hung out in the local bar. It's not like we were allowed inside, but Levi could get us in anywhere.
I was squeezed between Tom and Sunny, while Levi took the seat opposite us. I couldn't help noticing our waitress was insisting on free milkshake refills, her frantic eyes glued to Levi.
I had zero idea why. Levi Costella was about as intimidating as a fruit fly.
Wearing a white shirt with a popped collar, a leather jacket thrown over the top, Levi was giving rebellious Harvard student, rather than son of a crime family.
Leaning forward, he raised a brow, clearly not believing me.
“So, you're like a stink psychic?”
I shrugged, sipping my own shake.
“Sure.”
I wasn't planning on telling him the club room smelled off on our first day.
Once we actually started the club, Levi surprised us as the smartest member, and getting to know him further, I came to the realization his family were infamous in our town.
However, his parents hid it well. Lucy and Michael Costella were the owners of a popular ramen store in our town, hiding under the facade of two successful business owners. The Costella’s were an attractive family.
Lucy was a sophisticated brunette with a lipstick smile, Michael, a handsome fluffy haired man who looked like he modelled glasses.
The two were fiercely protective over their youngest son, not so casually reminding us behind grinning smiles, that if anything happened to Levi, we would automatically be involved in the family.
I mean, they did laugh and say, “We’re joking! Look at your little faces!” when Sunny went deathly pale. But there was definitely truth behind their words.
Being Levi’s friend was… challenging at first.
Tom and I were in his room studying for finals, and an alarm went off, flooding Levi’s room in red light.
I had zero idea where it was coming from, but it locked all the doors and windows, forcing the Costella residence into temporary lockdown. Levi didn't seem fazed, casually mentioning his parents were taking care of it.
He had a whiteboard set up in his room, and was standing in front of it, cramming all of our textbook notes into one easily digestible drawing.
Levi wasn't just smart.
He was Ivy League smart, so we had struck gold with him.
His family were questionable, and yes, sometimes I did fear for my life, but as the more time we spent at his house, the Costella household became a second home. We got used to the alarms.
I just brought along ear plugs.
I wish I was writing this post about Levi’s family, and sure, they are a factor in what is going on right now, but I want to preface this by saying the events below involve the 2024 scholastic decathlon final in our town with the school’s listed:
Starbrook High School.
Ratcliffe High School.
Please note, the incident that took place last night was immediately covered up, and all phone footage was destroyed. Our town is mostly out of the way, and does not show up on Google searches.
We also have our own version of the academic decathlon, which is a more town-level competition, due to lacking funds. The four of us were desperate to start competing with our schools.
So, we started taking things a little more seriously.
We got a coach.
Mr Hanes, who was hesitant at first.
In his words, “You will hate me as your coach.”
He started by recruiting more members, announcing, “If you want to be taken seriously as an actual club, then I'll be taking the reins from now on.”
He did, and with our teachers guidance (and sometimes brutal honesty), we reached a level where we could start competing with other school’s in town. Now, none of us knew this, but Mr Hanes was obsessed with winning.
So, club meetings were twisted into two hour study sessions with no talking, followed by Mr Hanes Jeaprody, which was Jeaprody, without the actual fun.
We were quizzed multiple times, answer cards and practise questions quite literally thrown directly in our faces.
I hate to admit this (I really hate to admit this) but Mr Hanes’s tactics worked. Sure, we had been mildly brainwashed by our slightly unhinged coach, but with Levi Costella, we destroyed our competitors. Like I said, our town held their own version of the academic scholastic decathlon, but it was pretty much the same, with some changes.
Ten subjects. Language and Literature, Math, Social Science, Economics, Art, Music, Interview, Speech, and Essay.
Unlike the official Decathlon, ours was more like a game show, with the ability to be knocked out if a team member answers a question wrong. Whoever answers the most questions correctly wins. Team meet ups were either tests, study sessions, or quizzing each other.
Which leads me to last night.
The finals were held in the reigning champions, Ratcliffe High School’s, auditorium.
And we were about to win our town’s Scholastic Decathlon 2024 Championships.
Well…I was knocked out in the music section. Standing next to my coach who I was sure was going to asphyxiate from excitement, I could smell the sudden potent stink of lemon. I tried to ignore it at first, but the more questions my team were answering correctly, the smell got worse, suffocating my senses.
This wasn't just lemon. The stink was like a burning, singing smell trickling into my nose and the back of my throat.
It was stronger than what Alex smelled like.
This was suffocating, drowning my thoughts.
“Are you okay, Cassandra?”
Mr Hanes nudged me when a Ratcliffe girl was struggling to answer a question, only for Sunny to jump in with the answer. “You look quite pale.”
I nodded, forcing a smile.
My gaze was on the Ratcliffe coach, a scary looking blonde woman, whispering in one of her student’s ears.
The Ratcliffe kid freaked me out. He was way too tall, dark blonde hair, and bulging eyes I swear were not blinking.
His gaze was glued to Levi, who wore a smug grin.
There was a smaller girl next to the Ratcliffe kid, a Macbook balanced on her knee. Every so often, he leaned into her, the two of them in deep conversation.
“I'm just nervous.”
I jumped when Ratcliffe scored a point, their side erupting into cheers.
During the break, we had a mini team meeting.
Sunny rushed to the bathroom to freshen up, and I noticed a Ratcliffe girl with a bouncing ponytail following her.
Ignoring our coach’s speech, I joined the two girls in the corridor, that lemony scent hanging thick in the air.
I caught them in an awkward position.
The Ratcliffe girl had her fingers pinched between the material of Sunny’s dark blue shirt bearing our school’s name.
Sunny looked confused, her lips parted like she was going to yell.
Ponytail dropped her hand, suddenly, with a nervous laugh. “Oh! I'm so, so, sorry,” she gushed. “You had, like, the biggest spider crawling on your back.”
Sunny caught my eye, shooting me a reassuring smile.
“Thanks.” She made sure to keep her distance. “Uh, where's your bathroom?”
The Ratcliffe girl nodded down the hallway. “It's just down there. I'm going there too if you want me to show you?”
Sunny motioned for me to go back to the auditorium. “Uh, sure! That'd be great!”
I did try to follow them, only for Sunny to cough loudly.
I took the hint, reluctantly heading back into the auditorium.
My team was hyping each other up, Levi in the centre, sweating through his team shirt. He ran a trembling hand through his hair. “I can't do this,” He groaned. “Ratcliffe High is known to play dirty, man. They're unbeatable.”
“In what way do they play dirty?” I asked, joining them.
Levi gulped down water, shrugging.
“I dunno! They're already trying to distract me with the stink eye.” The boy narrowed his eyes at a grinning Ratcliffe kid who, after noticing our stares, jumped to his feet, waving at us.
“Hey guys!”
“That's Harry Cartwright, the son of the Cartwright family who tried to kill my parents in the third grade.” Levi mockingly waved back. “As you can see, their kid is a fucking sociopath.”
Huh. I wasn't expecting the smiley kid to be the mobster’s son.
Harry Cartwright was not what I expected.
Unlike his team members, he was the only one in casual clothing, a short sleeved white shirt and jeans, a pair of sunglasses perched on top of his head.
Tom went pale.
“Fuck.” He hissed. “He’s one of you? Then those bastards will have a reason to play dirty, right?”
Levi shrugged, averting his gaze. It was the first time I saw his eyes darken, like he was subtly telling the boy to back off.
“The Cartwright’s have been trying to buy our land for a while,” he muttered. “I wouldn't put it past them to use the Decathlon as a way to attack.”
“Attack?!” April, another member of our team, hissed. “Like, attack attack?”
Mr Hanes grabbed the boy, resting his hands on Levi’s shoulders. “Ignore them,” he said. “Hey. Look at me.”
Levi did, raising a brow.
“You're losing that spark in your eye, young man.”
“Spark?”
Our coach nodded. “Look at me, kid.”
Levi rolled his eyes. “I am looking at you, Mr Hanes.”
The man was shaking. I was guessing his whole career (or coaching career) was on the line.
“They know they're losing, Mr Costella.”
Hanes shook the boy, squeezing his shoulders. “You are being positive and Ratcliffe doesn't like that. They want you to be nervous. They want to make you second guess yourself and lose confidence. Don't let them get into your head.” he smiled, giving the boy a playful shove. “Kick their asses.”
“Exactly!”
I didn't realize Sunny was back from the bathroom.
The faint smell of lemons had followed her. I noticed a wet patch on her shirt collar, though she was quick to smile at me, admitting she'd spilled water down herself. Sunny wrapped her arms around Levi, squeezing him into a hug.
She hung on for a little too long, Tom dragging her away with a laugh. “Good luck, all right?” she backed away, ruffling his hair. “We’ve got this!”
When I hugged Levi good luck too, I had to resist covering my nose.
The smell of lemon was unbearable, just like fourth grade Alex.
But it wasn't as potent as earlier.
I vaguely remembered the smell starting to fade once Alex’s body was being carted away on a stretcher.
Following my captain through the crowd, I was right. The smell was less suffocating. Before he went back to the stage, I grabbed the back of his shirt.
The material was soaking wet.
“How are you so wet?” I said, swiping my hands on my shirt.
“Huh?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. Do you remember what I told you in sophomore year?”
Levi settled me with a confident, but nervous smile. “Thaaaat you're scared of clowns?”
“No. I mean the boy who smelled of lemons.” I gritted out.
Levi surprised me with a laugh. “What are you talking about?”
Something ice cold trickled down my spine.
Levi did know what I was talking about. He brought up my stink sense a day earlier in front of his parents, and I had to cover his mouth to shut him up.
Leaning close, I whispered in his ear. “You stink of rotten lemons.”
He nodded slowly, pulling away. “Uh… thanks?”
I bit back a hiss of frustration. “No, you don't understand what I'm saying–”
“Starbrooke High School,” The host announced. “Can all members please return to the stage.”
Levi held up his hand for a high five.
“Can we do this later?” He winked. “I'm kinda busy carrying this spelling-bee on my back right now.”
I nodded shakily, high fiving him, and letting him jump back onto the stage.
Before his words hit like a tidal wave, ice cold water slammed into me.
Spelling Bee?
Slowly making my way back to the stands, Levi’s mistake was circling around my head. He did win a spelling bee, but that was in middle school.
Thankfully, the smell of lemons was gone when I returned to my seat.
Mr Hanes handed me a soda. “Chill out, Cassandera, it's just a game.”
He could talk. The guy was on his fifth coffee.
Mr Hanes was not chilled out in the slightest.
Surprisingly, the event went well. I was half expecting my team to be crushed by the rafters, or caught in a blaze started in the crowd. But we were doing well. No, we were winning.
Reaching the climaxing round, Sunny choked against a smug Ratcliffe boy, joining me on the sidelines.
Levi answered the next question with a confident smile.
We were winning, but Ratcliffe could still catch up with a miracle.
The second to last question was to Ratcliffe, and it was general knowledge.
”Where on the human body would one find the *orbit?*
I knew the answer, and so did Levi, his lips breaking out into a smile when the Ratcliffe boy was hesitating, eyes wide.
Our school’s buzzer went off, Levi slamming his hand down.
Bzzz!
The host turned to our team. “Starbrooke, can I have your answer?”
Levi nodded, shooting our team a victory grin.
“It's…!“ He opened his mouth to answer, his jaw slackening suddenly.
The boy’s shoulders slumped.
“Uh… “
“Um…”
“Huhhhhh…”
Levi inclined his head, blinking, his eyes glazing over. There was a sudden, hollow vacancy that sent chills down my spine. It was like someone had reached into his skull, and yanked out his brain, leaving a shell in his place.
To my confusion, our team captain frowned at his buzzer like he'd never seen one before. He pressed it, exploding into child-like giggles.
Bzzz!
The audience laughed along nervously.
Tom nudged me. “What the fuck is he doing?”
Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz!
Levi’s entire body was slumped, his hand slamming down on the buzzer.
I caught something pooling down his chin.
“Is he… drooling?” I whispered.
Mr Hanes looked mildly horrified. “Has he been drinking?
“Levi?” Tom spluttered. “Drinking?!"
Whatever we were watching, however, was definitely influenced by… something.
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz!
“Young man, that is not a toy!”
The host wasn't amused. “Starbrooke High School, I need an answer from you,” He nodded to Levi, who was pressing the buzzer, his smile growing.
“Once again,” The host backed away, like Levi was contagious. “Where on the human body would one find the Orbit?”
Levi cocked his head, lips parted.
His gaze found the overhead lights, and he winced, his lips curling into a frown.
“Starbrooke High School!”
Levi jumped, tipping his head back and blowing a raspberry. “Palm tree?”
The audience laughed, and I started feeling nauseous.
Across from us, I could see the twist of a smirk on the Ratcliffe coach’s lips.
Bzzz! Levi slammed the buzzer again giggling.
“Starbrooke High School, if your team member continues to act like this, I will be forced to disqualify all members.”
Our captain stopped, gaze glued to the host, his hand creeping towards the buzzer, like it was a big red button.
The audience loved it, laughing like they were watching a sitcom.
“He wouldn't.” Tom whisper-shrieked.
The auditorium was silent for a moment, awaiting Starbrooke’s response.
Levi stuck out his tongue, slamming his hand down.
Bzzz! Bzzz! Bzzz! Bzzz! Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz–
When Tom dragged Levi away from his podium, a Ratcliffe girl hit her buzzer.
“Starbrooke High School, you are disqualified,” the host announced. “Ratcliffe High School, do you have an answer?”
It was Ponytail who nodded with a grin.
“The answer is the eye socket! The Orbit is part of the eye socket!”
“That is the correct answer.” The host was distracted, his eyes glued to Levi.
“Ratcliffe High School wins.”
Levi jumped when the Ratcliffe wide erupted into cheers.
His eyes were wide, clinging onto the buzzer for comfort.
Next to me, our coach looked like he was going to faint.
I barely noticed Ratcliffe’s victory, too busy watching our team captain, who was Harvard bound, tipping his head back and smiling at the ceiling like a new-born baby. Tom dragged the stumbling boy over to me, his mouth twisted.
“This was Ratcliffe, right?” He hissed, shaking our captain, who was struggling, squirming in his grip.
“Did they put something in his drink?!” He prodded Levi. “Hey! What did they do to you?!”
Still, though, drugging his drink didn't make sense.
Levi never left the auditorium, and kept his water bottle with him the whole time.
How did they even manage to slip something into his drink in the first place?
Did I smell our competitors drugging him?
Sure, intentionally inebriating my teammate was morally wrong and illegal, but why could I smell lemon?
“I doubt it was Ratcliffe.” Sunny squeezed next to me. “I've been watching them. They're harmless.”
“Then how the fuck do we explain this to his parents?!” Tom whispered, grappling with Levi, who was fighting to get back to the buzzer.
When Tom let go of him, he dropped onto the floor, crawling over to his podium. It was like watching a child.
Who was determined to piss off the adults.
Levi jumped back to instead feet, his gaze was glued to the host, a smile curved on his lips, when he slammed the buzzer again.
Bzzz!
“Someone, please remove the Starbrooke boy from the stage!”
I was embarrassed, our whole team ducking our heads as our captain was forcibly removed from the podium.
Mr Hanes grabbed Levi, pulling him off of the stage.
I expected our coach to be mad at him, but I think the teacher was more worried, a phone pressed to his ear while he forced the boy into a sitting position.
No, I don't think it's influence from alcohol, I could hear his conversation.
Levi kept trying to get up, mesmerised by the buzzer. The teacher was firm but gentle. “Hey. Sit down, all right? Keep still.” He went back to his phone call, gently prying Levi’s eyes open.
From what I can see, there's nothing wrong. He's just kind of…
Mr Hanes swiped his own hands on his jeans. ... wet?
Team Ratcliffe came over to rub it in our faces, though I was still tuned into our coach’s hissed whispering.
Water? No, I don't think it's water. It smells… no, I haven't told his parents…
“You guys did awesome!” Ponytail's voice was sugary sweet. Too sugary.
She held the 2024 trophy, bearing a satisfied smile. I noticed the Ratcliffe members were surrounding Harry, like guards.
“Better luck next time, okay?” She held out her hand, her eyes twinkling.
“No hard feelings?”
“Control your dog.” Harry said, amused eyes flicking to Levi, who was once again sprinting back to the fucking buzzer. His eyes had visibly darkened, lips curled into a triumphant smile.
Harry Cartwright was watching Mr Hanes chase our team captain like it was his own personal entertainment.
I had to look away before I died of second hand embarrassment.
“What did you put in his drink?” Tom demanded. “Weed? Edibles?” the boy attempted to shove Harry, only to be pushed back. “What the fuck did you do to him?”
Harry’s smile didn't waver. “Like I said. Control your mut.”
When the Ratcliffe team walked away, our red faced coach struggling with Levi, who was behaving progressively more erratically, informed us we were longer welcome inside the school.
Tom suggested calling an ambulance, but our coach was hesitant.
We all knew who Levi’s family were.
On the way out, Tom matched my stride. He was frowning at our team captain struggling to walk.
The way he was acting was already eyebrow raising.
But walking at an angle and being unable to stand up straight was worrying.
“I don't think they drugged his drink.” Tom muttered.
We pushed through the doors out of the school, and I revelled in the cool night air grazing my cheek. “If they did, he would be acting out of it, right? So, what's the deal with him acting like–”
“A child.” I finished for him.
“Yeah.” Tom leaned closer. “Do you think this has something to do with their turf war?”
I slapped at a bug creeping across my cheek.
Levi fell over again, this time bursting into giggles.
“Almost definitely.”
Levi was right about Ratcliffe playing dirty. I didn't realize how dirty until we were on the losers bus home. Levi was in the seat next to me, and the kid hadn't moved since we left Ratcliffe, his eyes wide, lips pulled into a dazed grin.
Bzzz!
The noise startled me from slumber. I was drooling, my head pressed against the window. Outside, the sky was pitch dark, and squinting through the glass, I couldn't get a bearing on where we were. I thought I was hearing things, but when I sat up, I heard it again.
Bzzz!
It was close.
Leaning over the boy, I glimpsed a smear of scarlet on his headrest.
I choked on my next words.
“Tom.”
Tom was in front of me, listening to music.
He didn't reply, his head of dark blonde curls nodding to the beat.
“Levi.” I managed to get out. I prodded him, and his head lolled into his shoulder. “Hey. Can you… sit up?”
Bzzz! Bzzz!
When the boy didn't move, I gently grabbed his shoulders and pulled him forward myself, something contracting in my stomach.
I don't know how long it takes for your mind to fully register something, but my body was already reacting.
Levi’s seat was infested with bugs, eating their way through the upholstery. I was aware of my body moving back. I threw up, instantly, screaming into my hand.
The back of my best friend's skull resembled a deflated soccer ball, what was left of his brain leaking from his skull where a swarm of skittering bugs chewed their way through brain tissue, metallic legs scratching the curved, pearly white of the base if his skull.
Levi’s head hung, his body flopping into mine.
But his eyes were still open, lips still stretched into a smile.
Blood ran in thick rivulets from his nose and ears.
Bzzz!
I could see them, black writhing dots alive in his eyes, wriggling movement under his skin.
“Tom!”
I jumped up, stumbling into the aisle, my stomach heaving.
And it was only when I was on my knees, swiping bile from my lips, when I realized the others weren't reacting.
Tom wasn't moving.
I pulled an Airpod out of his ear, a long, slithering string of pink attached to the end.
There was a stray bug skittering across his hand, his face starting to twitch and writhe.
Moving back, I checked myself over, my hands shaking.
Head.
Shoulders.
Hair.
Clawing through it, my breath was stuck in my throat.
Arms.
Legs.
Feet.
Mr Hanes was slumped against the window, a reddish froth bubbling from his mouth.
Sunny.
I started towards the back of the bus, but all I had to see was her bowed head, half of her skull chewed through.
Sunny was in a far more deteriorated state, her face had been ripped through, a skeletal smile glinting in the dim.
The thick black smear on the window next to her was moving.
When I screamed for the driver to stop the bus, he ignored me.
If anything, he stamped on the gas.
I moved forward to shake him, before glimpsing a bug creeping down his face.
Calling 911, the operator laughed at me.
“Bugs are eating your friends.” He said. “Do you know the penalty for calling with bullshit pranks?”
The bus didn't stop, so I stayed at the front, while the bugs took over the back, eating through my teammates.
After four hours, I risked leaning over the seat next to Tom to check on Levi.
They were eating him.
Chewing all the way through skin, muscle and bone.
I tried to stop the bus, but the driver’s hands were tightly wrapped around the wheel.
Another hour, and blood was seeping down the aisle, crawling with bugs.
Levi was gone, and in his place, a buzzing skittering pile of bugs, that I thought were going to move to a second victim, maybe burrowing into the seats.
But, no.
These things began to tremble, replicating.
Building.
Slowly, nothing became static, and static became muscle.
Then bone.
Then flesh.
When a body began to slowly form, moulded from the dead boy, I stumbled back.
These things weren't eating Levi Costella.
They were rewriting him.
…
Edit: I'm still on the bus. I'm 99.9% sure that I'm infected with whatever this thing is. I can't stop fucking itching.
I keep picking them off me but they won't stop. This bus isn't going to stop until I'm like the others.
…
Edit 2:
I can feel them chewing into my skull. They're in my ears. I keep spitting them out. Please, someone get them off of me. Help me. I don't want to die at 17.
Edit 3:
Still alive. Still breathing. Maybe they're leaving me alone????? I think I'm okay. There is a pile of bugs at my feet, but they're crawling off of me.
Edit 4:
Levi really wants to go home. Like, he just told me he REALLY wants to go home. He's got a gift for his parents.
~~Edit 5 :) ~~
Levi is next to me right now, an odd smile on his face.
The bugs are not finished building him yet, but he'll be ready soon.
We will be ready soon.
Your son says hello! He is a wonderful boy, is he not?
Mr and Mrs Costella, I cannot wait for you to meet him.
He is our greatest achievement, and rest assured, you will give us what we want.
Warm regards.
The Cartwright's.

I have consistently had issues getting PCVR to run decently. I've tried air link with dynamic and fixed bitrates and cable getting 2.7 Gbps throughput. I've downloaded OpenXR toolkit and messed around, I've changed graphics settings, I've changed render resolutions, I've confirmed the key registry pointed to the correct run times, ive confirmed oculus debug tool was set to default values and 0's where applicable, I've tried restarting and resetting, . . . The list stretches.
I have an: - AMD Ryzen 7 3800X - RTX 2070 Super - 16 GB Trident 3600MHz DDR4 - 2 TB SSD
Runs what I play and more @1440p high and/or ultra all day. Medium on some reeeeally intense games. Can't for the life of me get it to stop lagging after playing for a few minutes. I used to run a Valve Index no problem so I can only assume it's a Quest 3 issue.
If i try to run Half Life Alyx, it runs flawlessly for a few minutes until i either hit a loading screen from dying or moving to a new area, open up the meta menu, or steam overlay menu, and then it stutters like crazy, stops head and controller tracking (at least visually), jittery flashing screens, runs at 1 frame a millenium, and then when i can finally get back into the normal gameplay, it will now have microstutters until i restart.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was even worse. runs beautifully on my PC, straight down to 13 fps as soon as VR is activated and tracking starts lagging behind and feels like its actually running at a frame an eon.
I can't figure out the problem and all the googling I've done is people having only some of my symptoms, never all of them.

I hope this is the right subreddit, flair, and has a reasonable length. If it doesn’t, please tell me and I’ll change it to fit the requirements.
My younger brother (16m), let’s call him Nathan (false name), is currently having a ton of issues and my family and I (17m) feel like we have played all of our cards and don’t know what else we can do for him. Nathan has Bipolar I, ADHD, dyslexia, and even though he isn’t professionally diagnosed, we suspect he also has Autism. He is currently on medication for his Bipolar but he isn’t on any for his ADHD. He also gets seizures when he becomes too stressed. He is on a DUI at school and has a lot of support there regarding teachers and faculty. He used to have a psychologist but they terminated him for stupid reasons that he had no control over. He has been in the mental hospital before back in elementary, as he used to be much worse back then. He also has a background of violence (his violence would only be directed to me and our Mother(40f), but he hasn’t been violent for 3-4 years). He also has done self-harm in the past, but they were pretty minor. Nathan and I also have no insurance but we are about to get on our Mother’s plan. Nathan also has ways of coping and knows what to do if he becomes too angry, but I feel like there could be more that could be done. We live in a household with 7 people. We live with our Papa (Mother’s Dad) and his twin brother, who sleep in the living room, Grandma and Grandpa (Papa’s parents) who sleep in the master bedroom as they own the house, our Mother, who sleeps in her own room, and Nathan and I, who share a room. We also have one dog. Okay, now to the issue.
Nathan has lately been on the computer 24/7 and we feel it has negatively affecting him and he simply is unable to see it like that. We feel that the computer has begun to consume his life. He spends all day and night talking to his online friends playing Minecraft with them. He communicates with them on discord and has constantly communicating with them. He has been spending all night talking to them even though he should be going to sleep for school and has been struggling getting up to get ready for school and been falling asleep at school. He has been saying that he has been struggling going to sleep at night and believes he has insomnia (our family has a history of insomnia). I believe his sleeping issues is a result of his computer use. Before, he never really struggled going to sleep but now he has been having a ton of issues doing so. I won’t be surprised if he has/started to have insomnia because of this. As a result of the obsessive computer use, he has begun having back-lashes on not just our Mother, but our Grandma (we currently live with our Grandma and Grandpa), which isn’t good for her health.
He doesn’t know how to be quiet on the computer, especially at night. He is loud and often yells while on it. Our Papa and Mother can hear him at night. It has started to become a really serious issue. I’ve been professionally diagnosed with Insomnia and struggle falling asleep. Nathan’s inability to be quiet at night has started to affect my ability to sleep. I’ve used to being able to ignore it pretty well, but it has become a very serious issue lately and I have been having a very hard time falling asleep for school. I also won’t be surprised if it has also started to affect Papa’s ability to sleep as well, as he is right next to our door as we are right outside the living room.
His online friends aren’t much better. Him having online friends isn’t abnormal at all, but his current online friends I feel aren’t good for him. They actively encourage him to stay up all night with them (they are all around the same age as Nathan, or at least that is what they say). Nathan often falls asleep while on call with them, and they regularly wake him up, as they don’t want him falling asleep on them. He has an online girlfriend, in which to my knowledge she is the only one who is trying to get him to sleep at night (in which he refused to do so). He has been hanging out with them too much, as he isn’t just neglecting his real life friends but his older online friends too (in which I prefer a whole lot more than his current ones, which he became friends with 1-3 weeks ago). He used to be more active and hang out with his real life friends often, but he wants to stay inside 24/7 now and doesn’t hang out with his real life friends outside of school anymore. He is way too naive and too trusting of his online friends. As a result, he is easy to take advantage of. One example of this was that several of his friends apparently had a house in our city and Nathan wanted to get a job so he can help pay for the house (I don’t think they even showed evidence that this house was actually real). Our Mother luckily cut down that idea immediately. He is also surrounded by people who are suicidal online, which isn’t good for his mental health at all.
On top of neglecting his real life friends, he is also neglecting his family. He is really close to our Mother and I. He used to watch anime with our Mother, but he no longer does so. Nathan and I also used to watch anime together, play games together, and chat but we barely do any of that stuff anymore. He also would be eager to go out of the house with family but he no longer wants to. He either wants to hang out with his friends or is too tired to do so. Recently, he didn’t go to our cousin’s graduation and even my induction ceremony for National Honor Art Society because he was too tired. It also has been months since he went to our other cousins house as he is either too tired or wants to stay home (she isn’t our actual blood cousin, but we see each other as such. Nathan is really close to her as well). I admit I’m obsessed with my phone, but I know when I need to put it down and it hasn’t consume my life like it has Nathan. I’m an introvert and I don’t prefer going outside of the house, but I have been going outside the house with our Mother quite often. Nathan used to do the same but he no longer wants to.
With all this information, you may be wondering why we haven’t taken away the computer yet. There is a reason on why we haven’t. This is because if we did, he will become violent. If he does continue going on the computer at night, our Mother will take away the computer at night. Nathan knows this. She also is wanting to turn off the internet at night and before he goes to school, but we don’t know if we could do that just yet. One manipulative and toxic thing he does, which is extremely unhealthy, is that if our Mother threatens him with punishment, Nathan threatens his own life to try to get out of the punishment. This never works on our Mother as she knows these are hollow threats and she used to do the same (actually she used to be much worse and actually attempted suicide before. I don’t think Nathan even has the will for suicide) so she knows the signs and how to deal with the situation. I think he does this since he is constantly surrounded by people threatening their lives online, he now sees this as normal. Since he sees this as normal, he has begun doing the same to not just our Mother but other people (I’m guessing he learned to do this as he probably seen this work before with his friends doing the same).
All of this cumulated into Monday morning. The day before, Nathan was asleep all day and was up all night on the computer. He was being so loud that I had a very hard time falling asleep and it began to annoy me incredibly. I don’t know when he fell asleep but it’s obvious he stayed up all night, even though he knew we were going to school in the morning. We usually get up around one hours before school starts to get ready. This is also when he gets his medicine. When it was time to go, Nathan was still asleep in his pajamas. I couldn’t get him to wake up, and our Grandma had to be the one to wake him up (our Mother was at work). Our Grandpa had to drop me off at school without him, go back home, and then drop him off to school (we go to the same school). He was hard on our Grandma, in which I assume it took a little while to finally convince him to get up and get ready for school. This is incredibly stressful for our Grandma and is definitely not good for her health. As a result of this, it simply became too much for all of us and we need to find a way to get him help.
The Mental Hospital is our very last option, and we don’t want this at all. We simply don’t know what else we can do for him, as he needs help. Is their other methods/ways we can use to help him or is the mental hospital our only option? Btw, no methods/ways/punishments that include any sort of violence, as this won’t help him at all and he will retaliate back with more violence (our Mother is a lot more stronger than Nathan and she has incredibly hard punches. She has never punched Nathan before, but she has slapped him. Even though our Mother doesn’t like this, she will defend herself against Nathan if she ever needs to do so. She’ll never throw the first punch but she won’t hesitate to throw hands back. On the other hand, I’m incredibly weak and will fold like a lawn chair.)
tl;dr, My younger brother’s computer use has started to consume his life negatively in all aspects and we don’t know what else to do, as he simply refuses to see it like that.

Hi - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition. Let's dive in...
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STAT OF THE WEEK: Kohl's sales have shrunk by $2.3B since 2019. During that same period of time, the company lost 1.3M customers who no longer shop with the retailer.
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BigCommerce is exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to sources who chose to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the information. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions are at an early stage and no deal is certain.
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Squarespace announced that it will be going private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, who agreed to pay $44 per share (a roughly 30% premium). Although Squarespace never lost 90% of its share price like BigCommerce, it has experienced a tumultuous time on the market since its IPO in May 2021 — opening around $49.50 and at times trading in the low $20s. Shares rose nearly 13% to $43 in pre-market trading upon release of the news.
___
ByteDance filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to block the new law that would force the sale or ban of the app within the country. The lawsuit challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also citing commercial, technical, and legal hurdles, as well as opposition from Beijing. Legal experts say the legal battle will play out in the courts in coming months and likely will reach the Supreme Court.
___
OpenAI unveiled its newest model, GPT-4o, designed to turn ChatGPT into a digital personal assistant that can engage in real-time, spoken conversations and interact with users using text, screenshots, photos, documents, and charts. The new version of ChatGPT also has memory capabilities, which means it can learn from previous conversations. It will be available to both unpaid and premium customers alike. OpenAI also announced that it would be launching a desktop app with the GPT-4o capabilities, giving users another platform to interact with the technology outside of a web browser.
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Amazon launched in South Africa last week, marking its first marketplace in sub-Saharan Africa, and bringing its total number of marketplaces worldwide to 22. To launch the new marketplace, Amazon is offering free delivery on first orders and on subsequent orders above R500 (about $27), access to 3,000 pick-up points, status updates via WhatsApp to track orders, 30 day refunds, and 24/7 customer support. The marketplace was supposed to launch in the country in 2023, but got delayed due to changes in priorities within Amazon.
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In an unlikely partnership, Instacart is partnering with Uber Eats to expand into the restaurant delivery business. Instacart will add a new tab for restaurant delivery to its app in the coming weeks, the listings will be provided by Uber, and the food will be picked up and delivered by Uber Eats drivers. Customers will receive the same prices on both apps and Instacart will receive an affiliate commission on orders. It's a strange partnership though given that Instacart and Uber Eats actively compete on grocery delivery. Are they planning to merge? Uber says no.
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Apple's advertisement for its latest iPad Pro sparked criticism for showing an animation of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, record players, and other symbols of creativity being crushed by a giant machine, with the output being the new iPad Pro, which the company says is the thinnest Apple product ever. In this context, “crushing” was supposed to symbolize “consolidating” and “compacting” — with the visuals meant to showcase how the new iPad Pro puts the power of all these tools into the hands of creators in one thin device. However online commenters criticized the ad as insensitive and as symbolizing a “destruction of the human experience.” The ad hit the web on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Apple issued a mea culpa and apologized for the campaign.
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Google is encouraging merchants to enable conversion annotations on their Google Shopping ads, which offer social proof that highlight a product's popularity. Conversion annotations like “best selling” or “3K shopped here recently” would provide visual cues about a product’s popularity or sales performance directly in the ad unit. Annotations like these are par for the course with e-commerce retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Temu, which all employ similar tactics. They can provide valuable info for shoppers and also help with conversions. However they also open data privacy concerns, given that Google is not the actual retailer or marketplace selling the items, so a merchant would have to share this purchase history data from their e-commerce platform with Google — which technically most already do by giving access to GA4.
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Shein is attempting to join the National Retail Federation as it pursues regulatory approval to go public in the US. The company believes that NRF membership would boost its chances of receiving SEC approval. However so far, Shein has been rejected numerous times. An anonymous source familiar with the matter said someone with heavy influence at the NRF is strongly against the Shein's admittance. However board members who spoke to CNBC said that Shein's membership application hadn't come up in meetings, and that they aren't involved in deciding which companies are granted access.
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Amazon is leading the way with selling home goods, capturing 18.8% of consumer home furnishings spending, compared to Walmart's 7.3% market share. Notably, Amazon’s gains in the furniture category come in spite of the company’s decision to phase out two of its three furniture brands last year.
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Stanley, which is projected to do $750M in sales this year, up from $73M in 2019, after seeing its water bottles become a status symbol thanks to TikTok, is now expanding into trendier accessories. The company is launching a line of bags called the All-Day Collection which include a mini cooler, backpack cooler, and Quencher Carry-All, designed for someone to sling their Stanley over their hip.
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Jack Dorsey left the Bluesky board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart, claiming that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. Dorsey says he never intended Bluesky to be an independent company, but rather, an open source protocol that Twitter was supposed to be the first client of. He also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder.
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Amazon is deploying 50 electric trucks in California, which it claims is the largest EV fleet in the country, as part of its mission to eliminate pollution from its global operations. The trucks will be integrated into first-mile operations, moving goods from container ships at the ports to fulfillment centers, as well as middle-mile operations, transporting packages from fulfillment centers to delivery centers.
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Wix launched a new tool called AI Portfolio Creator, which allows a user to upload and organize large-scale image collections, select the type of portfolio they want, and then have the AI tool sort and generate a portfolio with clustered images, recommended titles and descriptions, and personalized layout options.
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Amazon is now requiring all dietary supplements to be verified by a third-party testing, inspection, and certification organization — which is something that not even the FDA requires. Amazon is the largest supplement retailer in the US ahead of Walmart and Target, and its new requirements are expected to put more pressure on the industry, which is being scrutinized more than ever.
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Alibaba is revamping its flagship retail website Taobao for the first time in seven years with a focus on providing a smoother search and buying process. The website overhaul comes ahead of the 618 sales event, China's second-largest annual shopping event. A few weeks ago I reported that Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, would now be directly overseeing its domestic e-commerce arm which includes Taobao and Tmall Group, and it sounds like he's hitting the ground running with his new responsibilities.
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Amazon is hosting its first-ever Amazon Book Sale, a new shopping event starting on May 15th that offers up to 50% off print best sellers and up to 80% off Kindle Books. The six day shopping event will exclusively run in the US, and Prime-membership is not required to take advantage of the deals.
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FTX reported that nearly all of its customers will receive the money back that they are owed, two years after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. The company owes about $11.2B to its customers and estimates that it has between $14.5B and $16.3B to distribute to them. The caveat is that customers will receive the USD value of their holdings at the time of the exchange collapse, and not the actual crypto holdings themselves, which means that they'll miss out on all gains during the past two years during which BTC went from around $16k to now over $60k. Better than nothing though, that's for sure.
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800,000 consumers in Europe and the US were duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a network of fake online designer shops operated from China, which comprised one of the largest scams of its kind with 76,000 fake websites created. The scammers used expired domains to host its fake shops in order to help avoid detection by websites or brand owners, and more than 1M orders were processed in the past three years alone.
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Beyond Inc, which owns Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Zulily, reported that its Q1 net loss swelled to $72M from $10M a year ago, while its operating loss widened to $58M from $8M. The company's active customers grew to 6M, up 26% from nearly 5M a year ago, however, its average order value dropped to $173 from $220 a year earlier.
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TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI generated content when it is uploaded from certain platforms like DALL.E 3, Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, and Microsoft Copilot. TikTok will also start attaching Content Credentials to content, which will remain on the media when downloaded, allowing other platforms to read the metadata.
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eBay is testing an Add To Cart button in search results that opens a Quick View window, allowing buyers to skip the listing page. Technically the button should probably not be labeled “Add To Cart” since it doesn't perform that action, but rather, displays a quick view window with three buttons: Buy It Now, Add To Cart, View All Details. Sellers are worried that buyers will miss crucial details in the product description that may lead to increased returns and negative feedback.
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Amazon is planning to launch its fleet of drones in Tolleson, Arizona, but the city's extreme temperature is hampering its efforts. Drones can't operate in temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that Tolleson crosses for a full three months of the year.
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A US district judge dismissed X's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X system and violating X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. The judge basically said that if X owned the data, it could perhaps argue that it has exclusive rights to control it, but then X wouldn't be able to enjoy the safe harbor of Section 230, which allows the platform to avoid liability for third-party content. Can't have it both ways!
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Nintendo is discontinuing its X integration for the switch on June 10th, which means users will no longer be able to post screenshots or videos to the platform from their device. The drop in support also affects games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which had game-specific options to send out tweets. Microsoft Xbox dropped support for X in April 2023 and Sony Playstation dropped the service in October 2023 due to the increase in X's API access fees.
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Amazon claimed that its recordable incident rate — a metric that comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment” — at its US warehouses has improved by 24% since 2019. However the National Employment Law Project challenged Amazon's injury data in a report last week, claiming that Amazon's overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector at 6.5 cases per 100 workers.
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Amazon Ads announced three new advertising formats for streaming TV including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive trivia ads. Amazon did not say when the new ad types would officially launch, but noted that it will formally present them at a presentation on May 14th.
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Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI ad tools that can create full image variations with text overlays, expand images to fit across different aspect ratios, and generate alternate versions of headlines and other ad text. The features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
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Square introduced a tool called Square Kiosk to allow self-service ordering at fast food restaurants. The device is a combined software, hardware, and payment solution that allows customers to select exactly what they want with customization options, upgrades, and add-ons.
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The European Parliament announced new measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste in the EU, including reduction targets of 15% by 2040 — which sounds far away but is only 16 years away?! As part of the new rules, the EU will set maximum empty space ratios for e-commerce transportation, ban certain single-use plastic packaging types, and beverage distributors and take-away food will have to offer consumers the option of bringing their own container.
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Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and seeking refunds of their deposits after Elon Musk canceled another visit to the country last month. Disillusioned Tesla enthusiasts in India say they will now buy a car from the company only if they see it in a showroom, or they'll buy a different electrical vehicle from a company that actually exists in the country.
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Target is limiting its Pride Month collection to select stores this year instead of rolling out the merchandise nationwide like it typically has for the past decade, due to backlash the retailer experienced last year. Last May customers in certain stores knocked down LGBTQ+ merchandise displays, angrily approached store employees, and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.
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E-commerce spending from Jan 1 to April 30, 2024 rose 7% YoY to $331.6B, according to Adobe Analytics. One trend Adobe identified during the period is a shift of online spending to purchasing the cheapest goods across personal care, electronics, apparel, home & garden, furniture, and grocery.
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Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Shopify's acquisition of Peel, a tool that integrates with a merchant's tech stack including Klaviyo and Recharge and helps them analyze their sales data to improve customer retention.
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I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter
PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

I'm getting to the back end of the curriculum for CFA Level 3 at the end of August. I used Mark Meldrum for L1 and L2, but due to the nature of the exam (written response), I opted to read directly from CFA text this time around because I figured it would be best to learn in CFAI's terminology to get a sense of how they phrase things.
I'm currently in the middle of the PWM readings, doing the question bank after highlighting and reading. As of right now I'm completing the question bank after each reading and focusing on the "green" (blue?) boxes. I'm close to 60% through the curriculum and starting to think about how to approach my review topic as I plan to be finished some time in early July or late June with my first pass.
I've been doing well (~70%) on the question bank but it seems to be more qualitative in nature and I'm just questioning the quality/difficulty) of it. I'm also used to a prep provider consolidating information for me and it's making me a bit nervous.
Are there any resources that you would recommend specifically for review? I'm planning on doing CFAI mocks and maybe a quick second pass of the qbank, but I was wondering what materials are best for summarizing material, focusing on key formulas (it feels like there is no math in CFAI text compared to L2?), and has an objectively good question bank.
I am apprehensive to purchase Mark Meldrum's full package because it feels like a waste; all I'd use is the review videos and qbank frankly.
Thank you and good luck to everyone else preparing for a CFA exam!!

Understanding and rectifying flaws in your Instagram growth tactics is essential for building a robust and engaged following. Here are some common pitfalls and how to address them to optimize your Instagram strategy.
1. Lack of Audience Understanding: Not tailoring your content to the interests and preferences of your target audience can lead to low engagement. Conduct regular surveys or use Instagram Insights to understand what type of content resonates most with your followers. For example, if you notice that behind-the-scenes posts get more engagement, make them a regular part of your content strategy.
2. Inconsistent Branding: Inconsistencies in your visual and thematic branding can confuse potential followers. Ensure that your posts, stories, and overall profile maintain a cohesive look and feel that reflects your brand identity. This includes using consistent colors, fonts, and filters to create a recognizable brand aesthetic.
3. Overlooking Engagement: Simply posting content without interacting with your audience can make your profile seem impersonal. Engage with your followers by responding to comments, liking their posts, and participating in discussions. This interaction builds community and loyalty, encouraging followers to stay and new ones to join.
4. Ignoring Analytics: Failing to regularly analyze your performance metrics can hinder your growth. Use Instagram Insights to track which posts perform best, what times your audience is most active, and other key metrics. Adjust your strategy based on these insights to continuously improve your content and engagement.
5. Underutilizing Hashtags: Not using hashtags or using irrelevant ones can limit your reach. Research and use a mix of trending, niche, and branded hashtags to increase your content’s visibility. For instance, if you're a fitness influencer, hashtags like #FitLife, #WorkoutWednesday, and #HealthyLiving can help attract relevant followers.
Identifying and correcting these flaws can significantly enhance your Instagram growth strategy, leading to a more engaged and expanding audience.
To support your efforts, Boost App Social provides tools to refine your Instagram tactics, including access to trending sounds, captivating captions, and strategic hashtags. With Boost App Social, you can enhance your content’s appeal and reach, ensuring your Instagram growth tactics are both effective and sustainable.

Hey guys
I just wanted to make a small post about airdrops based on my own experience the last couple of weeks/months. There are other users way more experienced on the topic who might add to this with informative comments. Some things I would consider worth knowing:
1) There is no such thing as totally free & gifted money (except from your grandpa as a child). The projects doing airdrops get something back for their money and it works this way: By incentivizing users to use their project, the chain or dapp has more daily active users (DAUs) and can push their metrics which serves them well when searching for additional funding (mostly from VCs) and they earn through the network effects, user growth and fees.
2) There is no entitlement to earn anything when farming airdrops. Some people get mad at protocols because they don't send them $3k for a couple of transactions made, but the truth is that you aren't entitled to receive anything. It's mostly speculating on a future airdrop and doing your best hoping for a favorable outcome.
3) The space is pretty overcrowded right now and it isn't as easy anymore as it was. Protocols are using the " multiple season approach" to get the most out of their drops and huge drops like Wormhole and Arbitrum are exceptions.
4) You should try to look where others aren't as active. The most shilled airdrop on earth is the most overfarmed as well.
5) The Security risk shouldn't be neglected. I do airdrop farming on a totally separate wallet, bookmark all URLs directly from verified Twitter accounts and I'm super paranoid which is a good thing. Never use your main wallet for airdrop hunting.
Let me know what should be added.
Greetings

Hi - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth in the newsletter. Let's dive in...
___
STAT OF THE WEEK: Kohl's sales have shrunk by $2.3B since 2019. During that same period of time, the company lost 1.3M customers who no longer shop with the retailer.
___
BigCommerce is exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to sources who chose to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the information. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions are at an early stage and no deal is certain.
___
Squarespace announced that it will be going private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, who agreed to pay $44 per share (a roughly 30% premium). Although Squarespace never lost 90% of its share price like BigCommerce, it has experienced a tumultuous time on the market since its IPO in May 2021 — opening around $49.50 and at times trading in the low $20s. Shares rose nearly 13% to $43 in pre-market trading upon release of the news.
___
ByteDance filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to block the new law that would force the sale or ban of the app within the country. The lawsuit challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also citing commercial, technical, and legal hurdles, as well as opposition from Beijing. Legal experts say the legal battle will play out in the courts in coming months and likely will reach the Supreme Court.
___
OpenAI unveiled its newest model, GPT-4o, designed to turn ChatGPT into a digital personal assistant that can engage in real-time, spoken conversations and interact with users using text, screenshots, photos, documents, and charts. The new version of ChatGPT also has memory capabilities, which means it can learn from previous conversations. It will be available to both unpaid and premium customers alike. OpenAI also announced that it would be launching a desktop app with the GPT-4o capabilities, giving users another platform to interact with the technology outside of a web browser.
___
Amazon launched in South Africa last week, marking its first marketplace in sub-Saharan Africa, and bringing its total number of marketplaces worldwide to 22. To launch the new marketplace, Amazon is offering free delivery on first orders and on subsequent orders above R500 (about $27), access to 3,000 pick-up points, status updates via WhatsApp to track orders, 30 day refunds, and 24/7 customer support. The marketplace was supposed to launch in the country in 2023, but got delayed due to changes in priorities within Amazon.
___
In an unlikely partnership, Instacart is partnering with Uber Eats to expand into the restaurant delivery business. Instacart will add a new tab for restaurant delivery to its app in the coming weeks, the listings will be provided by Uber, and the food will be picked up and delivered by Uber Eats drivers. Customers will receive the same prices on both apps and Instacart will receive an affiliate commission on orders. It's a strange partnership though given that Instacart and Uber Eats actively compete on grocery delivery. Are they planning to merge? Uber says no.
___
Apple's advertisement for its latest iPad Pro sparked criticism for showing an animation of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, record players, and other symbols of creativity being crushed by a giant machine, with the output being the new iPad Pro, which the company says is the thinnest Apple product ever. In this context, “crushing” was supposed to symbolize “consolidating” and “compacting” — with the visuals meant to showcase how the new iPad Pro puts the power of all these tools into the hands of creators in one thin device. However online commenters criticized the ad as insensitive and as symbolizing a “destruction of the human experience.” The ad hit the web on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Apple issued a mea culpa and apologized for the campaign.
___
Google is encouraging merchants to enable conversion annotations on their Google Shopping ads, which offer social proof that highlight a product's popularity. Conversion annotations like “best selling” or “3K shopped here recently” would provide visual cues about a product’s popularity or sales performance directly in the ad unit. Annotations like these are par for the course with e-commerce retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Temu, which all employ similar tactics. They can provide valuable info for shoppers and also help with conversions. However they also open data privacy concerns, given that Google is not the actual retailer or marketplace selling the items, so a merchant would have to share this purchase history data from their e-commerce platform with Google — which technically most already do by giving access to GA4.
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Shein is attempting to join the National Retail Federation as it pursues regulatory approval to go public in the US. The company believes that NRF membership would boost its chances of receiving SEC approval. However so far, Shein has been rejected numerous times. An anonymous source familiar with the matter said someone with heavy influence at the NRF is strongly against the Shein's admittance. However board members who spoke to CNBC said that Shein's membership application hadn't come up in meetings, and that they aren't involved in deciding which companies are granted access.
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Amazon is leading the way with selling home goods, capturing 18.8% of consumer home furnishings spending, compared to Walmart's 7.3% market share. Notably, Amazon’s gains in the furniture category come in spite of the company’s decision to phase out two of its three furniture brands last year.
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Stanley, which is projected to do $750M in sales this year, up from $73M in 2019, after seeing its water bottles become a status symbol thanks to TikTok, is now expanding into trendier accessories. The company is launching a line of bags called the All-Day Collection which include a mini cooler, backpack cooler, and Quencher Carry-All, designed for someone to sling their Stanley over their hip.
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Jack Dorsey left the Bluesky board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart, claiming that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. Dorsey says he never intended Bluesky to be an independent company, but rather, an open source protocol that Twitter was supposed to be the first client of. He also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder.
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Amazon is deploying 50 electric trucks in California, which it claims is the largest EV fleet in the country, as part of its mission to eliminate pollution from its global operations. The trucks will be integrated into first-mile operations, moving goods from container ships at the ports to fulfillment centers, as well as middle-mile operations, transporting packages from fulfillment centers to delivery centers.
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Wix launched a new tool called AI Portfolio Creator, which allows a user to upload and organize large-scale image collections, select the type of portfolio they want, and then have the AI tool sort and generate a portfolio with clustered images, recommended titles and descriptions, and personalized layout options.
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Amazon is now requiring all dietary supplements to be verified by a third-party testing, inspection, and certification organization — which is something that not even the FDA requires. Amazon is the largest supplement retailer in the US ahead of Walmart and Target, and its new requirements are expected to put more pressure on the industry, which is being scrutinized more than ever.
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Alibaba is revamping its flagship retail website Taobao for the first time in seven years with a focus on providing a smoother search and buying process. The website overhaul comes ahead of the 618 sales event, China's second-largest annual shopping event. A few weeks ago I reported that Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, would now be directly overseeing its domestic e-commerce arm which includes Taobao and Tmall Group, and it sounds like he's hitting the ground running with his new responsibilities.
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Amazon is hosting its first-ever Amazon Book Sale, a new shopping event starting on May 15th that offers up to 50% off print best sellers and up to 80% off Kindle Books. The six day shopping event will exclusively run in the US, and Prime-membership is not required to take advantage of the deals.
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FTX reported that nearly all of its customers will receive the money back that they are owed, two years after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. The company owes about $11.2B to its customers and estimates that it has between $14.5B and $16.3B to distribute to them. The caveat is that customers will receive the USD value of their holdings at the time of the exchange collapse, and not the actual crypto holdings themselves, which means that they'll miss out on all gains during the past two years during which BTC went from around $16k to now over $60k. Better than nothing though, that's for sure.
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800,000 consumers in Europe and the US were duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a network of fake online designer shops operated from China, which comprised one of the largest scams of its kind with 76,000 fake websites created. The scammers used expired domains to host its fake shops in order to help avoid detection by websites or brand owners, and more than 1M orders were processed in the past three years alone.
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Beyond Inc, which owns Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Zulily, reported that its Q1 net loss swelled to $72M from $10M a year ago, while its operating loss widened to $58M from $8M. The company's active customers grew to 6M, up 26% from nearly 5M a year ago, however, its average order value dropped to $173 from $220 a year earlier.
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TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI generated content when it is uploaded from certain platforms like DALL.E 3, Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, and Microsoft Copilot. TikTok will also start attaching Content Credentials to content, which will remain on the media when downloaded, allowing other platforms to read the metadata.
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eBay is testing an Add To Cart button in search results that opens a Quick View window, allowing buyers to skip the listing page. Technically the button should probably not be labeled “Add To Cart” since it doesn't perform that action, but rather, displays a quick view window with three buttons: Buy It Now, Add To Cart, View All Details. Sellers are worried that buyers will miss crucial details in the product description that may lead to increased returns and negative feedback.
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Amazon is planning to launch its fleet of drones in Tolleson, Arizona, but the city's extreme temperature is hampering its efforts. Drones can't operate in temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that Tolleson crosses for a full three months of the year.
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A US district judge dismissed X's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X system and violating X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. The judge basically said that if X owned the data, it could perhaps argue that it has exclusive rights to control it, but then X wouldn't be able to enjoy the safe harbor of Section 230, which allows the platform to avoid liability for third-party content. Can't have it both ways!
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Nintendo is discontinuing its X integration for the switch on June 10th, which means users will no longer be able to post screenshots or videos to the platform from their device. The drop in support also affects games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which had game-specific options to send out tweets. Microsoft Xbox dropped support for X in April 2023 and Sony Playstation dropped the service in October 2023 due to the increase in X's API access fees.
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Amazon claimed that its recordable incident rate — a metric that comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment” — at its US warehouses has improved by 24% since 2019. However the National Employment Law Project challenged Amazon's injury data in a report last week, claiming that Amazon's overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector at 6.5 cases per 100 workers.
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Amazon Ads announced three new advertising formats for streaming TV including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive trivia ads. Amazon did not say when the new ad types would officially launch, but noted that it will formally present them at a presentation on May 14th.
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Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI ad tools that can create full image variations with text overlays, expand images to fit across different aspect ratios, and generate alternate versions of headlines and other ad text. The features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
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Square introduced a tool called Square Kiosk to allow self-service ordering at fast food restaurants. The device is a combined software, hardware, and payment solution that allows customers to select exactly what they want with customization options, upgrades, and add-ons.
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The European Parliament announced new measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste in the EU, including reduction targets of 15% by 2040 — which sounds far away but is only 16 years away?! As part of the new rules, the EU will set maximum empty space ratios for e-commerce transportation, ban certain single-use plastic packaging types, and beverage distributors and take-away food will have to offer consumers the option of bringing their own container.
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Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and seeking refunds of their deposits after Elon Musk canceled another visit to the country last month. Disillusioned Tesla enthusiasts in India say they will now buy a car from the company only if they see it in a showroom, or they'll buy a different electrical vehicle from a company that actually exists in the country.
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Target is limiting its Pride Month collection to select stores this year instead of rolling out the merchandise nationwide like it typically has for the past decade, due to backlash the retailer experienced last year. Last May customers in certain stores knocked down LGBTQ+ merchandise displays, angrily approached store employees, and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.
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E-commerce spending from Jan 1 to April 30, 2024 rose 7% YoY to $331.6B, according to Adobe Analytics. One trend Adobe identified during the period is a shift of online spending to purchasing the cheapest goods across personal care, electronics, apparel, home & garden, furniture, and grocery.
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Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Shopify's acquisition of Peel, a tool that integrates with a merchant's tech stack including Klaviyo and Recharge and helps them analyze their sales data to improve customer retention.
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I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
For more details on each story and sources, see the full edition: https://www.shopifreaks.com/bigcommerce-for-sale-openai-gpt-4o-instacarts-unlikely-partnership/
What else is new in e-commerce? Share stories of interesting in the comments below (including in your own business) or on shopifreaks.
-PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter
PS: Want the full editions delivered to your Inbox each week? Join free at www.shopifreaks.com

My (F28) and my family all went to celebrate my brother (M30) and his fiancé's (F30ish) graduations. My brother received a doctorate at noon and my almost-SIL (ASIL) received her's at 3pm. The college that we traveled to was at least 2 1/2 hours - 3 hours away to drive without stopping. So, it was a long day. My parents and my sister (F39) and her son (M12) all went for this big day, too.
So, the ASIL is SUPER sensitive compared to our family. She's not used to joking around or teased, which is "funny" because that's how my brother always was when we were growing up. They love each other dearly and I fully believe they make each other better. She's also VERY sheltered.
My sister, on the other hand, has a short fuse. She's not in a healthy relationship, her son was out of control messing with people, they traveled even further than us, she had a MASSIVE headache, and she recently stopped smoking cold-turkey.
I believe our family is used to giving each other shit and handing it right back, but we can be mean at times. We may apologize or just let it go, because we are actually a really close family and have an on-going text thread that we talk to each other almost every single day. -with the exception to my brother not being very active because he worked full time and just got his doctorates degree. OH, AND HE'S ABOUT TO MOVE TO ANOTHER COUNTRY!
Okay, so here's where it gets messy.
My sister was already having a bad day from the already mentioned reasons. Apparently, when my ASIL tried to speak to my sister, my sister was very short with her and walked away soon after. I wasn't there, but my mother called me asking what we should do because I guess my ASIL ended up crying about that interaction for a long time after everyone had left.
It was a long and happy day for everyone, I thought. BUT my sister was also short with me several times and I shrugged it off because I knew she was not having a good day, even though she was super happy for my brother and ASIL to be achieving these huge accomplishments.
My sister is the kind of person that will just "be done" with someone, which I don't think she'll do in this situation, but she still might hold a grudge. And my sister and I don't really know our ASIL that well because there's been so much distance and all of our lives are busy. We seem them usually once or twice a year briefly.
I do not believe that my sister would INTENTIONALLY be mean or rude to ASIL. I also don't doubt this didn't happen because I'm used to it and don't take it personally. She really does have a much more difficult daily life than me and especially my ASIL have ever experienced.
I think my ASIL is very sweet and kind-hearted. She's got that gentleness to her that nobody in our family has lol. BUT she is also very sensitive and she won't say anything to anyone that these things bother her.
My brother informed my mom and I don't think that his fiance knows he told my mom. I think she'd be horrified that my mom and I know. My sister doesn't know that our ASIL cried about it and we don't know if we should say something.
If we say something to my sister and she spills too many beans, then ASIL will know that my brother said something. If we don't say anything to my sister, then ASIL may be very offended and distant in a very close family environment.
I'm not asking if my sister is the A-hole, because I know she can be or come across like one even when she doesn't mean to. But seriously, we don't want this to blow up. So, anyone have any ideas on how to confront my sister in a way that she doesn't make things worse?

Recently had someone accuse me of pointing a gun at them and gave a sworn statement to the sheriff claiming such. However, also in his statement he admits to stopping his car in the middle of a a single lane road, getting out of his vehicle, approaching my vehicle, and that I never got out of my vehicle.
I get a call about 3 hours after the event happens from an officer asking for my side of the story. I told him I didn’t wish to make a statement or file a report of my own. He then calls my wife and tells her they have probable cause to arrest me for 2nd degree assault and that we should get a lawyer.
2 weeks later the same officer is showing up at my house after 10pm 2 nights in a row in addition to calling multiple times. Again, I have already told him I don’t wish to make a statement. I call to file a complaint because I checked and I have no active warrants (or no arrest warrant). They refuse to allow me to make a complaint stating that the officer was there to arrest me for probable cause and that I can’t file a complaint about the manner in which the officer conducted himself since the officer works graveyards. The guy I’m talking to then asks if I’d like to have a squad car come take me to jail and book me but says he’s not sure if a judge would be able to see me today.
Long story short I met with a daytime deputy who said if I gave a statement refuting the initial pointing a gun claim that they wouldn’t arrest me for probable cause. I repeatedly told them the only reason I was making a statement was because I didn’t want to go to jail. I also asked why the case wasn’t passed along to a prosecutor to which I was told that the original graveyard deputy was still collecting evidence (presumably a statement from my wife and I).
My question is wtf is this “probable cause” arrest that they are trying to use 2+ weeks after the fact instead of passing the case to a prosecutor and getting an arrest warrant? There is no physical evidence (video) only the 1 guys statement. Clearly there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution, especially for a 2nd degree assault when he admitted he instigated the whole thing and that I never got out of my car. I’m really scratching my head over this.

Im sorry for making this post longer than it needs to be.
I (22M) and my gf (24F) have been together for 3 years.
As context I was viciously abused by my mother for the majority of my childhood. I was the result of an affair and her husband divorced her because of me. My bio dad was gangbanger and went to jail when I was 6. The momemt he went to jail my mom started taking her frustrations about her failed marriage and miserable living situation out on me. I was an afterthought and a punching while my older sister was her "true baby." If my sister got bad grades, it was okay. If I got bad grades I was beaten until I started having seizures. If I started crying my mom would lock me outside. We lived in Chicago and sometimes she would lock me outside during the middle of winter. I tried telling people about the abuse but I was always framed as a liar and in our community my mom had a prestine image, so in their eyes she could do no wrong.
In my mothers words i was " a sorry ass bitch that no mother would want."
If it wasnt for my sister I would probably be dead by now. She would sneak her jackets out of the house when my mom locked me out, snuck food into our room when my mom refused to let me eat and would bring me icepacks and let me cry in her arms after my mom was done beating me. I am and will forever be grateful for her. To this day I consider her to be my actual mother.
A few months after I turned 18, I ran away to Indiana. Besides keeping in contact with my sister and a few friends, to everyone else I just disappeared from the face of the earth. It was tough. I had a few distant relatives there and they would let me occasionally crash on their couch but for the most part, I was homeless. Eventually I did land a job at a grocery store and with a bit of financial help from my sister, I was able to rent a small apartment.
I met my now ex gf while working at that grocery store. I was about to turn 19 and she was 20. After working a few shifts together we eventually started casually seing each other which eventually grew into a full on relationship.
I never really opened up her about after my last gf left me after I drunkenly opened up to her. I just lied enough to explain my constant nightmares, occasional seizures and why I would cringe hearing a latina womans accent. I just wanted to forget that part of my life.
Two years into dating each other we moved in together. I eventually got a better job working at a call center.
Around the same time me and my sister started loosing contact. Besides occasionally checking up on each other and wishing each other happy birthday, we didn't text each other. Last I heard from her, she had a new bf.
All that changed recently. My sister randomly texted me saying she wanted to come visit me in Indy. At this point I havent seen her in 3 and a half years so I obviously said yes.
I told my gf that my sister and her bf were coming to crash at our place for a few days. This was their first time meeting each other so I was kinda nervous.
She arrived at our place while my gf was home and I was at work. I spent the next few days catching up and me scoping out her bf(I have always been a bit protective of her. Even tried beating up the boys she brought over when I was 10 lol.)
I did see a weird change in my gf around the same time. It felt like she was walking on egg shells around me. I did bring it up to her but she would just tell that it was nothing and I was imagining things.
The day after my gf and her bf left, me my gf and a few of our friends went out clubbing. I remeber her friends giving me a werid look throughout the night. I didn't drink much but my gf was nearly blackout drunk. I decided to call it a night and get an uber home since my gf could barely stand anymore.
I literally had to drag her out of the club. While everyone was waiting outside for their uber to arrive my gf started throwing a fit about leaving so soon (it was 2am.) She started calling me a pussy and some shit about how I was just probably insecure about some guys hitting on her or something like that. Neither do I remember seeing any guys hitting on her nor do I really give a shit since I trusted her enough to simply reject them. I knew she was drunk and kept my cool until she said something on the lines of "No wonder your mom used to beat you." Everyone just fell silent and stared at her. She then clearly told me "dont worry. You sister told me everything you fucking pussy." At this point her friends tried to shut her up and started pleading with her to „do it at home“ whatever that’s supposed to mean.
I was beyond fuming. I just took out my phone and followed the car icon on the uber app. I wanted to stop myself from doing something that I might regret later. She kept on going on about how im a pussy for letting a woman overpower me or something. After that I just blocked out whatever other bs came out of her mouth.
The uber ride home was silent. I didn't even respond to the small talk the driver tried to start with me. All I could think about was what my gf said earlier. I didn't even notice her starting to sob next to me. When we walked into the apartment she started full on crying and begged me for forgiveness. She said wasn’t thinking straight and she didn't mean what she said etc. I just told her to shut the fuck up and to go to bed I tried sleeping on the couch. I coudnt.
I decided to end things with her a few hours later. She was completely passed out on our bed so I just started packing my things and loaded whatever I could into my car.
Im currently staying at a friends place and shes been trying to reach me nonstop.
Im not mad at my sister for telling my gf since she didn't mean any harm and probably just wanted to tell her what I went through. Im purely mad at my gf.
Thats not something you say to someone you love.
My ex was always insistent on me opening up to her more and her reaction to hearing what I went through just pisses me off. Seriously why do some women want their SO to open up about their emotions/past if they know they’re only going to shame them for it?
A part of me believes that she meant what she said but the other part of me believes that she was just drunk and I was overreacting and should give her a chance to explain herself but Idk.
Her friends have also been texting me that im an AH for leaving even though I knew she was drunk and that my gf has been trying to apologise to me.
Am I going too far?
Should I give her a second chance?
Am I actually the asshole here?
Im overwhelmed by everything happening and just need some advice.
A part of me doesn't want to start over again. Ive done that enough in my life.
She is the second girl ive dated that has had a negative reaction to the things I went through so I believe I should take a bit off the blame here as well and should have told my sister to keep her mouth shut regarding my past.
This will probably be the last time I let anyone else hear my story.

Hey Sportsfans — it's time for Week 7 of baseball Power Rankings: These baseball numbers have been forwarded directly from Manfred's office. They are accurate and caanot be questioned.
Every voter has their own style / system and the only voting instructions are these:

"To an extent determined individually, you must take into account how strong a team is right now and likely to be going forward. You must, to some degree, give weight to the events and games of the previous week."

TRANSPARENCY: This link will show you who voted each team where and has added neat statistics!
Please check this space shortly for a link to the Auxilliary Post for added details and stats!
If something is a little messed up, feel free to pester me let me know.
Total Votes: 30 of 30. Another Perfect Vote!.

#		Team	Δ	Comment	Record
1		Dodgers	0	The Dodgers started off a mediocre road trip by sweeping the Marlins in dominant fashion, followed by a sleepy series against the padres. My early season prediction of the Dodgers's infield defense being the biggest issue was completely wrong. Mookie looks natural at short, and Muncy has been playing pretty darn well at 3rd. We will be using our prayers this week to pray that Shohei is going to be okay	27-15
2		Phillies	+1	It's tough to end the week on a walkoff loss to the Marlins and feel good, but it's hard to complain about a 4-2 stretch. Nick Castellanos might finally not be the worst hitter in baseball after he says he started treating hitting like glorified batting practice again. Ranger Suarez has arguably been the best pitcher in baseball, pitching to a 1.5 ERA and an astounding 0.72 WHIP with team wins in each of his starts. Somehow this performance isn't even all that surprising for a guy with a 4.18 ERA last year. He was this dominant in a half season between the bullpen and rotation in 2021 and has a career 1.62 ERA in 7 postseason starts and 2 relief appearances. This week: another weird scheduling quirk as they play a 4 game set against the Mets with the first two at Citi Field and the next two in Philly before the Nats come to town for a 3 game series.	28-13
3		Orioles	-1	I was hoping the Orioles would go 5-1 this week but they went 4-2. Still nothing to be super upset about. I think the main concerns right now are Mullins is hitting under .200 and Santander still not hitting the way he can. Yesterdays game was just not great so hopefully it was just a one-off and can be flushed and they move on. Blue Jays and Mariners are in town this week so it doesn't get any easier.	26-13
4		Yankees	0	Our pitching is so good right now. Anyone in the rotation could pull a Glasnow and write their number on a ball for a cute girl, and she’d call. Doesn’t even have to have their name. She doesn’t care if its’s Nestor Cortes or Clarke Schmidt. Yankees starter? She’s calling, and she’s shaving her legs beforehand. If we signed Pete Davidson for some spot starts there'd be a second baby boom. By the way, my nickname for Clarke Schmidt used to be Farte Schidt. He has very much made me eat my aforementioned schidt this year, and officially has the second-best starter ERA behind Luis Gil, as we all predicted. In other news, Judge and Stanton both have their pop at once, Soto is doing what Soto does, and Verdugo is playing sneaky good right now. We also officially took the season series against Houston 6-1, which feels GREAT. If only they were a playoff team so we could finally bounce them this year. Oh well. A Yankees-A’s ALCS it is.	27-15
5		Braves	0	The walk off loss hurts, but can't be too upset with a 4-1 bounce back week! Big time perfromance from our SP. Giving up only 4 ERs in 23.2 IP (1.52 ERA) in these 5 games. Our bats are not what we have come to expect, but that can't last much longer. Signs of life from Acuña and Olson and continued performance by Ozuna. If by the end of May we don't see massive improvement to our offensive numbers, I will be surprised. Until then, buckle up because the offense is coming.	24-13
6		Twins	+3	Another great week, Sausage be praised! We took series from the Blue Jays and Mariners with both blowouts and well-pitched close games. I think it's safe to say that the team has found its groove, and this is how the Twins can be expected to perform moving forward. The only blip has been that the bullpen is having a slight slump, but that will even out shortly.	24-16
7		Brewers	0	Paul Who? The only starting pitcher debut I care about is BOBBY GAS who threw 6 innings of 2 hit, 0 run ball in a win against the Cardinals. He fills a much needed spot in the Brewers rotation, and likely would have been up sooner if not for an injury of his own. Rhys Hoskins also had a monster week, racking up 3 HR and 9 RBI in hist last 5 games. I had my doubts this young lineup and shaky rotation actually could be a contending ballclub over 162 games, but I'm not going to argue with the results.	24-16
8		Guardians	-2	Another bad week. The Guardians had rough series against the Tigers and the mighty World Champion favorite White Sox. This coming week, we play the reigning World Series champs and the hottest team in our division. I'm not worried. Not at all.	25-16
9		Cubs	-1	The Cubs went 3-3 this week in what felt like a complete microcosm of their season. While they did get Justin Steele, Cody Bellinger, and Seiya Suzuki back from injury, they lost Dansby Swanson and Yency Almonte, who had been a rare reliable bullpen arm. Christopher Morel also had a scare after tweaking his knee sliding into sexond, but fortunately is alright. Otherwise, the offense remained inconsistent, the starting pitching was outstanding, and the bullpen was abysmal at worst and heart-stopping at best. While he didn't continue his usual dominance against them, Ian Happ extended his streak of 62 consecutive games reaching base vs the Pirates. This week, the Cubs travel to Atlanta to take on the Braves before hosting the Pirates for 4 games.	24-17
10		Royals	+2	The Royals have a chance to be in first place by themselves this late in the season for the first time since 2016. It feels like a lifetime ago. Yes, it is just seven weeks into the season but hopes are usually gone by this point. Maybe this year can be different.	25-17
11		Mariners	0	Apologies for any typos, doing this from mobile is miserable. Not the best week, but given the pitching hiccups I can't complain too much. Woo is back (and hopefully staying back, him getting pulled was a bit of a scare.) The next few series are another gauntlet, and if the M's can make it through playing relatively well they'll be in a good positon to take advantage of their schedule for the end of the month and early June. Up next: 3 vs. Roy L's, 3 @ Oreo L's	22-19
12		Padres	+2	The San Diego Madres beat LA on both día de las Madres (friday) as well as Mother’s Day, wherein both we got great pitching performances from King and Darvish respectively. Arraez capped off the walk-off win on friday, and it was nice to see Bogaerts get one deep on Sunday. So far in ‘24 the Padres haven’t lost a series to the Dodgers, whether in LA, San Diego, or South Korea. It’s a bit cathartic, though I do wish there was less blue in the stands this weekend though. Really interested to see how they come out against the rocks, as SD was only able to split the 4-game series earlier in the season. This one lines up between the series’s vs LA and ATL, it could be a bit of a trap, hoping the Pads continue their series winning streak (which is now at 4) and just take care of business.	22-21
13		Rangers	-3	The baseball gods are unforgiving. Sacrfices have to be made and will continue to be made to the baseball gods. Oh dear baseball gods please forgive our hubris for thinking the baseball suffering was over. It was not but also, flags fly forever.	22-20
14		Red Sox	-1	The Sox have not been having a good May. Losing Casas has been brutal, and the expected bump in performance from Vaughn Grissom at 2nd hasn't happened (well, at least not yet). As a team we have a decent looking triple slash, but situationally they've been horrible. In high leverage PAs, the Sox are hitting .195/.264/.272 in 247 PAs. We have loads of talent, but there's always some issue whether it be defense or clutch hitting that holds us back from being truly competitive.	21-19
15		Tigers	0	The City Connects... phew phew phew. Looks like we got tire tracks laid on us after a truck ran us over. No thanks. I hate it... and that's not even mentioning the dumb hat. In terms of actual baseball, though, Tarik Skubal is still Skuballing. This week: 3 vs. MIA, 3 at ARI.	20-20
16		Rays	0	It was a .500 week for the Rays, and the good news is things are looking better, but only like maybe? Randy and Yandy seem to be coming back a bit; glancing at the lineup's batting avg in the game threads isn't painful anymore. Ben Rortvedt is over .300 in the catcher position which is unheard of for this team. The bad news is pitching is only bouncing back from abysmal to below average. A week against division opponents on the road will test if that improvement is here to stay or if it was just a new uniform bounce.	20-21
17		D-Backs	+3	The Diamondbacks have been winning more games of late but are still underperforming their Pythagorean record and are 3 games below .500 despite a +17 run differential. Reinforcements should be coming back from injury soon which should help.	19-22
18		Mets	-1	I prewrote a big and extremely negative blurb about the Mets getting swept by the Braves. That did not happen, Brandon Nimmo hit a walk off homer on Sunday Night Baseball immediately as I was about to close my computer. Never been so glad to be wrong. Bring on the Phillies and Marlins.	19-20
19		Nationals	0	Two large accomplishments for the Nats in the last week - 1) For the first time since 2021, the Nats climbed over .500 with an opening win over the Orioles in a 2-game series. 2) Patrick Corbin recorded a win this week vs the Red Sox (his first since 9/11/23 vs the Pirates). The Nationals quickly slid back under .500 losing the 2nd game vs the Orioles and then 2 of 3 against the Red Sox. James Wood is hitting everything in AAA (over 1.000 OPS) so there are lots of calls for HRCHU.	19-20
20		Blue Jays	+1	Very up and down week for the Cyrulean Winged Creatures of Ontario. A 1-1 split with Philly and a 1-2 tilt vs Minnesota extended a too-long stretch of not winning series. Turns out, the combination of bad offense and a bad bullpen is bad. But there have been some glimpses of hope, at least. Alek Manoah threw a gem on Sunday, giving up 0 ER and 1 BB over 7 IP with 6 Ks. Also, Vladdy is hot as shit right now; since the last week of March, he's been hitting over .400 with a nearly 1.000 OPS. Still, the Jays in general continue to underperform and hover just below .500. Mid-May is not the time to freak out and this team is in too deep to consider a full tear-down even in a lost year, but things will be getting worrisome if they can't pull out of this middling stretch that has defined the first quarter of the season.	18-22
21		Giants	+4	Believe it or not, the Giants had a winning week. They continue their flirtation with being a decent team. However, we would like the world to know about several issues	19-23
22		Athletics	0	Happy Mother's Day, say hi or I'll drop by. Rough week, our bullpen had some awful games esp w/ Kotsay's choices. Will possibly fall below the Astros this week as we play them along with the Royals, and unlike last year I don't think we're a better team than KC. Toro and Harris have been playing well with Soderstrom getting some reps in (A+ defense from them), but Gelof will likely return and change something there.	19-23
23		Reds	-5	What is the meaning of suffering? This question has stumped philosophers throughout the ages, but nobody has come up with an answer. On the opposite side of this, we have also been in search of evidence of the divine, and we’ve searched for it in things like the miracle of our world. But again, we haven’t found anything. What if we’re looking in the wrong place? What if suffering is the greatest proof of a divine presence? Suffering is an art. Perhaps the greatest art ever devised. Devised by who or what though? Some greater power looming over us all? Some great cosmic being who looks upon us the same way as we do ants? Some primordial consciousness created trillions of years ago in the Big Bang that’s been merely existing all this time and only gets enjoyment out of the suffering of others? How do we figure this out? Who do we ask? I have a suggestion, we can ask baseball fans. We are connoisseurs of suffering. Ask an A’s fan about the meaning of suffering and you’ll get your answer just by looking into their eyes. Ask a Rockies fan, or a White Sox fan, or even a long dead Expos fan. It’s weeks like this that make me ask why do people even like baseball. Why do I even like baseball? Well, I remember my grandfather, since I live in the midwest we always called him Papaw, and he was the biggest baseball nut I know. He got me into baseball at a young age, and I remember one day asking why he loved it so much. When I say he was a baseball nut, I mean he was a season ticket holder, bought all the merchandise, had books about baseball and biographies written by baseball players, he had all of it. He could tell you everything about the sport with ease. So I asked him why did he love baseball so much because at that time I found it boring, and you know I still to this day remember his response. He told me baseball is 3 hours of nothing happening, but when something did happen, it was the most beautiful sport god ever created. I loved that man. Anyway this is all a long way to say the Reds suck ass right now.	17-23
24		Astros	0	Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there, especially yours. I'll visit her later, don't worry. The Astros continue to take 1 step forward and 3 steps back. Kyle Tucker is the man and we should extend him immediately. Our pitching is still mostly trash and no one deserves an extension.	15-25
25		Pirates	-2	Paul Skenes made his highly-anticipated debut on Saturday, and it was one of two games the Pirates won last week. And they only won that game after first blowing a 6-1 lead thanks to 6 (SIX!) walks with the bases loaded. At one point. Kyle Nicolas threw 12 straight balls with the bases loaded. The bullpen was so depleted that Nicolas had to pitch the next day after Aroldis Chapman gave up 2 runs and 2 walks in the 10th inning, only for Nicolas to give up another run on a wild pitch. The Pirates then hit a 2-run homer in the bottom of the inning and lost 5-4. So yeah, that's how things are going in Pittsburgh right now.	18-23
26		Cardinals	0	Bro, I'm straight up not having a good time.	16-24
27		Angels	0	Hot and then cold and then hot again, Jo Adell hit three homers this past week. With a wRC+ on the season now standing at 134 and a wOBA of .363, the next step for him is now maintaining a level of consistency. With a bottom-ranking farm system, his future may not ultimately be in Anaheim. The looming rebuild is going to be a long and slow process and at the age of 25, it is hard to see much point in keeping him if someone else starts looking his way.	15-26
28		Rockies	+2	We have the longest winning streak in baseball. We just swept the defending champs. I'm pretty sure that means Rocktober is coming. In all seriousness, the Rockies finally gelled for the first time this season. The Rangers didn't play poorly, the Rockies just played well. The concern now is what kind of "Coors Hangover" we'll see.	12-28
29		White Sox	0	The White Sox had a shockingly good week while clinching the season series against the Rays and winning 3 of 4 from the Guardians over the weekend. They have been playing objectively better baseball lately (which means that their 72 wRC+ season stat was at 84 last week, and their pitching has been middle of the league since the start of May). It's not much, but it's something. Myself, I'm excited to attend my first ball game of the year tonight. Of course, I'll be going to the Schaumburg Boomers home opener.	12-29
30		Marlins	-2	So the fish still cant produce runs but at least we got burger back. Luzardo looks much better in his return to the bigs but oof braxton garrett. Somehow miami managed to squeeze out a win this week against two top teams but well see how they do against the tigers and mets this upcoming season.	11-31

CPU— AMD Ryzen7 7800X3D(AM5)
CPU COOLER— Thermaltake TOUGHLIQUID Ultra 119.1 CFM((Liquid Cooler)(AM5))
Thermal Paste— Prolimatech PK-3 Nano Aluminum High-Grade 30g
Motherboard— MSI Mag X670E Tomahawk WIFI ATX(AM5)
Memory/RAM— G.Skill Ripjaws S5 ((4 x 16gb)(64gb)) DDR5-5600 CL28
STORAGE—

Crucial MX500 2.5” SSD (4 x 1TB)

Western Digital Black AN1500 PCIe NVME SSD((1 x 2TB)(PCIe x8))

Crucial T705 w/Heatsink M.2-2280 PCIe 5.0 X4 NVME SSD(4 x 2TB) — GPU— Asus TUF GAMING OC GeForce RTX4090 24gb
CASE/TOWER— Phanteks ECLIPSE G500A DRGB ATX Mid-Tower Case
PSU/POWER SUPPLY— Super Flower Leadex 80+ Titanium Certified 1000watt Fully Modular ATX
OS— Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (2048gb max memory)
CASE FAN(S)— iceburg Thermal iceGALE Xtra 169 CFM 140mm ((1x)(this is for the back of the case))
MONITOR—

ViewSonic XG272 2560x1440p 240Hz 27” 0.02ms Response Time(G2G) 0.01ms Response Time(MPRT) O-LED Panel

Widescreen ✅ Curved Screen ❌
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Any feedback is appreciated. Price does not concern me. This PC is mainly used for gaming and Music Making but my only concern is gaming performance.

TL;DR: I cheated on my girlfriend of 4.5 years by going on a date with another woman. We didn't hook up, but I recognize that doesn't matter. I got exposed via one of those "Are We Dating the Same Guy" pages 5 months later, we broke up, and then after a few weeks decided to slowly fix things. After genuine improvements both on an individual level and relationship level, I got caught being on Hinge after making an account while on an international trip. I didn't meet with any women and used the app purely because it was a passive distraction. She has since ended the relationship once and for all and we haven't spoken in two weeks. I am trying to determine if the relationship is officially over or if I should attempt to reach out over time to demonstrate that I still care and want to fight for this as I have the last few months...
Hello all -- from the onset, let me start by acknowledging that I recognize that there is no excuse for cheating. I've taken responsibility for what I've done from the start, began therapy, and I was making active (and recognized) improvements to show that I was committed to change. So, if you intend on burning me at the stake for cheating, or rubbing my face in the consequences of my actions, please know that I've already done as much to myself and then some. For background sake, my ex and I dated for about 4.5 years.
Long story short, I was posted on one of those "Are We Dating the Same Guy" Facebook groups back in January by a girl that I went on two dates with while dating my then-girlfriend. For context, my ex and I broke up in the Summer of 2022 because of mounting fights and because I was unable to commit to a move-in date. During the breakup, I downloaded Bumble and matched with a girl that I could maintain good conversation with. We texted/phoned a few times, but we never met in person. Eventually, my ex and I got back together about roughly a month later, I ghosted the Bumble girl, and my relationship with my girlfriend moved on. Fast forward to about a year later (fall of 2023) -- I was out one night at a local bar and the Bumble girl was there on a date with another guy. She texted me later that night noting how funny it was that the first time we saw each other in-person was when she was on a date. We continued to text and I eventually made the poor decision to go out on not one, but two dates with her. We didn't sleep together and I broke things off after the second date because I realized how stupid and selfish I was being.
Fast forward to five months later (January of this year), the Bumble girl posted me on the above-mentioned Facebook group... I'm still in disbelief that she'd do so after only two dates, but word got back to my girlfriend and things went as you'd expect. Things were turbulent, she broke up with me, said that she couldn't forgive me for what I did, and that was that. However, after a couple of weeks, we began to reconnect. We began spending time together, sleeping together, and I made it a point to highlight how sorry I was and that I'd make the necessary improvements to show her that I was committed to her. As time went on, we began making genuine improvements as a couple, and things were steadily becoming good again... Until I made another poor decision.
In mid-March, I went to Japan with a couple of friends and I downloaded Hinge simply because I was curious. Despite getting matches, I didn't meet with anyone and purely downloaded it out of curiosity. Unfortunately, I never deleted the app upon returning home. Time went on and my ex and I maintained our continued progress and we were on the brink of becoming "official" again. In fact, roughly 3 weeks ago we took our first trip post-January and had a romantic getaway at a lake-front property. We had an incredible time and truly felt like ourselves again. Upon returning home, that next Monday, she told me that she was the happiest she's ever been and truly saw me as a forever partner again. Then, a few hours later, she called me asking if I was on Hinge -- one of her sister's friends saw me on the app. That, my friends, was the last straw. She was enraged, told me she was done, and that she should've never let me back in.
Let me highlight that I recognize that I shouldn't have been on Hinge, but again, I was passively swiping as a means to dissociate from the turbulent scenario I found myself in. It's a point that I'm unpacking in therapy. When I came back from Japan, she began discussing the possibility of eloping (her aunt has terminal cancer and she wanted her aunt to see her get married before she died), began discussing moving in, and was generally mounting pressure on our relationship even though we still had work to do. Again, I am not excusing my behavior, but in a sense, I was dissociating from the stress by engaging in an otherwise unhealthy distraction. I didn't maintain conversations or meet any women during this time. To my ex, though, it didn't matter. According to her, if I was truly committed to making things work, I should've never been on the app in the first place. It's tough because, as a way to demonstrate my commitment, I gave her access to my location and tried to establish that if I was seriously pursuing other women, why would I give her my location? It made no difference.
She went on to block me (which she's never done) and told me to leave her alone so that she could heal from this/move on. So, I respected her wishes and didn't contact her. I recognize I blew my shot. Then, a week later (roughly 2 weeks ago), she called me asking if I had certain kitchen items which she most assuredly knew I didn't have. She then went on to ask me how I was doing, to which, we ended up speaking for over 3 hours. She went from being angry to crying/asking how I could jeopardize our relationship after my improvements, to informing me that she's moving apartments because she's set on moving on and that there's simply too much baggage for our relationship to survive. Certain things that she said throughout this call demonstrated that she loved me immensely and that she'd miss me, but that she recognized that this couldn't continue. It was a hard phone call to stomach because, by her unblocking me and spending 3 hours on the phone with me, it instilled some form of hope (in a weird way).
It's been two weeks since we've spoken and all I can think about is her. Especially in light of the real improvements we had made before this all happened. I really was working on improving myself and considered her to be my life partner... Look, as I've noted from the onset, I'm reaping what I sowed; however, the last two and a half months before all of this were filled with genuine improvement and I truly believed that we were going to make it. She herself acknowledged this before I was discovered on Hinge. I am working through with my therapist as to why I was on Hinge post-Japan, but I just feel like this shouldn't be terminal. With that said, I've continued to respect her wishes and I haven't contacted her despite wanting to. I want to respect her healing process, even if that means losing her, but I can't help but feel like I should reach out to show that I care and that I'm willing to continue fighting. I love her immensely, consider her my partner and best friend, and despite what my actions demonstrate, am a work in progress. Am I in denial regarding this being over? Is there a chance for me here? Or do I let time take its course and move on?

hi everyone I’m a recent transfer and got into cal and ucsd for public health, waitlisted at ucla 😔💔! i am extremely grateful, however am not sure which I should pick. i’ve always imagined myself in socal but didn’t expect to get into berkeley. don’t want to regret letting go of an opportunity like this. both schools are extremely strong for my major so I’d love to hear your input!
Cal: Public Health B.A. major
Pros: - cheaper than UCSD by 5-7k - name and prestige - Global Poverty Practice (GPP) minor ^ can relate my own practice tailored to public health - 4+1 program (able to get masters in 1 year after undergrad, if i get accepted) - location! also has a joint program w UCSF - connections (great for networking and have multiple doctors I can shadow and gain experience from) - a lot of public health grads are able to land a job before they graduate - has a children’s hospital nearby (want to do pediatrics in the future) - research is great - feel like this school would rlly challenge me and make me grow - more premeds get into medical school - “feeder” school for UCSF, most students also go to UCLA for med Cons: - gloomy weather bc of bay - close to home - grade deflation - worried I won’t have a high enough GPA to apply to med school - no med school on campus - academic environment - housing prices are expensive 😭 - safety (as a girl) - anchor housing is 2k with no meal plan (i think) - i’m taking a summer class which is on quarter system and cal starts on a semester system
UCSD: Public Health with Concentration in Medicine Science
Pros: - la jolla! great location and would feel relaxed going to the school - nicer weather - 3 hospitals on campus and many other facilities - easier on GPA - amazing for premeds - tution is expensive - far from home - people are more friendly - safer than cal ? - research is great - feeder school for ucsd med ?
Cons: - ucsd use to be my dream school but it changed to ucla - not really sure if i’ll feel challenged enough to grow academically - housing crisis? - not too sure if sd is my vibe - heard it’s socially dead - heard their public health program is less premed and more health

Alcon SA60AT is the lens my surgeon has chosen for me after a lot of questions about my desired result. Most of the research I can find goes back 20 years, so I'm wondering whether it's just familiarity with it that drove that choice (he's older, with plenty of experience and lots of confidence in his ability to do things right).
I'd like to know if there have been any improvements made to it since the early 2000s and about anyone's experience with this lens used to favor near vision in eyes that have lost their nearsightedness without becoming farsighted (ie., plano vision) with only astigmatism correction (and grade 3 cataracts) at present. The astigmatism is expected to be reduced by the surgery to only a minor amount (it's apparently mostly in the lenses that are coming out, one eye at a time, with time allowed for a refractive check between surgeries). How satisfied are people (who are not suitable candidates for multifocals, like me) with this specific lens?

hi everyone I’m a recent transfer and got into cal and ucsd for public health, waitlisted at ucla 😔💔! i am extremely grateful, however am not sure which I should pick. i’ve always imagined myself in socal but didn’t expect to get into berkeley. don’t want to regret letting go of an opportunity like this. both schools are extremely strong for my major so I’d love to hear your input!
Cal: Public Health B.A. major
Pros: - cheaper than UCSD by 5-7k - name and prestige - Global Poverty Practice (GPP) minor ^ can relate my own practice tailored to public health - 4+1 program (able to get masters in 1 year after undergrad, if i get accepted) - location! also has a joint program w UCSF - connections (great for networking and have multiple doctors I can shadow and gain experience from) - a lot of public health grads are able to land a job before they graduate - has a children’s hospital nearby (want to do pediatrics in the future) - research is great - feel like this school would rlly challenge me and make me grow
Cons: - gloomy weather bc of bay - close to home - grade deflation - worried I won’t have a high enough GPA to apply to med school - no med school on campus - academic environment - housing prices are expensive 😭 - safety (as a girl) - anchor housing is 2k with no meal plan (i think) - i’m taking a summer class which is on quarter system and cal starts on a semester system - more premeds get into medical school - “feeder” for UCSF, most students also go to UCLA med
UCSD: Public Health with Concentration in Medicine Science
Pros: - la jolla! great location and would feel relaxed going to the school - nicer weather - 3 hospitals on campus and many other facilities - easier on GPA - amazing for premeds - tution is expensive - far from home - people are more friendly - safer than cal ? - research is great - feeder school for ucsd med ?
Cons: - ucsd use to be my dream school but it changed to ucla - not really sure if i’ll feel challenged enough to grow academically - housing crisis? - not too sure if sd is my vibe - heard it’s harder to have a social life - heard their public health program is less premed and more health - dining hall food is bad, not too sure about places around ucsd