Introduction

Pertaining to Taylor Swift, "Female Rage" has deviated from its intended meaning after Swift debuted a new performance of The Tortured Poets Department during the Eras Tour. Now, according to Swift's use of the phrase, female rage is interpreted as public backlash against Swift's dating choices rather than as a response to the broader injustices against women and women's rights. This post examines Taylor Swift's flawed feminism, philanthropy, branding, and the controversial trademark petition for the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical". Swift's background as an entertainer, indeterminate politics, and alignment with capitalism over feminism pervades her legacy, again threatening her public tolerance as not just an individual but as a brand.

Once Upon a Female Rage...

If you were cognizant in the early 2010's, you've heard countless jabs at Taylor Swift in the media. Magazines, radio, or online. Music critics did not take her seriously as a songwriter; parents put a woman on an unrealistic pedestal as the ideal role model for their children; she dated too much and used men as lyrical fodder. No matter the story, it inevitably spread, conjoined with everyone's respective opinions, and you'd be left to wonder, "Why does everyone hate this girl so much?"
Taylor's target demographic has always been young or adolescent girls, more so when Swift herself was one. She made music that spoke to the awkward misfit, cultivating a para-social relationship with fans on MySpace, then later twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where Taylor posted relatable vlogs showcasing the life of a homegrown American girl. Taylor had a delayed public "growing up" and, compared to her female pop contemporaries, Swift never "gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy" (and, apparently, never even had a sip of alcohol until she turned 21). She was more than happy to spin this narrative to allude to an inherent moral superiority above other women in the industry (Better Than Revenge, heard of it?), engaging in the very slut-shaming that she herself endured (the Madonna and Whore archetypes). The victim complex arose with the need to prove Taylor as a different type of pop girl. Based upon her holy and clean image, Swift had been dubbed "a feminist's nightmare", and that "[To Swift] other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability." Feminism and Tennessee-Christian country values don't exactly mix, it seems.
Years later, Swift befriended Lena Dunham and thus experienced white feminism osmosis, where Dunham taught Swift that real feminists defend rapists, makes insensitive jokes about rape and abortion, and prioritize all-white casts. Swift then declared herself a feminist in 2014, saying,

"Becoming friends with Lena – without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for – has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so."

I suppose the male-centric songwriting subject that permeates Swift's discography contained covert feminism and that we just didn't see that. Perhaps, the "Bad Blood" song and music video were written only in jest and not about poor Katy Perry, for Swift, as a feminist, would "never make it a girl fight" or tear other women down (though all Katy did was date your terrible ex-boyfriend and allegedly steal three backup dancers from your tour). In 2013, Swift said, in response to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's joke towards her serial dating, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
There was that time in 2015 Taylor said that Nicki Minaj was "invited to any stage [she is] on" (as if Taylor expects to have access to every stage, award, and platform that Nicki might not otherwise have as a black female artist...yikes!) in response to Nicki's criticism of the white + thin VMA nominations. Later, Nicki responded with confusion, as Swift continued, "It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..". Of course, this 'beef' was 'squashed' when Nicki performed with Taylor at the VMAs, with Nicki quite literally only having 38 seconds of stage time without Taylor. Maybe all that parading around with a legion of famous white women - similar to the way Taylor might've done with her numerous 1989-era handbags - was in fact a stance against gender inequality, and that this display of "girl power" should be enough to constitute Swift as a feminist icon.
Even while Swift says that Dunham informed her feminist outlook, she dances around the exact contents of those beliefs: "what she believes, what she says, what she stands for" is not exactly insightful towards what beliefs Swift might have inherited. Taylor never broaches women's rights topics such femicide, FGM, forced pregnancy & marriage, sex trafficking, women in slavery, women's financial and political oppression, women's educational rights, women's health, or women's autonomy, so we can assume she only gives a fuck about "girls supporting girls" (whatever that fucking means).
Despite some questionable (and sometimes vindictive) behavior, Taylor as a young woman did not deserve every media lashing that she received. We cannot deny that most headlines and criticisms perpetuated a misogynistic rhetoric which has plagued Swift for a majority of her career. Acknowledging events such as the development of her ED, her sexual assault trial, "Famous" lyric and MV depiction of Taylor, and the explicit Twitter deepfakes, for example, as both disgusting and unfortunate things that happened to a young woman in Hollywood does not negate the fact that Taylor is mostly a performative feminist.

Get Your Fucking Ass Up and Be a Philanthropist, It Seems Like Nobody Wants to Be a Philanthropist These Days

In 2013, Taylor Swift cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. The donation amount - $4 million - was the largest individual artist gift ever donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is, of course, mentioned on Swift's website. The two-story facility features three classrooms, an instrument room, and an interactive children's exhibit gallery. Swift also performed at "All for the Hall" charity shows and has donated numerous artifacts from her career (such as notable guitars, tour costumes, etc) to the museum.
This was over 11 years ago, and it is still the only notable philanthropic contribution Taylor Swift has made.
For a woman of her net worth and stature, and a woman who recognizes the difficulties for women in film and music, you would think that Taylor Swift might establish a scholarship program for women to study the arts or something. Perhaps Swift might even consider becoming a member of organizations that support female artists, or one that supports LGBTQ+ causes (since she is now proudly an ally), yet she remains superficial with her graces. Broader philanthropy, such as donating relief aid to Palestinian women or women impacted by violence and discrimination will probably never receive any financial support from Miss Swift because then she'd be using her money towards philanthropies involving anyone but white entertainers.
She even says herself in Miss Americana, "My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as 'good'." Well, she's certainly thought of as good, though her actions say otherwise. She's more than happy to do a vaguely altruistic song and dance for a clip-worthy interview quote and mass appeasement, then fuck off to one of her mansions on a 20 minute private jet flight, rather than actually contribute to anything pertaining to the causes she has endorsed. Yet, far too many people continue to give a woman such as her their money, time, and energy, and she hoards these resources to herself.

I Like Some of the Taylor's Songs, But What the Fuck Does She Know About Feminism?

Swift continued with her self-proclaimed feminist campaign, positioning herself as a political activist and LGBTQ+ ally in the Miss Americana documentary. The primary focus of the documentary consists of the sexual assault trial, Andrea Swift's cancer diagnosis, Taylor's ED and body dysmorphia, media scrutiny, and, largely, finally speaking up about her politics publicly, mostly her opposition to the 2018 Tennessee Republican senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn, and Blackburn's beliefs. Swift says, following a scene discussing her experience during the trial,

"I just couldn't really stop thinking about it. And I just thought to myself, next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you want to say."

We must ask ourselves, though: when has Swift ever spoken up to change anything? Okay, pulling her entire catalogue from Spotify because they didn't pay their artists enough and similarly pulling her catalogue from Apple Music are changes that she leveraged due to her revenue potential and power, but they are not pertinent to the average woman's rights. Moreover, these are issues that directly impacted Taylor's income, which was enough reason for her to protest in the first place. Swift has sold the most units for a female artist in first week sales, is the first female artist with 100k monthly Spotify listeners, is the first female artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy 4 times, and is the first female artist to do X, Y, and Z, all while being inoffensive and family-friendly to boot. The actual Taylor Swift seems unwilling to compromise the brand of Taylor Swift by contributing in meaningful ways to feminist causes, especially if it is for women outside of America and Hollywood.
The reason political anthems such as "The Man" and "Only the Young" of the Lover era feel disingenuous and corporate is because, well, it is. Taylor has taken every opportunity to advance her career or public image at the expense of other women. What is truly genuine to Taylor's outlook on other women is vying for male attention, taking down female competition, and vocalizing feminist injustices only if they directly impact her and her money. Some will argue that it's satisfactory for a woman with such a huge platform to even TALK about feminism, but that just isn't enough. It's even less impressive when you candidly look at the scope of her feminist lens: "If I was the man, then I'd be THE MAN", or "I really resent the ‘Be careful, buddy, she’s going to write a song about you’ angle, because it trivialises what I do", and, of course, "We all got crowns". Feminism, but only when it happens to me. It gets worse when you look at Taylor's track record of copying other famous women and removing other female artists as potential threats to her pop prowess.
It's good for PR to align yourself with certain blanket feminist and political beliefs, therefore good for branding, therefore good for ticketing and merchandise sales, therefore good for business. And Taylor Swift is a business.
She's not a feminist. Taylor Swift is a capitalist.

I Can't Pay Those Sweatshop Workers a Livable Wage or Benefits! How Else Would I Make My Billions?

Recently, Taylor's team filed to trademark the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical" after Taylor said during Paris N1 of the Eras Tour,

"So you were the first ones to see The Tortured Poets at the Eras Tour...or as I like to call it, 'Female Rage: The Musical'."

This trademark petition was filed last week on Saturday, and news comes about just as numerous unofficial fan-made merch designs have cropped up with this phrase plastered on Fruit of the Loom basics. I'm of the opinion Swift's team motioned for a trademark so that they can send out cease & desists to all those that make knockoff merch, which disrupts potential sales for Bravado, UMG's choice merchandising company; however, since it was filed earlier, perhaps Swift has bigger plans with the bizarre use of the gendered phrase. One Swiftie referred to the phrase "female rage" as "a funny Eras Tour joke". Could it be a possible fourth version of the Eras Tour Movie? Whatever the reason, the motion to capitalize off of such a concept is disgusting, but not unsurprising, for a woman that profits on her vain feminism.
Swift, through her company, TAS Rights Managements, has also trademarked over 200 phrases, including "1989", where she owns the property rights to this calendar year on keychains, phone cases, sunglasses, stationary, bags, beverage ware, clothing, entertainment services, your subconscious, and, of course, Christmas ornaments.
The vapid consumerism in Swiftie culture is, frankly, disgusting. Bravado's sustainability statement is non-existent, the quality control is abysmal, and the materials they use are horrible. The materials, such as acrylic and polyester, are made from petrochemicals. This means they are non-renewable, shed microplastics, and are quite toxic in production. The manufacturing process to make all of those lazy-rushed Eras Tour logo graphic tees is a huge blow to environmental well-being. Apparently, though, Swifties don't give a fuck. They sell out products in seconds and either have to face the manufactured scarcity or buy from a scalper that resells for 200% of the already ridiculous retail price. This doesn't include the environmental impact of vinyl records, CD, and cassette production, of which Taylor produces many variants that sell unsustainable amounts.
If we're talking about women's rights violations, why is no one acknowledging the women that work in the inhumane sweatshop conditions that have to pump out fugly t-shirts and hats? The millions of plastic microfiber dander they are inhaling, or the toxic dyes that touch their bare skin? Are they being compensated fairly for their skilled labour and are they in safe working environments? Do these women have minimal bargaining power, and do they have authority over their worker's rights? Is Taylor Swift female raging at their injustices? Does Taylor Swift ever feels bad that her wealth was built on the backs of women of color, disadvantaged by the demands of the global economy and garment industry? Do you think she ever says a little white feminist prayer for them before she goes to sleep at night?
What's even crazier is not that Taylor herself doesn't care, it's that Swifties don't care. There CANNOT BE ethical billionaires. You only make a billion dollars if you are exploiting other human beings for capital gain. Based on public perception of the possible "Female Rage: The Musical" trademark, it seems like Swifties are already asking for merch with this phrase. "If Taylor made it, I'd buy it." Oh, cool. So not only do you champion Miss Swift's avarice and billionaire status, but you also are unashamed to admit to your blind consumption of her music and merchandise, no matter where they might originate in production or sincerity. Just as Swift takes and takes and takes, Swifties' consumerism of Taylor Swift cannot be quelled.
The tortured artist's most vulnerable and sincere poetry...available now in 21 different versions!

I Am Tortured Poet, Hear Me Whinge

Look - even if Taylor's intention is to characterize TTPD as more "tortured" and "angry", the main thread of the album is "I was ghosted by my decade-long situationship with a controversial indie boy and my fucking stupid fans wrote a 'Speak Up Now' open letter prompting me to drop him" anger, which is adequately expressed in the lyrics and performances. The extent of Taylor's "female rage" on TTPD is on tracks such as "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?", which contends with relentless media scrutiny; "But Daddy I Love Him", where Swift firmly states she'll date whoever she likes no matter how "Sarahs and Hannahs" may react; and "The Albatross", a track mythologizing her reputation and the consequences of dating her. Of course, these coincide with deep psychological wounds that formed during Swift's early years in the media, and so, from her feminist perspective, these subjects tackle the misogyny and double standards that she faced.
Yet Taylor Swift still has no grounds to be claiming that TTPD best exemplifies female rage and therefore she, in the context of this album, is female rage incarnate. As the daughter of a stock broker and mutual fund marketing executive, Taylor was born into wealth and allowed privileges like trips and subsequent relocation to Nashville all so that she might get a record deal. Her father even invested at least $120,000 into the then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, which ensured Taylor's place with Borchetta after leaving her dead-end development deal with Sony. The fact that her parents were able to buy her a fucking brand new guitar for Christmas and pay for music lessons says so much about the financial security and safety of her childhood.
Money is privilege and protection, and despite Swift's experiences with misogyny and loser boyfriends, she does not know what female rage is.
Her rage is derived from her frustrations with her obsessive fans pulling the moral superiority card on Taylor in response to her rebound with Matty Healy. That's literally it. She's just pissed that the monster she created is no longer obediant, it's become a feral, sovereign entity that depletes the world of its natural resources and thinks it is more intelligent than it actually is because it's mommy has started to talk to it with big words. Apparently, 'illicit', 'elegy', 'nonchalant', and 'precocious' are considerably big words for the oafish monster, and I find it strange that this level of literacy is present in a group of fans that allegedly have GPAs of 3.5 or higher, but I digress.
Taylor Swift has never been one paycheck away from destitution. Taylor Swift has never experienced racial discrimination. She may have instances of gender discrimination, but she possesses the ideal white, blonde American beauty standard and therefore reaps the benefits of being a conventionally attractive woman. Taylor Swift has sufficient social capital. Taylor Swift is a billionaire woman prolonging her victimhood though she, as a woman, has mostly had control over her image and music (unlike her contemporaries). Taylor Swift is NOT entitled to be championed for her "female rage", nor should she be. Taylor Swift has never even been the struggling artist, for fuck's sake. I don't give a fuck if she's trying to fill the empty lunch tables of her past. Taylor Swift purporting herself, her unpolished album, and her lukewarm feminism as a musical bleeding with female rage is asinine.

Sigh Try and Come For My Job, Poors

Out there in the world right now is a 23-year-old woman, a recent college grad, who works as a barista. She has to wake up and get ready to go into a minimum wage job because she cannot get a job in her field. She doesn't have healthcare benefits or sick time, so she has to go into work no matter how she's feeling. All day long she is berated by vicious customers and creepy men, and, exhausted from being on her feet, she knows she has to go home to her shitty roommate that never does the dishes and her roommate's shitty dog. To comfort herself, she considers getting a treat, but thinks against it when she remembers that matcha lattes cost $15 and they taste like milky dirt. She knows that she needs to buy groceries this week, and so the woman resolves to go home, but notices that her gas tank is low. She goes to put gas in the car, but the pump stops at $27.86 because that's all that she has in her checking account. The woman, bereft and reeling, sinks into the driver's seat. "Well," she thinks, her head in her hands, "at least I don't have Taylor Swift's job. I just couldn't imagine."
Fame is somewhat of a choice. If at any moment Taylor feels that she is misunderstood, misconstrued, or overwhelmed by public opinion, she can LEAVE the public eye - Lord knows she has the retirement fund and residuals to do so. In "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart", the TTPD song about meeting the demands of your career-zenith mega-tour while in the relationship trenches, Taylor ends the song by rambling,

"You know you're good when you can even do it with a broken heart...you know you're good...and I'm good, cause I'm miserable, and no one even knows!...try and come for my job."

Yeah, obviously we wouldn't know, you recently passed the billionaire threshold and are the most famous and in-demand performer in the world right now. Taylor Swift makes an estimated $10 to $13 million dollars A NIGHT on the Eras Tour. Furthermore, the Eras Tour movie grossed $261.6 million globally, (which, as the producer, Taylor takes home 57% of the ticket sales) not counting the streaming revenue from Amazon Prime Video and the estimated $75 million deal that Disney paid to have it on Disney+. We're not even considering the income from cheap plastic popcorn buckets and drink cups plastered with colored squares in her Era-specific likeness.
It's funny. Taylor Swift often said that being famous wasn't hard, that she "isn't complaining". I'm sure it is difficult to always have to present in a good mood, else you'll end up misrepresented in the media, and I'm sure it's invasive to virtually have no privacy or semblance of anonymity. Still, Taylor Swift shows up each night of tour and performs. For a majority of her career, she has penned her sad songs while on the road. Most of "Red", her breakup album, was written in the thick of the Speak Now World tour. Now, some Swifties say they almost "feel bad" for attending the Eras Tour with Swift's revelations in this song, that they have had a 'dimmed experience' upon hearing Taylor's misery whilst performing. Despite the fact that Taylor said that "this was the happiest she's ever been" at Gilette Stadium in May, the lyrics "boohoo, woe is me, smile for the cameras and make the fans happy!!!" are jarring for Eras attendees.
While Taylor Swift was making double-digit millions a night in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and feeling miserable, Ana Clara Benevides Machado passed away due to heat exposure. The concert promoters, Time For Fun, are now the subject of a criminal investigation due to their lack of adequate hydration and safety. Taylor Swift cancelled the Sunday show that was to follow and offered VIP tent tickets to Benevides Marchado's family, which was a kind gesture, but perhaps incongruous to the incident of which they were offered as consolation. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but I'm not sure attending the very show at the very same venue that my daughter or sister passed away in two days prior, where the singer CONTINUED the show despite her death, would be healthy for closure.
There was no female rage at the show as Swift never saw Benevides Machado pass out. There was no female rage towards the disregard for fans as humans while Swift elected to proceed with her Brazil tour dates despite the country being in historic heatwaves (at risk of overheatting herself). If Taylor Swift was so shaken by touring with a broken heart or a fan's passing, she wouldn't have added an additional North American leg of Eras just two months after the Matty breakup. She's brokenhearted but willing to mend the cracks with your money and move onward with her worldwide female rage induced pillaging.
No matter what happens, even if you die at a Taylor Swift concert, Taylor collects a big fat check and flies away. She doesn't know you as anything other than a conversion rate or earning potential despite what her nearly 20-year long parasocial relationship with fans might otherwise indicate. She knows that, while some Swifties are without disposable income, they feel obligated to spend on a "48 Hours Only!" exclusive vinyl variant instead of necessities because they are so entrenched in Taylor Swift's intoxicating celebrity, they'll prioritize materialistic fandom before their needs. This is good enough for her because this means she can expand her real estate portfolio and finance her cat's lavish lifestyles. They're worth an estimated $100 million dollars. Her three cats could pool their net worth and solve world hunger.
While you and I might be denied bereavement leave and barely surviving the current political and economic climate, Taylor Swift has to, instead of gets to, perform for stadiums at full attendance for three nights in a row across the globe. You and I might be replaced by AI at our longtime jobs, but Taylor Swift is threatened with losing more and more money each time you listen to a "Stolen Version" of her songs. If we don't buy every variant of all of her albums, then who is going to pay for the fucking cats?
It is tone deaf to spend as she spends and lives as she lives in this economy, but this is her reality. She was able to donate $100,000 to all of her tour truck drivers, and that's wonderful, but it leads me to wonder about the ethos of the 2020s where one woman can hoard such life-changing amounts of money. Remember in 2014 when she gave a fan $90 ($120 in today's money) to get Chipotle because she had no fucking clue how much it cost? This is a 34-year-old woman who is increasingly out of touch with the reality for working class people and women in general. Normal everyday adults must wake up and go to their thankless jobs, and yet Taylor Swift, despite all her riches, incessantly references the lows of her life and career as a public figure and entertainer to farm sympathy and drive sales. And still, the corporate women have latched onto "I cry a lot, but I am so productive! It's an art!" as their cubicle battle cry.
Do you think that, from up in her private jet, Taylor Swift gazes at the world through her poetic, tortured eyes, and thinks, "All the little people, in their cars, walking, going about their lives...all those girls that don't support girls...do they know that I've made an album about female rage?"

Conclusion/TLDR

Thank you for reading. I would love to hear your critical insights towards this entire ordeal: TTPD, the trademark, the implications of it all.
TLDR: Taylor Swift is a bad feminist and is delusional to think that the TTPD eras set exemplifies female rage at women's injustice.

About a year ago, I [29 M] was in a toxic relationship with J [29 M]. While there were no serious stakes in it (no kids or messy finances), the relationship and breakup ended up emotionally affecting me in a way I had never really thought possible. I feel guilty because after the relationship I tried to be friends with my ex still, which I now see as a mistake in the context of this relationship, and then after a few months, he blocked me because I didn't respect a boundary he had set about not sending him long messages. He said he didn't feel safe since I "completely ignored" the boundary.
I was devastated, but over the course of the next few months, came to understand a great deal of ways that I feel that I had been abused during the relationship. I felt angrier and angrier, and even though I was seeing a therapist, it eventually boiled over. My ex had blocked me on discord and probably on text, but I went onto an astrology app called Co-Star that he had had me download, and sent a message using it that said something like, "You were an abusive partner, but you can make it right with an apology."
Now, I have no idea if he actually saw the message. It was sent with a weird feature of the app called Chaos Mode that apparently chooses to send the message at some future time, so who knows if it actually ever sent. I don't know if he still has the app, if he unfriended me, or whatnot. But I feel guilty because I enacted exactly the caricature of me that he had created--I hadn't respected his boundaries, and I sent the message anyways.
At the same time, I am still feeling very victimized by the relationship. To give you a sense of the kinds of things that were going on in the relationship, here's a few examples that I currently find a little horrific [Note: this kind of turned into a summary of the relationship after I wrote it]. I'm aware that to heal I should probably not be ruminating about these things, especially if they lead me to boil over and message him, but here you go.
The first time I had sex with him, he slammed the door on me for not being able to finish and said "finish yourself." When I came to bed, I told him I felt shame. He said "good." The next time we had sex, he set a timer for me and said I had to finish within 5 minutes. These were the first times I ever had sex. He was manipulative in bed, telling me he didn't want to perform certain acts because I didn't give him enough praise for them, so that I started exaggerating my pleasure; he blamed me for why certain positions weren't working and was frustrated with how my body worked. On top of this, he admitted at the end of the relationship to having had sex with me around five times after he decided to break up with me (before he did), which just makes me feel a bit icky.
He would put me down in pretty transparently cruel ways. One example was when I exerted myself, he said I sounded like a muppet and that he "didn't want to be dating a muppet." When I offered him a blanket but apologized that it might not have been washed in a while, he called me a baby. He would insult my ability to give complements, asking me to tell him what color his eyes are but then rejecting everything that I gave him, telling me I was bad at complements repeatedly (and saying that it wasn't fair of him because his other exes were artists, so no wonder I was bad). Now, there were times that he was complementary to me--he told me I was hot, good at singing, good at writing, smart--but also times where he would put me down for things I was less good at, like cooking.
He constantly made me feel insecure about my gender. (For context, we are both men, but he was raised as a woman). So he would make pretty sweeping feminist critiques over fairly mundane things, like if I complained when I was sick he would go off about how men are always babies when they are sick and women don't get attention. When I confronted him about some of the things he was saying, telling him that while I wanted him to express these kinds of social problems so that I could be aware and adapt, I was feeling insecure in the relationship--he flipped it around and told me that if I didn't feel loved, he could say "I love you" less, and that I hadn't been grateful enough for when he came to visit me. (I had written him poetry, deep cleaned my apartment, taken time off work, sent my roommate off for the week, bought him a bus pass, planned his visit, met him in the airport despite not having a car, and just an insane amount of work to be turned into, "you weren't grateful enough").
Other than namecalling, he was just plain controlling. The reason that the boundary around me not sending long messages exists is that when I felt insecure--which I think makes sense given the ways he would talk to me--I would often send him a few paragraphs apologizing and explaining how I was growing. Even though long messages were the first thing he said he loved about me, and that he said our communication was like magic, he eventually set up what he called an "Essay embargo" and told me not to write them. The first time he set the "embargo", he had said it was only until we met in person because he didn't want me to write anything that would make him nervous. After we met in person, I assumed the embargo had lifted. Yet shortly after, he set it again, giving a few explanations--the main one just being that he wanted to appreciate our relationship without overthinking it. It seemed playful. He definitely did also say that long messages made him uncomfortable because he felt obligated to send a response. So, when I did send messages, I would add that he didn't have to respond (which I realize is not fully respecting the boundary). I did ask after sending messages whether they were ok and he never responded to those questions.
Despite this, there were times during the relationship that I continued to send long, often apologetic messages. I had felt like this boundary was set playfully and I also was feeling overwhelming guilt that I, for whatever reason, needed his affirmation for. I am conflicted because on the one hand, I was definitely ignoring his boundary--but on the other, I feel like the boundary was not very thoughtful of my own needs, either.
Prior to the breakup, it was hell. He was getting angry at me for everything--for pretty mundane things like using the bathroom before him and stinking it up. He told me he had to show me how to do everything, but I realize now that a lot of this was just him being particular (e.g, he told me I don't know how to drink tea because I left the bag in, when I just like it strong). Unfortunately, I had flown 5,000 miles to visit him and was sort of trapped in his proximity, and was drunk on love still since I was trying very hard, it was my first relationship, and he had sold me on notions of fairytale romance and told me we were cosmically meant to be together and other lovebomby sort of things. At one point, he missed a turn while driving with GPS and got angry at me for not helping--he disconnected his phone and threw it sideways at me (I guess so I could navigate for him, but it was a pretty retaliatory motion). We flew to a convention and I met some of his friends, and at one point he introduced me to a girl he had almost dated before, saying I was a friend and not a partner. I pointed this out to him later and he just said "does that make you angry?". He flirted with a woman at a party, telling her she was pretty while demanding that i bring him snacks (I feel so, so weak for not confronting him about this). He got drunk and I stayed with him as he passed out, but he was angry at me in the morning. When one of his friends told me they thought I was nice, because i was opening doors for everyone, my ex said "Is he really?" Questioning them.
The breakup itself was cold and calculated. He started it by telling me that he thought about not giving me any reasons for the breakup because I always overanalyze things. He told me he wouldn't have broken up with me if I was a woman. He told me I didn't take care of him and he needs a partner that takes care of him, and that his partners always feel taken care of. He threw some things I had said at the beginning of the relationship back at me--misquoting and misunderstanding them.
After the relationship, I had no idea what to think. It was my first relationship. It had started with fairytale romance. I had been passing his tests, I had been an exception to his long string of abusive relationships. He presented himself as this incredibly moral person (vegan, environmentally conscious, telling me of all of the ways others had abused him that he would never do, even his closest friends). I had completely internalized criticisms that he had had of me throughout the relationship, many of which had led to serious self reflection and my writing messages about my growth. Within a week I told him I still loved him and that I always would. He reminded me of his boundary around long messages and said they made him anxious. I was desperate. We took a few weeks of no-contact. We messaged short-messages back and forth, with a few life-updates to eachother each. He told me he was rescuing a kitten that he found, and I remembered how he could be kind.
But as I processed, more and more, I felt angry. I wrote unsent angry letters in the notes app on my phone for a month. I wrote myself a 20,000 word summary of the relationship. This was not a healthy way to process. It elevated me. (Some of you will probably comment that maybe I shouldn't have written this post for the same reason, but oh well--I wanted to process and I want to hear if others have similar stories). Meanwhile, my ex kept pushing back the date for when we would verbally connect again. Eventually, I boiled over. I did not insult him. But I wrote a long message explaining that I wanted to take 3 months of no-contact. I had entered another relationship and told him that even though I was feeling angry at him, he shouldn't be worried because even though I had baggage from the relationship, I was communicating well with my new partner. I also told him that I felt like if I did talk with him, that I would end up tearing him a new one, and that I needed time to cool down. I'm not proud of the message in general, but I didn't call names, tell him he was awful, or anything like that. I was just insensitive and told him I was angry.
And like that, I was blocked. It was over. A period of about 9 months, five of which we were together, with two before escalating towards love bombing and two after escalating towards my boiling over.
And yet, I had never expressed to him that I thought he had been abusive. I felt frustrated that I had told him that I would always love him, when in many ways now I hated him.
Five months passed, during which I came to realize more and more how messed up the relationship was.
And then I sent the message on Co-star.
Fast forward another four months to now.
I just sent him a text, knowing he probably has blocked me there too. It said something like, "I want my last message to you just be: I'm sorry, and I forgive you." I wanted to free myself. I needed to not feel angry at him or ashamed of myself. I needed to not feel like I had a million things to say to him--I needed to just say, this is it: I'm not sending more messages. I'm sorry, and I forgive you. It was for myself. I was forgiving him selfishly, even though he didn't deserve it, so that I could move on.
I feel like I shouldn't have sent this, but I don't feel bad about it yet, either. I needed closure. It always felt like there was some "message I could send" to detail his abuse, and I needed to not have that standing over me--I needed to forgive. I am now oscillating between wondering about myself--whether I have a problem with boundaries, since I had boiled over at this point three times to message him. Feeling frustrated I didn't assert myself about his abuse, that I doubled down on loving him. Part of me is glad that I sent the message on Co-Star saying that he was abusive, because it was the only indication I ever gave him, really, that what he did wasn't ok to me--he had blocked me before I could articulate anything. But I also know that this message even if received would not mean anything to him.
Anyways, now I'm venting about it here on Reddit. Does anyone have similar experiences surrounding self control messaging exes and feeling a bit out of control?

My fantasy RPG, https://johnlamping.itch.io/epic-power, is ready for more extensive playtesting. (It's had 5 years of development and 500 hours of playtesting, but primarily with just one group. And I've turned one arc we played into a tutorial module, good for about a dozen sessions) What is the best way to find playtesters? Is anybody here interested?
The pitch:
Epic Power is a fantasy TTRPG system that allows you the freedom to build and play the character you want while simultaneously providing the rules to structure the game.
Each action can be accomplished in many ways, because when a character acts, they choose both the action, and how to spend epic power to make it better. With their epic power, a hero can accomplish feats that would be impossible, even for a highly skilled character.
Of course, character creation is open ended, not boxed in by classes and levels. A player chooses what broad disciplines their character is good at, what skills in those or other disciplines they further focus on, and additional ways they can use their epic power. From there, character progression is similarly open ended; a character can head in any direction the player wants.
Epic Power is a system where you can do what you want, how you want, as cool as you want, while still having the rules to govern your game.

My boyfriend got mad at me for blocking her classmate, as he is bothered about what this girl will think if she sees that she is blocked on my boyfriend’s account. I just want to feel secure in our relationship and not feel anxious about him cheating on me again. Please let me know if I am wrong for taking this action. I just want the best for us.
I blocked my boyfriend's classmate on his account for several reasons: 1.) I checked his phone, and I saw that he was searching his classmate's social media account. 2.) He told me that he just accidentally clicked her account; later on, I brought up what he did, and he confessed to me, saying that he literally took a look at her account, and he just lied because he didn't want me to get angry. He told me that he took a look at her account because he was curious as he saw that his classmate was viewing his stories even though they are not mutual on any social media. This made me wonder if she is interested in my boyfriend because, as a girl, this is my way of showing interest in a guy (like, let me show you that I am viewing your stories even though we're not mutuals, just so you know that I am checking on you and I am interested in you).
As a woman who has experienced cheating before, this issue was very serious to me. I have trust issues and insecurities as I caught him talking and inviting other girls to come over and hang out (drinking). 3.) My boyfriend and THIS classmate are in the same circle of friends (which was made up just recently), so they have been adding my boyfriend to a group chat where there are a lot of girls (his classmates). It gets me annoyed every time somebody in the group chat says something to my boyfriend about things that are not related to school. My boyfriend will respond to those chats, but I told him to stop entertaining them if they are not school-related because it makes me feel uncomfortable, especially since this classmate that we argued about is included in the group chat.
4.) I saw a picture of THIS classmate being very close and touchy to another man, even though she has a boyfriend. She was also sending pictures of cigarettes, like, girl, for what reason? (My boyfriend loves smoking cigarettes), some nonsense stuff, a picture of her face with her revealing clothes (I don't know if it's because she wants to look cool or what), in the group chat, knowing that there are boys in there and anyone can see what she sends. The thought that she is doing this even though she has a boyfriend made me realize how trashy his classmate is, and I don't want my boyfriend around her.
TL;DR Am I wrong for blocking this classmate on my boyfriend’s account, as I don’t want this kind of girl around him? I am thinking that this classmate is interested in my boyfriend, and my boyfriend is also interested in her, as I caught him checking her profile.

I watched the anime a bit as kid around the johto era, but really only got deep into Pokémon in the mid 2000’s in elementary school. My first games were leaf green and diamond/pearl and because of the anime and tcg, my favourites were always the hoenn and kanto pokemon with the sinnoh starters and evolutions of earlier pokemon like dusknoir. I never got a lot of exposure to the johto pokemon and found them to be weak and the designs to be really bland (minus the ‘cool’ ones). Interesting considering heartgold was and still is my favourite game along with platinum.
I’ve wanted to replay heartgold for years to relive that game but couldn’t re start it because it was a save file my closest friend and I played a ton with his soul silver copy and he unfortunately passed away several years ago now so it’s incredibly treasured. I always wanted to buy it, but couldn’t bring up $200 to do it going through uni/grad school and strugling to find work after. After overcoming all of that and getting a good job, I decided to treat myself and finally bought a legit copy of soul silver for $220.
Because it had been so long, it felt like I was playing it again for the first time and it still hits as well as it did when I was 12 when it first dropped. But the one thing I noticed differently was I really liked the johto pokemon. Understanding how to actually battle can make strength somewhat irrelevant in game, and I love the simplicity of the designs, looking like fun re-imaginings of real animals. I feel totally disconnected with a lot of modern designs and they feel so overwhelming and cartoonish to me, whereas here that simplicity is relaxing/comforting.
I’m usually a water guy, but Typhlosion’s look in this game makes him one of my favourites, along with feraligatr, kingdra, donphan, sudowoodo, and quagsire. My favourites from this region were always sneasel, scizor, crobat, ampharos, and tyranitar and that liking only grew stronger.
Johto pokemon went from being probably my least favourite as a kid to possibly my favourite as an adult and I just think it’s all kinda cool and wanted to share lol

For context, I’m a 25yo female, that comes from a mixed background (my mother 56F is a white woman from Italy, my father is from the Balkans and migrated to my country when he was younger). This is relevant and you will understand later.
I moved away from home as soon as I could when I was 18 after a not so good childhood, and currently live in another European country. My parents are divorced, my father is not really in the picture, I keep in touch with my mother on a daily basis and come visit her and the rest of the family once or twice a year. We never had the best relationship but since I moved out it improved a lot. I’d say we get along better when I’m far away from home.
Anyway, back to the reason of this post. I’ve been seeing this guy for more than a year, he’s great, we’re slowly getting to know each other and see where this is going. We are not in a rush but of course this is a relationship and I felt it was time to tell something more to my mother. I’ve always been quite open about my relationships and people I was dating, however since getting older I started being more private as I don’t think it would be good to mention every failed date to my mother (lol). We come from a typical small town where people are bigots and close-minded. The news on the tv are constantly complaining about “immigrants coming to our country” and jadajadajada. The government is right wing. So yeah, being racist is almost the norm, unfortunately.
I didn’t really mentioned much about this guy, first of all cause I’m trying to keep it private but also because I could imagine her reaction, since she’s the standard average middle age woman that you find on Facebook without much culture. She is ignorant not as an insult but in the real sense of the word: she ignores, she doesn’t inform herself and just believes whatever the media tells her.
The day after I arrived we were casually talking before bed and she just kept asking “C’mon, don’t you have a pic of this guy? Show me! C’mon c’mon! I’m your mother!” so, one side of me didn’t wanna show her, the other one was excited cause at the end of the day I’m proud of my relationship and I was happy to tell her more (maybe naively hoping for a good outcome…). So without thinking much I showed her one of the best pictures of him. Literally in the millisecond while I was showing her the picture she said something like: “hope it’s not a n****” (WHATTT???).
At that point the phone was already on her face. It was done. She said it, and at the same time she saw the picture. She was speechless and I was too. I was ashamed of her. And sad.
She didn’t say anything more for the following 10 minutes, she went to her room and I went to mine. Afterwards she just asked “does he even work?!” And I told her “don’t worry about it, he’s better off than the both of us” just to make her shut up about that question that I found so disrespectful. This made me just so sad, and disappointed.
But the worst had yet to come. We didn’t speak much about it at all until today.
We were having a casual conversation during the afternoon when the relationship topic came out. In particular, we were talking about how your partner should improve your life and not making it worse, meaning he should make you happy, he should bring good positive vibes, get along etc. that’s what I was thinking and referring to. But she started being very materialistic, she asked me “so, in which way is he improving your life?!” in a very aggressive sassy tone “I don’t see anything changing“ she said. I was mentioning that he makes me happy when the conversation degenerated. All sort of things came out of it.
She started by saying:
“well, I truly hopes this will be just a friend and you will keep it like that”
then she continued with:
“please take birth control precautions before you regret it”
“don’t come to me later saying I didn’t stop you”
and the cherry on top was:
“I would have preferred if you told me you were a lesbian cause at least that is cool nowadays”.
I was speechless and I still am.
I asked her what is it that she doesn’t like and what is she basing her opinions on, since she literally knows nothing about him. She couldn’t answer. She kept repeating the same things over and over and she also said she would never want to meet him.
I have to mention that the few guys she met that I was dating were of different cultures, but she never had a problem with them, I guess because the skin color was the same… and in her mind there are probably foreigners of Class A, B, C…
I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I neither expected such a bad reaction.
All this hurts me so much.
I don’t know what to do.
In my mind it neither makes sense cause she married an immigrant but it seems like she never really came to terms with it, she never really accepted it. For instance, I know nothing about my father’s culture, I never learned the language or interesting facts about it because nobody ever thought me anything about it. I only learned about my mother’s culture, the one of the country I lived in. And I always felt out of place because this country is extremely racist. The fact that my father was not a good husband or father has nothing to do with where he comes from. If a person is an idiot, is an idiot no matter what. And I told her this when we were talking. The fact that she had a bad experience doesn’t mean that I will, just because I’m seeing someone from a different culture. I also explained to her that I am myself an immigrant, since I’m living in another country. But it doesn’t seem to click in her head. And when I told her, to her face, that she is indeed racist, she obviously denied it, because how can she be racist if she married an immigrant herself?
And of course during today’s conversation there was some victim behavior on her side, because every time I come back here it’s certain that we are gonna fight and every time it happens I say stuff like “let’s see when and if I will come back again!”. So she was bringing that up cause the other day I said “the first racist comment I hear I’m gone”. She mentioned that, saying I don’t care about her, that she has to beg for me to call her (mind you, we write good morning, good night, text here and there during the day and we talk on the phone 3/4 times a week…). She even said that “she lost me already the moment I left”. Honestly, I don’t know what else more than this she expects from me if what I do is not enough already.
I don’t really know how to handle this. And I’m also just venting and need some support. I wished we could all act as adults, respect each other, have a normal relationship. Am I asking for too much?!
Any advice is highly appreciated.
I’ll be stuck in her house for the next two days and I’ll leave on Thursday. I want her to think about her actions and realize where she did wrong before I leave. I don’t wanna put this under the carpet cause it’s unacceptable and will never forget it.
TL;DR: my 25F mother 56F doesn’t approve of my boyfriend 28M just because of the color of his skin and his religion. Her opinion is based solely on a photo I showed her and at the same time she plays the victim and claims she lost me the moment I moved abroad and I don’t care about her even if we talk everyday. I wished there was a way to behave like adults. Advices on setting boundaries?

Should I be worried that my GF (19f) is going to leave me (18m)?
This is a really long story so please bare with me.
Ok so first of all, you're all going to see that I'm not innocent in this but I just couldn't help myself as you'll see.
So for context, my gf and I have been dating for 3 months now at long-distance. I've visited her every 2 weeks since we met and I feel we really do like/love eachother.
However, there has been some road bombs since we started dating but this story only concerns one of them.
And it's important to note that my GF has had a few "crushes" and 1 or 2 short "relationships" in highschool before me. One of those includes a crush on a guy who we'll call Frank. This was at most just the 2 of them having a deep interest in eachother and they both knew. All of this being around 2 years ago.
In early April, my GF's older cousin got an invitation from one of her friends, who we'll call Oliver, to go to his Birthday Party. And he told my GF's cousin to invite all of her cousins if she wanted to. Including my GF.
And lord and behold, guess who was also going to the party? Frank.
And when Frank got word that my GF was going, my GF, who at the time told me all of this btw, said that Frank let out a joyful "yes" in response to her going.
Now, I obviously HATED hearing this, but I appreciated the fact that my GF told me when she didn't have to if she didn't want to.
So a week goes by and the party is coming up...
Everything is going well between us until...the night of the party. On the day of the party, we were both good as usual. We talked, called, she went to work just before the party and she sent me cute pics of her and all that stuff until after her shift.
After she finished work, she was immediately taking the bus to the party and that's when things went south. We called whilst she was on the bus and she suddenly became so cold to me. I can't explain it but she just became cold and her tone sounded mad at me. I kept trying to talk to her until she cut the call and texted me: "we're done".
I called her back and texted but she was still cold. I to talked her about all the things we've said and done and what they meant to her and she basically said "I don't care". I was depressed but after trying too much, I stopped texting.
2 hours later, at around 1am, I get a text from her calling my name:
"Toby?"
I answer:
"Yes?"
To which she replies "I'm sorry". It kept going a bit like that until she started telling me about why she ended it. And the first reason was because we were so far apart. And I'm like, ok sure, I understand that, but why not talk to me about it rather than making me feel so shit about myself?
That kept going for a bit and a few other things happened but aren't important. Let's skip to when she arrived back home.
As she was back home, in her bed, we continued texting. And this is when she told me the second reason as to why she ended it. Which was the fact that, a week earlier, I brought up how she's going to uni soon and that I was concerned about her meeting new people there and potentially leaving me. And I guess this kinda backfired because it apparently put doubts in her head about whether or not I'd leave her. So essentially, she ended it before I could, so she wouldn't have to endure that pain.
So we talked we talked we talked, and in the end, about 4 hours of reassuring her later, we got back together.
So the next day, we started talking about the party. And that's when she opened up about something. So apparently, Frank, had approached her during the end of the party when she wanted to go home and started talking to her about how he left his old gf and blah blah blah, obviously trying to show an opening but my gf didn't show any interest, allegedly. I didn't think much of this, even though once again, I HATED it.
Now let's skip to today.
So this is where I also become an AH in this. A week ago, when I was visiting her, she logged into her Instagram on my phone because her phone died. And when I left, she didn't log out.
So curiousity got the best of me. I snooped around in her DMS. First of all, there are absolutely zero guys in her DMS. Cool. But the main reason I was snooping was actually precisely because I wanted to see what she was gossiping to her close friends about, especially on the night of the party.
And as I scroll, I see something.
In one of her DMS with her friend, she talked about the moment Frank got word that she was going to the party.
And to cut it simple, she talked about how he was excited she was coming and all that until I see:
"I feel bad"
Her friend replies:
"About what?"
To which my gf replies:
"About thinking for a second about leaving Toby for Frank".
When I read this, my heart, dropped.
The next messages were her friend saying I'm better, my gf agreeing and all that stuff.
But then my gf says "put me back on the right path please". Like what?
She then went on to say that she knew Frank wasn't worth it regardless of what she felt and that she was just flattered in that situation. "As all girls are".
Needless to say, regardless of the fact that they said I was better, that hurt me like a mf.
And then in another DM with another friend, they talked about the moment Frank approached her at the party. And essentially, they said what I said earlier but in no way did my GF say anything like "No I'm not interested" or "I have a BF". In fact, she was talking about how bad his flirting skills were with her.
I feel so down rn after having seen all of that.
But it's worth noting that my GF expressed many times before that she doesn't support cheating in any way. She HAS good values (doesn't like exposing herself, partying often all that stuff) and she is a good person overall. And she has expressed recently as well, to her friends via DMS, about how much I make her happy and that I have no red flags or whatever. And that she loves me a lot.
So I just don't know what to think or do.

Hello! How are you? I'm from Europe, I'm 21 and I speak English/French.
My hobbies are movies/tv-shows, Disney, discovering/learning new things, deep talks...
I'm here in the hope of finding interesting people.
Please don't message me if you can't take time for me, I'm not someone you talk to only when you're "bored".
I'm seeking for long-term friendships, loyalty and commitment is a must for me, someone who can also voice chat (not every time but it's still cool to have deep talks or just talking about anything on a call once in a while).
If you can't make yourself interesting (writing more than one line), asking questions back, initiating the conversation once we're done with a topic, getting to know me, don't bother to message me.
I will of course do the same as I'm asking for, but I value quality over quantity with friends.
Have a nice day, I hope to meet new people ! :)

Anyone know how long Cardless takes to make a decision one way or the other? I applied for their new Qatar Airways Visa Signature credit card, and it's been 7 days since I received this non-answer on my application, basically saying they'll get back to me:
"We need some more time to reach a decision. We'll send you an email once we've finished reviewing your application.
Best, Cardless"

Hello! How are you? I'm from Europe, I'm 21 and I speak English/French.
My hobbies are movies/tv-shows, Disney, discovering/learning new things, deep talks...
I'm here in the hope of finding interesting people.
Please don't message me if you can't take time for me, I'm not someone you talk to only when you're "bored".
I'm seeking for long-term friendships, loyalty and commitment is a must for me, someone who can also voice chat (not every time but it's still cool to have deep talks or just talking about anything on a call once in a while).
If you can't make yourself interesting (writing more than one line), asking questions back, initiating the conversation once we're done with a topic, getting to know me, don't bother to message me.
I will of course do the same as I'm asking for, but I value quality over quantity with friends.
Have a nice day, I hope to meet new people ! :)

Hi all
I'm a 22m united statesian math student from the midwest. At some point, I realized that math is actually (secretly) a humanity, so my closest friends have been less engineer types and more artists, historians, college philosophers, and people with a lot of empathy.
Normally, I can just hang out with my film roommates or weird people at the library, but I've got flipped seasonal depression where the loneliest time for me is summer, so this is my annual post looking for online friends to chat with.
I'm looking for people that are cool (REQUIRED), academic (ish), and more than anything curious in seeing just how far their passions go. There's way more meaning in being brave with what you do than in being smart.

Some passions of mine:

math - I'm finally doing the trifecta of undergrad classes my old math-ish degree deprived me of: real analysis, number theory, and topology. Most of my thinking energy the past year has been applied to recursive functions, data structures, and border math/cs topics I'm so sick of at this point. I can't wait to be writing proof by contradictions again for homework. My favorite "sup" is definitely the great supremum.
reading - my summer list: Stella Maris (the McCarthy epic), Permanent Record (Snowden book), Wolf Hall (tudor-core), and Traitor to His Class (bio on the coolest Roosevelt). I mostly read classic literature and history + mythology books. I'm gifting Kafka on the Shore by Murakami to my English teacher friend as it left a real mark on me when I read it last year. Also with everything going on in Palestine and the nearby protests, Chomsky and Orwell essays are so clarifying.
linux/code - I know I dissed it above, but there's definitely a before/after FOSS in my life where you discover just how composable everything is with pipes and streams. I run unix with vim, emacs, dmenu and all the rest. I like programming in golang and lisp and wanna learn haskell. LaTeX equations are also very beautiful.
history - I visited Vienna a few weeks back and saw a cool Marshal Joseph Radetzky statue. It was interesting putting myself in the mind of those 1848 Viennese students and their revolution crushed by the state power of an eighty-year-old catholic Joe... Anyway, reading about the imperial krauts is neat. Knowing about the past makes travel, talking to geriatrics, and old coins way more fun, so I've always appreciated political, cultural, and religious history.

Littler things I like:

• Rock N Roll (simon and garfunkel, fleet foxes, björk, radiohead, elliott smith, brian eno)
• Singing beatles karaoke at open mics
• Emailing random authors at 2 a.m.
• Photography
• Talking to goofy kids, old people with endangered idioms, foreigners in their own language, anyone not cowed into being boring

That's enough color about me. I wanna hear about you now!
My ideal penpal is someone that cares very deeply about ideas as well as people. If you wanna leave me swooning, send a bandcamp if you're a rockstar or a git repo if you're a hacker or anything cool you wanna show off in your domain.
Life can be a real swirl for me, but for the first time I'm starting to feel dizzy. Little chats and side-tangents of friendships are not what I need now. Please only message if there was something that really stuck with you.
If my hopes of finding inspiration and kindness from the world resonate with you, send me a PM.
cool bye now B-)

Hi all
I'm a 22m united statesian math student from the midwest. At some point, I realized that math is actually (secretly) a humanity, so my closest friends have been less engineer types and more artists, historians, college philosophers, and people with a lot of empathy.
Normally, I can just hang out with my film roommates or weird people at the library, but I've got flipped seasonal depression where the loneliest time for me is summer, so this is my annual post looking for online friends to chat with.
I'm looking for people that are cool (REQUIRED), academic (ish), and more than anything curious in seeing just how far their passions go. There's way more meaning in being brave with what you do than in being smart.

Some passions of mine:

math - I'm finally doing the trifecta of undergrad classes my old math-ish degree deprived me of: real analysis, number theory, and topology. Most of my thinking energy the past year has been applied to recursive functions, data structures, and border math/cs topics I'm so sick of at this point. I can't wait to be writing proof by contradictions again for homework. My favorite "sup" is definitely the great supremum.
reading - my summer list: Stella Maris (the McCarthy epic), Permanent Record (Snowden book), Wolf Hall (tudor-core), and Traitor to His Class (bio on the coolest Roosevelt). I mostly read classic literature and history + mythology books. I'm gifting Kafka on the Shore by Murakami to my English teacher friend as it left a real mark on me when I read it last year. Also with everything going on in Palestine and the nearby protests, Chomsky and Orwell essays are so clarifying.
linux/code - I know I dissed it above, but there's definitely a before/after FOSS in my life where you discover just how composable everything is with pipes and streams. I run unix with vim, emacs, dmenu and all the rest. I like programming in golang and lisp and wanna learn haskell. LaTeX equations are also very beautiful.
history - I visited Vienna a few weeks back and saw a cool Marshal Joseph Radetzky statue. It was interesting putting myself in the mind of those 1848 Viennese students and their revolution crushed by the state power of an eighty-year-old catholic Joe... Anyway, reading about the imperial krauts is neat. Knowing about the past makes travel, talking to geriatrics, and old coins way more fun, so I've always appreciated political, cultural, and religious history.

Littler things I like:

• Rock N Roll (simon and garfunkel, fleet foxes, björk, radiohead, elliott smith, brian eno)
• Singing beatles karaoke at open mics
• Emailing random authors at 2 a.m.
• Photography
• Talking to goofy kids, old people with endangered idioms, foreigners in their own language, anyone not cowed into being boring

That's enough color about me. I wanna hear about you now!
My ideal penpal is someone that cares very deeply about ideas as well as people. If you wanna leave me swooning, send a bandcamp if you're a rockstar or a git repo if you're a hacker or anything cool you wanna show off in your domain.
Life can be a real swirl for me, but for the first time I'm starting to feel dizzy. Little chats and side-tangents of friendships are not what I need now. Please only message if there was something that really stuck with you.
If my hopes of finding inspiration and kindness from the world resonate with you, send me a PM.
cool bye now B-)

Hi all
I'm a 22m united statesian math student from the midwest. At some point, I realized that math is actually (secretly) a humanity, so my closest friends have been less engineer types and more artists, historians, college philosophers, and people with a lot of empathy.
Normally, I can just hang out with my film roommates or weird people at the library, but I've got flipped seasonal depression where the loneliest time for me is summer, so this is my annual post looking for online friends to chat with.
I'm looking for people that are cool (REQUIRED), academic (ish), and more than anything curious in seeing just how far their passions go. There's way more meaning in being brave with what you do than in being smart.

Some passions of mine:

math - I'm finally doing the trifecta of undergrad classes my old math-ish degree deprived me of: real analysis, number theory, and topology. Most of my thinking energy the past year has been applied to recursive functions, data structures, and border math/cs topics I'm so sick of at this point. I can't wait to be writing proof by contradictions again for homework. My favorite "sup" is definitely the great supremum.
reading - my summer list: Stella Maris (the McCarthy epic), Permanent Record (Snowden book), Wolf Hall (tudor-core), and Traitor to His Class (bio on the coolest Roosevelt). I mostly read classic literature and history + mythology books. I'm gifting Kafka on the Shore by Murakami to my English teacher friend as it left a real mark on me when I read it last year. Also with everything going on in Palestine and the nearby protests, Chomsky and Orwell essays are so clarifying.
linux/code - I know I dissed it above, but there's definitely a before/after FOSS in my life where you discover just how composable everything is with pipes and streams. I run unix with vim, emacs, dmenu and all the rest. I like programming in golang and lisp and wanna learn haskell. LaTeX equations are also very beautiful.
history - I visited Vienna a few weeks back and saw a cool Marshal Joseph Radetzky statue. It was interesting putting myself in the mind of those 1848 Viennese students and their revolution crushed by the state power of an eighty-year-old catholic Joe... Anyway, reading about the imperial krauts is neat. Knowing about the past makes travel, talking to geriatrics, and old coins way more fun, so I've always appreciated political, cultural, and religious history.

Littler things I like:

• Rock N Roll (simon and garfunkel, fleet foxes, björk, radiohead, elliott smith, brian eno)
• Singing beatles karaoke at open mics
• Emailing random authors at 2 a.m.
• Photography
• Talking to goofy kids, old people with endangered idioms, foreigners in their own language, anyone not cowed into being boring

That's enough color about me. I wanna hear about you now!
My ideal penpal is someone that cares very deeply about ideas as well as people. If you wanna leave me swooning, send a bandcamp if you're a rockstar or a git repo if you're a hacker or anything cool you wanna show off in your domain.
Life can be a real swirl for me, but for the first time I'm starting to feel dizzy. Little chats and side-tangents of friendships are not what I need now. Please only message if there was something that really stuck with you.
If my hopes of finding inspiration and kindness from the world resonate with you, send me a PM.
cool bye now B-)

Hey all, at least once a day there seems to be a post in this subreddit complaining about the quality of matches or teammates. In those posts there seems to be a split on whether or not there is a problem or player behavior is justified. I'm going to leave most of my opinions at the end of this post, but from my point of view it's obvious that there is a problem that is clearly illustrated by how often players choose to forfeit, but most players are unwilling or even mentally blocking themselves from the idea that they might be part of the problem. I had already taken up note taking in video games as I played Dark Souls for the first time, so I decided to continue this when I came back to Rocket League and record stats and tallies by hand of instances when my teammates vote to forfeit.
​
For context, all of these matches were in the 3v3 competitive playlist from the Diamond 1 to Diamond 2 range. I wanted to come up with a system that made it easy to record quickly during games, so I kept tallies of the basic stats in the first table, and in terms of forfeiting I recorded the time of the first vote, the score, and notes (things I wanted to keep track of but ultimately didn't deserve their own tallies). Right off the bat we can see that it only took 311 matches for me to reach 100 instances of forfeiture, this means almost one third of my games are going to include a teammate forfeiting. Out of those 100 times where a teammate voted to forfeit, 34 times also included the teammate idling or hard throwing. That means almost 1 out of every 9 matches I played was ruined solely by someone on my team not playing the game as intended. It's also extremely important to note that I only recorded instances of this happening on my team. I'm making the assumption that all of this happens at a slightly higher rate on the other team because I personally don't vote to forfeit or throw my matches.
​
Here are the results of what I recorded:
​

Games played	Wins	Losses	Vote to ff?	idle or hard throw?	OTW (includes W)	OTL (includes L)
311	153	158	100	34	31	27

​

	Time left at first vote	Score	Notes
1	0:07	2-1
2	0:37	3-1	toxic in text
3	0:42	3-2
4	3:30	3-0	immediate throw after ff vote
5	2:23	3-0
6	0:07	4-0
7	1:25	up 2-0	conceded immediately after, still won
8	0:35	2-1
9	0:47	4-1
10	1:42	2-2	led whole game then lost
11	2:51	4-1	toxic in text
12	1:26	4-1
13	1:28	3-0
14	3:20	3-0	mid-play vote, teammate threw
15	2:58	2-0
16	2:00	3-0
17	3:17	4-0	teammate quit at 2-0 with 4:00 remaining, ff accepted
18	2:23	2-0
19	0:14	4-2
20	0:15	3-1
21	3:22	3-0	player left the match
22	1:30	4-0
23	3:30	4-1	almost came back
24	3:22	3-0
25	1:07	5-1	teammate left match
26	1:50	3-0
27	1:20	3-0	teammate left immediately after ff vote
28	0:45	3-1
29	2:34	4-3
30	1:55	1-0	mid-play
31	0:36	3-1
32	0:23	5-1
33	2:27	3-0
34	1:26	4-0
35	3:26	1-1	was leading, teammate quit immediately after ff vote
36	2:02	2-2	OT win, teammate voted mid-play
37	1:37	2-1	voted as the enemy team ball rolled into goal to be 3-1
38	0:45	3-1
39	1:08	2-0	mid-play, teammate later left match
40	2:55	3-1
41	2:41	4-0
42	0:52	2-2	mid-play, other team eventually won, teammate left early
43	0:24	5-1
44	0:44	3-3	ff vote @ them tying, we won
45	1:52	up 4-1	ff when other team first scored, we won, this is the only ff vote i feel bad about including here
46	0:09	3-1
47	1:04	3-0	immediate throw after ff vote
48	0:54	3-1
49	0:03	5-3	mid-play
50	0:15	3-1
51	0:07	2-4
52	0:15	0-1	mid play, idle after vote
53	1:49	3-1	was told to kms by probably the only player that got banned during this experiment
54	0:21	3-1
55	2:47	2-1	all downhill after one bad goal
56	0:50	5-1	idle after vote, still got one goal back
57	1:02	4-0	made it 2-4, one guy seemed IRL distracted during portions of the match
58	0:02	5-1	teammate idled and quit after opponent scored a quick goal in 5 seconds. remaining teammate and I played the 2v3
59	0:32	2-4
60	0:06	4-2	mid-play vote, then we conceded, game took longer to end because of the goal and replays than if we'd just played it out
61	0:06	3-1
62	2:20	3-0	teammate threw then left at 4-0
63	2:40	3-0	team played worse after ff vote, 7-1 final
64	3:15	4-0	teammate threw
65	0:15	2-1
66	3:22	3-0
67	2:51	2-0	teammate quit at 2:23 3-0
68	0:06	2-4
69	0:55	4-0
70	2:40	2-0	mid-play, both teammates quit at 2:05 3-0
71	0:01	3-3	mid-play, won in OT
72	2:03	4-0	idle before and after ff vote
73	1:06	3-5
74	2:00	3-3	won in OT
75	1:42	3-0
76	2:25	3-1	first 2 goals because teammate was idle
77	1:26	3-0
78	2:58	1-0
79	2:46	1-0	mid-play, we won 4-2
80	1:52	5-0
81	2:24	4-0	teammate left after we scored to make game 4-1
82	1:24	2-0
83	0:06	3-1
84	0:44	2-4
85	0:35	3-1
86	2:50	0-0	mid-play, we won 4-1
87	1:07	3-2	we won 4-3 in OT
88	0:11	2-0
89	0:32	3-1
90	1:12	3-0	teammate quit at 4-0 0:47
91	0:15	1-0
92	0:36	2-0
93	0:53	3-1
94	1:46	3-0
95	3:18	3-1
96	0:17	3-1
97	2:29	3-0	idle and quit after 4-0
98	2:23	4-4	losing 3-0 at 4:15, ff vote at tying goal, one teammate goading the other to ff in chat, we won 5-4
99	0:49	2-2	won in OT
100	1:38	3-0

​
As an information dump, here are some of the statistics I found interesting with these instances of forfeiting.
​

• The median time when forfeits were first voted on was 1:25.5 left on the clock. 34 times there were 2 or more minutes left, and 10 times there were 3 or more minutes left
• 60 votes occurred with a 2 goal or less deficit, an additional 15 votes occurred at a 3 goal deficit
• 18 votes occurred with 15 seconds or less on the clock. 4 times the deficit was 1 goal, 11 times the deficit was 2, and one vote occurred in a tie game
• 19 votes occurred with between 30 seconds and 1 minute on the clock, 16 of those votes were a 2 goal or less deficit
• 27 votes occurred with between 1 and 2 minutes left on the clock, 11 times the deficit was 2 or less, 11 more times the deficit was exactly 3
• 44 votes occurred while my team was getting shut out
• 10 matches with votes were won, but this includes the only "joke" ff, 2 games where we were leading and 7 when we were tied. In other words, every game where I was losing at the moment and a teammate voted to ff was lost
• 10 votes happened as the other team tied the game, we lost 3 (see above)

​
I'm pretty terrible when it comes to Excel/Google Sheets, but if anyone wants to mess around with this data set to find any other cool stats I'd be very interested.
​
My Thoughts
​
My original purpose when I started to keep track of my games was to try and prove that most games when my teammates vote to forfeit are still winnable, but I no longer feel that is the case, although for different reasons than I expected. Now, I feel like a lot of matches are lost the moment my teammate voted to forfeit either because of the idling/hard throwing, or because of what I perceive as passive throwing by my teammates. I never recorded "passive throwing" because there isn't a reliable way to do so, but a lot of the time it feels like certain players are mentally out of the game once they've hit that vote to forfeit button. Those players make a habit out of forfeiting, which causes them to lose the ability to see a path to victory in matches that are winnable (example: 4-1 with 1:30 on the clock), and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where a large portion of the player population just doesn't see the value in playing matches where they are more likely to lose than win.
​
I don't expect most people to have the self-awareness to realize the self fulfilling prophecy they've created, which is why I believe something has to be done to restrict or remove players ability to forfeit in competitive and tournament playlists. Personally, I never plan on forfeiting and I don't want to know when my teammates have voted for it. Why isn't there an option for me to disable the "vote to forfeit" text on my HUD just like people do with quick chat? Additionally, I think one good idea would be to only allow players the ability to initiate a vote a certain number of times per day, and disable the option entirely in tournaments. I didn't record my tournament games on paper, but several times my team would win 3-4 games, go down by 2 goals in the next game, and then one of my teammates votes to ff and checks out of the game. It's ridiculous that this kind of thing happens so regularly in game modes that are advertised as "competitive". I don't want to pretend like I know the perfect solution, I just think in the game's current state it is far too easy for players to give up, and barriers need to be put in place to keep games competitive, therefore something has to change.
​
I know a lot of people will believe players will act this way even if forfeiting wasn't an option, but I think the option of an easy way out affects mentally weak players' gameplay in matches where they are losing. I played Overwatch for many years, a game where matches are much longer and forfeiting is not an option. That game can be toxic as hell, but I've never seen the amount of throwing or giving up in Overwatch that I do in Rocket League. Even when Blizzard was having problems with people leaving quickplay matches after one lost fight, I rarely saw people stop trying in competitive matches just because they got their ass kicked in round 1. In Overwatch, there was a sense of commitment once you got into a competitive match that straight up doesn't exist in Rocket League. I believe the fact that forfeiting has never been an option in Overwatch and always an option in Rocket League has contributed to how willing players are to give up in these respective games. To me, there really isn't ever a good reason to forfeit in RL, but there are still instances that are more ridiculous than others. 22 times my team voted to forfeit with under 30 seconds on the clock, and 18 of those times the deficit was 2 goals or less. Why wouldn't you play out 30 seconds or less just to see if you can get 2 goals? The worst that can happen is it takes you less than 30 seconds to get into a new game, in the best case you might be able to get a goal at the kickoff and then a 0 second goal to go to OT. Yet so many players in this community would rather deny themselves an opportunity for something amazing just because it isn't likely to happen, even when the time cost is absolutely minimal.
​
I hope that this post inspires some discussion and helps players realize how detrimental habitual forfeiting is in modes that want to call themselves "competitive". I also want to tell the players who want to play out every game that you don't owe anyone on either team a forfeit if you don't want to. I know a lot of people feel pressured when someone tells them to forfeit or when they see 2 teammates vote for it, but any reason you want to play out a game is valid, even if you're getting destroyed 10-0 and just want to get one goal. 5 minutes + replays is not an unreasonable time commitment and if anyone tries to pressure you into forfeiting, they aren't worth considering. I hope this can change in the future, because I want to be put on teams that want to try and overcome a 3 goal deficit, and I want to play against teams the make me fight to hold a 3 goal lead. Instead we have a community that is hyper focused on trying to determine when a match isn't worth effort anymore, and competitive playlists and tournaments have suffered because of it. This makes me sad because Rocket League is so simple and elegant that I consider it to be one of the best multiplayer games ever made, but this community-created problem is big enough where it makes me want to play other games.
​
TL;DR Habitual forfeiting is a major problem in Rocket League, and I hope we can actually have an honest conversation about it

So I'd been hanging out with this artist and DM duo online for quite a while, after meeting Art Lady through her commissions, and I loved her and generally thought the husband was pretty cool most of the time... I joined DM's 5e game, where everyone played as dragons themed after different things, like love, roses, gold, etc, and we could all turn into 'almost' human forms. All seemed pretty cool early on. We even got custom abilities (though DM didn't seem to understand or want to allow my character simply being resistant to cold weather, meanwhile others got some *powerful* abilities)
Dragon forms were powerful, but dragons were hunted in this setting, so there was also an added danger to using them, despite the +10 to ability scores, double HP, breath weapons, multiple melee attacks, and custom abilities. It worked relatively well, honestly, though it certainly had issues, and DM couldn't make up his mind on certain details.
I played a dragon of sunlight and cleric of the Sun, going by the name Monday Bell in her human form; she hated being a dragon and did her best to hide her nature. I enjoyed creating her, and I loved some of the character interactions, but...
DM had some really questionable encounter designs and rulings. It would take forever to explain, but basically it felt like he thought "you can't do anything once X happens" and likely instant-kill musket shots were fun. Yeah... Anyway, I stayed for the characters.
DM was obsessed with PCs being as mechanically different as possible. He didn't allow people to have the same class (including a 1-level dip into Monk just for better AC as an unarmored person), AND... He didn't allow people to have the same... highest ability score. I kid you not. He went so far as to tell casters to base their spells off of different abilities than the rules say (he gave specific options for each class) so there's no twinsies... I really hated this, and I should have dropped out before I joined, when I saw that rule of his.
DM also said that Art Lady and her friend were uncomfortable with my character flirting with theirs... Monday hadn't flirted with anyone. She was vaguely affectionate, putting a hand on someone's arm sometimes, but that was it; that's not flirting. DM claimed I put Art Lady "into a position where she couldn't say no", because... Monday had asked her PC if they could share a hotel room (not a bed!) for a night, when Monday was scared by something earlier. Um... If Art Lady's PC said no, I would've asked the others; it's just that Monday didn't get along with them as well. They were kind of sus, actually.
Side note: I found the flirting accusation extra weird, because I had consensually flirted with Art Lady before (fiancé also saying he was fine with it); I'd think they'd know the difference between flirting and my character being friendly and compassionate. I was baffled.
Then the "saint" issue. For context: DM previously said "there are no gods in this setting, only saints." He defined saints, then said "Or you can worship a heavenly body, a magical place, or mythical creatures". Sounded cool. As a child, I was a closeted lesbian abused by a Christian cult, and I'm still processing some of that trauma, so I squirmed at the word saint, but I can worship the Sun? that sounds cool! I'll be a pretty dragon lady who gets power from the Sun. Awesome. A couple months into the game, DM reveals to me that ALL worship is saint worship; that I MUST worship them to be a cleric, and my Sun worship would in fact be worship of saints who embody aspects of the Sun... This completely invalidates my character concept. He then finally tells me that the campaign contains intentional Christian references. I'm very uncomfortable.
I'm not anti-Christian, but I am very uncomfortable interacting with Christian-specific themes in games. I wasn't the only one either; the paladin was supposed to be an "ocean" worshiper, and was pretty uncomfortable when I mentioned what DM said to me; she didn't want to play a character worshiping "saints" and was pretty uncomfortable with it. This person wasn't in the game for a few sessions, and DM said to her that she couldn't rejoin since it would be narratively awkward after too long, but gave us a different story; I had to get that from her directly. Her coming back didn't work, but replacing us was fine, apparently. Wow.
I did quit the game, but only after the "saint" conversation; DM said I wasn't allowed in his games anymore, but he was allowing me to stay on his Discord server, because "it would be evil" to kick me off. I then saw that DM and Art Lady had left my Discord server without even mentioning it... I then wrote up a long message to the 2 of them carefully explaining how DM had effectively banned me for having religious trauma and (politely) questioning his crazy rules, and that DM had anger issues, communication issues, and a track record of making me cry a few times before, and that I wasn't going to put up with it anymore. But I wished them both to become healthier, less codependent people.
DM then posted on his server that I "was not so friendly" and warned others about me trying to talk to them, as if I was going to do something harmful. This is absurd, as I had expressed not anger, but sadness and pain. I wished they could've been the people I thought they were before I joined that game, but they weren't; they were toxic, codependent crazy people, and DM was a hyper-controlling jerk with some bad anger issues. I'm a little scared for Art Lady, but also, does she want to be independent or functional? She seemed to like relying on DM for everything, which makes me sad; that's not a recipe for a healthy or happy life.
This experience has made me want to be a more lenient GM myself, and I just don't want to tell people no when I don't have to anymore and I want to be more careful about boundaries/triggers than that guy was, but I don't want to say yes to things that don't fit the game world. I'm trying to find the right balance, and oh, I am galvanized after that.
I hope this story encourages others to watch for these sort of issues in games they join.

Hey there! I'm a 28 year old man (technically nonbinary (AMAB) but I present as very masculine and have a beard but use whatever pronouns), 275lbs, 6ft tall. I'm looking to join a closed poly relationship as your third partner!
I'm bi/pansexual - we can make whatever parts you've got work. I should note that all of my dating history has been with women though, so men may need to hold my hand as I learn the intricacies of a same-sex relationship.
My hobbies:
Video games, specifically I'm mostly into strategy games like Civ (Civ V to be specific) and an old school MMO.
Fishkeeping - I keep both fresh and saltwater fishtanks! I love aquariums as well, might be a good date idea. Can talk your ear off about fish nerd stuff.
Anime - I watch way too much anime, more than I watch American TV at this point. My favorites are Ouran Highschool Host Club, Overlord, and Log Horizon.
Reading - I like to read or listen to audiobooks depending on the day, mostly Fantasy novels like Brandon Sanderson books and even some lit-RPGs.
What I'm looking for - Ideally I'd join a closed poly relationship, meaning that we all date each other at the same time - and that if any other partners get added in the future, we'd all have to agree and date them as well. I'm not really particular about age, you can be older than me or younger (I guess just be over 21?), and I'm not particular about your gender either - whether you be men, women, enby, or anything else - what really matters to me is that we have shared interests that we can bond over! And I suppose it helps if you're cool people!
I know that it can be difficult to add a whole new person into your relationship, figuring out where we all stand, what roles we fill, and how our personalities mesh - so it's important to me that you're emotionally intelligent, mature, and willing to talk things out! Oh and I'd appreciate it if at least one of you is a bit of a yapper! I tend to yap on about anything even slightly interesting so it'd be cool to have someone to talk too about random stuff! Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this whole thing! If you did and you're going to send me a message, add the word "dolphin" to your message so I can tell that you did!
Thanks <3

Hello! How are you? I'm from Europe, I'm 21 and I speak English/French.
My hobbies are movies/tv-shows, Disney, discovering/learning new things, deep talks...
I'm here in the hope of finding interesting people.
Please don't message me if you can't take time for me, I'm not someone you talk to only when you're "bored".
I'm seeking for long-term friendships, loyalty and commitment is a must for me, someone who can also voice chat (not every time but it's still cool to have deep talks or just talking about anything on a call once in a while).
If you can't make yourself interesting (writing more than one line), asking questions back, initiating the conversation once we're done with a topic, getting to know me, don't bother to message me.
I will of course do the same as I'm asking for, but I value quality over quantity with friends.
Have a nice day, I hope to meet new people ! :)

Hi everyone! First time posting in this subreddit, so I hope I do okay.
I'm (29F) planning my wedding for April of 2026, and I want to make sure my mom feels included in the day.
My fiancé (30M) is really close with his mom, and she is going to be "officiating" the wedding, and he also wants to do a mother-son dance with his mom at the reception. I love my future MIL, so I think this is lovely. His father is out of the picture, no skin off either of our backs.
I also love my own mom, but things are a bit harder- she is deaf and has cerebral palsy, and requires an electric wheelchair for mobility. My bio-dad is also out of the picture, good riddance, and my mom has a husband, my step-dad, who I'm cool with but not very close to- he is also deaf.
I don't really want to have my step-dad walk me down the aisle, because I'm not super close with him- but I think it would be kind of nice to have my mom come down the aisle with me, holding hands or something.
She can't exactly do a mother-daughter dance with me- both because she's in a wheelchair, and deaf (so music doesn't do much for her), and I'm a really tall bride, so her sitting in a wheelchair puts her significantly lower to the ground than me.
She's very understanding, but also really sensitive and I don't want her to feel left out, watching my fiancé's mom participate so much in the wedding and doing a one-on-one dance with him and feel like she's not getting any mother-of-the-bride treatment.
Any suggestions or ideas on how to keep her included and also share a special mother-daughter moment with me at the wedding/reception? She's important to me and I don't want her to feel left out as she has so often before.

Hello! How are you? I'm from Europe, I'm 21 and I speak English/French.
My hobbies are movies/tv-shows, Disney, discovering/learning new things, deep talks...
I'm here in the hope of finding interesting people.
Please don't message me if you can't take time for me, I'm not someone you talk to only when you're "bored".
I'm seeking for long-term friendships, loyalty and commitment is a must for me, someone who can also voice chat (not every time but it's still cool to have deep talks or just talking about anything on a call once in a while).
If you can't make yourself interesting (writing more than one line), asking questions back, initiating the conversation once we're done with a topic, getting to know me, don't bother to message me.
I will of course do the same as I'm asking for, but I value quality over quantity with friends.
Have a nice day, I hope to meet new people ! :)

Genocide looked to the sky. He thought of his mentor. The one who had saved him. He remembered his childhood. How powerless he was. He remembered the anger. He never wanted to hurt anybody. He thought of all the times he showed compassion. How much they hurt him for it. He saw the world before him, a graveyard. Humans. People that were supposed to be made in the image of some divine creator. They were but maggots feasting upon his remains. They ate away at his very being until nothing human remained. His thoughts were no longer his own. He had no joys in life that mattered. He hated humanity more than he could love anything about himself. He remember his first killing spree. Being gunned down by police. Left for dead. He remembered a hooded figure moving towards him. Getting closer the more he neared his death. He saw its pale face. Its impossibly black eyes. It was a man. This figure in question appeared to be of Japanese nationality with long, straight, loose hair. It emanated extreme malice. It offered him a choice. A purpose. Power. He thought the figure a reaper but it identified itself as Amakusa Masataka. Masataka guided him on how to kill and gave him specific locations to kill people in. In a sense, he became a hitman for quotas of people. He inquired what Masataka was. The presence of evil, his ability to appear and disappear at will, how he could control what people could see him and what people couldn't. While vague, years of killing for this being offered some insight. Amakusa Masataka belonged to a group of people not of this world. His people had been corrupted by a dark force long ago and had aligned themselves with the warlord who had subjugated their version of Japan. Their dark high priest assisted the warlord along with two others. These four rulers in turn served a larger order. The four were tasked with bringing about the end of the current world as an act of retribution for some fallen deity. Masataka's people acted as covert operatives for this empire. They were feared across the land and were collectively referred to as "Shinigami". An agent of the coming apocalypse, a servant of evil possessed by the will of those gods of death, Genocide would walk the earth.
Genocide stepped toward the station. A police cruiser rammed into him. He pulled out a knife and stabbed the hood of the car. The inhuman force of the knife created sparks which burst the engine into flames. The car crashed into a streetlight and exploded. A second cruiser neared the scene. No way a man could have done this. Yet still, out of the fires Genocide strode forth. It set upon the second vehicle, shooting out it's tires while jumping 9 feet into the air. The car tries to reverse but crashes into a wall. Genocide lands on the hood and kicks through the front window. Glass shatters under its boot, blinding the two officers inside. Genocide shoots one of the officers with a shotgun, killing him. The second officer in the passenger seat readies his pistol and takes aim. Only two shots fired, both directed at Genocide's head. It casually cocks its neck to avoid them. Then it grabs the officer's arm, breaking it. Genocide uses its free hand to grab the officer's head and bangs it into the dashboard no less than 5 times. The skull is shattered on the final impact. Genocide jumps off the car and continues on his mission.
Detective Evans speaks through a megaphone," This is your first and final warning. Stand down or we will use any and all means at our disposal to put you down." Genocide dropped its shotgun and raised its hands. A group of five SWAT team members rushed out the station, surrounding Genocide with riot shields. An officer accompanies them, edging behind the figure to apply handcuffs. Suddenly, Genocide springs to life , grabbing the officer behind him. He flips the officer over his head, slamming him into the pavement at his feet. Then Genocide stomps his head causing it to burst. Genocide drops a flash bomb from his coat sleeve, blinding the SWAT team as he draws his knife. He drives it into one SWAT member, the knife puncturing the shield and piercing his chest. Genocide kicks the corpse away withdrawing his knife. He goes to another, this time using the end of his boot toe in a rising kick to disarm their shield. He grabs them by the throat and drives the knife slowly into their eye socket. Another is tackled to the ground and beaten to death despite still being under the shield. Another is picked up and thrown into the fires still burning from the first auto incident. In no time, Genocide stood before an indistinguishable mass of gore, blood streaking across his black leather outfit. He laughed" So this is all you can give me. I'm not entertained." Officers took aim from the station windows, and snipers did so from other rooftops. Genocide laughed maniacally as he was rained down upon from all sides by a hailstorm of bullets. His body convulsed, but he did not fall. Moments more and he was on his knees. Still though, their efforts were futile. Gracia looked out and saw a black mist coalescing around the man in black. His blood. Blood erupted from his body only to transform into this dark mist that reentered his wounds. Genocide screamed. No. It was just an elevated pitch in his laughter. Optimism failed everyone yet again. Gracia saw Genocide holding something in his right hand. She could only make out a beeping red light. Genocide pushed the button triggering the carefully concealed explosives he laid in preparation for this event. C4 explosives went off in all the places he saw fit. The sniping posts he couldn't reach. The assault of lead lightened. Then Genocide drew an RPG from...somewhere. He collected himself and fired at the station's entrance. The explosion shook the station. From inside, the lights began to flicker. Communications were down on all fronts. Had he modified the rocket with some type of EMP? Not good. Amisdst the confusion Genocide entered using smoke bombs to mask his presence. Moving like a shadow, he killed everyone in the lobby silently with his knife. He made his way to the holding cells. Still they chanted. Still they praised. Still they raved for the arrival of genocide. Genocide shot the lock opening the cell. Jim Jimenez walked out and bowed before his master. Genocide smiled. He couldn't have imagined how proficient he had gotten with possession. Well, not quite possession. He had known of the Shinigami's ability to share their thoughts and emotions with humans. Shinigami like his mentor were ancient. They had so many years of memories, such strong a hatred for life that they overwhelmed the personality of the victim. The victim sees themselves as one of them. Shinigami can't force the will of the victim, so they find those who are already similar to them in some way. Genocide found the collective universal distrust of police to be a prime sentiment to capitalize on. He armed the inmates, infecting them with samples of his own dark essence.One particular inmate caught Genocide's eye. He knew the man's work. An arsonist. The one whom he recalls was responsible for blowing up his first car way back in high school. Rather than a standard firearm, Genocide gave the man a random assortment of grenades containing a special surprise. Genocide showed them visions of anarchy, of sending a message to a society that used and disregarded them. While this was also true of how he felt, years of living in darkness had changed him. He needed no purpose. No end goal. No justification. He just wanted to watch the world burn.
Genocide's small army broke off to engage several different wings of the station. Genocide went to the security room. He found Wayne, his informant, playing some FPS on one of the monitors. Wayne took of his headphones and asked," You kill everyone yet?" Genocide responded," No. You should get going before that happens. Your life becomes fair game if I run out of pigs to cook." Wayne clapped his hands, "Aight, GC my man, say less." He packed his things and left. Genocide drew a twin pair of handguns and laid waste to the station. He followed a group that took cover in the men's restroom. Kicking open multiple stalls he was surprised to find...nothing. Where had they gone? He turned around and saw his mentor, Masataka, smiling at him. It looked like him. Long, dark hair, black clothing, and soulless, empty eyes. But it wasn't. It was Genocide's own reflection in the mirror. Genocide smiled. He didn't notice the changes at first. They must have happened gradually. Subconsciously. From the final stall, an officer sprung into action, rushing Genocide, hitting him point blank with a shockgun round. Genocide felt the tingling sensation electrifying his body and grew numb. In spite of the pain, he took a single step. Then, another. He came within striking range of the officer and snatched the shockgun. Two more officers erupted from another stall, battering him with baton strikes. Genocide felt nothing. He clutched the shockgun in his hand like a bat and went to work pulverizing his attackers. An officer kicked in the bathroom door, a woman holding a pistol. She fired multiple times to no effect. Genocide stood covered in blood. He even let her reload. Twice. He wanted to see her despair. Her hopelessness. He walked towards her, shrugging off bullets as they pierced his body. His wounds healed nigh instantly due to the dark essence he had been imbued with. He held her face with both hands, lifting her body off the ground. As she screamed, he used her head to shatter the restroom mirror, running down the full length of it while smashing her into it at several points. He dropped the remains of what he held, washed his hands with soap, dried them, then exited the restroom.
The inmates that rallied for the cause of genocide attacked the station. Fortunately, they were nowhere near Genocide in terms of power and only carried one type of firearm each. They shared his healing ability but could be killed quite easily. Gracia encountered a sniper on the end or a west wing hallway. Other officers waited behind corners unable to get close. Gracia noticed the faulty lighting. In this hallway, the lights flickered in intervals of 3 seconds. Finding a pattern and timing her movements, she rushed the sniper at the exact moment the lights went out. Running the length of the hall, Gracia zigzagged, dodging the sniper inmate's bullets. She jumped on a wall, ran 3 feet on it, then kicked off it, pouncing on the assailant. She fired five shots into him, making sure to hit the brain and the heart. Two severe injuries that were impossible for Shinigami essence to heal simultaneously. Elsewhere, Evans took on another escaped inmate. A vehicular arsonist named Carson. Carson had a bag filled with an assortment of different grenades and was happily giving them out like candy on Halloween. "A flash bang here, a bit of tear gas there. Oh. Wait! Was that an ice grenade? Did the explosion freeze your leg to the floor? Whoops. Maybe a fire grenade will melt that for you. Hold on let me get one fore you," Carson rambled gleefully. Evans looked at the carnage before him. Officers burning. Officers partially frozen in blocks of ice. He took a breath and aimed his wristgun. He steadied his right forearm. Carson readied to throw a random grenade. Evans shot it the moment it left Carson's hand. The grenade exploded directly in front of Carson. Both Evans and Carson looked at each other in shock. Confetti. A party grenade? Carson quickly fumbled for another but was tackled and restrained by several officers. Meanwhile in the South wing, Lary had some colleagues set a trap for another shotgun toting inmate. He had them bait the inmate and flee. Giving chase he turned a corner and ran straight into Lary's fist. The inmate recovered and motioned to shoot Lary. "Let's tango. " Lary gave the code word. Nearby officers activated a device. A signal jammer of sorts. The inmate shoved the barrel of his gun into Lary's gut and pulled the trigger. Nothing. The special signal jammer in question was designed for firearms. It was a last resort as it left officers just as defenseless. Lary was having fun. He boxed the inmate in hand to hand combat. Despite the inmate's enhanced strength, Lary's technique pulled through. Lary ducked under one of the inmate's wide punches and did some type of rising uppercut where he jumped off the ground while spinning. One of the other officers whispered" The rising dragon." Lary smiled giving a thumbs up" Yeah, it was a rising dragon uppercut. Saw it in one O my kid's vidya games. Thought I'd try it out while I'm jacked on adrenaline".
Jim Jimenez looked long and hard at himself in the mirror. He was in the women's restroom. Some brainless woman had broken the men's restroom mirror with her face. For the first time in a long while Jim could think clearly. He was becoming sane. At the least he was no longer a raving lunatic. The life essence of the dark gods had healed the wounds to both his body and his mind. He saw his face, his scraggly dirty beard. He found a razor and shaved. He trimmed his beard somewhat. He liked it. He washed his hair. It fell down his face like silk, no longer greasy. His bloodshot eyes once burning with crazed intensity had cooled. He blinked. Just for a second, he saw the man known as Genocide. The man that attacked him. The one that killed him and gave him new life. The drug dealers. The police. They were all the same in his eyes now. They were all to blame for the world being what it is. Jim wanted to hate them. He wanted to take revenge, but he felt nothing. It didn't matter. He knew he was wronged, could logically justify acting against them, but he just didn't care anymore. About anything. He was finally free. Sensing his presence was no longer needed here, Jim vanished into the night. He needed to find someone who had had the answers he needed. Himself. Who had he been? Who was he now? Who could he become? Where was he going? So many questions to ponder indefinitely. So much time left in the rest of his life.
Genocide ran down the station's halls raining hailstorms of bullets upon its occupants. He had a handgun in each hand as well as a wristgun on each wrist. This effectively gave him 4 separate firearms that he could use simultaneously. Lary regrouped with Gracia, Evans, and a handful of others. They radioed all surviving officers near Genocide to flee to the roof. This plan had been set in motion days before the assault and had been kept hidden from most of the force. The plan involved scheduling flights for several helicopters to arrive at some point after Genocide arrived. There would be no way for him to prepare for them and pre-scheduling their arrival ensured they arrived regardless of if they were called or not. Lary and the others set about preparing the second jamming device. Genocide stood among a hallway of bodies. He saw one man clinging to life trying to crawl away. He decided on trying that other thing he saw his master do. He grabbed the dying man and pinned him to the wall. Slowly he drove a knife into his chest. As the man's life slipped away, something else entered his body. Genocide channeled a small amount of his essence into the vessel. He had steadily done this with other casualties around the station whose bodies were somewhat salvageable. He dropped the body he was holding and looked upon the others. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his eyed were black, both sclera and iris. The scene before him changed. Genocide had a vision. He saw a dead gray wasteland littered with bodies. These people however weren't cops and wore traditional Japanese attire. In his hand wasn't a gun or knife but a short sickle akin to a farming tool. He heard a dark voice call out to him. Slowly, the corpses around him began to rise, now mere puppets bound eternally to their master's whim. The bodies sold to the reaper who had claimed their lives. Genocide's vision ended. His eyes had returned normal. Around him, dead cops began to rise. His dark essence had entered their bodies and reanimated them. He sent his dead army to attack the officers fleeing to the roof of the station. These zombies swarmed the stairwell giving chase to the few survivors. There were five of them. They had two flights of stairs to climb and a horde of their former colleagues close behind them. One officer tripped and was set upon by the horde. The zombies didn't bite them but held them firmly in place. The other four officers stared down wondering what to do. They could hear Genocide chuckling. They could hear humming. They could feel the temperature rising. Their colleague and the two zombies holding him were hit by an enormous green fireball. Genocide had fired a Magnum Opus and had charged the bullet to level 3. The Magnum Opus was simply a magnum that shot fireballs, with bullets that could be charged by holding down the trigger. It had three levels of charges. Level 1 was a small reddish ball of plasma. Level 2 was slightly larger and yellow. Level 3 was the maximum charge and resulted in a large slow moving green blast of energy. The officer was ignited and Genocide watched gleefully as the force of the blast sent him flying through a wall. The four officers continued up firing occasionally to slow down the zombies. Soon they made it to a door leading to the roof. Before one officer could reach it, he was sniped by Genocide, a bullet to the head killing him instantly. The remaining three made it out. They regrouped with the others already there, 12 in total, including Lary, Evans, and Gracia. This would be their final stand. They just had to hold out until Genocide made it up there. They just had to keep Genocide occupied until the helicopters arrived. Genocide slowly ascended the stairs behind his horde. On the roof, the remaining survivors faced off against waves of the undead. Evans recognized the attackers. These zombies were being controlled by nanomachines. He heard the stories of several weapons encountered by soldiers on the battlefield. These creatures were called Metaldeads as they were reanimated via machines. They had been officially banned by most of the worlds' governments for being unethical. However, this did not stop the technology from being spread still between shady organizations, terrorists, etc. Evans wondered how Genocide got this form of nanotechnology. Evans long speculated that the dark essence used by most of the killers they encountered was a a form of nanotech however it was different from anything else he had seen or heard about. The dark essence seemed to be an amalgamation of other types of nanotech. Evans had to save his inquiries for later. He reloaded his wristgun and took aim at the approaching group of Metaldeads. Gracia steadied her handgun and shot two Metaldeads in the head. From the single door countless arms seemed to spill forth from the darkness. The other officers took turns firing in intervals. this allowed them to create a steady stream of fire where no more that three guns needed to be reloaded at once. The horde seemed to thin out over time as if they were making progress. In actuality, the Metaldeads were just making room for Genocide to enter. Genocide exploded in a sprint from the door. Everyone fired upon the killer. Genocide had now chosen a wrist mounted mini flamethrower to use as his weapon. He stormed past the oncoming bullets taking some damage, but refused to slow down. He unleashed a stream of fire that caught five of the officers in one fell swoop. Gracia fired five rounds into Genocide's face. He stumbled back. Lary took the chance to fire several mine gun bullets at Genocide's feet. The mines quickly detected his movement and exploded. In seconds, Genocide was on his back.
Staring at the night sky Genocide saw the moon. He reached for it. He called for the darkness to give him more power. His wounds began healing. In the sky he could hear the whirl of propellers. There were six helicopters in total. The first two had evacuated the survivors while the others stayed to engage Genocide. Genocide got up and unstrapped the sniper rifle from his back. He stood before the searchlights as a black silhouette, cornered but unwilling to back down. Lary stared down at him smiling. "Okay!" He shouted, "Let's Tango!" Upon this declaration the second jamming device was activated. Now, isolated on the roof, Genocide's guns couldn't be fired and the helicopters were out of range of the device. Now Genocide stood like a sitting duck. A helicopter fired a rocket. Genocide side stepped and grabbed it. He turned his body redirecting the rocket to hit another helicopter. As it exploded Genocide drew his knife and threw it at another helicopter. Behind the knife was such force that it shattered the helicopter window's glass, embedding itself in the pilot. This helicopter too went down where it exploded. "Holy clucknuggets!Did you see that!?" Lary said dumbfounded. Evans looked out the helicopter door he was in jaw open in shock. "There's no way." He collected himself quickly and radioed the remaining two helicopters to keep moving and to use their machineguns as much as possible. The helicopters reigned down upon Genocide tearing apart his body. Shreds of leather and darkened blood sprayed across the pavement of the roof. Gracia watched as Genocide's body was destroyed repeatedly as it tried to heal. Surely he had to stop at some point. After 10 minutes the helicopters had exhausted their cache of ammunition and soldiers opted to fire their own rifles and occasionally throw grenades. After about six minutes, they too had run out of bullets. Genocide stood unfazed. He had long since healed himself and now appeared intangible with gunfire seeming to pass through his body. His coat once ripped , now appeared whole though on closer inspection seemed to writhe. Gracia looked in horror as she remembered the tales her adopted father had told her. Tales he had in turn heard from his predecessors. Every so often officers had reported encounters with ghost like beings cloaked in a cloud of living dark mist. The beings were rumored to be responsible for the deaths of multiple people ranging from scientists, veterans, mafia, politicians, etc. They were seen near such crime scenes and even more shockingly appeared around several sites where suicides were committed. These beings were reportedly impervious to bullets and filled anyone who got near with an impending sense of dread. If Genocide was connected to them or somehow turning into one , there was little chance they would be able to defeat him. Gracia's fears were confirmed when she saw that Genocide's leather coat had been destroyed and he had replaced it with the dark mist coalescing from his own spilled blood. The dark mist, swirling, grew larger and several tendrils sprouted out from it. Gracia could briefly make out a figure standing next to Genocide. A hooded figure cloaked in the same black substance. The figure stared up at her with soulless, blackened eyes which seemed to beckon her to jump from the aircraft she was standing in. Compelling her to give in to the death that plagued the earth. Genocide kneeled to his master. The Shinigami, Masataka stared down at his disciple. "You have done a great service to us. Even now the sealed god stirs in its slumber. Its...Awakening will soon be upon us. It calls out for war. It begs for famine. It longs to continue its conquest. We are the death it so desires. The death that is necessary for this civilization to grow. Use the power that I have bestowed upon you. Finish the mission as you see fit." The Shinigami vanished and Genocide stood.Genocide stared at his hands. He remembered the first killing spree. He was on a bus. It stopped. A woman got on the bus and walked to the back smiling as she passed him. Something about her eyes unnerved him. They were so bright but something dark reflected inside them. He ignored the thought and put in his headphones. In minutes he had dozed off. He jumped awake. He looked around and froze in panic. All around him, everyone had been hacked to pieces. He saw the driver, actively being stabbed by a masked assailant. The mask, painted white with black eyeholes, stared back at him. It raised a finger over where its lips would be. Even under the expressionless visage, he could feel that same smile. He ran home that morning. He went to his room to find it destroyed. His posters, his computer, his tv, everything, had been ruined. He turned around and saw a man at the end of the hallway holding a sledge hammer. "The hell you been, boy?", his stepdad sneered. The man dropped his hammer and walked closer, veins pulsing with rage. He tried to explain how his car had caught fire forcing him to walk 4 miles to the nearest bus stop, but the man's fist was faster than his words. "Boy!Answer me when I talk to you!!" the man says as he backhands the taste out of the would be Genocide's mouth. He took that beating for several minutes before being left to stare at his ransacked room. He hated how his stepdad went out of his way to destroy the things he loved. Soon, another set of footsteps could be heard. It was his mother standing behind his locked door. She didn't knock, or say anything. She just stood there, doing nothing as always. He never knew if she came to talk to him or apologize. All he knew was that she could never bring herself to speak to or even acknowledge him. Maybe out of guilt or perhaps shame. A year or two later after he had had enough he ran away from home. Living out on the streets alone, without friends, or family, he would embark on countless killing sprees. These killings weren't of his own volition however. He was coerced by some corrupt officers from The Unit. They made him kill on their behalf. Sometimes they were protesters, sometimes they were drug dealers, other times, petty criminals they couldn't be bothered to process. It was routine for him to be used to kill entire houses of drug riddled addicts. During one such venture he entered a drug den, killing the dealer as instructed. He took out several junkies before turning to leave. A woman who survived her injuries clung to his heel begging him to stop. Looking down he aimed the handgun he was carrying at her head of long disheveled brown hair and fired. Feeling nothing, he kicked her body aside like trash when it hit him. Her face. This woman had been his mother. What was she doing in a place like this? He felt a shock of emotion. He wondered if she had always been like this, or had she changed after he left. He never made amends, but decided to stop killing from then on. The unit did not like that. Once it became apparent that he was no longer of use to them they started a manhunt to apprehend him with lethal force. They found him. They killed him. But he survived.
He remembered the girl on the bus. He remembered her eyes. Those of a sadistic killer. Still there was something else inside them. Something faint but deeper. So. Much. Sadness. Just like him. He felt the hatred begin to spread. His purpose, he decided, was to make all humans rot in the hell they created for him.
These people, he thought to himself, these living diseases, all needed to die. Their struggles, their problems, they spread like cancer to others. The only cure for humanity's sin, its collective wrongdoings, was genocide.
Around him, dark tendrils continued to form and expand, spinning in a vortex. Genocide pulled out two pistols. He squeezed the triggers to no effect. "As I see fit, huh? Hehe." He squeezed both guns in his hands, breaking them into pieces. He concentrated. In his hands, two more guns materialized now completely black due to being forged from the dark essence. Forged by his will. Immune to the jamming device that shut down conventional firearms. He raised his arms at each remaining helicopter and opened fire. Countless tendrils whipped out and slashed at his targets joining the dark essence bullets. It was chaos. Dark tendrils and bullets tore through every direction as Genocide spun and swirled around in 360 degrees firing randomly with purpose. A tendril pierced Gracia's right arm, another, her abdomen. She was however, fortunate, as the other passengers of her helicopter were dismembered. She barely had time to jump from the vehicle before it crashed. She fell 2 yards onto solid concrete. She felt immense pain as her right shoulder shattered on impact. She looked up to see Genocide's blade like appendages ripping through the other escape helicopters. She rolled onto her back and tried to steady herself. Within seconds her body began to repair itself. The nanocells inside her had saved her life but were now depleted. She would need another supplement lest she receive another fatal injury. The standard nanocells she and the others had were much less potent than those of the killers they faced. In truth, they had only minimal strength boosts being able to lift 5-8 more pounds than before and healing being limited to one or two fatal injuries so long as death didn't occur instantly. Gracia blacked out. She awoke the next morning in a hospital. There the doctors refilled her nanocells. She learned that the station had been left in ruins. Genocide had detonated some type of minature nuke following his rampage. He always blew up the stations as if to send a message. Gracia looked out the window thinking about why she became a cop. Twice her family had been murdered by them. Her biological family had been killed in an on record drug raid committed by a group of corrupt officers called The Unit. She had been adopted by another officer that arrived at the scene who found her as a child hiding in a closed. Sadly, he too was killed for trying to expose the activities of The Unit. Gracia joined the force to avenge both losses and bring justice to the killers that disguised themselves as normal people. Law enforcement was neither good, nor bad. It depended upon the people that made it up. In the dying corrupt world Gracia lived in, she vowed to be a beacon of light. Evans laid in a bed adjacent to Lary. "That damn Genocide's somethin else in' he?Like the stories you told us were understatements. That man could legit not die at this point in the story. Like he has friggin plot armor or somthin.'' Evans cut him off" I get it. We all got our asses handed to us. But did you see that ..thing that appeared next to him. Right before he created that black vortex that wiped us out. That must have something to do with his power. Maybe there's a still a way to stop him."Lary chimed in," That fella looked like he was on the way to a black metal concert wit all the black facepaint he was wearin' Creeped me out to be honest." As the survivors mulled over their predicament, the cycle of evil continued to spread elsewhere.
Budley flips through the pages of a magazine. He checks his watch. He looks around the gas station and doesn't see any customers. Seizing the opportunity, he puts in his headphones and begins playing an imaginary guitar as he jams to a progressive deathcore album. Oblivious to the screams coming from outside, the store clerk moves on to thumping two candy bars on the counter to simulate drums. Budley sees that his shift has ended and begins locking up the store. He sweeps the aisles and jumps as a shadow appears behind him. He turns and sees a well groomed bearded man dressed in a black hoodie, black shirt, and black and gray camo pants. The man holds out his hand and smiles. Budley rings up the pack of nicotine substitute gum. "Tryin to kick the habit huh?" Budley asks. The man replies, "Somethin like that. Gotta get my priorities back in check. Focus on the things that really matter. That damn KonCreep's a hell of a band aren't they?" He nods to the playlist on Budley's phone. "Yeah, they're killer. just got into them a month back." Budley answers. "You know, I'm something of a musician myself. Maybe you'll hear of me on the news someday." Jim Jimenez says as he sees himself out. He walks to the back of the building and passes an ominous form of graffiti. A woman lays unmoving and above her, written on concrete in red is a message that simply says "Genocide Reigns".